Everyone who watches Sci-Fi soap operas knows the rules: blood ties can change anyone’s loyalty at any time; the best characters are the anti-social maniacs; and, most importantly, if two people have been pursuing each other across seasons, they have to hook up, and consummate for the rest of us. Otherwise, the creators have strung the audience along, teased us and then left us to pay the bar tab. Not cool.

Battlestar Galactica’s messy, indulgent conclusion utterly violated its viewers’ most tender hopes and expectations. It failed to deliver any sort of resolution to the Starbuck-Lee Adama romance that had animated so many silly conceits and livened up the whole dull period before Earth turned out to really exist.

These two people had been attracted to each other since way before the Fall. They were a couple of scrappy pilots who had resorted to all manner of hysterical maneuvers to save each others’ skins. If duty demanded, they could strip the others’ defenses down to the core.

Their tryst on Caprica sent Cara Thrace/Starbuck running to marry a lug she almost immediately lost interest in, while yelping Lee’s name in her sleep. Here, finally, is our moment, and suddenly they’re separated by nothing less than — what? All I get is a one-second shot of wind in the grass? Dust in the wind? Apparently, Cara’s a ghost? If this has all happened before and it will all happen again, couldn’t they at least share a final shot of Ambrosia?

What I get instead is Helo and Athena, Tighe and Ellen, Bill and Laura’s grave, all mouthing inane happy talk that seems to completely miss the fact that they’re all going to have to get their nails very dirty from now on. The only ass they’re going to kick will be that of the occasional Wildebeast. Snore. No wonder Starbuck evaporates into the wind. Or maybe morphs into a pigeon, I’m not sure.

Either way, all the excitement of completing the mission evaporates along with Starbuck. She gets no medal of valor, no heartfelt thanks from her elders, and not even a final pass at Lee. She’s like the programmer who slaved eighty hours a week to make all her co-workers rich, and now she’s gone without notice or severance while they stand around reading glossy brochures to each other and counting their stock options. Not fair. She’s been the salvation of four seasons of television, not to speak of the whole Human Race, and she gets less air time than Bill Adama’s copious bodily fluids.

What could David Eik and Ronald Moore have been thinking? Despite Lee’s promise, Starbuck is treated like the Dick Cheney of Battlestar, gone and, we hope, soon forgotten. Once you’ve had to stage your own Viking burial, apparently you’re done talking.

If the story had been handled with any irony, Cara’s end could have brought us a bittersweet sentiment about the futility of colonialism, or the coming land rape that the survivors will soon engage in. Instead, the end piece goes to Baltar, who has ascended to a state of permanent bliss with Caprica Six, a pair of smug angels walking through a generic future city of unsuspecting Humans [who may or may not get their chance to wrestle God via a war with robots]. No Cara here. Though she has committed far less evil than Baltar, killed far fewer than Lee, and been a whole lot easier on the eyes than the Admiral, she gets no moment for a “So Say We All.”

And for that, Battlestar goes on limply with Sam Anders, a voyage to the surface of the sun. Sparkly, but inglorious.