> I'll catch hell for this, but Battlestar Galactica was the same way.
I just rewatched the mini-series and first few episodes of Season 1 of BSG. While, I remember thinking the same thing at the time, it was very obvious the second time around that for large arcs, the writers didn't have much of a plan. If I remember correctly though, there was always a lot of uncertainty about how many seasons they show would have, so it was difficult to plan more than a season at a time. It was also SciFi's most expensive show at the time, IIRC. They had a similar problem with Farscape... it was a big (and expensive) show, which stressed the network financially.
BSG is a great premise, but hard to come up with an overarching story arc that makes sense or offers closure. But sometimes you just have to let the writers go with things to see where they end up. There were some really good episodes later in the series, even with the filler.
The pattern seemed to: great story, engaging arc, high viewer ratings, sneak in individual episodes where there is a crisis that is resolved in a single show and the arc doesn't move so we can stretch the overall story. Lastly, I either stop watching or the show ends mid-arc.
Well, the writer's strike was also during the last season. So it was just the producers winging it with no one left who could tell them "no, that's stupid, we need to come up with something for else".
I'm surprised Farscape would've been expensive. I originally didn't watch that series because the production values didn't look much better than Andromeda (which I didn't like). Course Farscape ended up being one of my most favorite shows.
I just rewatched the mini-series and first few episodes of Season 1 of BSG. While, I remember thinking the same thing at the time, it was very obvious the second time around that for large arcs, the writers didn't have much of a plan. If I remember correctly though, there was always a lot of uncertainty about how many seasons they show would have, so it was difficult to plan more than a season at a time. It was also SciFi's most expensive show at the time, IIRC. They had a similar problem with Farscape... it was a big (and expensive) show, which stressed the network financially.
BSG is a great premise, but hard to come up with an overarching story arc that makes sense or offers closure. But sometimes you just have to let the writers go with things to see where they end up. There were some really good episodes later in the series, even with the filler.