Blog Update

Ron Moore has updated his weblog with some answers to questions:

February 27, 2006
Q & A

"I've never understood Roslin's rationale for wanting to abort Sharon's baby in "Epiphanies". Why did she see the hybrid baby as a threat to the fleet? Dr. Cottle mentioned that the blood sample was 'odd', but how does that translate to dangerous? I've never been able to appreciate this episode because I couldn't really understand the character's motivations."
The idea was that Laura saw the upcoming birth of the baby as representing a risk to the fleet. She didn't know exactly what that risk was, but as Adama put it, "If it's good for the Cylons, then it's probably bad for us." The complicating factor was that Laura knew she was dying and that the presidency was about to be turned over to Baltar, whose judgement and abilities she had grown to have less and less faith in over the course of time. Faced with her seemingly imminent demise, Laura felt she couldn't gamble by leaving the decision of what to do with the child in the hands of Baltar and opted for the safer -- if harsher -- choice of aborting the child immediately.
"How were you able to deal with ramping up to more episodes per season? I recall hearing that HBO's "The Wire" even had to take breaks to ease new writers into the fold. BSG has a different model, with ads and other pressures... Maybe we will we see more character studies, which are more contained within themselves?"
We did take a month long break in between eps 10 & 11 in order to catch up on scripts. Doing 20 instead of 13 makes a big difference in terms of stamina and quality control. When you're concentrating on 13, you can essentially make each of them special and each of them gets a lot of attention. With 20, you're spreading yourself out more and trying to keep more balls in the air at once. I won't say that's the only reason why we had a couple of shows that I wasn't happy with this season, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a contributing factor.
"Will there be anymore episodes that reflect one from TOS? Also, I don't know if this has been asked yet but here it goes. In the mini series, part one before the attack, as Six and Baltar were leaving the Ministry of Defense, Six told Baltar that she was meeting somebody, a person/cylon walks up to her after Baltar leaves and Six says "I was wondering when you would show up". Who was she talking to??"
We don't have any plans for redoing any more episodes from the original series. "Pegasus" was the one that translated the best and the others all seem too distant from our structure and universe.
In the miniseries, the presumption was that Six was meeting with another humanoid Cylon on Caprica, and I was using that moment to do a cut to the original series Cylon aboard Galactica. We've talked about various possibilities over the course of the last couple seasons as to who she might've been meeting with at that moment, but nothing's really grabbed us (although, there was a mad moment when we considered revealing that she was meeting with Laura! We talked about working that in as the reveal in the "Epiphanies" flashbacks, but we couldn't come up with any rational justification for why Laura wouldn't have reacted to the Shelley Godfrey Cylon in "Six Degrees of Separation").

The rest: http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/archives/2006/02/#a000277