Mary McDonnell described her reaction to the script this way: It filled her with "an incredible feeling of adrenaline,” she told Ain't It Cool News. “It made me understand the entire saga, and made me excited for all of you.”

We’ll have to wait until early 2009, when the show returns with its final episodes, to find out how things go for the humans who’ve finally found Earth. Surely it won’t be a party down there on that blasted planet.

But if we’ve learned one thing from “Battlestar,” it’s that salvation doesn’t necessarily arrive in the manner in which you expect it.

Though many of its characters have strongly held beliefs, the storytelling “Battlestar” has shown, time and again, how futile it is to cleave to what I call “if only” thinking.

Guylons Most people in the fleet think that “if only” the Cylons were eliminated, things would be grand. One faction of Cylons believes that “if only” the humans were gone, everything would be fine. “If only” the humans believed in one God, “if only” those heathen Cylons believed in many gods, “if only” the humans could find Earth, they’d be saved… and so on.

Except what the characters have learned time and again that “if only”-ism doesn’t work. There’s no way to rid the universe of the stuff you don’t like. There’s always good mixed in with the bad.

And even if you could remove what you loathe, that wouldn’t necessarily make for smooth sailing. Problems would still crop up because everyone is flawed and always will be. Life is about muddling through. There’s rarely a black-and-white answer, there’s never a magical solution. Sometimes you have to trust your gut, roll the hard six and hope for the best.

The final moments of “Revelations” were dispiriting for the characters, but they’re consistent with what “Battlestar Galactica” has done all along, which is rip away the characters’ belief in “if only” solutions.

Finding Earth was never going to be their salvation. Their true salvation lies in discovering, through blood and toil and pain and sacrifice, “the better angels of [their] nature,” to quote Lincoln. Salvation lies in the love they can share with each other, despite what the universe throws at them.

William Adama and Laura Roslin have already found their redemption, their salvation, their final home – whatever you want to call it. That didn’t happen when they found Earth, it happened when they embraced at the end of “The Hub.”

It’s certainly a buzzkill to find out that Earth is a charred ruin. But that’s not the point. Even if Earth had been a green and verdant paradise, if the humans gotten there after having committed genocide on the Cylons – instead of having arrived at an uncomfortable truce with them – how long would it have taken for the cycle of bloodshed to begin anew? As Lee Adama said, they don’t have to keep the endless rounds of retaliation going. All this has happened before, but it doesn’t have to happen again.

It’s going to be rough. There are going to be more friendships shattered and more hard times ahead, no doubt. But that was always going to be the case. Life can be difficult. The point is to have a shred of faith in the people around you and in yourself. The point is to try and to be OK with the idea that you’re going to be wrong some of the time.

As a commenter named Mr. Glass put it on critic Alan Sepinwall’s site, “When [executive producer] Ron Moore says that faith is at the center of ‘BSG,’ I don't take it as a sign that all the final explanations will be supernatural, with some Beings of Light or other deus ex machina; but that the show is about what you can cling to and [how you can] keep your sanity when you have lost everything.”

Exactly.

“The choices just get harder,” Moore said in an April interview about Season 4. “At the end of the day, what does it say about you because of all those choices that you’ve made and the way that you’ve chosen them. In a larger sense, what does it say about your society that you as a group and as a people have taken these paths. At the end, you look back at the paths that you’ve trod and, you know, did you lay waste to villages along the way? … Did you leave certain areas better than you found them? .. Ultimately it’s all very complicated. It’s not easy to come up with a simple philosophy that can guide you at every moment along the way.

It sure isn’t easy. Though it’d be nice to think that it could be. “We’ll find Earth and then everything will be OK.” That belief sustained humanity when not much else could. But it was never going to be that simple, was it?

The humans and Cylons who’ve arrived on Earth have nothing. Except each other. That has to be enough.

Maybe that’s everything.

Last night I started from the beginning. I intend to re-watch the entire series, before the final half starts. I'm dragging my wife and unborn child along for the ride.