Battlestar Galactica Season 3 Topic
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[quote name='David85']I was thinking Anders for months with maybe Tigh or his wife, and of course Baltar, and also Cally because I hate her.
Four of the Final Five are....
Huge spoilers (If they are true, I think they are....)
Last chance.....
[/QUOTE]
Wow, I know two of those people. Lame.
EDIT: Ohhhhhh...did a search, now I recognize them. Meh. Two of em were ones I had on my alt. list.
Four of the Final Five are....
Huge spoilers (If they are true, I think they are....)
Last chance.....
They are Tigh, Anders, Chief, and Tryol (The President's new Billy). Someone said music would play a huge part in the season finale and supposedly all of them start hearing the Cylon music or something and all meet in a room on BSG. Roslin or Adama I think are the final 1, but that's not in this season.
Wow, I know two of those people. Lame.
EDIT: Ohhhhhh...did a search, now I recognize them. Meh. Two of em were ones I had on my alt. list.
I'm really looking forward to the trail, especially since I don't read spoilers and have no idea what's going to happen.
The last episode wasn't all that great, but I do like Baltar's lawyer. I looked him up on IMDB and it turns out he also played Badger on Firefly, which is really cool. I wish Firefly would have lasted as long as Battlestar Galactica (or at the very least a full season).
The last episode wasn't all that great, but I do like Baltar's lawyer. I looked him up on IMDB and it turns out he also played Badger on Firefly, which is really cool. I wish Firefly would have lasted as long as Battlestar Galactica (or at the very least a full season).
David85
Banned
[quote name='Kaijufan']I'm really looking forward to the trail, especially since I don't read spoilers and have no idea what's going to happen.
The last episode wasn't all that great, but I do like Baltar's lawyer. I looked him up on IMDB and it turns out he also played Badger on Firefly, which is really cool. I wish Firefly would have lasted as long as Battlestar Galactica (or at the very least a full season).[/QUOTE]
I have read the spoilers and haven't heard a lot about Baltar's trial. It's the main part of the next two episodes but that's it, not a lot more.
The last episode wasn't all that great, but I do like Baltar's lawyer. I looked him up on IMDB and it turns out he also played Badger on Firefly, which is really cool. I wish Firefly would have lasted as long as Battlestar Galactica (or at the very least a full season).[/QUOTE]
I have read the spoilers and haven't heard a lot about Baltar's trial. It's the main part of the next two episodes but that's it, not a lot more.
We got a really great episode this week, much better then last week. The trial was really enjoyable, and I'm kind of rooting for Baltar to win, since he did what he had to do to keep the vast majority of the human population alive on New Caprica.
I'm also really interested in seeing how the major events, like Roslin's cancer coming back, and Lee resigning is going to effect the story. Next week also looks great, and I'm glad that the cylons are finally back in the storyline. It's been too long since we've seen a basestar.
I'm also really interested in seeing how the major events, like Roslin's cancer coming back, and Lee resigning is going to effect the story. Next week also looks great, and I'm glad that the cylons are finally back in the storyline. It's been too long since we've seen a basestar.
So was it just me or did they all but flat out tell us who 3 of the final 5 are?
I haven't read any spoilers in this thread yet and I have no intention of doing so until after next week's episode. I could be way off and it'd be awesome if I was, I love surprises.
Am I the only one that's finding it difficult to think of Baltar as 100% guilty anymore?
My guess is its the people who kept hearing music when there was none. Tigh, the president's aide, and Starbuck's husband. With Starbuck, who I'm still convinced can't be dead, that makes 4. Still a 5th mystery guest but I'm assuming that'll be one of their last secrets.
I haven't read any spoilers in this thread yet and I have no intention of doing so until after next week's episode. I could be way off and it'd be awesome if I was, I love surprises.
Am I the only one that's finding it difficult to think of Baltar as 100% guilty anymore?
[quote name='Kaijufan']Who was it that said "You know this means we're Cylons" in the preview for next week? I thought it sounded like
, but it might have been
(Don't want to spoil it for people who don't watch the preview).[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I thought that was interesting as well the way they threw that in there. To me, it sounded like
but hell, what do I know?
Ok, just saw the preview again and this time it sounded more like your first guess...
Tyrol
Tigh
Yeah, I thought that was interesting as well the way they threw that in there. To me, it sounded like
Starbuck's husband
Ok, just saw the preview again and this time it sounded more like your first guess...
David85
Banned
No, read them! READ THEM!
I read them and I'm more excited about the season finale than ever before. This will be the best one yet. Season 1 was ok, but not enough action, but lots of charater drama and shocking. Season two was lame, lacking, and looney (charaters) the whole thing felt really pushed and just done for shock value.
This season the Final 4 (of 5) has new meanings, and so will the definition of a Cylon. Come on January 2008!!!
I read them and I'm more excited about the season finale than ever before. This will be the best one yet. Season 1 was ok, but not enough action, but lots of charater drama and shocking. Season two was lame, lacking, and looney (charaters) the whole thing felt really pushed and just done for shock value.
This season the Final 4 (of 5) has new meanings, and so will the definition of a Cylon. Come on January 2008!!!
It was so clearly Chief saying "We're all cylons" that it's not even funny. Seriously.
And the music thing is so obvious that it hurts. From this episode and the preview, it can easily be deduced that the 4 are Chief, the president's aid, Singh, and Starbuck's husband.
And the music thing is so obvious that it hurts. From this episode and the preview, it can easily be deduced that the 4 are Chief, the president's aid, Singh, and Starbuck's husband.
[quote name='David85']Boy, you people suck 
And I read the spoilers and him/her say that in the next episode.[/QUOTE]
how can they be wrong at guessing? they didn't get it right but they did guess.
