Battlestar Builds, Gets Dark

Source: SciFi Wire

David Eick, co-executive producer of SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, told SCI FI Wire that the upcoming third season of the show is quite different from, but still of a piece with, all that preceded it in the miniseries and seasons one and two. For one thing, the humans will be a little darker—and the Cylons not so one-dimensional.

"I would say that season three is taking another big step," Eick said in a conference call interview. "In the first half, anyway, it's moving more towards the Cylon point of view. It's saying, 'OK, you've seen how the human beings can be darker and perhaps more unforgivable in ways that you don't normally do with protagonists. Let's see how these antagonists whom we've generally assumed nothing but the worst from have their own sympathies, have ways in which they're not exactly perfect, how they are stunted and less evolved on some fundamental fronts than the humans. It's a very interesting and, I think, bold and risky way to go because the heart of the show has always been about, in a way, how the Cylons and humans are so eerily alike. And I think what we're saying with the first half of season three is, 'Not so fast. They're also quite different, and here's how.'"

At the end of last season, the survivors of the human race had built a settlement on New Caprica, only to find themselves occupied by the invading Cylons. The story of the third season picks things up from that cliffhanger. Eick said that the third season builds on what came before.

"I think the miniseries in a very obvious way was about setting things up, but I also think that, more than any other piece of this journey, [it] was about not just what it was, but what it wasn't," "Those were the days when the title was very much associated with the 1970s show, not that it still doesn't have that, but a great deal of what we were doing was developed and depicted and illustrated and also, I think, was responded to in the context of how it wasn't like the old show. And so, in many respects, the miniseries was a statement about what it wasn't as much as it was a statement about what it was."

Eick added: "The first season was about investigating the foibles and dark side and really the Achilles heel of humanity more than how are we going to outrun the Cylons. In that first season we really got into the depths of how the so-called good guys really aren't so good and really don't have all the answers and are not mouthpieces for morality by any stretch. And I think just that alone was its own statement because in this genre, certainly, and in drama in general, certainly in TV, there's a tendency to expect that your protagonists are the good guys, that they do have the answers, and that in the end they're going to do the right thing. I think the first season was making a statement that that's not always the case."

The second season, Eick said, was all about strange bedfellows and switching roles. "The people who were at each other's throats in season one were suddenly getting each other's back and vice versa," he said. "It was about Gaius Baltar [James Callis] moving into a completely new realm. [He's] not a man who's after power at all. He's really just out for himself and finds himself, ironically, in a scenario where the only way he really can ensure, in his mind, self-preservation is to move to this place that he never dreamed he'd be in. And, conversely, [season two ] demonstrated the ways in which Sharon [Grace Park], of all the characters, becomes the most sympathetic and the one to whom we relate to the most." Battlestar Galactica will launch into its third season with a two-hour premiere on Oct. 6 at 9 p.m. ET/P

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