We’re having a great time discussing Friday night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica on Tor.com. Come join the fun, but be warned: spoilers abound! If you missed it, SciFi has posted the episode in its entirety right here.
Battlestar Galactica Round Table: “Sometimes a Great Notion”.
Wired has a great interview with Ron D. Moore, the showrunner for Battlestar Galactica, in which he spoils absolutely nothing, yet talks about all sorts of cool things, like his personal religious beliefs and how they relate to the show’s portrayal of religion, the way BSG differs from Star Trek (RDM was a writer/producer for Deep Space Nine), etc. Most salient in my mind, his little anecdote about what happened when NBC/Universal focus-grouped the original BSG miniseries:
They did one of the infamous controlled tests of the miniseries just before the mini went on the air — like four weeks before we aired or something, one of those marketing testing focus group things. They watched the series. It was one of the worst rated ever.
The company that did it sent back this cover page report that just said, nobody likes any of these characters, we see no reason this should ever become a series, there’s no identification with any of it, it’s too dark, it’s too scary. And the network, all the blood drained from their face when they heard that, because it was too late. Fortunately, it was too late. The show was done, locked, in the can.
Yet another example of how focus groups are good for exactly one thing: wasting your money. Anyway, enjoy the interview.
Watched Battlestar Galactica before heading off to Comic Con today, because it’s probably an excercise in futility to stay spoiler-free in such a nest of geekery.
Oh. my. frakking. gods.
BSG is in full form so far. I haven’t had such a heart-pounding, nail-biting, I-know-what’s-gonna-happen-but-it’s-still-suspenseful, edge-of-my-seat TV watching experience since, well, since the beginning of Season Three of Galactica. Heh.
Anyway, off to Comic Con. So say we all.
Battlestar Galactica finally comes back for its fourth and final season a week from today. Skiffy will be streaming the episode live a full ten hours before it airs, which conveniently makes it lunchtime on the East coast. We’re now in the process of reserving the conference room and procuring a projector for Tor’s very first Frak Party.
For the uninitiated among you: Don’t let the science-fictiony stuff fool ya– Battlestar Galactica is bar none the best show on television right now. And yes, that includes Lost. To wit, here’s the first three seasons of BSG rolled into one fraktacularly cool little recap: