Note: If you are an absolute newcomer to the current Battlestar Galactica TV series and think you might want to catch up, this post contains spoilers.

I wonder if anyone has said that the Sci-Fi Channel’s timing was off when it decided to air the first episode of the last season (or rather, half-season) of Battlestar Galactica less than a week before President Obama’s inauguration.

“Sometimes a Great Notion” is, so far, the bleakest episode in the entire series, and it came to us in a time when the country was looking forward to a speech which would lift us up from doldrums that we’d grown tired of thinking about.

Thinking is not, I should confess, something that I’d been doing with regard to Battlestar Galactica—bonus content on the Sci-Fi site can maintain interest for only so long. The lag between seasons was unjustifiably long, and not the fault of the creative staff. Watching the episode online last night, it was difficult to sink back into the thick warm swamp that Galactica had become by the end of last season, when crisis followed by crisis made it more and more difficult to keep track of who believed in the gods, who believed in the One God, who was dying and hoping to live, and who was living and secretly hoping to die. I guess this is a weakness with television series because they have to go on hiatus every year: it was hard to return to the Galactica wavelength, where I could still feel the pathos of its characters.

But none of that really matters, because “Sometimes a Great Notion,” the new episode, works as a standalone. A viewer who doesn’t know anything about the back story and mythology of the series isn’t missing the most important thing: Everyone was searching for Earth, hoping to find Earth, wishing for a new home, and now they have found it and it is a wasteland. They were hoping in something untrue. The episode is about the aftermath, which is, necessarily, despair.

The series still has many questions to answer about its own religious mythology: Just who is Kara? Who is the prophet mentioned in the scrolls of Pythia? How many cylon-human babies are there? Why are they so important to the Cylons? How did Tigh impregnate Six?

One wonders whether they can pull it off. But it’s alright if they don’t, because the value of the show lies in what it has to say about hope, not in what it was to say about faith. It’s easy to imagine a person living well with faith in the Cylon God or in the human gods, with full faith or half-faith like President Roslin, or with a vicarious almost-faith, like Adama (he leans a lot on Roslin’s faith, although he does not claim to believe himself). It’s even possible to be an atheist, like Cavil.

But while it’s conceivable to live without faith, for no character is it possible to live without hope.

Back in the miniseries (which, hard to believe, first aired in 2003), immediately following the Cylon attack which blighted the twelve planets (colonies) which were the homes of billions of human beings, Galactica Commander William Adama felt compelled to lie nobly, to tell the remnants of the human race that a prophesied new home, Earth, was reachable and waiting for them. When Roslin asks him, in private, whether he really believes that the mythical Earth exists, Adama balks: the people need something to believe in, to keep them going (though Adama rarely seems to know what keeps himself going).

Something unexpected happens, though, when Roslin gets religion and starts believing in Earth, along with believing herself to be the dying leader prophesied in an ancient scroll. Fast forward a bit, and you find that the Cylons, too, are looking for Earth, though we don’t quite know why. Fast forward to the end of last season, and we see that Earth is nothing but a nuclear wasteland, all life having evaporated in the wake of atomic conflict—the water undrinkable, the soil infertile.

And so we are left with a Galactica that resembles the hotel in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence more than the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Sometimes a Great Notion” would be more suited for an indie film festival than the Sci-Fi Channel. The episode contains little action, and most of the acts consist of tortured discussions about whether life is worth living, and what to do next. At least three characters consider suicide as an option, and one actually pulls the trigger. The hopelessness of the Galactica crew, lounging around the hallways of the ship beneath a graffito reading, “FRAK EARTH,” is stylized and almost theatrical.

The idea is clear: no Earth, no hope.

Well, maybe. Adama tries to inspire hope, towards the end of the episode, in a speech where he promises to find another home for humanity, in another planet around another star. Only later episodes will show just who on the ship is going to believe his forced Stoicism, and how they will get through it all. The story has set a high standard for itself: hope has to be real, concrete.

The two million people who flooded Washington, DC yesterday morning—where I am writing this—wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less. That’s a truth that Battlestar Galactica has made clear. Whether the same people would be satisfied with an unremittingly bleak ending to the series is not so clear. But the artistic integrity of the series remains intact.

You can watch the full episode on the Sci-Fi Channel website here.