Via BuddyTV: Battlestar Galactica Season Four Premiere Details Emerge

The LAT has an interesting and somewhat amusing piece on Katie Sackhoff’s fake exit from Galactica: ‘Battlestar Galactica’ star.

I must say, between the way Moore did his podcast and the whole casting of Sackhoff in the Bionic Woman pilot, I was beginning to wonder if, in fact, they had killed the character–so kudos to the crew on that count. :

Other details also worked in favor of the surprise. One seemingly unpluggable source of leaks of character deaths is casting news — actors do want to continue working, after all. After she finished shooting her episodes, Sackhoff had a long hiatus from the Vancouver set and looked for other jobs in Los Angeles. “I was taking meetings for things and trying to tell people that they could hire me without really lying to them,” she said.

The fact the Sackhoff was auditioning for new roles spread throughout the “Battlestar Galactica” community. Then Eick cast her in his NBC pilot, a remake of “The Bionic Woman.” “I was excited to cast Katee as the guest lead in the pilot,” he said. “Because if nothing else, when it hit the press, people said, ‘Damn, she really is dead!’ “

In terms of the show itself, there are suggestions in the article that Starbuck isn’t a Cylon. Of course, given their misdirection on the death thing, can we really trust them in their press statements?

“My goal was to mislead the audience into thinking Kara Thrace was a Cylon,” Eick said. Being a Cylon, after all, would mean that there were many copies of her, and therefore Sackhoff could come back as a different version of Starbuck.

“For the fans really paying close attention — reading the message boards, consuming all the details — I think they were adequately misled,” Eick said. “They thought they knew the answer; they were wrong, and that’s ultimately what they want — to be surprised.”

We shall see. Either Starbuck is the last of the final five, or the maelstrom was a rather un-BSG-like portal of some type.

ThePost-Gazette Journal has and interesting interview with Ron Moore, which includes this interesting confirmation:

R: Are these four all full Cylons?

RM: Yes, but they are different fundamentally.

R: Will we meet the final fifth Cylon next season?

RM: I think so.

I thought perhaps that would be a mystery until next season, i.e., are they really Cylons…tune in to find out!

And surely, unless the Maelstrom was some sort of gateway, doesn’t Starbuck have to be the final Cylon? One gets the impression that she died earlier in the season and since only Cylons resurrect…

Of course, she did have her Viper in that final scene.

Also: I wonder if the Basestars in the final scene are populated with the Cylons we know or with Final Five models.

On the off chance you haven’t seen Maelstrom, I warn of major spoilers below.

(more…)

I was a little behind in my BSG watching and finally watched my TiVo’d edition of the latest episode (Dirty Hands) last night.

The recent spate of stand-alone episodes raises the question of whether the show wouldn’t be better off having a lower episode count per season and just sticking to the main arc. The stand-alones have the chance to highlight specific characters or issues, which is theory is a good idea, but it is hard to say that in practice that the stand-alone episodes have ever been as good, or as compelling, as the stories which specifically forward the overall arc (which we return to this week).

Some thoughts on Dirty Hands:

• The problems of keeping the fleet working and the conditions that that might create was a very, very interesting topic that raised a series of interesting questions that deserved more than one episode, to be honest. This should have been a mini-arc rather than a one-off story. The episode had a certain Trek-ness to it insofar as it was all wrapped up too easily at the end.
• Speaking of it all being wrapped up too easily, Adama and Laura both were too-hard in the beginning and too soft at the end, making the whole narrative have a too-contrived feel to it. Ditto with the whole thing about Selix (sp?) and her quest to become pilot. First it is presented as impossible, but all of a sudden at the end we have the whole silly scene with Starbuck.

• Laura seems far too authoritarian for her character when she had the guy from the refinery ship arrested just for quoting Baltar’s book in a defiant manner.
• Speaking of contrived, it came across as too neat, and too out-of-nowhere, that there was as much inter-colony differences and resentments as was presented in the episodes. It was established that there was something odd about the Sagitarons, and it was reasonable to cast Caprica as the “Golden Colony” but the idea that each of the other colonies somehow represented different elements of the under-class seem to come from nowhere. Earlier I had had the impression that the colonies were relatively co-equal, even if some where more important, wealthier or whatever than the others (like US states), rather than a system of associated dependent development in which Caprica was the wealthier uber-state that was keeping all the others in its thrall.
• I know that colonial society is paranoid about automation and that Ron Moore wants a more realistic view of technology, but sometimes I think that they have gone too far in making things more low tech than they ought to be (such as the tyllium refinery). Somehow hauling ore in small wheelbarrows and being dumped onto the conveyor-belts in little buckets seemed a bit too-1930s for me.
• How many mutinies/mutinous behavior can we have where essentially saying you are sorry is enough? In addition to Tyrol’s behavior in this episode we have had:
  

  -Lee pulled a gun on Tighe in direct contravention of Adama’s orders at the end of Season 1, and while he did spend some time in the brig, he eventually was not only fully restored to duty, but promoted.