It was Cheif! You were all wrong again! You are very bad at guessing! How did any of you graduate from High School. Guessing is the one thing they teach.
And I read the spoilers and him/her say that in the next episode.[/QUOTE]
how can they be wrong at guessing? they didn't get it right but they did guess.
great episode last night...really like the direction lee is going...as for baltar, what they are charging him for, IMO, he is not guilty. Maybe if I was in the general public, and not seeing them put a gun to his head I would think differently. I heard on last fridays tvguide podcast that in the season finale there is
very little/no fighting with the cylons
[quote name='sketch226']The spoiler/revelation is almost so blatant...and in the case of one of the characters so strange and confusing because of said character's history that I'm thinking this is a red herring...[/quote]
if you are talking about tigh, i don't quite get that as well...I am under the assumption that he and adama have been friends a very long time...unless he is one of the first 2 models or so
According to Coming Soon.net Sci-Fi has picked up the back 13 episodes of Galactica. I think next season may be the final season.
tangytangerine
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Wait, is sunday's episode the season finale? I can't find any new episodes after that. If so, when will it return?
yes it is the finale...i am pretty sure it doesn't come back to next winter, but i could be wrong...as of mid feb they hadn't started any shooting...The straight to dvd miniseries (roughly 4 hours) was greenlit as well, so I would expect that in early fall.
David85
Banned
This is the new rumour...
RUMOUR....
Next season will be the last.
FACT....
Sci-fi picked up 22 episodes for next season that will not start until January 2008. That's up 9 from the order of 13.
Two of the episodes will be made into a (what to me sounds like a bad) DVD movie and will be shown fall 2007. So much for a true DVD movie. To me Sci-fi went "We need DVD sales so let's make the season 22 episodes and just make people pay for two extra episodes". I hope they gave it some money, but this is Sci-fi and they will most likely be cheap shit.
EDIT -
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=40676
RUMOUR....
Next season will be the last.
FACT....
Sci-fi picked up 22 episodes for next season that will not start until January 2008. That's up 9 from the order of 13.
Two of the episodes will be made into a (what to me sounds like a bad) DVD movie and will be shown fall 2007. So much for a true DVD movie. To me Sci-fi went "We need DVD sales so let's make the season 22 episodes and just make people pay for two extra episodes". I hope they gave it some money, but this is Sci-fi and they will most likely be cheap shit.
EDIT -
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=40676
tangytangerine
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Damn it was bad enough when they had us waiting until October, but January of the next year, WTF?
I'm fine with waiting until January for the new season of BSG since it will have a non stop season. I hate having to wait between blocks of episodes, like Heroes and the Office.
Hopefully the rumor that the movie was going to be about what happened to the
Hopefully the rumor that the movie was going to be about what happened to the
Pegasus before they met up with Galactica is still true, since if it's just those 2 extra episodes I'm unsure if they will bring back the Pegasus characters.
kmartbum001
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so many fanboys...almost remind me of x-files fanboys but those people were/are more dedicated
[quote name='David85']Except BSG is good and X-files, not so much.[/QUOTE]
X-Files was good at the beginning but then it just got way too convaluted. That's why, despite the fact that I love BSG, I'm kind of glad to see next season will be the last one. No need to drag it out just to milk it for ratings (I'm looking at YOU 24).
X-Files was good at the beginning but then it just got way too convaluted. That's why, despite the fact that I love BSG, I'm kind of glad to see next season will be the last one. No need to drag it out just to milk it for ratings (I'm looking at YOU 24).
I enjoy The X-Files, and one of the major reasons is same reason I enjoy Doctor Who, it's a non standard sci-fi show. Plus I love the Mulder Scully dynamic, easily one of the best on TV, along with Jim Pam from the Office and Crichton Aeryn from Farscape.
Honestly, if the writing continue to with the same quality as the first 7 or so seasons and they had replaced Mulder and Scully with actors good enough and characters interesting enough and they had the right dynamic I wouldn't mind if new episodes of the X-Files were still being filmed to this day. It could have been similar to Doctor Who, with characters and actors being replaced when they were ready to move on.
Honestly, if the writing continue to with the same quality as the first 7 or so seasons and they had replaced Mulder and Scully with actors good enough and characters interesting enough and they had the right dynamic I wouldn't mind if new episodes of the X-Files were still being filmed to this day. It could have been similar to Doctor Who, with characters and actors being replaced when they were ready to move on.
I could actually see a 5th season being a possibility if BSG isn't loosing too much money. After all, after season 4 they will have 79 "episodes" if they break up the mini into 4 and the movie into 2 episodes.
A 20 episode fifth season would bring them up to 99, which is right at syndication level. Since BSG is critically acclaimed I'm sure network syndication is very important for Sci-Fi, and while 79 episodes would be enough for syndication, I would think that 99 would be better.
No matter what happens, I just want Sci-fi to make sure the writers know what season will be the final season, so we get a proper, non rushed ending.
A 20 episode fifth season would bring them up to 99, which is right at syndication level. Since BSG is critically acclaimed I'm sure network syndication is very important for Sci-Fi, and while 79 episodes would be enough for syndication, I would think that 99 would be better.
No matter what happens, I just want Sci-fi to make sure the writers know what season will be the final season, so we get a proper, non rushed ending.
David85
Banned
[quote name='Kaijufan']I could actually see a 5th season being a possibility if BSG isn't loosing too much money. After all, after season 4 they will have 79 "episodes" if they break up the mini into 4 and the movie into 2 episodes.
A 20 episode fifth season would bring them up to 99, which is right at syndication level. Since BSG is critically acclaimed I'm sure network syndication is very important for Sci-Fi, and while 79 episodes would be enough for syndication, I would think that 99 would be better.
