Comic-Con '07: The 'Battlestar Galactica' Crew Preps for Final Voyage

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Comic-Con '07: The 'Battlestar Galactica' Crew Preps for Final Voyage

By Scott Huver, Hollywood.com Staff

Katee Sackhoff

"Frack!"

That pretty much sums up the collective reaction of legions of loyal Battlestar Galactica viewers when they learned the series’ upcoming fourth season next winter will also be its last.

A far cry from the original, fondly remembered but oft-cheesy Star Wars knock-off that aired briefly on ABC in the 70s, SciFi’s re-imagined vision of Galactica, spearheaded by co-executive producers Ron Moore (Star Trek: The Next Generation) and David Eick (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys), is now widely recognized as not just one of the best science fiction series around, but one of the finest shows on television--period.

Several members of the creative team and cast were on hand at San Diego’s Comic-Con International and following a fan panel in which they announced a few tantalizing teases of what the final season has to offer (SPOILER ALERT: the first episode will deal directly the revelation that four key crewmembers are actually unwitting Cylons and their awareness may have been triggered by a Jimi Hendrix tune emanating--now or eons earlier--from our own planet Earth; fan favorite Lucy Lawless will return in her role as the previously defunct Cylon D’Anna), and after the panel they shed even more light on what lies ahead.

Tricia Helfer
Razor's Edge
First up, according to Ron Moore, is Razor, a one-off two-hour film airing in November that turns back the clock on the series’ timeline to unseen intrigue on the Battlestar Pegasus under Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes) and featuring appearances by most of the series regulars. The flashback film will be unveiled in an unusual, innovative way, Moore promises.

"It's going to air on SciFi and then it'll be available on DVD very soon thereafter," said Moore, possibly within a week, or even a day, of the initial broadcast. "It's an interesting structure of what they're going to do. There's going to be an on air version of the show, leading up to it will be a series of what they're calling featurettes, or promos. There's going to be two-minute pieces that were actually cut from the original long versions. There's a long version of Razor that will be on the DVD--to fit it into the on-air time, we had to cut material. That deleted material will actually be a promo of Razor itself. It's sort of a backstory to a lot of different events later on in the episode."

"Those will be put on air on the SciFi channel in the weeks leading up to the release of the movie," Moore explained. "You will see these little mini-episodes of 'Razor' in the six-seven weeks leading up to the Razor launch. Then you'll see the on-air version of Razor. Then the home video version of Razor will have all of that material integrated into one movie."

"Everybody wants to see how Razor is perceived," Moore said of the innovative release platform. "It's a unique sort of a situation to try in the middle of the run. It's possible that we would do more after that [but] there's no plans in the works for it. There is a practical limitation at some point. At some point, we're going to strike the set and it'll go away. It would be very difficult to rebuild Galactica just to do a one-off movie in the future, so I don't know how many of those type of projects there are, realistically."

Meanwhile, the producers have turned their attention to the final season, which launches in January, and David Eick said the writing team is already assembling a "ballpark storyline" featuring "scenes we've always wanted to see, or bits we've always wanted to play…Certainly the earliest conversations sprouted from this place of 'We've always talked about doing X.' Now is the perfect opportunity to do it."

Moore said the creative team is weighing which possible plotlines and wish-sequences will actually fit seamlessly into the mosaic of Galactica’s endgame and leave them all without any regrets about the bigger picture and what could have been. "I think the show will end and we will sit around and we will all say, 'Yeah, we could have always told this story,’ [but] I'd rather be doing that," he said. "To just end the show when we're still at the top of our game and it's strong and it ended on our terms and bring it to its natural conclusion. That choice precludes other choices."

"I think if the show had gone on for two more seasons, there would be other stories to come up with all kinds of other things," he continued. "But the story starts to attenuating, it wouldn't quite be as strong as it is now. You always get off stage when they're wanting more, and that would be the same for us as well. We always would say, 'Oh, we could have done that one other story, but we never got around to do it.'

Mary McDonnell

"The Cylons Have a Plan…"
Even those castmembers who weren’t revealed to be "toasters"--yet, anyway--are excited about last season’s cliffhanger finale--SPOILER COMING--in which Col. Tigh (Michael Hogan), Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), Viper pilot Sam Anders (Michael Trucco) and presidential aide Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) simultaneously discover that they are, in fact, Cylons.

"I thought it was such a great idea!" said Katee Sackhoff, who plays Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace. "Every single Cylon of the four was aligned with a person in power, in a strategic position to be able to take down the fleet. You had Anders, who was aligned with Kara and the pilots. You had Tory, who was aligned with the President. You had Aaron Douglas' character, who was in charge of the Vipers; and you had Tigh, who was directly connected with Adama. So each one of those Cylons is right next to a person that can take down the fleet, which I thought was a very, very smart thing to do--and also people that you would never expect."

Tricia Helfer, who plays the cybernetic seductress Number Six, said she hasn’t officially thrown the newbies a "Welcome to the Cylons" party, but can’t resist a little tease. "We're kind of going through some of that right now, in particular with Colonel Tigh. I'll just end that there," she said coyly. "I can say in the beginning of the season, it's a lot of their own inner-turmoil with what's going on and how each of them react differently to what's going on. I find it very interesting to see the journey that they're going through individually. I came from a perspective of knowing I was all along, so it's interesting, just as an actor, to watch them kind of go, 'Oh, I’m on this side, maybe.' Yeah, I was quite blown over by it."

