Battlestar Telemovie To Focus On Pegasus

When the "Battlestar Galactica" telemovie premieres on the SciFi Channel this fall, it will have very little of the Galactica itself, but a lot more about a battlestar that many fans have been wanting to learn more about: The Battlestar Pegasus.

"That story will not pick up our cliffhanger at the end of Season 3," executive producer Ronald D. Moore recently told Salon.com. "That didn't seem right. The story will be set on the [Battlestar] 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."

While it had been rumored for some time that the telemovie would focus on the Battlestar Pegasus, thus assuring a return of Michelle Forbes as Adm. Cain, this is the first official confirmation that has been received that the telemovie would in fact focus on the Cylon attack of the BSG pilot, but from the perspective of the Pegasus.

"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," Moore said. "One of the storylines everyone had really liked was the Pegasus story and the character of Adm. Cain, so we decided to go with that."

According to the mini-Pegasus story arc, the Pegasus survived the attacks much like the Galactica, but had a much different approach, putting civilians secondary and military first. That included the execution of the XO when he hesitated on an order, and the stripping of civilian ships.

While Moore said he and his writing crew already have more than a half-dozen episodes of the SciFi Channel series' fourth season already under way, creating the intricate storylines is a very organic process right up to the time that the show goes on the air. Anything at anytime can change, not just in the lives of the characters, but in the writing room itself. One of those major changes came from how the Sagitarions were approached in the second half of the third season.

"We'd developed a whole storyline this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of Gaius Baltar (James Callis)," Moore said. "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 backstory 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."

That forced the production crew to go back and re-edit, and even re-shoot, several scenes in episodes that made up the second half of the third season, and could be a reason why some episodes struggled during that period, Moore said.

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