[Note: this post contains spoilers concerning the final episode of Battlestar Galactica last season, and a few mild tonal and thematic spoilers for last night's season premiere -- but I don't give away any plot points.]

In honor of the return of Battlestar Galactica, I give you Five Ways the World Can End. The five listed ways are all plausible, although I think grey goo and robot (Cylon) uprising really should have made the cut. If you want a more complete list, these folks are paying very serious attention to the whole question of how the world might end.

Those who follow Battlestar Galactica know that the end of the world is key to the storyline -- although the show actually began with the world ending and then had things get more challenging from there. When last we saw our heroes (and the villains, with whom they had made a probably temporary alliance) they had come to the end of their long search for the planet Earth. Their hopes were utterly dashed when Earth turned out to be a devastated wasteland -- a world that had itself apparently ended long ago.

So the big question for all these many months has been -- and THEN what happened? Last night, we found out. In a word, what happens is despair. As executive producer Ron Moore puts it:

It felt like, if we were going to get to a place where we're going to find Earth mid-season and it's not going to be what they'd hoped, it's all going to be ashes, you had to play it truthfully. You had to say it's really going to devastate them. It's going to hit them in a way we've never seen before. Our heroes are not going to be heroic. They're not going to be able to come back from this easily. It's going to take their fondest hope away from them.

Well, the season premiere delivered all that and then some. It was one of the most gripping and relentless hours of television I have seen in a long time. If you are spoiler-tolerant, read the interview with Moore from which the above quote was taken. It provides a fascinating look at how this bleak story was put together. It also includes this rather worrying exchange between the interviewer (bold type) and Moore:

My attitude was pretty much, “Look, we're in the last chapter here. Anyone who's come this far and doesn't want to watch the rest -- they're a minority at best.” People are going to want to see how this turns out. And yeah, this is a very dark chapter. This may not even be the darkest chapter.

That's a scary thought.

[laughs] It may not get better.

I hope he's kidding. An hour of despair can be an extremely moving and cathartic experience. But speaking as a fan of the show, you don't go dragging me halfway across the galaxy for the past half decade just to tell me that the world is a harsh place and that things don't always work out well, and in fact that sometimes they work out horribly.

As the Old Man might say, "I already frakking knew that."

And speaking as someone who is concerned about the future, and who takes the idea of the end of the world seriously, I will be very much disappointed if our heroes don't turn it around and find something to hope for. An orgy of bleakness might be cutting edge TV, and it might be an original way to bring a series to its resolution, but it is, if you will pardon the expression, a sucky way of looking at the world. Nihilism isn't new, and it isn't an especially serious or realistic way of looking at the world, Goth arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.

If you really want to be hard-edged and fearless, show people who have had everything taken away from them -- or even just people who stand to lose it all, which is the position we are all in, all the time -- finding a way to push on. That's what the show has always been about -- I hope it finds its way back to that before it's all over.