"Michael Hogan is still in denial," giggled Sackhoff. "He's completely in denial. He will not admit that he's a Cylon. It's really funny, actually, because as an actor, he's really pissed off.

INCOMING SPOILER! Sackhoff, who last year struggled successfully to keep the secret that, while it seemed that Starbuck had been killed off when she was actually going to be back in her Viper cockpit for the last sequence of the finale, initially expected to play the returning pilot with a new Zen-like attitude for the final season. "Originally, the intention was to play her differently, was to play her almost surreal, just very calm. She had a mission and not really reacted to anything around her."

But now that production on the season is underway, Sackhoff’s discovered that her character is "the exact same Starbuck, but with the same idea that she has a mission and believes in that 100 percent – doesn't question it at all. That is something that's different for Starbuck. She always questions what she's doing and if she's capable. And this is time where she knows she's capable. She's been chosen. She's back for a reason. So she's more enlightened, in a sense. But she's also just as hot-headed and crazy as ever."

Lucy Lawless

Stellar Synergy
As Battlestar cruises to a close, the creators and their cast are already getting nostalgic about the apparently idyllic synergy they’ve shared over the show’s run, with the writers besotted with the way the actors have brought their scenes to vivid life, and the actors grateful for being given such weighty material.

"I personally think the entire ensemble should get a nomination," said Moore. "[The Screen Actors Guild] has the ensemble award. I think our ensemble absolutely deserves a nod, because it's one of the strongest ensembles on television and you can go down the list, as individuals, people from the guest stars to regular cast--it's been amazing."

Conversely, Mary McDonnell, who plays President Laura Roslyn, has marveled at the scripts she’s seen over the four seasons. "It's truly been awesome in that you watch writers and you think, 'Oh, they can't go beyond this. They've gotten themselves written into a corner now. Where do we go from here? It's impossible.' Then you get the script for next week and they've taken the same ideas and opened them up even further with layers and layers and the layers keep on folding."

"I found that as an actress it's really changed my perception of what was possible," said McDonnell, who had primarily starred in movies prior ro signing on to Galactica. "I didn't know that this level of collaboration was possible as an ongoing piece of work. And then it keeps you so alive inside of your work, because there's a writer there who's really beyond anything that you could've suggested or thought of. So instead of feeling like, 'Come on, come on, writers, catch up,’ you step into the next week going, 'Okay, I'm on a diving board again and this is unknown territory and I need to go and see what happens.' I've been doing this a long time, it's been a real gift for me at this point in my career to say, 'I love this format.' It's because of our writers."

Equally valuable, McDonnell explained, is the extremely passionate fan community that has rallied around the show--not just ardent sci-fi fans, but a wide spectrum of viewers who discovered that the show was something far more complex and significant that the average laser-shoot-‘em-up. "It's been kind of really incredible," she said, "to have this particular sci-fi community as your fans, that's been really engaging and very profoundly kind of stimulating…There's a real exchange of ideas, and so then when you come together in a place like [Comic-Con] you get to celebrate all of that. It's pretty joyous, I would say."

James Callis

It’s What You Walk Away With
The three Battlestar actresses know they’ll be leaving the series which much more than memories. "There's so much to take away," said Tricia Helfer. "For me in particular, it's been a huge learning curve. At the beginning, and still hopefully now, I was a bit like a sponge. In the beginning, I'd want to come to go see other people's scenes, Mary's scenes and Eddie [Olmos] scenes and so forth and try and try and pick up things.

"Now I'm doing a few scenes with Mary, which has been a lot of fun for me, to be able to acting opposite that," Helfer continued. "I've worked so much with James [Callis, as Gaius Baltar], who is a phenomenal actor. I was very lucky the characters paired up that way. But you learn so much about yourself as an actor and grow so much with working with other people too. So for me, I'm going to really take a lot of that."

McDonnell, on the other hand, has her eye on a more tangible memento: "I was looking the other day for fabric that was in the Galactica’s curtains. Those would be really nice on my couch."

Sackhoff’s also planning a little five-finger discount on souvenirs from the set. "It's really funny that on our show, there may be six ‘does’ but we don't have the clothes and the jewelry that you could take from another show," she said, "so we've got little things that you take, like, 'I took Starbuck's pencil today.' It's just like random stuff. I want to take the Goddess Aurora, the figurehead. I'm going to steal that! They have no more metal dog tags of mine left because they're all at my house. We have little plastic ones--I have the rest of them in a drawer at home, so I'm no longer allowed metal dog tags."

Sackhoff may have also gotten the best parting gift from the producers even before her final exit: a new gig. She has a recurring role on Eick’s new NBC series Bionic Woman, playing the titular heroine’s cybernetically enhanced predecessor and nemesis Sarah Corvis. Eick said that thus far both shows--which film near each other in Vancouver--have successfully juggled their Sackhoff fixes. "We got really lucky because the Battlestar production schedule works in such a way that there were preplanned hiatuses, one for six weeks, the other for two, and we were able to plan the Bionic production calendar in such a way that we would use a Sarah Corvis-slanted episode only during those times that Katee was free. So from a production calendar standpoint, it worked pretty seamlessly. From an actress standpoint, Katee just has to do a lot of amphetamines and she'll be fine."

"They've kept a doctor standing by with Vitamin B shots in my butt," said Sackhoff.

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