With the end of a long wait for new episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” in sight and new episodes hitting the airwaves Friday, the stars of the show are out and about, promoting the series’ fourth season and giving a few (key word: few) hints of what to expect from the final season.
Saturday’s Los Angeles Times featured writer Geoff Boucher on the set of the series as it films one of the final episodes. Boucher said that some areas of the sets were off-limits to him in order to keep certain secrets under wraps and avoid the dreaded SPOILERS leaking out.
At one point, Boucher interviewed Edward James Olmos, who stars as Admiral William Adama. Olmos entered the session covered in fake blood and said he couldn’t say how it had happened to his character or even whose blood it was.
What Olmos could say is that he and the cast and crew are confident of the final 20 episodes of the series.
“It is difficult to move on, but it is the correct time, the natural pace of the story — there’s the beginning, the middle, and now it’s time for the end,” Olmos said. “We have hit so many notes, and now it’s time to tie everything up.”
“The show is a dark mirror,” Olmos continued. “So, so dark. I was talking to one of the executives on the show recently and this person told me that they would never do something like this again, this kind of material. I have been doing this a long time, working in television, film, the theater, and this is the best material I’ve ever worked on in my life.”
Star Jamie Bamber, who plays Apollo, said that the feeling on the set is a driving one, indicating the end is in sight for the show.
“In previous years, there had been sequences where you could kind of sense that we were in an eddy at the side of the stream and we were just exploring an angle of the fleet that we just had not considered yet,” he said. “There’s no available time for anything like that now.”
The two stars went on to wonder if “Battlestar,” which while winning critical praise and a legion of devoted fan has never been a huge mainstream success, came along too soon with its dark, bleak portrait.
“People who watch it say they love it,” said Bamber. “People who don’t watch it say they’ve heard great things and they should watch it. The show is a success, but not as big a hit as people think, not in the commercial sense.”
“I think good science fiction is not optimistic,” Bamber said. “You think of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells, and they are pretty bleak. . . . The show is also not simple. We don’t have heroes because we examine everyone too closely.”
” ‘Blade Runner’ was the mothership for all of this, several generations of science fiction films, but nothing has jumped on that world as much as this show,” Olmos said.
Olmos went on to say that the cast and crew may not realize they’re a part of something special.
“The people involved don’t know how special it is,” he said. “In 20 years, I think they will look back and realize what it was.”
Meanwhile, actress Katie Sackoff, who plays Kara “Starbuck” Thrace participated in a conference call with the media Friday and discussed the show. Among the tidbits gleaned from Sackoff is that fans may have put too much stock in the publicity portrait “The Last Supper” featuring the cast. (This despite hints from Ron Moore than the pictures does have hints of things to come and revelations from season four).
Sackoff also said this season will shock fans and ruffle some feathers, though she wouldn’t get into specifics. She did say the cast know the identity of the final Cylon and that it would be revealed before episode 14. Sackoff said she couldn’t detail the exact episode the revelation would come though.
And she said that up through episode 14, things are still unresolved as to Starbucks’ relationship with Anders. Fans will recall that Anders was revealed to be a Cylon last season.
But the good news is fans won’t have to wait long for the answers. The new season begins April 4th, returning to its original Friday night slot at 10 p.m. EST on SCI FI.
Yesterday, we posted the video for BSG “Revealed.” Now sit back and enjoy all three parts of BSG “Phenomenon.”
[ Battlestar Galactica: The Phenomenon is available for free with Amazon Prime as part of Season 4 ]
Ha! It says Battlestar Galatica in the title.