No matter what happens, I just want Sci-fi to make sure the writers know what season will be the final season, so we get a proper, non rushed ending.[/QUOTE]
I have been saying that on several sites it would be the smart thing to do, but this is Sci-fi Channel we are talknig about.
Also the miniseries could be broken up to 5 episodes I think, so that would give them 100.
A 20 episode fifth season would bring them up to 99, which is right at syndication level. Since BSG is critically acclaimed I'm sure network syndication is very important for Sci-Fi, and while 79 episodes would be enough for syndication, I would think that 99 would be better.
No matter what happens, I just want Sci-fi to make sure the writers know what season will be the final season, so we get a proper, non rushed ending.[/QUOTE]
I have been saying that on several sites it would be the smart thing to do, but this is Sci-fi Channel we are talknig about.
Also the miniseries could be broken up to 5 episodes I think, so that would give them 100.
In an interview with Ron Moore he confirmed that the movie will be about (non season finale spoilers)
. I can't wait. The rest of the interview is also great (and it has no spoilers for the finale). One of the things he says is that he is unsure if season 4 will be the last and it hasn't been decided yet, and they are working on the first eight episodes of season 4.
the Pegasus before it meets up with Galactica
I don't know if the show needs to end next year. Yes more then 1/2 this seasons episodes have been rather shitty, but based on ronald moores comments on his podcast it is due to a major change in the season finale script after the other shows had been written. Between the triage needed to change the storylines, and the budget constraints sighted due to the first couple of episodes (big battles, and having several new sets to film on ) I can understand why the shows aren't as good as what we expected. That said, if they have the similiar problem in the first 8 episodes next year, then maybe they should end it next year. IMO there is still several storylines that they could expand on before ending the show. Besides the obvious of having more cylon finding them/interaction, they could steal some stories from the original. Finding another planet with inhabitants who didn't continue on to earth, also the storyline with the god like character that would appear/dissapear...i think they were the people of light or something like that.
very true we haven't seen any other humans/species, but that doesn't mean they don't exsist. I don't remeber the show saying that they are the only civilization in the universe. While it might suck, I think they could work something in. The one thing this season has really been lacking is the threat of the cylons getting them.
David85
Banned
Moore said he wanted it to only be Cylons and humans because if it was there story and other aliens would take away from that. Aliens in the first series always bothered me because why should I care about the humans of the 12 planets if there are more elsewhere?
And Edward James Olmos stated that forehead aliens showed up on the show he would quit. lol
And Edward James Olmos stated that forehead aliens showed up on the show he would quit. lol
[quote name='David85']I can't wait for the movie now!
And can you copy and paste the thing, I hate the stupid signing up crap.[/quote] You can view the interview without signing up if you click on the ad, I was running Firefox with ad block plus and I had to load the page in an IE tab to click on the ad.
Or here is a copy of it someone posted on Digg:
By Laura Miller
Mar. 24, 2007 | "Battlestar Galactica," the celebrated, Peabody Award-winning SciFi Channel drama, will conclude its third season on Sunday night, with a climactic human rights trial featuring some downright spooky resonances with today's headlines. Although the challenging and unconventional series commands a devoted following, its ratings have been anemic, and so fans received the announcement earlier this week that the SciFi Channel has picked it up for another 22 episodes with much rejoicing. Salon spoke by telephone with executive producer and show-runner Ronald D. Moore about what it's like to comment on the Iraq war in a show set in outer space, the fear-based mentality of the entertainment industry, and the difficulty of making TV that doesn't pretend to solve the world's most vexing problems in 60 minutes. [Warning: Spoilers for Sunday night's finale will follow.]
One of the things people like about "Battlestar Galactica" is the way it seems to touch upon the issues of our time without stooping to obvious connect-the-dots political commentary. In last week's episode, the lawyer prosecuting the big human rights trial in the season finale told an aide to President Laura Roslin to back off, and then added, "Of course, I do serve at the pleasure of the president." I thought you either had to be working much faster than is humanly possible, or "Battlestar Galactica" has become prophetic.
Wasn't that wild? We wrote and filmed that line months ago, before it became part of the current conversation. That was shot in November or October. It's a phrase I've been familiar with and I put it in the show because that's the expression used about people who serve for the president.
Do you often find the show echoing current events even when you didn't intend it to, or is that pretty rare?
It happens. It's an odd confluence of events sometimes. When we're working on a show and developing the story lines and scripts we're certainly keenly aware of what's going on in the world. You can project some things out to where the world might be when the show airs. But with some things, like that line, there's a bit of serendipity that happens.
What's especially weird about it is that the situation is so similar to the ones that led to the Alberto Gonzales scandal.
Yeah, it is. It's Laura trying to tell the prosecutor what to charge, what crime to prosecute. It's been interesting to watch that.
How hard do you try to link what's going on in "Battlestar Galactica" to real-world politics? Or do you find yourselves trying to resist that impulse?
It's part of the brief. The premise of the show lends itself to those topics so naturally. It's about an apocalyptic attack, a group of survivors on the run and they're dealing with issues that are inherently about freedom and security. There's the civilian and the military, and lots of issues it seems very natural for them to grapple with that mirror events in the real world. We talk about it at length in the writers' room and with the cast and directors, trying to figure out where the lines are for us. We never want to go into direct allegory for today's events because there's nothing really interesting about that.
What is interesting to you?
It's interesting for me as a writer when we can move the chess pieces around a little bit, when you're dealing with suicide bombing on the show but suddenly it's not those other people who are doing it, but your characters. You're able to examine the moral questions of it in a different context because you're not burdened by the direct analogy of saying, "If Laura is George Bush and the cylons are the enemy, how do you deal with it?" That to me isn't great drama because everything is so loaded and so apparent. Science fiction gives you the opportunity to mix and match the elements and the circumstances. You can deal with the deeper themes and issues because you've scrambled the chess pieces. You're coming at it from a different point of view.
