With Season 3 newly out on DVD and Season 4–the first half of the series’ swansong season–set to bow on the Sci-Fi Channel April 4, there’s no better time to talk about all things Battlestar Galactica. And no one’s in the know more than executive producer and co-creator Ron Moore, the visionary who re-imagined the semi-cheesy ’70s sci-fi staple into one of the most arresting shows on television, regardless of its genre. Just be wary as Moore spills his secrets, lest you discover that you, too, are a Cylon.
Hollywood.com: The conclusion of Season 3 ended with the big reveal of several surprise Cylon sleeper agents aboard Galactica. How quickly in the new season do we get the first ‘Holy frack!’ moment in relation to these revelations?
Ron Moore: That’s an interesting question. They’re kind of sprinkled along the way. Probably in the first episode there are a few sort of surprises and then we start multiple storylines going for a while, but it builds towards a midseason cliffhanger that’s pretty significant for the show, a pretty huge sort of moment that we get to halfway. The first half of the season is sort of one long story that’s building on top of one another and involving and embroidering on the existing storylines that then get us to a central place.
HW: What are you able to tease in terms of which characters will be stepping to the forefront in the first batch of the episodes?
RM: There’s a lot to do with Kara. She comes back and what she finds aboard Galactica and how she’s received and how people think of her and the questions surrounding her and how it changes relationships – all of that is a pretty major storyline. Then her saying that she’s been to earth and can take us there can launch us into a whole separate storyline that centers around Kara and Anders and people in her orbit. That’ll take us through a big chunk of the first half of the season. Baltar has a very specific storyline that takes him in a new direction and will continue actually throughout the new season.
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Photo: Ron Moore
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HW: What new corners of Galactica’s world will also be explored?
RM: There’s also significant things happening in the Cylon world. We crosscut over to the Cylon world beginning in the second episode and the situation is changing over there. The divisions and rivalries and sort of internal descent that’s been slowly percolating over the course of time are now starting to break into the opening and what was a fairly homogeneous ‘We all go forward together’ attitude, and that mentality starts to break down and begins to be much more fraught and much more contentious over there with significant ramifications for Galactica and friends. Laura’s cancer will be a long running storyline that spans the length of the fourth season and it’s not getting better. What can I tell you about that? Those are probably the major storylines along the way and then the final four Cyclons that were revealed and how they integrate themselves into the crew, what they struggle with, how they try to maintain their old lives while at the same time and discovering and figuring out what it means for them, what they’re supposed to do and what they’re not supposed to do, what they’re afraid of how and how they need to go about their day to day routines with sort of inner knowledge is a pretty significant story. We’re going to lose people. There are some significant stories that we’ve all come to know and love that will not make it all the way to the end and that’ll be a big component of the last season.
Photo: Mary McDowell
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HW: Will there be any extra significance to the meaning of “All Along the Watchtower,” the song used in the final episode of Season 3?
RM: We will get to that. That won’t be immediately resolved, but we’ll get to that eventually.
HW: Coming out of Season 3, did you feel that you had a lot to deliver this time around, that you’d built fan expectation to an all time high?
RM: I kind of felt that internally. There was more of an internal sense of pressure that this was the end and that we want to go out strong and want to wrap up all the things that we want to wrap up and we want an ending that’s worthy of the show. We’re aware that there are sort of expectations and questions and that people have things that they want to see on the show, but nine tenths of the pressure on the show is always sort of us sitting in the room and what we like and what we don’t like and what our perception is of things that weren’t satisfying and our perception of the best elements of the show. It always come down to making ourselves happy and being upset when we don’t deliver what we thought we should have.
Photo: Katee Sackhoff
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HW: Did time off caused by the writers’ strike actually help you at all as you head into the final nine episodes? Did it give you a chance to slow down and think really deeply about everything that you were going to do?
RM: It did actually. We had plotted out the second half of the season and sort of knew where we were going and had a lot of stories broken and lined up and then the strike hit. Over the course of the weeks I just started mulling over some of the choices that we’d made and began to get dissatisfied with some of the story arcs and thought that we could do better or that there were some things that weren’t quite gelling. By the time the strike was over, one day one, the first thing that I did is have all the writers come over the house and we sat and did a marathon of just watching the first ten episodes that were all complete, one after the other. Then we talked about them and said, ‘These are great. I’m very happy with these.’ Then I said, ‘I think there are some things about the second half that I think we can do better on and that I’m not satisfied with. So lets get back in there and lets re-break some of those stories and take a hard look at some of the choices we were making.’ So we didn’t really throw everything out, but we did certainly reexamine some stories and made some changes and so now we’re sort of refiguring some of the plans and moving some of the story elements around. So ultimately the strike is going to be good for us and give us the sort of thing that you never really get to do in production which is take a deep breath, step back and look at what you’ve charted and get the chance to make changes on the fly.
Photo: Tricia Helfer
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HW: Is it getting bittersweet the closer that you get to the end?
RM: Yeah. It was ramping up at the beginning. We were all feeling like it was senior year up here. Just from the first day you’re on the set going, ‘This is the beginning of the last season.’ It was getting to the point where you’re standing around going, ‘Oh, this is the last third day of prep on the fourth episode of a season.’ It’s like, ‘Okay. We can’t get too sentimental about everything.’ But by the time the break happened, by the time the strike hit, everyone was feeling it and I think the impending nature of the strike and the sort of uncertainty of what would follow and the remote the possibility that the show wouldn’t come back at all sort of affected everybody. There was a sense of farewell as they were shooting those last couple of episodes. Now there’s been a big break of time where the crew and the cast had scattered to the four winds and now we’re reassembling. Right now it just feels like normal production where we’re trying to get things back together and laying out schedules and boards and budgets and all the myriad of details of putting a show on the air. I don’t think it’s really going to strike us that we’re in the last run probably until when the cast gets here and we’re back on the sets. I think that none of us are really quite aware of the short time that we now have. It’s going to be a shortened season whereas before it was a long season and we had all this time to think about the end and get sentimental. Now we’re sort of hurrying and ramping up quickly and then it’ll be over before you know it. So the bittersweet quality has not quite returned, but I’m anticipating that it’ll come full force before you know it.
Photo: Grace Park
