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The end is near for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ series

For a show about outer-space robots, “Battlestar Galactica” is really about what it means to be human. Empathy, betrayal, morality, justice, faith, vengeance and forgiveness have all played out on an interstellar stage as the last remnants of humanity flee their destroyed worlds and Cylon pursuers close in to exterminate them.

The Sci Fi Channel drama, a reboot of the 1970s series overlaid with post-9/11 themes, starts its three-hour series finale with an hour tonight (10 ET/PT) and a two-hour finish next Friday. After four seasons, the Human-Cylon war is almost at an end, but only because both sides are near extinction.

“It held a gigantic mirror up to us,” says Edward James Olmos, who stars as Adm. Adama, the military leader of the refugees. “It took hold of a very simple but basic understanding: A catastrophic disaster happens to humanity, and what would happen to us? And could we find ourselves again?”

Though influenced by the terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the series could be seen as an allegory for any warring people, says creator and producer Ronald D. Moore, a former writer for “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.

“I don’t know that there are easy answers to a lot of things that we experience in life, the national traumas we have been through,” Moore says. “This was an opportunity to highlight them and talk about them in a different way, that wasn’t caught up in contemporary political cultural terms.”

The show, which pulls in an average 2.4 million viewers, has highlighted contemporary moral dilemmas. At one point, a refugee refused to commit genocide against the Cylons, who had all but succeeded doing the same to his own people.

This kind of subject matter elevated the show above sci-fi geekdom, earning the series a Peabody and on Tuesday a special United Nations screening, where its creators will discuss how international events fed their story lines.

“Battlestar” will live on in various forms. Universal is developing a feature film, a new version not connected to the series. And Moore will be working on the Sci Fi Channel prequel series, “Caprica,” which begins next year and looks at Adama’s family history and the origin of the Cylons. And there’s a TV movie, “The Plan,” directed by Olmos and airing this summer, about the initial destruction of the human worlds from the Cylon perspective.

“It’s bittersweet,” Moore says of the show’s finale. “I’m excited for people to see the end and bring it all home. But it’s hard to let it go.”