BSG Season 4, linking webisodes, and the long-awaited season 4.5

[nacho]

Begin with the rumors!

http://www.darkhorizons.com/news07/070511c.php

"Galactica" Last Season Official

It doesn't come as a surprise, but still it's disappointing to hear that the upcoming fourth season "Battlestar Galactica" will definitely be the last.

Stars Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff told The IESB at the Saturn Awards Thursday night that the SciFi Channel will officially pull the plug on the show following its fourth season, which begins in January.

Olmos says "This will probably be the most extraordinary season of 'Battlestar'. It's the final season, so it's definitely going to be the most vicious. As far as we know, in respects of the way we have this show constructed, this is the final season."

Sackhoff says "I think part of the problem is that it's an expensive show. It is [a great show], but we don't have the viewership that a great show should get."

Versus

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=41457

Flight of Battlestar Continues

Battlestar Galactica's search for Earth continues to be an open-ended adventure, executive producer David Eick said.

Contrary to comments by Edward James Olmos (Adm. Adama) at the Saturn Awards on May10, no end has been announced for the award-winning show. Battlestar Galactica is preparing to film its fourth season, one that will include 22 episodes, rather than the previously announced 13.

"For those of you who have been paying attention over the years, this is not the first time Eddie has made an announcement about the possibility of the show's end," chuckled Eick. "I promise you that when [executiuve producer] Ron [Moore] and I make a decision about Galactica's future, we'll let you know."

[Reginald McGraw]

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=41457

[executiuve producer]

Awesome.  One day I hope to be an executiuve senier associte vicae present.

[RottingCorpse]

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=41457

[executiuve producer]

Awesome.  One day I hope to be an executiuve senier associte vicae present.

I already am.

*HIC*

[nacho]

Thanks, SA:

next season the main plot arc is going to be hamsters. Here is what we know so far:

* The fleet begins a new breeding program to create tylium hamsters to fuel the FTL drives

* Adama is given a pet hamster from the new FTL fuel hamster breeding stock. He names it Zak

* Helo decides that using hamsters as fuel is suddenly immoral despite the fact that they have been turning hamsters into emergency tylium for four years and kills off the entire hamster population of the fleet to save the humans of the fleet from hamster fuel murder

* The fleet is stranded in the middle of nowhere as a result with the Cylons bearing down on them

* Zak could jump the entire fleet due to hamster fuel efficiency but Adama refuses to release his son's hamster namesake to the fleet because of sentimentality

* Starbuck is in love with the hamster because its name is Zak and she has deep-rooted emotional issues

* Everyone tries to steal the hamster at least once over the course of the first half of Season 4, including Romo Lampkin, who wants to feed it to his cat

* The hamster is actually a Cylon, upon finding this out Helo falls in love with it

* All of this is related in flashbacks from the perspective of the ship's janitor

      UNCONFIRMED RUMOR
* According to Edward James Olmos, Boxey will be back next season and he will have a robot dog named Muffit that will be "cute as the dickens" and "save the ship several times".

[nacho]

There we go... From Dark Horizons.  The fourth is the last. 

And we get a date for the movie.

Meanwhile it's official. Executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick issued a joint statement confirming that "Battlestar Galactica" will end after the upcoming fourth season.

The pair reiterate that it was their decision to close the series, and hinted that it was a struggle just to get the renewal for this final season.

A two-hour episode will air in November, followed by the 22-episode fourth season to screen starting in January on the Sci-Fi Channel.

[Matt]

Rest in peace, Battlestar Galactica. May your guns silence the immense Babylon 5 nerds who love that festering turd.

[nacho]

It's probably wise to end early, really.  Unless they go for the reboot that the old series did when they changed galaxies, there's only so far you can string out the story.  Season three sort of put that in focus, I think.

Though, now, we'll be faced with a Sci-Fi gap, no?  Atlantis will be our last place for glitzy, journeyman, lovable team sci-fi.

[Matt]

hahahaha

no.

I'll watch Heroes. I can live without spaceships if I need to.

[nacho]

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person who tolerates Stargate.  Of course, I probably shouldn't be so open about liking it.  And, deep down, I can't truly say that I do like it.  I'm just compelled to watch it because I have been for ten years, so it's a weird force of habit.

[Matt]

that's how I watched Star Trek, until I said "fuck it no more" and liking Star Trek wasn't cool anyway.

[nacho]

Well, Star Trek saw some real degradation.  We made it through seven years just fine, and DS9 managed to string us out.  But Voyager and Enterprise?  Man, those shows were just shameful. 

Atlantis manages to maintain a Stargate universe status quo and, occasionally, stand out.  Plus, they were brave enough to kill characters.   I guess you can say it's to Stargate what DS9 was to TNG.  Which means we're due to be raped by the new series.

[nacho]

And other news:  Lucy Lawless is back in the 4th season, RDM admitted that the Saggitaron refugee episode was a mistake and poorly done, Michelle Forbes is officially confirmed for "Razor," and "Caprica" is back on the drawing board.

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.

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.

[Matt]

I have a good feeling about this.

In other news, the TV IV forums are fucking retarded. In the "best science fiction franchise" poll, people actually said that BSG is quite clearly not as planned out as Lost. I'm shaking my head.

[nacho]

Yeah, I steer clear of TV IV most of the time.  They're hopelessly deluded.

As far as I can tell, Lost is planned out the weekend before each episode.

[Matt]

they also embrace Babylon 5.