I get the impression you want to avoid parroting a boiler-plate political position, whatever your own politics might be.
I do try not to do that. I'm not naive enough to think my politics don't influence the show. I'm certain that they do, but the show's mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: "And here's the way to solve Iraq!" I don't think that's helpful, and I don't think that's good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.
I like the show best when you get to a place where you're not sure who you're rooting for anymore, you're not sure whose side you're on. And you're confused and you might even be angry about what we're doing but at least it's forced you to a place of trying to define your own point of view on something.
Moral ambiguity is unusual not only in television, but in pop culture in general. You worked on several of the "Star Trek" series, which I associate with moral stances that are a lot more pat. What's difficult about making a TV series that aims for something different?
The challenge is that TV wants to bend you and your characters to neat moral decisions and arguments. Ultimately, the forces of television want your heroes to be heroic. It wants the leading characters to make the "right" choice each week and it wants there to be a clearly defined "bad" person in the show. Or at the most, the character does the right thing and maybe at the end he looks wistfully off-camera and ponders how it might have been different. There's a certain phony-baloney quality to a lot of the moralism on TV. It does serve up pat answers to difficult questions. And when you try to make it more morally ambiguous, you immediately run into the buzz saw of "It makes the characters unlikable. There's no one to root for. The audience won't like the character if they can't say he's making the right choice and that's what separates him from his enemies."
We set out to make a very different kind of show. The difficulty is that when you go into these morally ambiguous areas, you have to have morally questionable decisions and motives for all your characters.
The objection that this makes the characters unlikable doesn't even turn out to be true. I'm sure you're well aware of that after seeing the response to what you've decided to do with Starbuck, a person who consistently made bad decisions for bad reasons but who was very popular with viewers all the same. To say she's "unlikable" sounds like an executive's objection.
It's a very fear-driven culture, the entertainment business. It's all about fear. You're afraid the audience isn't going to like it. You're afraid that they'll be turned off and that they're not as smart as you are. They won't get what you're going for. Can't it be safer? Can't it be happier?
It's also got to be difficult to go that route in a show that's substantially about the military. The armed services is an aspect of society people tend to be absolutist about. Was the military setting one of the things that got you interested in the project to begin with?
Well, that was in the concept itself. The original show was a war show. From my point of view, updating it meant that I wanted to treat the military aspects differently. I wanted to make it clear that the people who are serving are human beings, not exalted icons. They do have flaws and make bad judgments and are afflicted by the same curses as everyone else. There are drunks and womanizers and all kinds of different people who go into the military because they're just people.
It was important to me to portray it like that partly because of working on "Star Trek" for so long. One of the central ideas of "Star Trek" is that the people on the Enterprise and in Star Fleet were the best of the best. They were better than you and I, a better breed of human beings who were not torn with petty differences, jealousies and all the things that make people human. That stuff was almost bred out of them at Star Fleet, and that made the drama hard to convey. You were more distant from them as characters.
So I wanted the people on Galactica to be a very different crop. It wasn't going to be the best ship in the fleet crewed by an elite crew. It was going to be an old ship getting ready to go into retirement, and there were going to be a lot of misfits on that ship. What happens when the fate of humanity rests on their shoulders? That's a far more interesting question to me.
Again, science fiction gives me a lot of license. This is not an aircraft carrier. I don't have to be so careful not to offend people who serve in the Navy or have relatives in the Navy, or people who just want to posture about what people are really like in the Navy and you're besmirching the names of our fair soldiers and sailors and all that crap. This is a made-up universe. It's certainly modeled on the U.S. military and we do a lot of the interior character work centering around military culture and how they treat each other, but it's not meant to be a direct representation of the people who are serving.
But before this you weren't sitting around thinking about how much you wanted to do a show about fighter pilots?
No, but it is one of my lifelong interests. My father was a veteran. He was a Marine officer in the Vietnam War. He had a library full of military books. I had an interest in history and read a lot about the military. I was briefly in Navy ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corp] in college. When I was at "Star Trek" I jumped at opportunities to do things like go on an aircraft carrier for a weekend, and when I was in ROTC I spent a week on a nuclear submarine. I've always been fascinated by the military culture. It was one of the things that appealed to me about the project, but no, I wasn't setting out to find a military project.
"Battlestar Galactica" is a bit like "Lost" in that it's what's called a highly serialized drama, with a long continuing plotline. If someone misses a few episodes, they may stop watching entirely, thinking they'll never be able to catch up. At the same time, once you get past the first season, new viewers can be put off by how much they don't know about what's going on. So you can lose the viewers you already have much more easily than you can acquire new ones, and both shows have suffered dips in their ratings. Yet this also seems to be one of the most fertile and exciting formats in the medium. How do you deal with those challenges?
I don't. It's a genuine problem I have no solution for. We have long conversations with the network about the extent of the serialized nature of the show. It's certainly not something they're in love with. We the writers are always pushing to make it more serialized because it makes for better storytelling. We've done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they're almost never very successful for our particular series. They're not what the audience tunes in for. But the network's legitimate concern is just what you were saying: The audience tends to attenuate over time. It's hard to bring new people on board. There's the hurdle of them having to catch up on all the old episodes, and any hurdle you put in front of the audience is just a bad thing. I don't know what to say. This is the kind of show I like to do, and we're just going to keep doing it. Hopefully, we can persuade people to buy the DVDs and catch up at home and keep watching the show, but the show is what it is.
The availability of DVD sets seems to have made it more possible to do this kind of series.
I think it has. It's really changed the landscape. People are much more comfortable getting on to shows like this because they can pick up a boxed set and catch up.
