Wanted to let you know that there's now enhanced material available on the podcasts, courtesy of SciFi.com, which consists of artwork and other images now associated with the last few podcasts.

Also, there's a new podcast available which was originally recorded last summer in the writers' room, featuring discussion of a few of the episodes from the second half of the season, including "Scar" and "Sacrifice." There are a couple more podcasts in this vein I recorded as well last season which with probably get posted at some point, so keep checking the downloads page. I'm also going to try to do some podcasts between now and the Season Three premiere, possibly with Mrs.Ron and other guests in attendance.

Okay, that's three blogs in one day. You can't say I'm not trying.

"The plot twist [of the finale] seems to share allot in common with the DeSanto Galactica continuation story, where the humans think they are safe from the cylons and revolt against the military by deciding to give up on Earth and to colonize another place called New Caprica. Were you at least partially inspired by this earlier concept? "

No. I can honestly say that the idea for our finale was entirely home-grown. I had lunch with Tom DeSanto a few weeks back and we talked about the struggles we both went through trying to get our respective versions of the show off the ground. As he talked about his pilot concept, I shared many of the plot details from our finale and we both remarked on how some notions and ideas are simply either "in the ether" or have a certain inevitability to them. It's reminiscent of the "Babylon 5" vs. "Deep Space 9" questions I used to get. I was there when DS9 was being created and I knew for a fact that neither Michael Piller nor Rick Berman had any knowledge of the B-5 material, but when you're doing a series set on a space station, there were bound to be certain paths that writers found attractive (like having a female second officer, for instance). In terms of Galactica, the idea that the people of the rag-tag fleet might one day come across a planet and decide to settle down permanently, is an idea that would probably occur to anyone approaching the material, and it's really a question of how you execute that idea which is key.

"What happened to Adama in the season finale to change him so much? Why would a man who spent decades of his adult life standing watch for the Cylon return suddenly give in and allow the military to stand down? How could he convince himself that the Cylons weren't coming back after 1 year when the last time they waited 40 years? He knew settlement was wrong so why didn't he offer any resistance? "

I think people have a remarkable ability to convince themselves of just about anything. Adama, like everyone else in the fleet, had been constantly on the run, constantly under stress, and constantly in danger of losing his life for months on end, with virtually no break from the metal walls surrounding him day in and day out. When, finally, the people decided to end the long sojourn and settle on New Caprica, he had little choice but to comply with the results of a democratic election which hinged on that very question. And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, people began to relax, to believe that maybe they had really turned a corner, had really found a place to lay down their burdens and start a new life. Adama was just as vulnerable to that attractive idea as anyone else, and as the men and women under him began to clamor for a new life, as the political leadership of New Caprica began to demand more and more military resources to support the civilian population, there came the point where Adama began to believe in the mirage too. He's not perfect. He never was. He couldn't bring himself to leave his ship, but as age and fatigue began to set in, he started to let down his guard just a little -- not all at once and never completely, but just enough.

There were also practical considerations. He was entirely alone out here. No Admiralty to call for reinforcements or intelligence, no Justice Ministry to prosecute soldiers who simply never came back from the surface of New Caprica, and no friendly ear in the office of the president to get needed resources for the military ships maintaining their lonely vigil up in orbit. He was alone and he was tired. It's almost as simple as that.

I remember one of my most vivid memories from the immediate post 9/11 period was opening up the newspaper and reading about a physical confrontation in the streets between members of the New York police department and the New York fire department. It was heartbreaking, it was infuriating and it was illuminating. People are people. Enormous events happen, history pivots around us and we tell ourselves that everything has changed, that we're irrevocably different from this day forward -- until the next time everything changes. Adama made a mistake. They all did. And as he is wont to say, they will all have to live with it.

"What is up with the pudgified Apollo? Too much chunky munky B&J? "

We're going to hint at some of the reasons for Lee's physical, er... changes in the first few episodes, then deal with it in more detail later. Overall, we're going to be hinting at a lot of things that happened in the intervening year over the first few episodes, then do more stuff with it later, as the season progresses.

