The Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica, which is the most important science fiction TV show ever, returns for its fourth and final season on Friday, and it could be a gorefest. (It damn well better be.) "Admiral Adama arrived at the door with blood on his hands. 'I'm sorry, I don't think you want me to shake,' actor Edward James Olmos said, presenting his red palms. With his world-weary eyes and the stained cuffs of his military coat, he looked like some battlefield surgeon fresh from triage." Oh! Oh! It's blood! Whose blood?

"Inside his dressing-room trailer, the star of the relentlessly bleak Battlestar Galactica washed his hands and apologized again. 'And I can't tell you why I look like this... I can't even tell you whose blood it is.'"

Olmos understands that legions of sci-fi and poli-sci wieners don't want the fun to ever end, but tough titties! "It is difficult to move on, but it is the correct time, the natural pace of the story-there's the beginning, the middle, and now it's time for the end... We have hit so many notes, and now it's time to tie everything up."

Brit Jamie "Apollo" Bamber gets philosophical about it. "The end is in sight, for better or worse... Every time I come to Vancouver now there will be a sort of Proustian element and a Pavlovian response. I'll think of my children being very young here, this stage and set, coming to North America, the sights and sounds. It will all be Battlestar. " [LAT]