Another thing: I don't know how reliable the ratings are anymore. I'm among those who cast a skeptical eye at the Nielsen Co. and the demographics and ratings they deliver. The fragmentation of the audience is so profound I don't know how the samples can even tell me how many people are watching my show anymore. It seems like such a crap shoot. It's like where the music industry used to be a few years ago, before they got -- what's that thing called? -- SoundScan. Before they got that it was like Nielsen; they called up store owners and asked them what was selling and what wasn't. When they shifted to a legitimate way of tracking each and every sale, it upended the charts. Suddenly, country music was huge, much bigger than anyone had thought. I think TV is in the same ballpark. We're relying on a really old system based on this sample of people, and it's not really accurate anymore. God knows how many Nielsen families are sci-fi fans.
Creatively, serialized dramas are tricky because you can plan some of it out in advance, but not all of it. Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?
A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes. I can think in groups of 10.
Then we break all the interior shows. But as those shows get translated into teleplays and we get into production, things will change. We'll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I'm writing and think, "Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here." Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly. But we still try to maintain that goal. We still aim to get to that same place by the end of the 10th episode, but the path to get there I consider much more flexible.
As you get deeper into the series and start planning the next 10 and what's the season finale, it's the same process. You think you've laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you've already set in motion. But I find that it's just a more organic way to do it. It's more interesting, it's more fun, it allows the writers' creativity to come to the fore. It certainly has its downside, because sometimes you make big mistakes. Something that sounded really good at that moment, and you grabbed onto it, doesn't really pan out. Then you have a bad episode.
What's an example where that process really worked well for you?
In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.
And when did this method not work so well?
We'd developed a whole story line this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of [former president] Gaius Baltar. During the missing year on New Caprica, when Baltar was president, a massacre had taken place among the people from this one colony that had isolated themselves from the rest of the people. It was this long intricate back story built into a lot of the previous episodes of the show and it just didn't work. And I basically decided to throw it out while I was writing the finale, on the spur of the moment. We then had to go back into previous episodes and take that out, reshooting and re-editing. Some of those episodes suffered from that decision. It was important because it saved the finale and made it much stronger, but certain episodes in the second half of the third season are weaker as a result of that.
One of the delicate issues with serialized dramas is that they can run out of gas.
Well, you can argue that daytime soap operas never seem to run out of gas -- they go on for 20 years! But we're not really set up to do that. Ours has a beginning, middle and end. Our main title every week says "A Search for Earth," and at some point you gotta find earth, or it becomes "Gilligan's Island." The audience loses faith that you're ever going to get anywhere and the cylons are never going to destroy the Galactica and what's the point. We've always felt that there's an end to this show, and we've moved into the third act of a three-act structure. Especially after this season's finale, we've moved the story to a place where we're talking about conclusions and climaxes and what's it all about -- getting into the endgame. How long it takes to finish out the saga is another matter.
So you couldn't say now whether you think of Season 4 as the last of the series?
I'm considering that right now, to be honest. It's in the air. I don't know. It hasn't been formally decided and I haven't made my own decision. It's a possibility.
The worst thing that could happen to us is if we overstayed our welcome and got to a place where we had not finished the story and then we got canceled. I'd rather go out on my own terms creatively and go out strong.
We won't be seeing Season 4 until January 2008, but I understand there's going to be some kind of miniseries or movie coming before then?
There is something that they're calling "extra episodes" or "extended episodes" -- they keep shifting the nomenclature. Essentially, we are shooting two hours of "Galactica" that will be broadcast on SciFi Channel sometime in the fall. Let's say they broadcast it on a Friday; then, on the following Monday, it will be available on DVD.
That story will not pick up our cliffhanger at the end of Season 3. That didn't seem right. The story will be set on the Battleship Pegasus and will take place in the past, relative to where we are in Season 3. But the events set up in that story will then pay off in Season 4.
What was the reasoning behind doing that?
They came to us. It gives Home Video something to sell in the stores. Since we won't be back until January, which is a long time to be off the air, it gives the fans something to see and keeps the show alive. So it serves multiple masters. There was no way we could pick up the cliffhanger in that format, and then ask people to wait to really start the season later. One of the story lines everyone had really liked was the Pegasus story and the character of Admiral Cain, so we decided to go with that.
There's been talk of you doing another series called "Caprica," set before the cylon attack on the colony of that name. Is that still happening?
It's possible. It's been in development at SciFi for a while and they haven't picked it up. And I don't know if they're going to pick it up at this point. There's talk of doing it as a TV movie and seeing how that works, as a back-door pilot, much as we did with the "Galactica" miniseries. Right now there's nothing telling me that they're going to move on it anytime soon, so I'm starting to feel that it's going to remain on the development shelf.
It was a different kind of show. Instead of an action-adventure sci-fi piece, it was more of a prime-time soap, a sci-fi "Dallas." It was about a family, the Adamas, and a company, and it was about the creation of the cylons 50 years ago. It was not going to be space-based, but set entirely on the planet of Caprica. But it would have sci-fi touches, and it would deal with issues like artificial intelligence and the various schemings and backbitings that you get in the traditional soap opera.
Are you already at work on Season 4 of "Battlestar Galactica"?
Yep, we've broken the first eight episodes. We're pretty happy. There are a lot of things coming; a lot of things change in the season finale of this season and propel us into the story lines of next season.
Can we expect something in this Sunday's season finale that will be as surprising as the finale to Season 2?
Well, the Season 2 finale is a pretty high bar. It certainly had some shocks. I don't know if we can really top Season 2, but it's up there.
-- By Laura Miller
And can you copy and paste the thing, I hate the stupid signing up crap.[/quote] You can view the interview without signing up if you click on the ad, I was running Firefox with ad block plus and I had to load the page in an IE tab to click on the ad.
