HomeGalactica News 'Battlestar Galactica' producers talk about the show's final season
'Battlestar Galactica' producers talk about the show's final season
By Maureen Ryan,
on 05-06-2007
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'Battlestar Galactica' producers talk about the show's final season Last week, the news broke that “Battlestar Galactica” is ending for good after its fourth season.
So a June 1 telephone press conference, in which the show’s creators talked “Battlestar’s” end, could have been funereal. But it was far from that, thanks to irrepressible humor of executive producer David Eick, who responded to many questions with a quip.
What stories does he regret not having the time to tell in the show’s four-season run?
“We never got Starbuck and No. 6 together,” Eick joked.
Executive producer Ron Moore was more serious, but he sounded sanguine about the show’s final season. He sounded like a man whose show is going out with pride, on its own terms.
“I don’t know if there are any regrets. I think everything we kind of talked about found its way into the show in some way or another,” Moore said. “The only regret I remember we had toward the end of the third season was [not being able to do more with Battlestar Pegasus]. Now we get a chance to do that too.”
Moore was referring to a two-hour episode called “Razor” that will air in November. It’ll return to the story of the Pegasus and its leader, the memorable Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes). But fans should be aware that “Razor” will not pick up the thread of the show’s typically jaw-dropping season finale. Season 4 proper will begin in early 2008, and will consist of 20 additional hours.
Moore said he began to feel that the story was about to reach its third and final act during Season 3.
The midpoint of that season was “probably the moment when I think we started feeling like, if we don’t start paying this off, if we don’t really reveal those secrets and start moving in that direction, you get to a place where you feel like… you’re just treading water. And we never wanted to be in that position, we wanted to always striding forward and always pushing the show to its limits,” Moore said.
“We really start taking our cues from the story itself,” he added, “and it just feels like the story has moved forward aggressively, and that’s one of the things I’m proud of about the series – [it’s] unafraid to take risks and unafraid to move strongly forward instead of trying to tread water. And it just feels like the momentum of the series is now moving toward the conclusion.”
At some point in the final season, the rag-tag Galactica fleet will reach Earth, their long-cherished goal, but Moore was understandably cryptic about the details (after all, jaw-dropping surprises are one of “Galatica’s” best features).
“Well, I don’t want to be that definitive about it,” he said. “but the show has always been about a search for Earth, and I think to end the series without getting to Earth, or a version of Earth or something we call Earth, or having at least somebody say ‘Earth,’ it would be unsatisfying. So it will definitely figure into this year’s story line.”
But Moore and Eick are still dealing with the fallout of the show’s season finale, which left fans scratching their heads in amazement. As “All Along the Watchtower” played in the closing minutes, four well-known members of the fleet were revealed to be Cylons, the robotic race that the fleet has been battling for years. Then the presumed-dead Kara “Starbuck” Thrace made a surprise reappearance and said she knew how to get to Earth.
“I think [fan reaction to the finale] was probably what we anticipated,” Moore said. “I sort of took as a guidepost how people reacted to the Season 2 finale. When we made the jump ahead [in time] and put them all down on the planet, the reactions were -- people were ecstatic and people were outraged. And there wasn’t a lot of middle ground. And I kind of felt like, that’s what they’re going to do when we reveal the Cylons. And that’s pretty much what happened.”
Speaking of that time jump, “Lost” employed a time shift in its generally well-received season finale (which I mostly enjoyed). When asked if his show would ever use a time jump like “Battlestar Galactica” did, “Lost” executive producer Damon Lindelof said in January, “First off, that’s an amazing show, and if we did it people would think we were ripping them off, and they’d be absolutely right. It’s a slippery slope and you have to execute it well, because when ‘Alias’ [another series by ‘Lost’ co-creator J.J. Abrams] did it, it was a complete and utter disaster of unmitigated proportions.”
Perhaps Lindelof’s comment was an intentional fakeout designed to throw fans off the trail of what “Lost” was planning for its season finale. And in any case, “Lost’s” time shift was somewhat different from the one seen on “Battlestar” (and other shows, as Lindelof pointed out, have used the device as well). But I had to ask the “Battlestar” producers if they saw the “Lost” finale as an homage or an appropriation or what.
“We often refer to them as thieves...thieves in the night,” Eick joked. “We appreciate your alerting us and our attorneys will be notified immediately after we hang up.”
