'Battlestar' mid-season finale delivers nuclear 'Revelations'

A promo for the half-season finale “Revelations.”

So Sci Fi’s “Battlestar Galactica” concluded the first half of its final season with a bit of a shocker. Was it worth it? What will happen in the final episodes?

Spoilers after the jump…

“Planet o’ the Apes,” anyone? Yes, those apparently were remnants and ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge jutting out from all that radioactive dirt at the end of Friday’s “Battlestar Galactica.” The ragtag fleet from the 12 colonies finally makes it to mythical Earth hand-in-hand with the Cylons, no less only to find that its civilization (our civilization, it seems) has nuked itself to death.

Game over?

It would have been a fitting, albeit dreary, end to the show, leaving the upcoming movies to mop up the aftermath. (Heaven knows the original series choked miserably once the fleet finally found a present-day Earth.) But we’ve got 10 more episodes not coming until early 2009 and plenty of questions still lingering …

… like this list of loose ends, from Alan Sepinwall’s thoughtful blog:

* The identity of the final Cylon

* The origin and nature of the entire Final Five

* The origin of the rest of the skinjobs

* The fate of the 13th colony, and what role (if any) they played in the destruction of Earth

* The identity of the person/persons/entities that have been orchestrating all this, and what it means that “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again”

* The opera house vision and the fate of Hera

* What exactly happened to Kara when she went into the maelstrom, and what she’s really the harbinger of

* Roslin’s health

* The true nature of Head Six, Head Baltar, Head Leoben, and all the other “angels”

* Tigh and Caprica Six’s baby

* The whereabouts of Boomer and whether any of the 1, 4, or 5 models are still out there

It’s an exciting development, for sure, though I still think Season Four thus far has been overly hasty in, what now is clear, was a breathless sprint to fast-forward the storyline to Earth the logic of this slapdash “truce” with the Cylons be damned! Here’s hoping “Lost” won’t be so sloppy as it careens toward its closing date.

For behind-the-scenes tidbits, here’s an amusing post about a Hollywood screening of “Revelations” and the campaign to get Emmy voters to take notice of the show before it’s too late!

What do you think? And will you survive till 09?