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Many fans are just learning about the official announcement that the fourth season of "Battlestar Galactica" will be it's last, but for executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, they had the feeling it was time to wrap up for some time now.
"Somewhere midway through the second season, we started to seriously think what the end of the series itself would be, where it was heading, and what it all meant," said Moore, who participated in a phone conference with reporters on Friday with Eick. "In between seasons two and three, we were talking in earnest that if we do end it next year, what would it be? And we decided that yeah, this is the right time to do it."
All of that came to a head near the midpoint of Season 3 when the fleet visits the algae planet and Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) discovers the Temple of the Five.
"The temple gave D'Ann (Lucy Lawless) the glimpse of the Final Five that triggers the beacon that points the way to Earth," Moore said. "At that point, you're promising the audience that you were moving toward revelation. By the end of the season, we had taken that moment to decide that we were going to reveal four of the Final Five, and one of the characters had been to Earth and seen it.
"That's probably the moment when we started feeling it. If we don't start moving in that direction, you get to a place where you just feel like you're jerking off the audience or treading water instead of just moving forward and pushing limits. We didn't want to be in that position."
Reports of the impending demise of the critically acclaimed SciFi Channel show had circulated the Web since last February soon after the network officially announced a partial season order for the fourth season. SyFy Portal reported days after the announcement that the network was looking to possibly add nine more hours to the overall order, but if they did, it could actually signal the end of the series rather than a continuation.
Then last month, series stars Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff told reporters at the Saturn Awards that this would be the end of the show following the fourth season, something Eick initially denied.
But in planning for the fourth season, knowing that the end was definitely near, Moore said it gave him and the writing staff a good frame of mind in which to plan.
"The burden then became that we have a great deal to wrap up," he said. "We wanted to pay off a lot of things, and we wanted to tie up a lot of loose threads."
The producers did promise that when the final hour of the show does air, viewers will get a chance to see a definitive end, and not simply more questions that have to be answered, a la "The X-Files." And with that end, there could be nothing more as neither of the showrunners have heard any specific plans to continue the series past the fourth season through telemovies or the like.
"There is no plan or even thoughts in our head of doing a follow-on feature or any series or anything beyond that," Moore said. "But we also say never say never, because who knows how we'll feel when we actually write the conclusion."
Not all the actors were comfortable with the decision to end the show after four seasons, Eick said. And it's possible those feelings will continue even after the final wrap party.
"Some of them were very understanding to the point of view that the show had reached its natural conclusion," Eick said. "There were others who believed the show might have a longer life and were more surprised by that decision. It really depended on the individual.
"For the most part now, everyone is looking at this season ... that without this being another big step on a potentially infinite journey, it's the concluding step. Everyone really now is sinking their teeth into it."
The pre-fourth season telemovie "Razor" is expected to air in November, with the fourth season itself premiering sometime in early 2008 on SciFi Channel. |
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