"You have giant, steel balls. My head is still spinning from being smacked in the head with them in the form of Lay Down Your Burdens Part 2. It seems like you are operating under the philosophy that if the audience could possibly come up with a plot idea then it isn't good enough for BSG. Am I reading that right? I know I never would have guessed that we would suddenly jump 380 days ahead, but I love it. Will we get to see Tigh and Starbuck put all past hostility behind them and become a super bad ass resistance fighting duo with Anders, the chief, and Cally as their sidekicks? I'd like this not only because of the Tigh/Stabuck dynamic, but also because it would be nice to see Tigh do some good again. I loved the arc at the beginning of season two where all he could do was [censored] up while in command. However, since that point it seems that Tigh's only purpose for existing is to expose to the audience the wrong opinion or bad idea. Everything that comes out of his mouth is obviously the stupid or shortsighted answer which is invariable and immediately undercut by one of the wiser characters. He didn't like the documentary, the blackbird project... Have you noticed this theme? Personally I love Tigh and want him to be good for something again. Oh, and that first shot of him on New Caprica in that old man hat was priceless. Thanks. "

They're teflon, actually.

Anyway, I think you'll be happy to know that we've got some real meaty stuff planned for the Colonel in the first few episodes. I also felt that we didn't use Tigh as effectively in the later part of Season Two, and I was eager to get him back into the thick of things. He's got a sizable role in the initial episodes, and there are some enormous changes and shocks coming for his character next season.

"What happened to Zarek? Given his help getting Baltar elected, I would have expected him to have recieved a pretty nice 'reward', perhaps as VP? Did Baltar even have a VP? We never see Zarek post-election or a year later on New Caprica. Given Zarak's penchant for political mayhem, I would think that his fate would be one of significant interest. Perhaps we will see this early in Season 3? "

You will be seeing Zarek again and early in the season. He was the Vice President, but his relationship with Baltar went south relatively quickly, and he simply refused to cooperate once the Cylon occupation began.

"Speaking of Directors - I think everyone has paid attention to the remarkable work the directors do on this show, albeit subconsciously. I was wondering about some specifics on how you developed the show's directorial conventions. I believe I read in AC that most scenes are shot with two cameras running. Given what was in your mission statment regarding the script, how much of that was instigated by Rymer and the other directors in terms of realizing that style and making BSG grounded in a semi documentary aesthetic? What conventions did they establish on the show that have surprised you?"

The documentary/verite approach was in the initial pitch I made to the studio and network, and it was something that David Eick and I had numerous conversations about in the lead-up to the miniseries. It was a stylistic choice we made early on, and it colored all the conversations about the show with the production team, including the directors. Michael Rymer then took this aesthetic approach and made it real, developed the visual language of the show and made concrete the ideas that David and I were tossing around. The series bible does discuss the documentary film approach, but as always in this business, it's up to the man or woman behind the camera to make these things happen and Michael deserves a great deal of credit for the visuals we now take for granted.

"I understand according to the podcast that you guys were way over budget on ep 2.20, but the tent city really threw me off. I try not to be one of those fans that nitpicks everything to death, but this bothered me so much that I had to register and post. If they've been on planet for over a year now and they intend to make it their home, why are they still living in tents? If I had my choice between a tent and something more permanent and weatherproof, I'd be moving heaven and earth to construct the latter."

There are some permanent buildings in the settlement, but it seemed plausible that to start an entire city from scratch would be a massive undertaking to say the least. It also seemed that without a strong leader like Laura Roslin to helm this kind of effort, that the organizational problems would add up and that the project could easily get stalled or delayed. Now, add to that various unknowns like disease and unfamiliar weather patterns as well as the difficulties in exploiting the natural resources in a completely new environment, it didn't seem implausible that there'd still be a lot of people living in tents.

"Why is the fleet so concerned [about] elections? They are running for their lives, so I would think holding elections would be the least of their problems."