Or here is a copy of it someone posted on Digg:
By Laura Miller
Mar. 24, 2007 | "Battlestar Galactica," the celebrated, Peabody Award-winning SciFi Channel drama, will conclude its third season on Sunday night, with a climactic human rights trial featuring some downright spooky resonances with today's headlines. Although the challenging and unconventional series commands a devoted following, its ratings have been anemic, and so fans received the announcement earlier this week that the SciFi Channel has picked it up for another 22 episodes with much rejoicing. Salon spoke by telephone with executive producer and show-runner Ronald D. Moore about what it's like to comment on the Iraq war in a show set in outer space, the fear-based mentality of the entertainment industry, and the difficulty of making TV that doesn't pretend to solve the world's most vexing problems in 60 minutes. [Warning: Spoilers for Sunday night's finale will follow.]
One of the things people like about "Battlestar Galactica" is the way it seems to touch upon the issues of our time without stooping to obvious connect-the-dots political commentary. In last week's episode, the lawyer prosecuting the big human rights trial in the season finale told an aide to President Laura Roslin to back off, and then added, "Of course, I do serve at the pleasure of the president." I thought you either had to be working much faster than is humanly possible, or "Battlestar Galactica" has become prophetic.
Wasn't that wild? We wrote and filmed that line months ago, before it became part of the current conversation. That was shot in November or October. It's a phrase I've been familiar with and I put it in the show because that's the expression used about people who serve for the president.
Do you often find the show echoing current events even when you didn't intend it to, or is that pretty rare?
It happens. It's an odd confluence of events sometimes. When we're working on a show and developing the story lines and scripts we're certainly keenly aware of what's going on in the world. You can project some things out to where the world might be when the show airs. But with some things, like that line, there's a bit of serendipity that happens.
What's especially weird about it is that the situation is so similar to the ones that led to the Alberto Gonzales scandal.
Yeah, it is. It's Laura trying to tell the prosecutor what to charge, what crime to prosecute. It's been interesting to watch that.
How hard do you try to link what's going on in "Battlestar Galactica" to real-world politics? Or do you find yourselves trying to resist that impulse?
It's part of the brief. The premise of the show lends itself to those topics so naturally. It's about an apocalyptic attack, a group of survivors on the run and they're dealing with issues that are inherently about freedom and security. There's the civilian and the military, and lots of issues it seems very natural for them to grapple with that mirror events in the real world. We talk about it at length in the writers' room and with the cast and directors, trying to figure out where the lines are for us. We never want to go into direct allegory for today's events because there's nothing really interesting about that.
What is interesting to you?
It's interesting for me as a writer when we can move the chess pieces around a little bit, when you're dealing with suicide bombing on the show but suddenly it's not those other people who are doing it, but your characters. You're able to examine the moral questions of it in a different context because you're not burdened by the direct analogy of saying, "If Laura is George Bush and the cylons are the enemy, how do you deal with it?" That to me isn't great drama because everything is so loaded and so apparent. Science fiction gives you the opportunity to mix and match the elements and the circumstances. You can deal with the deeper themes and issues because you've scrambled the chess pieces. You're coming at it from a different point of view.
I get the impression you want to avoid parroting a boiler-plate political position, whatever your own politics might be.
I do try not to do that. I'm not naive enough to think my politics don't influence the show. I'm certain that they do, but the show's mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: "And here's the way to solve Iraq!" I don't think that's helpful, and I don't think that's good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.
I like the show best when you get to a place where you're not sure who you're rooting for anymore, you're not sure whose side you're on. And you're confused and you might even be angry about what we're doing but at least it's forced you to a place of trying to define your own point of view on something.
Moral ambiguity is unusual not only in television, but in pop culture in general. You worked on several of the "Star Trek" series, which I associate with moral stances that are a lot more pat. What's difficult about making a TV series that aims for something different?
The challenge is that TV wants to bend you and your characters to neat moral decisions and arguments. Ultimately, the forces of television want your heroes to be heroic. It wants the leading characters to make the "right" choice each week and it wants there to be a clearly defined "bad" person in the show. Or at the most, the character does the right thing and maybe at the end he looks wistfully off-camera and ponders how it might have been different. There's a certain phony-baloney quality to a lot of the moralism on TV. It does serve up pat answers to difficult questions. And when you try to make it more morally ambiguous, you immediately run into the buzz saw of "It makes the characters unlikable. There's no one to root for. The audience won't like the character if they can't say he's making the right choice and that's what separates him from his enemies."
We set out to make a very different kind of show. The difficulty is that when you go into these morally ambiguous areas, you have to have morally questionable decisions and motives for all your characters.
The objection that this makes the characters unlikable doesn't even turn out to be true. I'm sure you're well aware of that after seeing the response to what you've decided to do with Starbuck, a person who consistently made bad decisions for bad reasons but who was very popular with viewers all the same. To say she's "unlikable" sounds like an executive's objection.
It's a very fear-driven culture, the entertainment business. It's all about fear. You're afraid the audience isn't going to like it. You're afraid that they'll be turned off and that they're not as smart as you are. They won't get what you're going for. Can't it be safer? Can't it be happier?
It's also got to be difficult to go that route in a show that's substantially about the military. The armed services is an aspect of society people tend to be absolutist about. Was the military setting one of the things that got you interested in the project to begin with?
Well, that was in the concept itself. The original show was a war show. From my point of view, updating it meant that I wanted to treat the military aspects differently. I wanted to make it clear that the people who are serving are human beings, not exalted icons. They do have flaws and make bad judgments and are afflicted by the same curses as everyone else. There are drunks and womanizers and all kinds of different people who go into the military because they're just people.
