Popular opinion of Battlestar Galactica hasn't quite hit Dollhouse levels of disappointment, but it's certainly headed that way. And not without just cause: Despite some great episodes this season, it sucks to realize that with a mere three episodes left, this is how they're spending them.

As always, a spoiler-filled rundown of last night's episode, plus a spot to weigh in, after the jump.

Let's kick it off with this gem:

STARBUCK: What am I? A ghost? A demon?

JUST A PIANO PLAYER: You're askin' the wrong guy. I'm just a piano player.

Yes, that was actually said last night. By Starbuck's dad. Who was imaginary. But who appears to be, at least a little bit, Cylon. But who mostly is just imaginary. And who sits around playing schmaltzy music for Starbuck to get drunk and reminisce to. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My general idea is this: As Battlestar has become less about ideas and more about plot, it's gotten steadily less interesting. When it started, Battlestar was a show not only about killer robots and sweet spaceships, but also big questions: What does it mean to be human? What are the costs of war? How hard will we fight to survive? Is enduring life's inevitable misery worth it? Do any other parts of Cylon chicks glow bright red when they do it?

But as it's progressed—and certainly as it's headed into its home stretch—the show has chosen to ditch those larger concerns in order to sort out its labyrinthine mythology. Instead of thinking about daring ideas, fans are now tasked with updating mental spreadsheets of Cylon timelines. The fact that the Galactica is literally coming apart at the seams has played out like a subplot over the past few weeks when it should have been front and center; the still-precarious status of the human/Cylon alliance has been all but ignored; the issues that made the rebellion onboard Galactica feel so believable have been swept under the rug. Instead of delving into those still-rich mines of drama, we've been stuck with watching Ellen be alternately brilliant and skanky, depending on which role she needs to fill that week; with wondering if Anders' eyes being open rather than closed really means something; with sighing our ways through reams of exposition detailing a backstory—the details of which are ultimately irrelevant to the drama at hand. Some hardcore fans might want nothing more than an encyclopedic record of a fictional history, but I'm tempted to agree with something David Mamet wrote in On Directing Film:

What you're talking about is what the illiterate call the "back story." You don't need it. Remember that the model of the drama is the dirty joke. This joke begins: "A traveling salesman stops at a farmer's door"—it does not begin: "Who would think that the two most disparate occupations of agriculture and salesmanship would one day be indissolubly united in our oral literature? Agriculture, that most solitary of pursuits, engendering the qualities of self-reliance and reflection; and salesmanship, in which..."

There might be a way to have both, I suppose—to deliver both the smart drama and visceral action that makes Battlestar great and to fill in all the mythological blanks, but if there is, it's not happening now. This week's episode, "Someone to Watch Over Me," cut back and forth between clunkily disguised exposition (the "Starbuck Plays Piano and Learns Shocking Things About Her Past" plot) and stuff that genuinely moved the drama forward (the "Poor, Dumb Chief Gets Screwed Over Once Again by Boomer, Who It Turns Out Is Genuinely Evil" plot). But in order to please both those who want the story to move forward and people who want it to move back, both of these plots would have needed to be interesting, and neither of them was.

Long story short: An imprisoned Boomer, using a convenient form of "Cylon projection" (seriously? they're inventing this sorta bullshit this late in the game?) tricked Chief into thinking that she's been pining for him all this time. Chief fell for it and broke her outta the brig (in a way that, um, really didn't make sense at all). As soon as she got out, Boomer shows her gratitude by finding the nearest floor of a public restroom and fucking the living shit out of Helo on it. Oh, and she stole Hera outta daycare.

MEANWHILE, IN THE BAR... Remember that piano that was hastily introduced in last week's episode? Well, last night we got a good look at the dude playing it. First, though, we saw Starbuck getting more emo than a 14-year-old girl whose mom won't let her go to Twilight until she finishes her homework. (You can tell she's sad, you see, by the way she looks all defeated in the shower and burns herself with her Zippo, no doubt just to make sure she can still feel something. It's only a matter of time until the cutting starts.) Luckily, the dude playing the aforementioned hastily introduced piano served as a good enough pal as any, and soon enough, Starbuck was getting all Chatty Cathy and having heart-to-hearts with him about music and song structure and how her dad abandoned her when she was a little girl.

This season, there have been plenty of theories floating around that Starbuck's barely-mentioned-until-now dad—the general idea was that he, not Ellen, might be the final Cylon—but I never quite bought into them, because they seemed pretty far-fetched. But make no mistake, that's where this is going—turns out Starbuck's hallucinating the pianist (heh, "pianist"), and that he was really her dad, and OMG, the music she and her dad started playing together was not "Chopsticks" but was, in fact, "All Along the Watchtower," which can only mean that—

I think Tigh put it best when he heard Starbuck playing that goddamn song in the bar: "What the frak?"

It's not that any of this is genuinely bad so much as it's just poorly done: If it was necessary for Hera to end up back in the hands of the bad Cylons, that's fine, but doing so via a bunch of goofy segments with Chief and Boomer didn't serve any purpose, and certainly didn't resonate as it was supposed to. (I think with that final shot of Chief being all sad in his imaginary house with Boomer, we're supposed to feel bad for him, but I just wondered why Chief had been acting like a goddamn dumbass for the whole episode.) Likewise, having to explain Starbuck's part-Cylon heritage is undoubtedly important at this point in the show—but doing so with hammy piano music in a bar, groan-inducing foreshadowing ("My gods, you're just like my father!"), and super-cheesy flashbacks and dream sequences? Fucking come on. (Why hello, little clichéd scary girl from every Japanese horror movie ever made! How did you get in my Battlestar?)

And then the whole thing ends with Boomer stealing Hera (cramming her in a goddamn shipping crate to do so—easily the most entertaining aspect of the episode), but jumping too close to Galactica and fucking up the ship even more. (Note that this is also the first time the show has ever said anything about how if a ship jumps too close to another ship it could cause problems.) And then Roslin said "Hera" all ominous-style and then passed out. Meanwhile, Chief discovered that not only did Boomer fuck him over in real life, but when he goes to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe uses "Cylon projection," he finds out Boomer also fucked him over and abandoned him there, too. The show should have ended with a frowny emoticon.

Not to keep quoting Mamet like some excruciatingly annoying film school student, but something else the dude writes in On Directing Film is, "Any good drama takes us deeper and deeper to a resolution that is both surprising and inevitable." Consistently, Battlestar has proven to be among some of the best TV I've ever seen when it comes to putting great characters in impossible situations and watching them survive, all while using those plot points to riff on themes and ideas that are gripping, weird, and cool. But as the show wraps up and its creators feel a burden to wrap up all (or at least most) of their varying plot threads and histories, the gutsy and intellectual elements that have made the show so engaging in the past seem to be getting lost in the maudlin and overreaching goals of plot. For some, that might be satisfying. Personally, I'd rather have something surprising and inevitable.