I felt right from the beginning that question of who was in charge and how a democratic society would deal with this situation was one of the fundamental questions of the show. If democracy means anything, it means that people get to decide who their leaders are and what kind of life they choose to lead. And the operative word is "choose." Democracies are about choices, some made intelligently and thoughtfully, and some not so much. Adama and the Galactica were faced with an immediate question as to the role of the military in this surviving population: were they still the servants of the people, or were they the overseers? Adama's choice was to preserve the idea of their society, indeed of their entire civilization while still striving to protect them from their enemies both within and without. It was, and continues to be a difficult balancing act, but as he said in "Resurrection Ship": it's not enough to survive, you have to worthy of suriving.

If the military simply took choice away from the people of the fleet, if it simply decided that the senior commanders knew best and that was that, then the people out there in those ships become irrelevant. They're cargo. It's a military world and a military society and everything else is secondary. Down that road lies the cautionary tale of Admiral Cain and the battlestar Pegasus. One Adama and Galactica decided not to go down that road, then the entire panoply of democracy was in play -- representation by consent and elections to determine those representatives.

Last week I had the privilege of being invited to speak at the annual Game Developers' Conference in San Jose and I have to say, it was an eye-opening experience. I haven't been an active gamer in a long time, and it was startling to see how the industry has changed and matured.

I grew up in the Classic Atari era, when a row of quarters on the Asteroids machine carried a great deal of credibility down at the bowling alley where I and the few video denizens of Chowchilla plied our trade. I had the first home consoles as well, but after college I pretty much dropped out of gaming, with periodic forays into the burgeoning computer game market over the years. My last effort involved buying an XBox a couple of years ago with the determination to get back into the game (pun intended) at last. A week spent in frustration over my inability to master the multi-buttoned controller finally put to rest my dreams of mastering Max Payne and Madden NFL, and as Terry constantly reminds me, the XBox sits beneath the TV table in my office gathering dust.

That may have to change, however, after spending a few days at the GDC getting to know the people in the gaming business. I was impressed, first of all, by the sheer brainpower which permeated the event and second of all with the maturity and seriousness of the business itself. To put it succinctly: these are seriously smart people, doing seriously smart things with a deadly seriousness of purpose. When I walked the convention floor, I was struck by the intensity of the attendees as they browsed through the various booths and displays. I'm told the event itself had discouraged the "babe booth" mentality long ago wherein scantily-clad women beckoned to the hormonally-challenged, and sadly, I saw no such relics from this storied past. Instead, I found a lot of intense concentration and discussion of the latest software applications and character-building tools, upwards of ninety-five percent of which went sailing over my head.

I was impressed with the the fact that this business was maturing right before my eyes and it was filled with people who wanted to push the bounds of their medium into new and exciting frontiers. It was especially interesting to contrast the conversations I had with people in the gaming industry with the typical conversation with people in my own industry. My industry tends toward the narcissistic, finding new and exciting ways to be in love with itself and its own hype, sometimes to the point of being in love with being in love with itself. At the GDC, I found an almost uniformly skeptical and critical attitude toward the gaming business; a sense that they hadn't figured everything out yet, that anything you might like about games today was probably going to be obsolete very soon and a frustration level with the shortcomings and limitations of both the business model and the creative results. For a business whose rise to billion-dollar status has been nothing if not meteoric, it was refreshing to see that the key movers and thinkers were restless and eager to move on, to find the next great idea and push the boundaries of the business to the next level.

I was treated well, with unfailing courtesy, and was gratified to find that many, many people there were fans of Galactica -- and more than one told me how they either were openly skeptical of the idea or didn't like the miniseries, but eventually came around to love the series. I was a complete outsider at the event, a traveller from a distant land who barely spoke the language, but I never felt unwelcome. With people like that involved in gaming, the future for video games is not only bright, it's probably blinding.

Now, if only I could figure out which button gets Dante to run the bootleg correctly...

I'll be appearing over at the Grand Slam Creation Con at the Pasadena Convention Center on Sunday March 12 at 12:30pm. I think they gave me a half hour, so I'll just open it to Q & A and take as many questions as I can.

See you there.

"My question, why do the "marines" on the show always wear a CQB (close quarters battle) gear loadout in all the episodes? Even in the ones where they are outdoors? Is it possible we might see a different "marine" gear setup? "

It's primarily a budgetary issue. We've got the CQB gear, so it's cheaper and easier to keep using it week after week than it is to rent specific items for every mission or to buy a wide variety of gear for stock. There's also a costume issue in that we don't really have specific Marine uniforms, so we use variations of our existing "naval" uniforms for the Marines and distinguish them mostly through the use of the CQB gear.