It was important to me to portray it like that partly because of working on "Star Trek" for so long. One of the central ideas of "Star Trek" is that the people on the Enterprise and in Star Fleet were the best of the best. They were better than you and I, a better breed of human beings who were not torn with petty differences, jealousies and all the things that make people human. That stuff was almost bred out of them at Star Fleet, and that made the drama hard to convey. You were more distant from them as characters.
So I wanted the people on Galactica to be a very different crop. It wasn't going to be the best ship in the fleet crewed by an elite crew. It was going to be an old ship getting ready to go into retirement, and there were going to be a lot of misfits on that ship. What happens when the fate of humanity rests on their shoulders? That's a far more interesting question to me.
Again, science fiction gives me a lot of license. This is not an aircraft carrier. I don't have to be so careful not to offend people who serve in the Navy or have relatives in the Navy, or people who just want to posture about what people are really like in the Navy and you're besmirching the names of our fair soldiers and sailors and all that crap. This is a made-up universe. It's certainly modeled on the U.S. military and we do a lot of the interior character work centering around military culture and how they treat each other, but it's not meant to be a direct representation of the people who are serving.
But before this you weren't sitting around thinking about how much you wanted to do a show about fighter pilots?
No, but it is one of my lifelong interests. My father was a veteran. He was a Marine officer in the Vietnam War. He had a library full of military books. I had an interest in history and read a lot about the military. I was briefly in Navy ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corp] in college. When I was at "Star Trek" I jumped at opportunities to do things like go on an aircraft carrier for a weekend, and when I was in ROTC I spent a week on a nuclear submarine. I've always been fascinated by the military culture. It was one of the things that appealed to me about the project, but no, I wasn't setting out to find a military project.
"Battlestar Galactica" is a bit like "Lost" in that it's what's called a highly serialized drama, with a long continuing plotline. If someone misses a few episodes, they may stop watching entirely, thinking they'll never be able to catch up. At the same time, once you get past the first season, new viewers can be put off by how much they don't know about what's going on. So you can lose the viewers you already have much more easily than you can acquire new ones, and both shows have suffered dips in their ratings. Yet this also seems to be one of the most fertile and exciting formats in the medium. How do you deal with those challenges?
I don't. It's a genuine problem I have no solution for. We have long conversations with the network about the extent of the serialized nature of the show. It's certainly not something they're in love with. We the writers are always pushing to make it more serialized because it makes for better storytelling. We've done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they're almost never very successful for our particular series. They're not what the audience tunes in for. But the network's legitimate concern is just what you were saying: The audience tends to attenuate over time. It's hard to bring new people on board. There's the hurdle of them having to catch up on all the old episodes, and any hurdle you put in front of the audience is just a bad thing. I don't know what to say. This is the kind of show I like to do, and we're just going to keep doing it. Hopefully, we can persuade people to buy the DVDs and catch up at home and keep watching the show, but the show is what it is.
The availability of DVD sets seems to have made it more possible to do this kind of series.
I think it has. It's really changed the landscape. People are much more comfortable getting on to shows like this because they can pick up a boxed set and catch up.
Another thing: I don't know how reliable the ratings are anymore. I'm among those who cast a skeptical eye at the Nielsen Co. and the demographics and ratings they deliver. The fragmentation of the audience is so profound I don't know how the samples can even tell me how many people are watching my show anymore. It seems like such a crap shoot. It's like where the music industry used to be a few years ago, before they got -- what's that thing called? -- SoundScan. Before they got that it was like Nielsen; they called up store owners and asked them what was selling and what wasn't. When they shifted to a legitimate way of tracking each and every sale, it upended the charts. Suddenly, country music was huge, much bigger than anyone had thought. I think TV is in the same ballpark. We're relying on a really old system based on this sample of people, and it's not really accurate anymore. God knows how many Nielsen families are sci-fi fans.
Creatively, serialized dramas are tricky because you can plan some of it out in advance, but not all of it. Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?
A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes. I can think in groups of 10.
Then we break all the interior shows. But as those shows get translated into teleplays and we get into production, things will change. We'll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I'm writing and think, "Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here." Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly. But we still try to maintain that goal. We still aim to get to that same place by the end of the 10th episode, but the path to get there I consider much more flexible.
As you get deeper into the series and start planning the next 10 and what's the season finale, it's the same process. You think you've laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you've already set in motion. But I find that it's just a more organic way to do it. It's more interesting, it's more fun, it allows the writers' creativity to come to the fore. It certainly has its downside, because sometimes you make big mistakes. Something that sounded really good at that moment, and you grabbed onto it, doesn't really pan out. Then you have a bad episode.
What's an example where that process really worked well for you?
In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.
And when did this method not work so well?
We'd developed a whole story line this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of [former president] Gaius Baltar. During the missing year on New Caprica, when Baltar was president, a massacre had taken place among the people from this one colony that had isolated themselves from the rest of the people. It was this long intricate back story built into a lot of the previous episodes of the show and it just didn't work. And I basically decided to throw it out while I was writing the finale, on the spur of the moment. We then had to go back into previous episodes and take that out, reshooting and re-editing. Some of those episodes suffered from that decision. It was important because it saved the finale and made it much stronger, but certain episodes in the second half of the third season are weaker as a result of that.
One of the delicate issues with serialized dramas is that they can run out of gas.
Well, you can argue that daytime soap operas never seem to run out of gas -- they go on for 20 years! But we're not really set up to do that. Ours has a beginning, middle and end. Our main title every week says "A Search for Earth," and at some point you gotta find earth, or it becomes "Gilligan's Island." The audience loses faith that you're ever going to get anywhere and the cylons are never going to destroy the Galactica and what's the point. We've always felt that there's an end to this show, and we've moved into the third act of a three-act structure. Especially after this season's finale, we've moved the story to a place where we're talking about conclusions and climaxes and what's it all about -- getting into the endgame. How long it takes to finish out the saga is another matter.
