Popular Character To Return For Season 4

Only history will tell how well Ronald D. Moore and the people behind "Battlestar Galactica" pulled it off, but the "Bring Back Tasha Yar" trick apparently still works, even in the 21st century.

After months of speculation and just weeks after seeing her Viper explode, executive producer Moore confirmed to TV Week that Katee Sackhoff will be back as Starbuck for the fourth season of "Battlestar Galactica" when it returns in 2008.

"We were trying to walk a very fine line," Moore said about the interviews that took place around Starbuck's "death" in the BSG episode "Maelstrom." "She was very careful how she phrased it. We wanted people to feel the loss. We didn't want to put Katee in the position of lying to people. She did look for other work and is getting other work -- just other work that won't interfere with her 'Battlestar' commitments."

SciFi Channel, which airs the series, created some confusion when it first picked up "Battlestar Galactica" for 13 episodes in its fourth season, and then extending it to 22 just days before the third season finale aired. Moore said that there were a lot of variables coming ito play.

"It got into complicated things," he said. "Budget was a factor, but it wasn't like, 'Your budget is too high, cut it by this much and we'll talk again.' We're not going to be on in 2007, so then it's a question of how many episodes will we broadcast in 2008. There were a lot of moving parts in terms of finances. It was a long, tedious accounting conversation."

Even with the increased order and talk over budget, Moore didn't hint about any budget decreases for the coming year. "It wasn't like, 'You have to kill 'X' amount of characters or we're gonna cur your special effects budget in half,'" he said.

The show has faltered in the ratings since it premiered as a regular series in 2005, and that wasn't more evident than this past season when the show was moved from Fridays to Sundays in an apparent effort to boost ratings.

"Launching in the fall, we ran into a buzzsaw with baseball and a lot of things," Moore said. "On Friday nights, we were losing a third of our audience due to time-shifting (people recording the show and watching it later) -- that's a huge hit. Things have stabilized and bounced back now that we're on Sunday night. There's also the serialized nature of the show ... people feel like they can't just pick it back up. But that's offset by people buying a whole season's worth of DVDs.

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