This morning the Sci-Fi Channel announced that the upcoming fourth season of “Battlestar Galactica” would be the show’s swan song. But it was not the decision of the network. Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick just feel like the time is right:
“This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end,” Eick and Moore said in a statement on May 31. “Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end, and we’ve decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms. And while we know our fans will be saddened to know the end is coming, they should brace themselves for a wild ride getting there: We’re going out with a bang.”
Season four will consist of 20 episodes that will begin in early 2008, but to tide fans over, there is a two-part set to air in November, “Battlestar Galactica: Razor,” that will tell some of the backstory of the Pegasus before it joined the refugee fleet.
I was able to sit in on a conference call this afternoon, and while most of the questions asked were about the decision to end the show, the duo didn’t deviate much from the statement above. I did get a chance to pose one question before the call ended.
JP: I’d like to ask you about your decision to use a contemporary song, “All Along the Watchtower,” in the season three finale and is there any plan to explain how the song popped up in deep space in season four?
RDM: We will touch on it again probably later on in the fourth season, to explain it within the context of the show. It was something I thought about doing in an earlier season –
DE: Before that we talked about it being in the mini-series.
RDM: Oh, yeah.
DE: We were going to open up with Simon and Garfunkel’s…was it “America?”
RDM: It was “America.”
DE: Yeah, and we talked ourselves out of it because we felt that we were making such a re-invention as it was that it might be a little bananas on bananas. Then, we were talking about playing around – I think it was in episode five of season one – when Helo and Sharon end up in a diner, that maybe there’s a jukebox and maybe it still works and maybe Helo’s screwing around with it and maybe suddenly he hears the song “Yesterday.” And maybe we just don’t explain it. We just kind of go on and, you know, it just felt like one of these ideas that was good enough and big enough to require its own story point and it just took us until now to figure out how to do it really well.
I have to applaud the duo for finishing the show on their terms. So many shows either stay around too long or get cutoff midstream with no opportunity for appropriate closure that, while sad, it’s refreshing for a series to identify and properly plan for an end date. Fans know that this is how the story was meant to go, and that’s vitally important. Also, it frees up Moore and Eick to work on other projects (the show’s spinoff, “Caprica” is still alive, buf for some reason isn’t a done deal) without having to spread themselves too thin. “Alias” really suffered when J.J. Abrams was trying to launch “Lost” and there are those (myself included) that would argue that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” suffered when Joss Whedon was putting the first season of “Firefly” together. It’s sad when great shows go out with a dud (“Alias” was pretty brutal the last few seasons, but Whedon did a nice job with “Buffy” and “Angel”) so this news is exciting from the standpoint that Moore and Eick will be putting a lot of their creative effort into making season four a great one.