Moore was his typically placid self. “I haven't kept up with ‘Lost.’ I didn't know that,” he said.
It’s no wonder they don’t have much time to keep up with other television shows; Moore and Eick are developing the “Galactica” prequel “Caprica” (which appears to be stuck in the development process at the moment), and Eick is the executive producer of “Bionic Woman,” an NBC remake of the ’70s show. And of course both men are also overseeing production of the final season of “Battlestar Galactica,” which, Moore promises, will wrap up its stories as definitively as it can.
“The plan is to end the show. The plan is to bring us to a definitive conclusion. There’s no plans or even thoughts in our heads of doing a follow-on feature or any series or anything beyond that. But it’s also the kind of thing where you never say never, because who knows how we’ll feel when we actually write the conclusion -- will there be a plotline or a story that we create on the page that opens a later door? It’d be foolish to say, ‘Absolutely not.’ But right now the plan is now for a definitive ending,” Moore said.
Photo: Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos as Laura Roslin and William Adama in "Resurrection Ship Part 2."
An edited transcript of Moore and Eick's press conference is below. Please note that most questions have been summarized and not every word of the press conference is transcribed below.
[On the fact that in a recent interview, Sci Fi executive Mark Stern did not say that the series was ending.]
Eick: “I just think he’s generally a very shifty character. [laughs]. This decision took some time to arrive at and like most decisions this large, there were a number of questions that we had internally. We had a creative agenda that we wanted to serve and we all had to kind of collectively decide when it was time to be definitive about it, and that time is now. But I certainly don’t blame him for keeping it close to the vest until every side of this equation had been vetted.”
[On “Razor,” the two-hour episode that will air in November.]
Moore: It’s two episodes that are not really part of the fourth season. They’re not connected to the cliffhanger where we ended season three. Essentially, what the history was, we were approached by home video in between the seasons, who had expressed an interest in releasing a couple of episodes on DVD for domestic and foreign distribution, and as we talked about internally, we realized there was no way we could really pick up the [Season 3] cliffhanger in that form, and we would preserve that for the official beginning of the fourth season. The way that it made sense to us was to go back a little in time, not before the series began, but back a season or two, from the second season… we found a way to connect the events of that story to things to things that will happen in the fourth season.
It ties into the story of the Pegasus. There are sequences that involve Admiral Cain. But it does not take place during [the] Pegasus [timeline of] ‘Resurrection Ship.’ Some of the events of Pegasus’ backstory during the original Cylon attack are dramatized, and other events after the death of Admiral Cain, while the Pegasus was still in the ragtag fleet, are covered.
[On whether Sci Fi wanted a fifth season.]
Moore: There was discussion of how long it should go on, and to their credit, they were very sensitive to what we wanted to do creatively on the show, and since it came from David and I, approaching them and saying, ‘Look, we feel that the show has reached its third act and it’s about the resolution of the series and we feel that the storyline is sort of propelling us toward a conclusion,’ they asked us questions on why we felt that way, and they wanted to think about it for a while, but they didn’t really fight us on it. They expressed concern that the show might be able to go on longer, and [they] wanted to make sure that we weren’t passing up opportunities to continue telling the stories from the series, but they were very accommodating. When David and I were clear that this was what we really definitively wanted to do, they supported us.
[On whether the ending of the series will be definitive.]
Moore: The plan is to end the show. The plan is to bring us to a definitive conclusion. There’s no plans or even thoughts in our heads of them doing a follow-on feature or any series or anything beyond that. But it’s also the kind of thing where you never say never, because who knows how we’ll feel when we actually write the conclusion, will there be a plotline or a story that we create on the page that opens a later door? It’d be foolish to say, ‘Absolutely not.’ But right now the plan is now for a definitive ending.
[On ‘bringing closure to relationships’ between characters on the show.]
Moore: Well, that’s the plan, that’s how we approached the story lines as we were breaking them out for the season. The intention would be certainly to concentrate on the characters and their relationships and sort of bring them all to an end point. I don’t know if we’ll resolve every single thing about every single relationship. There’s value in leaving some things to the imagination and having some things that are sort of tantalizingly unresolved. But the intention is to move toward what is the final chapter.
[On any stories they didn’t get to or wish they could have done.]
Eick: We never got Starbuck and No. 6 together.
Moore: I don’t know if there are any regrets. I think everything we kind of talked about found its way into the show in some way or another. The only regret I remember we had toward the end of the third season was [not being able to do more with Pegasus]. Now we get a chance to do that too.
[On whether 20 episodes will be enough for the last season.]
Moore: The burden … became, now we have a great deal to wrap up and bring resolution to. … it felt like we had more than enough [stories] to get to where we were going to. Whereas usually when you’re facing the 20-episode order, it’s like, whew, we need 20 of these? This time it was like, OK, let’s make sure we have enough time to get everywhere we need to go.
[On whether the duo had long term plans for the series or whether they were ‘winging it’ as they go.]
Moore: Well, each season we sort of mapped out where we wanted to go by the end of that season… somewhere midway through the second season, I started thinking seriously about what the end of the series itself might be, those ideas of where we were headed and what it all meant, started to coalesce over the course of the third season, and in between seasons four and three we started to talk in earnest about, ‘OK, well if we do end this next year, what would it really be.’
[On when they began thinking of mapping out the ending.]
Moore: I think it was somewhere around the midpoint of the [third] season, when we were working on the story where they got to the algae planet and discovered the Temple and the Temple gave D’Anna a glimpse of the Final Five, and then that triggers the beacon that points the way to Earth. Both of those events felt like you were promising the audience that you were moving toward revelation.
And indeed by the end of the season, we had taken that moment, and moved it to, OK, we’re going to reveal four of the final five Cylons, and one of our characters has actually been to Earth and seen it. That was sort of probably the moment when I think we started feeling like, if we don’t start paying this off, if we don’t really reveal those secrets and start moving in that direction, you get to a place where you feel like… you’re just treading water. And we never wanted to be in that position, we wanted to always striding forward and always pushing the show to its limits…
[On whether they have enough time to wrap up the series.]
Moore: It just felt like yeah, this was really the right time. In terms of, have we had enough time [to tell the stories they wanted to tell], I feel like we have. We really start taking our cues from the story itself, and it just feels like the story has moved forward aggressively, and that’s one of the things I’m proud of about the series – [it’s] unafraid to take risks and unafraid to move strongly forward instead of trying to tread water. And it just feels like the momentum of the series is now moving toward the conclusion.
[On politics on the show and the allegories to current events.]
Eick: Part of the point of science fiction, at least in its roots, was always to give the audience an allegory, to present a metaphor for what was taking place in the culture. I think we’ve always enjoyed and taken a certain satisfaction in the fact that there are those who watch the show and assume there’s a liberal bias, and there are those who watch the show and assume there’s a pro-military bias.
And that’s all kind of how it’s supposed to work, you’re supposed to bring your own point of view to it and be able to extrapolate out whatever messages you want, and the show tends not to be terribly definitive. We were pretty clear from the outset that this wasn’t going to be about protagonists espousing lessons and rules and arriving at the end of the day to tell everyone what was right and what was wrong. …
[On how the next season will play out -- whether will it be 10 episodes, a break, then 10 more, or whether it will be 12 and 8 episodes.]
Moore: At the moment, the network has not settled on a schedule. All we can say definitively is that season 4 begins in early ’08
[On ‘Lost’ using that flash-forward device that ‘Battlestar’ used at the end of season two.]
Eick: We often refer to them as thieves...(laughs) ...not writers or producers, thieves. Thieves in the night.
Moore: Did they jump ahead?
Reporter: Yeah, there's typically those flashbacks in an episode…
Moore: Uh huh...
Reporter: Well, it turns out that the scenes we were seeing of the lead character, Jack, were actually taking place in the future after they'd been rescued from the island.
Moore: Oh really.
Reporter: Yeah... you're not really sure what’s intervened.
Moore: I haven't kept up with it. I didn't know that.
Eick: We appreciate your alerting us and our attorneys will be notified immediately after we hang up. (laughs)
[On the fleet reaching Earth.]
Moore: Well, I don’t want to be that definitive about it, but the show has always been about a search for Earth, and I think to end the series without getting to Earth, or a version of Earth or something we call Earth, or having at least somebody say ‘Earth,’ it would be unsatisfying. So it will definitely figure into this year’s story line.
