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Battlestar Galactica will celebrate its 35th anniversary next year, and enthusiasm still runs high. This year's packed panel at Comic-Con on July 12 delighted fans of the original series as well as the reboot.
Richard Hatch—who played Capt. Apollo in the original and Tom Zarek in the later series—was the ideal moderator, and writer/producer Jane Espenson (BSG/Firefly/Husbands) could've spoken all day and still held the audience in rapt attention.
Two additional panelists, science consultant Dr. Kevin Grazier and actress Luciana Carro, got stuck in traffic, with Grazier arriving midway through the panel, and Carro having to say "hello" to the audience via cell phone.
Some highlights:
• Hatch announced the recent launch of BSG's new social networking website and reminded everyone about the anniversary convention that will be held in Houston next year.
• When an audience member asked Espenson, "What is Starbuck?" Espenson said that question was left to the imagination, but that her personal wish was that, "When [Starbuck] vanished, I'd like to think she dropped to her stomach and commando-crawled out of those weeds. I don't want her to be that supernatural. I want her to live in our world."
• In response to a question about the status of the program Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, which would follow William Adama as a young man, Hatch said the project is still viable. The powers that be are still figuring out where to place it. A Syfy representative in the audience offered a "Soon!" when someone asked when it would be available.
Espenson emphasized that even if it became an online show, it shouldn't thought of as "less than." She said, "It's everything TV can be and more, because you don't have voices from above—standards and practices—and all the things that go into making something corporately accessible. You get the pure vision."
The panel also mentioned Bryan Singer's Battlestar Galactica film, which is in development. So if things go well, the coming years should be good ones for BSG fans.
• Said Hatch of his character Tom Zarek and the perception that he's a bad guy, "Most bad guys don't see themselves as bad guys…" He then went on to say that, from accounts he's heard, BSG creator/executive producer Ronald D. Moore always told the writers to put the truth in Zarek's mouth, though—as Hatch observed—people often don't want to hear the truth.
• In speaking about what the writer's room was like on the BSG reboot, Espenson said that most of the writers were former journalists, and episodes would often evolve during 8-10-hour conversations.
• Hatch praised Jamie Bamber's portrayal of Apollo, and both both Hatch and Espenson concurred that Apollo was one of the hardest characters to write, because it's easier to get epiphanies about characters that are "frakked up," and it's more difficult to write true-blue characters who are holding everything together.
• After being asked if he ever snuck into a viper on the set of the reboot, Hatch admitted that he did jump into a plane one morning around 3 a.m.
As Hatch mentioned at the beginning of the panel, hopefully what has happened before will happen again, and Battlestar Galactica—in one form or another—will return soon. So say we all!
