Creatively, serialized dramas are tricky because you can plan some of it out in advance, but not all of it. Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?
A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes. I can think in groups of 10.
Then we break all the interior shows. But as those shows get translated into teleplays and we get into production, things will change. We'll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I'm writing and think, "Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here." Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly. But we still try to maintain that goal. We still aim to get to that same place by the end of the 10th episode, but the path to get there I consider much more flexible.
As you get deeper into the series and start planning the next 10 and what's the season finale, it's the same process. You think you've laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you've already set in motion. But I find that it's just a more organic way to do it. It's more interesting, it's more fun, it allows the writers' creativity to come to the fore. It certainly has its downside, because sometimes you make big mistakes. Something that sounded really good at that moment, and you grabbed onto it, doesn't really pan out. Then you have a bad episode.
What's an example where that process really worked well for you?
In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.
And when did this method not work so well?
We'd developed a whole story line this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of [former president] Gaius Baltar. During the missing year on New Caprica, when Baltar was president, a massacre had taken place among the people from this one colony that had isolated themselves from the rest of the people. It was this long intricate back story built into a lot of the previous episodes of the show and it just didn't work. And I basically decided to throw it out while I was writing the finale, on the spur of the moment. We then had to go back into previous episodes and take that out, reshooting and re-editing. Some of those episodes suffered from that decision. It was important because it saved the finale and made it much stronger, but certain episodes in the second half of the third season are weaker as a result of that.
One of the delicate issues with serialized dramas is that they can run out of gas.
Well, you can argue that daytime soap operas never seem to run out of gas -- they go on for 20 years! But we're not really set up to do that. Ours has a beginning, middle and end. Our main title every week says "A Search for Earth," and at some point you gotta find earth, or it becomes "Gilligan's Island." The audience loses faith that you're ever going to get anywhere and the cylons are never going to destroy the Galactica and what's the point. We've always felt that there's an end to this show, and we've moved into the third act of a three-act structure. Especially after this season's finale, we've moved the story to a place where we're talking about conclusions and climaxes and what's it all about -- getting into the endgame. How long it takes to finish out the saga is another matter.
So you couldn't say now whether you think of Season 4 as the last of the series?
I'm considering that right now, to be honest. It's in the air. I don't know. It hasn't been formally decided and I haven't made my own decision. It's a possibility.
The worst thing that could happen to us is if we overstayed our welcome and got to a place where we had not finished the story and then we got canceled. I'd rather go out on my own terms creatively and go out strong.
We won't be seeing Season 4 until January 2008, but I understand there's going to be some kind of miniseries or movie coming before then?
There is something that they're calling "extra episodes" or "extended episodes" -- they keep shifting the nomenclature. Essentially, we are shooting two hours of "Galactica" that will be broadcast on SciFi Channel sometime in the fall. Let's say they broadcast it on a Friday; then, on the following Monday, it will be available on DVD.
That story will not pick up our cliffhanger at the end of Season 3. That didn't seem right. The story will be set on the Battleship Pegasus and will take place in the past, relative to where we are in Season 3. But the events set up in that story will then pay off in Season 4.
What was the reasoning behind doing that?
They came to us. It gives Home Video something to sell in the stores. Since we won't be back until January, which is a long time to be off the air, it gives the fans something to see and keeps the show alive. So it serves multiple masters. There was no way we could pick up the cliffhanger in that format, and then ask people to wait to really start the season later. One of the story lines everyone had really liked was the Pegasus story and the character of Admiral Cain, so we decided to go with that.
There's been talk of you doing another series called "Caprica," set before the cylon attack on the colony of that name. Is that still happening?
It's possible. It's been in development at SciFi for a while and they haven't picked it up. And I don't know if they're going to pick it up at this point. There's talk of doing it as a TV movie and seeing how that works, as a back-door pilot, much as we did with the "Galactica" miniseries. Right now there's nothing telling me that they're going to move on it anytime soon, so I'm starting to feel that it's going to remain on the development shelf.
It was a different kind of show. Instead of an action-adventure sci-fi piece, it was more of a prime-time soap, a sci-fi "Dallas." It was about a family, the Adamas, and a company, and it was about the creation of the cylons 50 years ago. It was not going to be space-based, but set entirely on the planet of Caprica. But it would have sci-fi touches, and it would deal with issues like artificial intelligence and the various schemings and backbitings that you get in the traditional soap opera.
Are you already at work on Season 4 of "Battlestar Galactica"?
Yep, we've broken the first eight episodes. We're pretty happy. There are a lot of things coming; a lot of things change in the season finale of this season and propel us into the story lines of next season.
Can we expect something in this Sunday's season finale that will be as surprising as the finale to Season 2?
Well, the Season 2 finale is a pretty high bar. It certainly had some shocks. I don't know if we can really top Season 2, but it's up there.
About the writer
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon.
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