At the end of season three, we showed you a glimpse of Earth. You actually saw it and I think you will see more of it. We will get to a place that we’re going to call Earth, by the end of the series. You’ll get to see it.
[On what the actors thought of the news of the final season.]
Eick: It sort of depends on the actor. Some of them were very understanding of the point of view that the show had reached its natural conclusion and was ready for its third act as it were, and there were others who believed the show might have a longer life than that or were more surprised by that decision.
But I think for the most part now, everyone is looking at this season in a way that they might not normally look at a fourth season of a show. Which is to say that instead of just being another big step on a potentially infinite journey, it’s the concluding step. There’s a sense now of everyone really sinking their teeth into this and really grabbing hold of it as tightly as they can.
Moore: I was up in Vancouver on the set just a week or so ago, the best way I could describe it is, it felt like the beginning of senior year up there. Everyone was very aware that this was the last time, ‘the last first day of shooting,’ ‘the last time we’re going to do this,’ thinking about signing each other’s yearbooks and all that stuff.
[On whether anything has happened to change the direction of the show from what they originally conceived.]
Moore: I think it’s continued to head in the same general direction. I think that … what’s changed is sort of the path to get there. Who was going to get there, what it would mean to them and in what context.
Reporter: Any words of wisdom to those of us who remember the first Battlestar series and how it crashed and burned?
Eick: How did the first Battlestar series end?
Reporter: They arrived at earth…
Moore: The question you’re not asking is, will there be any flying motorcycles?
Reporter: How did you know? [laughs]
Moore: We’ve been doing a lot of R&D on our flying motorcycles.
[On whether the fan reaction to the Season 3 finale, and whether it was in line with their predictions of it what it would be.]
Moore: I think it was probably what we anticipated. I sort of took as a guidepost how people reacted to the Season 2 finale. When we made the jump ahead and put them all down on the planet, the reactions were, people were ecstatic and people were outraged. And there wasn’t a lot of middle ground. And I kind of felt like, that’s what they’re going to do when we reveal the Cylons. And that’s pretty much what happened.
[On the the Saggitarion plot getting dropped during Season 3 and any possible regrets about that.]
Moore: It was misstep but also, in the planning of it, it was a story line we were excited about… it was charged and it had racial and political overtones to it, which are the things that we generally love to do on the show. So, I mean, I can look back at that and go, yeah, ultimately that didn’t pay off and we had to retrofit a lot of things to cover our tracks. But I think when you’re doing a show like this, if you’re going to swing for the fences and keep trying to knock them out of the park, there’s going to be a few times you’re going to whiff and you’re not going to make it. And I think that just goes with the territory.
[On whether cast members will direct in the show’s fourth season.]
Eick: [cackling] No comment.
[On Lucy Lawless possibly coming back.]
Moore: It’s possible. It’s sort of in the planning stages, nothing firm. It’s one of the things we’re talking about.
[On whether the Season 4 episodes will be more serialized or more standalone.]
Moore: I think the term standalone is a bit slippery for us in the best of circumstances. I think the show has worked the best when its operated in continuity. I think what we’ve promised the network is that we will try not to overly serialize the show so that it’s impossible to watch an episode out of sequence. [They will try to have a beginning and middle and end of a story within each episode.]
[On whether the rest of the cast knew that Katee’s character was not really dying in ‘Maelstrom’ and was coming back.]
Moore: Uh…. No. There was quite a process actually. We were trying to keep a secret, and keeping a secret is very, very difficult in this business…. So initially we tried to just let Katee know and not tell anybody else. And of course when the script [in which Starbuck ‘died’] landed in Vancouver, it was like a small nuclear weapon had been detonated. Various people were up in arms and very upset and David and I had to make some sheepish phone calls and gradually bring more people into the circle of knowledge. … And it was amazing because we did still manage to hold the secret throughout. It paid off eventually, but it was a bit rocky for a while.
[On how they selected who the four Cylons of the finale would be.]
Eick: Well, there was a big dartboard in the writers room with all the cast members’ pictures on it…
Moore: It was a process. We sat and we talked about it, who would be the final four, and actually we gravitated kind of quickly to these four names, for various reason.