So you couldn't say now whether you think of Season 4 as the last of the series?
I'm considering that right now, to be honest. It's in the air. I don't know. It hasn't been formally decided and I haven't made my own decision. It's a possibility.
The worst thing that could happen to us is if we overstayed our welcome and got to a place where we had not finished the story and then we got canceled. I'd rather go out on my own terms creatively and go out strong.
We won't be seeing Season 4 until January 2008, but I understand there's going to be some kind of miniseries or movie coming before then?
There is something that they're calling "extra episodes" or "extended episodes" -- they keep shifting the nomenclature. Essentially, we are shooting two hours of "Galactica" that will be broadcast on SciFi Channel sometime in the fall. Let's say they broadcast it on a Friday; then, on the following Monday, it will be available on DVD.
That story will not pick up our cliffhanger at the end of Season 3. That didn't seem right. The story will be set on the Battleship Pegasus and will take place in the past, relative to where we are in Season 3. But the events set up in that story will then pay off in Season 4.
What was the reasoning behind doing that?
They came to us. It gives Home Video something to sell in the stores. Since we won't be back until January, which is a long time to be off the air, it gives the fans something to see and keeps the show alive. So it serves multiple masters. There was no way we could pick up the cliffhanger in that format, and then ask people to wait to really start the season later. One of the story lines everyone had really liked was the Pegasus story and the character of Admiral Cain, so we decided to go with that.
There's been talk of you doing another series called "Caprica," set before the cylon attack on the colony of that name. Is that still happening?
It's possible. It's been in development at SciFi for a while and they haven't picked it up. And I don't know if they're going to pick it up at this point. There's talk of doing it as a TV movie and seeing how that works, as a back-door pilot, much as we did with the "Galactica" miniseries. Right now there's nothing telling me that they're going to move on it anytime soon, so I'm starting to feel that it's going to remain on the development shelf.
It was a different kind of show. Instead of an action-adventure sci-fi piece, it was more of a prime-time soap, a sci-fi "Dallas." It was about a family, the Adamas, and a company, and it was about the creation of the cylons 50 years ago. It was not going to be space-based, but set entirely on the planet of Caprica. But it would have sci-fi touches, and it would deal with issues like artificial intelligence and the various schemings and backbitings that you get in the traditional soap opera.
Are you already at work on Season 4 of "Battlestar Galactica"?
Yep, we've broken the first eight episodes. We're pretty happy. There are a lot of things coming; a lot of things change in the season finale of this season and propel us into the story lines of next season.
Can we expect something in this Sunday's season finale that will be as surprising as the finale to Season 2?
Well, the Season 2 finale is a pretty high bar. It certainly had some shocks. I don't know if we can really top Season 2, but it's up there.
-- By Laura Miller
[quote name='David85']Don't forget tonight's episode runs a little long, 3-5 minutes long because Sc-fi = assholes.[/quote]
How are they assholes for giving us an extended episode? I love it when the episodes run a little long.
Anyway, great episode. The trial was great, though the lack of Baltar and Six getting on the stand was disappointing. The ending was also great, I'm really looking forward to next season. The pan out from the fleet and onto Earth was great, it seems like they are really close.
I look forward to seeing them explain how Tigh is a Cylon since he fought in the first Cylon war, before they had human Cylon models.
How are they assholes for giving us an extended episode? I love it when the episodes run a little long.
Anyway, great episode. The trial was great, though the lack of Baltar and Six getting on the stand was disappointing. The ending was also great, I'm really looking forward to next season. The pan out from the fleet and onto Earth was great, it seems like they are really close.
I look forward to seeing them explain how Tigh is a Cylon since he fought in the first Cylon war, before they had human Cylon models.
David85
Banned
[quote name='Kaijufan']How are they assholes for giving us an extended episode? I love it when the episodes run a little long.
Anyway, great episode. The trial was great, though the lack of Baltar and Six getting on the stand was disappointing. The ending was also great, I'm really looking forward to next season. The pan out from the fleet and onto Earth was great, it seems like they are really close.
I look forward to seeing them explain how Tigh is a Cylon since he fought in the first Cylon war, before they had human Cylon models.[/QUOTE]
I'm pissed because they could just cut a commerical.
And I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that Six wasn't on the stand. Can we kill her now?
And I can't wait to explain how these 4 of the final five are important and their meaning to everything. They are not regular cylons, no clones or anything, and seem to be gods retaking human form. That's all I can think of.
Anyway, great episode. The trial was great, though the lack of Baltar and Six getting on the stand was disappointing. The ending was also great, I'm really looking forward to next season. The pan out from the fleet and onto Earth was great, it seems like they are really close.
I look forward to seeing them explain how Tigh is a Cylon since he fought in the first Cylon war, before they had human Cylon models.[/QUOTE]
I'm pissed because they could just cut a commerical.
And I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that Six wasn't on the stand. Can we kill her now?
And I can't wait to explain how these 4 of the final five are important and their meaning to everything. They are not regular cylons, no clones or anything, and seem to be gods retaking human form. That's all I can think of.
[quote name='David85']I'm pissed because they could just cut a commerical.
[/quote] :lol:
Anyway, I suppose that all of the new Cylons could have been real humans at one point and replaced by Cylons on New Caprica.
I also want to know how the entire fleet lost power at the same time and got it back at the same time.
I'm not sure what to think about Starbuck.
[/quote] :lol:
Anyway, I suppose that all of the new Cylons could have been real humans at one point and replaced by Cylons on New Caprica.
I also want to know how the entire fleet lost power at the same time and got it back at the same time.
I'm not sure what to think about Starbuck.
- Status
bread's done