  -Helo has done a number of questionable acts, not the least of which was thwarting Adama’s plan to use the biological weapon against the Cylons.

  -Starbuck ignored orders when she went to Caprica to get the Arrow of Apollo–although I suppose she technically was working for the President on that one.

• I like the idea of Baltar trying to manipulate the situation, but don’t like the implication that he is somehow deep down motivated by his background on some backwater farming planet. It just doesn’t track, and like a lot of issues in the episode, feel like they came out of nowhere.
• On balance I find the attempt at asking political, social and economic questions within the context of the fleet to be fascinating, but I think the execution fell short.
• I don’t buy the idea that the colonial military was, as a general principle, stratified by colonial background.
• Also, where is the fleet’s resident radical, Tom Zarek, on these issues?
  

Technorati tag: Battlestar+Galactica

Via the SyFy Portal: ‘Caprica’ Will Be ‘Battlestar Galactica’s’ ‘Lou Grant’

“I would say it’s pretty positive, because of the support for ‘Battlestar,’ but also because it represents a pretty strident departure from the kind of show ‘Battlestar’ is,” Eick said. “Not that SciFi doesn’t like the kind of show that ‘Battlestar’ is, but I think if you’re going to do a spinoff, you can do ‘Xena’ or ‘Stargate: Atlantis,’ which are sort of variations of the same theme as their precedessors. Or you can say, ‘OK, you had ‘M*A*S*H,’ and then you had ‘Trapper John, MD.’ Or you had ‘Mary Tyler Moore” and then ‘Lou Grant.'’ So I think this is more in the spirit of taking a portion of the mythos, the backstory of ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and then advancing it in a completely new direction with a different style and tone and just an overall different kind of show than ‘Battlestar Galactica.’”

Ok, I understand what Eick means, but that just sounds, well, odd. But perhaps that because I never watched Lou Grant.

Via the LAT: ‘Battlestar’ will be back for four

For a while, things looked iffy for “Battlestar Galactica.” After the Sci Fi Channel last month moved the third-season drama about a human resistance movement against an occupying race of robots from Friday nights to Sunday nights in an attempt to goose ratings, viewership remained stagnant.

The network has ruled, however, that the show won’t live by numbers alone: The Sci Fi Channel is expected to announce Tuesday that it has renewed the series for a fourth season. At least 13 new episodes will be produced this summer for a premiere next January.

That’s excellent news. The bad news, however, is that a 13-episode order is smaller than S2 or S3. Worse, if S4 is slated for January, that means a loooong wait from the end of S3 (likely to end in a major cliffhanger, if history is a guide) and the start of S4.

Update: SyFy Portal reports that the final episode number will likely be 20.

Buddy TV has preview of upcoming episodes which include some moderate (I would say, anyway) spoilers.

Via the SyFy Portal:

BSG pulled in 2.05 million viewers, according to industry publication Broadcasting & Cable, bringing it more in line with how the series picked up in January 2024 when it had 2.1 million viewers tuned in for the second half of the show’s second season.

“The Dresden Files” also did well, bringing in 1.89 million viewers compared to 1.73 million it had in the previous week, however the gap between the two shows have widened a bit as “Dresden Files’” uptick was not as dramatic as “Battlestar Galactica’s.”

While Broadcasting & Cable didn’t release actual ratings numbers, 2.05 million viewers for cable usually equates to around a 1.7 or 1.8 rating, bettering the 1.4 the show earned last week when it competed directly with the AFC Championship game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots which pulled in 50 million viewers.

Good deal. Having the first Sunday be up against the AFC Title game was not a good move if the goal was to see if Sunday was going to be a ratings winner. For that matter this week the show will be up against the Super Bowl. I expect that the numbers won’t be so good.

I TiVo’d the Dresden Files but have only watched a few minutes of the first ep. It looks as if it has potential.

Straight from writer/co-executive produce of the show, Famous Mark Verheiden

Since there seems to be some confusion here, let me try to be as clear as possible about what I “know.” BSG hasn’t been cancelled. We’re waiting to see if the show’s renewed for season four. There is a very cool BSG “movie” in the works that will be shot if BSG gets picked up for season four. That, I’m afraid, is the sum total of my “intel.”

Which, of course, confirms known information, but it is nice to have it as straight from the source as is possible.