Tigh was the sexiest, because he was the one with the biggest hatred of the Cylons, he’d killed his own wife because she collaborated with the Cylons, he was a drunk and had all these completely human qualities. There was something amazing about realized that he’s a Cylon. Anders has participated in two resistance movements and was drawn to Kara Thrace for reasons unknown. And she had a specific destiny within the mythos of the show. Tyrol was the everyman, in some ways one of the most human characters. He was just very unexpected, to believe that he was a Cylon. And yet we’d already built into his backstory that he’d had a religious connection that seemed greater than anyone else’s. When he was on the Temple of the Five on the algae planet, he was sort of drawn there by reasons that had nothing to do with reason or rationality, he had a specific connection to it, he had dreamed about being a Cylon. He’d had emotional reactions about [Cylons], he was in love with a Cylon at the beginning of the miniseries. Tory was a wild card, she’s the one we knew the least about and could have more fun with, because we weren’t locked into as many choices with her as we were with the others. [On where those four characters’ stories will go.]
Well, you can see from the end of the third season that they all are still the same people. They’re still the same characters. They didn’t switch over and become robots. Essentially you’re going to see an extension of that initial moment, where they try to figure out, what does this mean to them. If they’re Cylons, when did that begin and what are their true backstories? What are they meant to do? Are they dangerous to each other, are they dangerous to the ship, can they trust any of the people around them, should they keep this secret only among themselves? That’s essentially where there stories are going to pick up.
[On whether ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ which was heard in the finale, will be referred to again]
Moore: We will touch on it again probably later on in the fourth season. We will explain it within the context of the show. It was something I thought about doing in an earlier season.
Eick: Before that, before that – it was the miniseries we talked about it.
Moore: Oh yeah, that’s right.
Eick: We were going to open the miniseries with a Simon and Garfunkel song, was it ‘America’?
Moore: Yeah, it was ‘America.’
Eick: We talked ourselves out of it because we were making such a reinvention as it was that it might be a little bit bananas on bananas. Then we were talking about, I think episode five of Season 1, when Helo and Sharon end up in a diner, that maybe there’s a juke box and maybe it still works and maybe Helo’s screwing around with it and suddenly he hears the song ‘Yesterday.’ And we just don’t explain it.
This felt like one of these one of these ideas that was good enough and big enough that it required its own story point and it just took us until now to figure out how to do it very well.
[On the show’s chances for Emmy nominations.]
Moore: Well, you know, hope springs eternal. … We certainly hope that we scored some nominations in a lot of different categories. But you never know.
[On whether it is better to approach doing a TV show with a definite end point in mind]
Moore: I think it’s hard to generalize, because I think there’s different kind of shows. A procedural doesn’t require that sort of thing. I don’t think anyone thinks that ‘CSI’ or ‘Law & Order’ has suffered because they don’t have the expectation of an end point. I think certain kinds of shows kind of demand a beginning, a middle and an end. I think you have to have an idea of what you’re creating.
Are you creating an open-ended franchise, like ‘CSI’ or ‘Law & Order,’ that essentially you can do them forever… or are you telling something that is tied to a specific narrative that sets up an expectation and ultimately has to be paid off? I think you just have to understand which show you’re doing at the beginning of the run.
[David Eick talks about Bionic Woman and Them, his two pilots for fall.]
Eick: I’m trying to use the [‘Battlestar’] cast as much as I can because I just have found that we have … stumbled upon the greatest collection of actors I’ve ever been a part of. Katee Sackhoff is in the pilot of ‘Bionic Woman’ and once ‘Battlestar’ ends and even when we go on hiatus if she’s free, we may be able to use her in an episode or two of ‘Bionic Woman.’ And Tricia Helfer was in another pilot I did for Fox which was called ‘Them,’ which may be flirting with a midseason order, and sort of the same thing there – if she became available she’d become a nerve center of that. [He would also try to use various writers, actors and directors from ‘Battlestar.’]
[On the status of ‘Caprica,’ a ‘Galactica’ prequel spinoff series that Moore and Eick have been working on.]
Eick: We’re certainly tremendously excited and enthused by what we were able to develop with Remi Aubuchon into a prequel launching point for a new series called ‘Caprica,’ which would basically take the stories that we come to discover on ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and go all the way back to their embryo, and the discovery of the technology that leads to Cylons, specifically. … we’re anxious for any opportunity to pursue it.
I don’t think we know the definitive answer to [whether it will go forward]. I don’t think anyone’s said to us definitely that it’s dead.
