Battlestar Galactica

The second half of the season, by the way, will be preceded by the debut of a new Sci Fi series, The Dresden Files. No new episode of Battlestar airs this Friday, Nov. But new episodes of Battlestar will air Dec.

8 (that's the episode written by Jane Espenson) and Dec. 15, then the series will take one-month break until Jan. Watch this space later in the week for more on on the Dec.

1 episode, Unfinished Business, by Michael Taylor. It's powerful and heartbreaking. Photo: Jamie Bamber and Katee Sackhoff as Lee Adama and Kara Thrace in Unfinished Business, the Dec.

1 episode of Battlestar Galactica. More photos from that episode on the jump. Continue reading "'Battlestar Galactica' moves to Sundays " in Battlestar Galactica | Permalink | Comments (20) That’s been “Battlestar Galactica’s” strength from the beginning - using believable characters to explore personal morality and political choices, while avoiding predictable polemics or easy resolutions.

Though the first part of the season has echoes of the situation in Iraq, the debates among the humans and the Cylons are universal to any conflict - what tactics are legitimate in a fight over core beliefs? Are any methods acceptable? In the end, what is worth fighting for?

“We were aware of the [Iraq] parallels and wanted to play it as truthfully as we could, given the situation,” Moore says. “But at the same time, we’re always a little more interested in watching how our characters respond to a situation more than we are in delineating a certain political idea about the situation. “We really should not pretend that there is a good answer and an easy way out and we’re going to tell it to you in 44 minutes,” Moore says.

In fact, unlike “The Path to 9/11” and “Over There,” which attempted to depict real situations through scripted drama and endured criticism as a result, Moore says “Battlestar Galactica” has more freedom to examine difficult issues, given its outer-space settings. When attempting to portray real events, he says, “suddenly you don’t have the freedom to examine the themes and issues and really delve into the bigger questions, because you get sidetracked into these arguments about what actually happened and what was actually said. And it becomes a really fraught and difficult situation to dramatize.

“If you take it out of that and put it science fiction… you can start playing around with the pieces more and get to the dramatic heart of what you’re trying to tell,” he says. The core story of the third season is, at first, quite dark and wrenching, but there are signs of hope; Commander Adama, leader of the military, forms an important bond with Sharon, a Cylon aboard his ship. And surely the fact that one of the Cylons’ greatest desires is to know what love is means that peace - or at least coexistence - might one day be possible.

“There’s always a conversation with [Sci Fi] about how dark the show is, and [whether] is it completely bleak. But I really don’t have a nihilistic view of the world, so it’s kind of easy to argue that that’s not the case and point to aspects of the show that are hopeful, like Sharon and other characters,” Moore notes. Still, in an effort to draw an even larger audience for the drama and to cement the loyalty of the 2.

3 million regular viewers of “Battlestar Galactica,” which won a prestigious Peabody Award for broadcast excellence earlier this year, various NBC Universal portals and SciFi.com are offering the refresher episode “The Story So Far,” which also airs on Sci Fi at 4 p.m.

And a series of 10 Webisodes about the New Caprica resistance movement has attracted more than 3.5 million viewers in the last month. “I think we’d like to see the numbers tick up,” Moore says.

“Our numbers are OK and good for basic cable, and Sci Fi’s been happy with them. But we’d certainly like to boost them up.” “That’s the big challenge for the show, to reach out and get the audience who are not used to watching Sci Fi Channel.

The audience that rolls their eyes as soon as you say, `Have you tried “Battlestar Galactica”?’ - those are the people that would like it. The people watching `The Shield’ and `The Sopranos’ would like this show.

” For much more from Moore, see this interview. Photo: Grace Park as Lt. Sharon Valerii, Dean Stockwell as Brother Cavil, Lucy Lawless as D'anna Biers, Rick Worthy as Simon and Michael Bennett as Doral; they play Cylons pressing Gaius Baltar (James Callis) to sign off on a particularly repugnant order.

in Battlestar Galactica | Permalink | Comments (3) difficult-to-watch but deeply compelling third season, which begins with the human settlers on New Caprica battling the Cylon occupation. Gaius Baltar is colluding with the Cylons, who are themselves riven by dissent, as the settlers engage in acts of resistance. The fleet, led by Battlestar Galactica, remains away from the planet, but continues to attempt to establish communication with the resistance, which is led by Saul Tigh and Galen Tyrol.

