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ShareThe official announcement didn’t come until Friday, but “Battlestar Galactica’s” executive producers had an idea that the show was nearing its end point several months ago.
“I think it was somewhere around the midpoint of (last) season, when we were working on the story where we’d gotten to the algae planet and discovered the temple” devoted to the final five Cylons, executive producer Ron Moore told reporters Friday. The discovery of the temple led to Cylon D’Anna Biers (Lucy Lawless) catching a glimpse of the final five, and that in turn triggered a beacon that pointed the way to Earth for the human fleet.
“And by the end of the season, we had taken that moment and moved it to the revelation of four of the five Cylons, and one of our characters had actually been to Earth and seen it,” Moore notes. “But that was sort of the moment where we started to feel like, if we don’t start to pay this off and don’t really reveal those secrets and move in that direction, we’d get to a place where it would feel like we’re jerking (around) the audience.”
Not wanting to do that, and feeling like they could wrap things up in one last batch of episodes, Moore and fellow executive producer David Eick told the Sci Fi Channel that they wanted to bring the Peabody Award-winning, critically hailed “Battlestar Galactica” to a close.
“This is a decision that took some time to arrive at, and like all decisions this large, there were a number of questions we had internally and a creative agenda we wanted to serve. I think we all had to collectively decide when we wanted to be definitive about it. That time is now,” Eick says.
The network wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of giving up its most buzzworthy show, but Moore says once he and Eick made their case, Sci Fi didn’t stand in their way either.
“They didn’t really fight with us,” Moore says. “They expressed concern that the show might be able to go on longer and wanted to make sure we weren’t passing up opportunities to continue telling stories, but they were very accommodating. When David and I were very clear that this was what we really, definitively wanted to do, they supported us.”
In addition to the 22-episode fourth season, which will begin early next year, “Battlestar” will also air a two-hour event titled “Razor” in the fall. The project grew out of a proposal to release a couple of original episodes direct to DVD, but Eick and Moore thought they wouldn’t be able to pick up the main storyline in that format.
Instead, they say, “Razor” will skip back a little in time to delve into the story of the Pegasus, another Battlestar that played a role in the show’s second season. “Some of the events of the Pegasus’ back story during the original Cylon attack are dramatized, and some after the death of Adm. Cain (Michelle Forbes) while Pegasus is still in the fleet are covered,” Moore says.
The episode will also set up some of the events of season four, the producers say, though it won’t officially be considered part of the season.
Eick and Moore also promise that while they may not tie up “every single thing about every relationship” by series’ end, they won’t leave fans hanging as to whether the fleet reaches Earth.
“The end of season three showed a glimpse of Earth; you actually saw it. And you will see more of it,” Moore says. “We’re going to get to a place that we’re going to call Earth by the end of the series.”
