I´ve watched all of season 1 and 2, but I´ve only watched half of season 3 (although I have watched the last 4 episodes) so maybe I can´t be all that impartial, but my feeling is, and I gather it is also the opinion of a lot of people, from what I´ve read on sites like Live Journal, that the miniseries, season 1 and season 2 up until "Black Market" are considered the best...but maybe in retrospective we can be proved wrong...I think many episodes in season 3 can be considered some of the best ever episodes of BSG, like "Unfinished Business", but some episodes in seasons 2 and 3 are mainly filler, and could have been left out.

I agree that there have been some shows along the way that definitely seemed like filler - for instance 'Black Market' from Season 2 and 'The Woman King' from Season 3. I'm hoping that as things are revealed in Season 4 those episodes will begin to make sense - perhaps some action that one of the characters took, really did have a purpose. (Or maybe they won't!)

RDM was under a lot of pressure from SciFi last year to make the show more "stand-alone" to gain more fans. Apparently, having a show be based heavily on story arcs that run over several episodes is not an executive favorite - although fans would agree that it's much better. After the end of last season, I read that the SciFi execs finally agreed that BSG is better in it's story-arc format vs. stand-alone epis. Therefore, we should see an improvement this season! I'm really looking forward to it!

Lastly, check out my group - Addicted to Battlestar Galactica for more.
http://teamsugar.com/group/953329