In the first few episodes of the new season, there are just so many echoes of the headlines we live with every day. This just seemed like the most political, tied-to-current events season so far. “Once we were on the planet and the Cylons came and there was an occupying force at the end of the second season, it just felt like, we have to be really true to what the show is and how we do things, and just go right at it -- play it from a variety of angles and play the complexity of the situation, and put in things that make you really challenge how you look at some of these events.

Continue reading "Ron Moore talks Season 3 of 'Battlestar Galactica' " in Battlestar Galactica | Permalink | Comments (6) The makers of “Battlestar Galactica” have never shied away from taking the program into dark terrain, and the first two hours of Season 3 may be the show’s darkest moment yet. As the season begins (and I’ll have a more full review when it debuts Oct. 6 on Sci Fi), residents of New Caprica are being tortured, ripped from their makeshift homes in the middle of the night, held in dire prisons, and resorting to sabotage and other desperate acts of resistance.

I won’t say what the final sequence of the first two hours was, but suffice to say, it was nausea inducing. Why was it so hard to watch, yet so compelling? Two reasons, I think: Over the course of the previous seasons, we’ve come to know the characters that inhabit the “Battlestar” universe.

And the more real and identifiable they become as human beings, even flawed human beings, the more affecting it is when they’re terrorized and put through awful situations. The second reason we can’t look away is because “Battlestar” so honestly depicts real events. Every single thing that we see on “Battlestar’s” Season 3 opener occurs on a daily basis right now, or has occurred within the lifetime of our parents and grandparents.

A child screaming as its parent is taken away in the night by the authorities is always going to be heart-wrenching, no matter the setting, no matter the decade. And when the person being taken away seems like your friend or neighbor, you can't not watch. The images we see as the season begins, and I suspect this is deliberate on the part of the show’s creators, evoke not only a variety of current situations in the Middle East but also occupied France during World War 2.

We’re seeing not just the nightly news come to life on New Caprica, but grainy, powerful images from history books. Seeing our past and present depicted so powerfully makes it hard to look away. “The Wire,” which begins Sunday (the season premiere is available now via HBO On Demand), may be even harder to watch, given that it’s set in the present day, not on another planet.

Maybe that’s one reason this fine HBO drama has struggled to find an audience – it’s too real. It’s too painful to see lives and good intentions wasted, as so often happens on “The Wire.” And this season can be especially difficult, because it’s impossible not to begin to care for the boys at the center of one of the show’s Season 4 story lines, which concerns the street and classroom educations of four eighth graders.

Thanks to the skills of the actors and the programs’ writers, these inner-city boys become intensely real. And they are only kids, after all -- tall, gangly adolescents making the transition to adulthood, but still boys. Yet the creators of “The Wire” pull no punches about the possible futures ahead of these young men, who inhabit a gang-ridden neighborhood in a broken city and attend underfunded schools.

You want them to make it out, to get to a better place, but the possibility that they won’t makes the show … yes, difficult to watch. But that’s one of the reasons we watch television, or read books, or watch films with any depth, or look at art that challenges our world view -- we do all of that to learn something about human nature. To understand the lives of those whom we might otherwise write off or ignore.

To me, the fact that television is offering us so many hard but ultimately compelling programs is a sign that the medium has grown up. Great art, in any medium, is sometimes hard to take. Photo: Michael Hogan as Col.

Saul Tigh and Dean Stockwell as Brother Cavil in Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. On a lighter note, here are two other “Battlestar” bits: The first of 10 “Battlestar Galactica” webisodes are up at Scifi.com.

There’s more on the webisodes in this interview with Bradley Thompson, who wrote and produced them with David Weddle. New episodes in Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance go up at the Sci Fi site each Tuesday and Thursday. Check out Dwight Schrute’s “Schrute-Space” at “The Office’s” Web site for his musings on what would happen if the “Battlestar Galactica” crew crash-landed on the “Lost” island.

An excerpt: Adama would want to imprison the 'Lost' cast in the old cave with the creek in it, but President Roslin would want to reason with them and have both casts mate in order to create more surviving humans. in Battlestar Galactica, The Wire | Permalink | Comments (16) The second half of the season, by the way, will be preceded by the debut of a new Sci Fi series, The Dresden Files.