Battlestar Galactica Kaput: Season 4 will be the Last

You've probably already heard, but here is the bittersweet news: Battlestar Galactica will end after Season 4, which will air in early 2008.

I call it bittersweet not just because I've had a love/hate relationship with the show for a while (though it was back to love by the Season 3 finale a few months ago) but because as much I hate to see a show I enjoy end, this is the way to do it. BSG has not been cancelled by the Sci Fi Channel -- the producers realized the show was approaching its final act and knew it was time to wrap things up. That is far, far preferable to watching a beloved series wallow in years of decline long after everyone involved stopped caring, and long after the natural course of the story had reached an organic conclusion.

Lots of folks are upset, which is perfectly understandable. But for me, far worse than seeing a show end is seeing a show lose all the originality and cleverness that made it special in the first place. Now we know that that won't happen with BSG... or at least we can be pretty sure of that.

On Friday, I participated in a hastily convened phone press conference with BSG producers Ron Moore and David Eick. They didn't have a lot to say that was terribly surprising, but here are some highlights:

= According to Ron Moore, before Season 4 starts we'll be treated to two one-hour episodes not connected to the cliffhanger at end of Season 3. It will go back in time to Season 2 to tell a story revolving around the Battlestar Pegasus that will connect in some way to events that will transpire in Season 4. It will air in the autumn on Sci Fi, before the early-2008 debut of Season 4, and then appear almost immediately on DVD.

= The Sci Fi Channel has not settled on a definitive schedule yet for Season 4, so it remains unknown whether we'll get 22 episodes in a row with no reruns, or whether there will be a break between blocks of episodes, or what. But, Moore insists, "Sci Fi has been good about not letting the show fall into the hiatus trap of losing viewers like Lost and Jericho." (Eick, by the way, jokingly said, "We often refer to them as thieves," they meaning the producers of 'Lost'.)

= Moore has known since the middle of Season 2 where he wanted the show to end; the "algae planet" episode of Season 3 "triggered the realization that we were starting to wrap things up." Moore assures us that "we have enough time" to get to that finale and that "the endpoint of the series has not really changed all that much since I first started thinking about it." Will we see the Earth of the BSG universe? "To end the series without getting to Earth -- or someone at least saying 'Earth' -- would be unsatisfying."

= Eick deems his cast "the greatest collections of actors I've ever worked with." Katie "Starbuck" Sackhoff may appear in the new Bionic Woman series Eick created for NBC.

= I asked about how contemporary global politics impacts the show, and whether Moore and Eick are ever frustrated by how fans interpret the show politically. Eick responded that "the politics of the world around us continue to inform the discussion in the writers' room," and that they've always taken "a certain satisfaction in how some viewers see a liberal bias, and some viewers see it as pro-military." They also like that often, as Eick said, "the audience is asking themselves if they're rooting for the right side."

= Any regrets about things they haven't been able to do with the show? Eick joked, "We never got Starbuck and No. 6 together."

= What's up while we wait for 2008? Moore will try to do some podcasts this summer. "It'll be a while before we're back on the air, so it'd be nice to kinda fill that time."

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