"My question concerns Sharon's pregnancy. We know Helo is the father. Is Sharon the mother? That is, did Hera come from Sharon's egg, or were the eggs implanted in her from a human source?
If so, isn't she just a surrogate womb and the Cylons don't really reproduce at all? Therefore the baby would still be totally human.
If not, then how the heck did they manage to make her fertile, as female humans are *born* with all their eggs."

My assumption has been that the Cylons created Sharon's eggs and presumably the eggs for all Cylon females. This could change, obviously, but the idea was that the Cylons were attempting to create a virtually perfect replica of the human form, right down to the reproductive system, but that they had been unable to actually reproduce on their own.

"Ron, on another board we've been having a discussion about the comparisons between Galactica and Hill Street Blues, which just came out on DVD (Season One). How much of a conscious foundation is HSB for BG?"

Hill Street Blues was definitely something of an archetype we looked to for developing the structure of the series. I made explicit reference to the show in our series bible and talked about how we would strive to emulate their structure as much as possible. That structure was, basically, to have a self-contained A-Story that would begin and end each week, with smaller character-centered B-Stories that would take place over a few episodes, and finally long-running C-Stories that would arc throughout the season. It was a starting place for a lot of story discussions and script meetings, but we didn't strictly adhere to the form, as you can see from the experimentation we did throughout the first season. The first seven episodes of season two roughly follow this format, but then we varied again from that structure for the rest of the season. Why didn't we hew more closely to the Hill Street format? Partly it's a result of not wanting the show to get so serialized as to be inaccessible to new viewers, and partly it's a result of continually wanting to try new things on the show and mix up the story-telling.

"Why was it that Pegasus was able to escape given that it had networked computers? Seems odd. My theory is that the Pegasus is one huge trojan horse."

This will be explained in the longer version of "Pegasus" that'll be included in the Season Two DVD box set. Essentially, Pegasus had her network off-line in preparation for going into the shipyard for an overhaul and wasn't vulnerable to that point of attack.

"If (when?) working on the show becomes too stressful, are you able to notice and take a time-out? I bet it is easy to get caught up in the business, and therefore lose some of the art. How do you maintain the pleasure in the craft when your role also contains so much of the mechanics, business, and politics of creating TV?"

My wife is very focussed on making me chill out from time to time. I tend to think about the show even when I'm not sitting down and working on it, and it does become all-consuming at times. We try to go to the movies, but often end up camped in front of the TiVo or DVDs. I read a lot -- there's a stack of books on my nightstand at the moment, everything from "The Age of Federalism," "The Assassins Gate" and "State of War" to "Vanilla Slim," "The March," and "Gravity's Rainbow," not all of which I've even started yet. I coach my son's T-Ball team and I'm teaching my daughter basketball, both of which have the added benefit of making me get off my ass and do something physical.

As for maintaining the pleasure in the show itself, I find that it rarely wans, actually. For all the struggles and arguments and politicking, I still get to see the words I write translated and improved by an incredibly talented production team and that joy never seems to go away. There's an immense sense of accomplisment and pride in just stepping onto the soundstage or looking at artwork, or viewing dailies, or putting the film together, and it hasn't run out so far. Hopefully, it never will.

Surfed through the official boards and saw a LOT of spoiler photos from the finale. I'm not trying to be snarky, or ruin anyone's fun or trample anyone's speech, but I gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed that so much material is getting posted. There's a lot of people who work really, really hard on the show who are waiting to see the finale and have the pleasure of surprising the audience and it's a bummer when it's ruined this close to the final airdate. Obviously, people can do what they want, it's a free country but I'd really appreciate it if the photos posted so far were confined to that thread and if people resisted the temptation to post any more shots or any more plot details. I've resisted going through the locked-down security regimes that the studios sometimes go through to protect material, but this is the kind of thing that could reverse that policy and make everything harder to access.

Thanks and enjoy the show.