Jane Espenson

Battlestar Galactica and Caprica series masterminds Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson, and BSGverse stars Edward James Olmos, Esai Morales (plus, surprise guest Grace Park!), gathered at Comic-Con this morning to share some great news with fans about the prospects for more of the critically acclaimed sci-fi saga. Comic-Con 2009 Franchise Brick

Want to hear Edward James Olmos’ pitch for the next Battlestar Galactica movie?

Wanna know when Caprica is finally premiering on your TV after a years-long gestation?

Or would you care to hear how Caprica is catnip for the Buffy fans of the world? Read on...

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

Jane Espenson called her script for the Battlestar Galactica continuation film The Plan "a puzzle," because it retells much of the BSG mythology from the Cylon point of view, strictly adhering to the canonical timeline while still telling an entertaining, darkly humorous tale. In a nutshell, said Espenson, we fans can expect The Plan to be about "What happened on the other side of that door after she walks through." The Plan director Edward James Olmos, meanwhile, said simply, "You will freak out."

For now, Edward James Olmos just wants you BSG fans to buy The Plan on Blu-ray when it comes out on Oct. 27 (Eddie’s really into Blu-ray for some reason), but he also insisted, "I can guarantee you this will not be the last movie on Battlestar Galactica." And what might that movie be about? Well, one fan wanted to know if Olmos had thought out about what happened to Adm. Bill Adama after the close of the series, and Olmos told us, "I’ve actually written an entire script already on exactly what happened to him. Let me put it to you this way: When you next see Adama, he will be in a rustic log cabin, and there will be a knock on the door. And it will be his old friend Col. Tigh saying, ’We have a problem.’ And that’s how the journey begins."

Caprica

The best Caprica news out of the panel is that the series finally has a launch date! Set your TiVos for Friday, Jan. 22, 2010 for the broadcast premiere, which will include cuts for TV (fewer boobies) as well as some new footage not seen on the DVD.

And for those of us who are already Caprica fans, thanks to the movie released on DVD earlier this year, executive producers Eick, Moore and Espenson provided a little color to Comic-Con attendees, sketching out the political and aesthestic world we’ll be stepping into when the series launches. According to Jane, Eick and RDM, Caprica the series is set before the unification of the Twelve Colonies, so there will be a lot of detail about the sometimes warring cultures of those planets. (In case you’re not up on your Battlestar Galactica backstory, the human-populated Twelve Colonies were all but destroyed at the beginning of the series by the genocidal Cylons.)

So this spinoff is a prequel of sorts, rather than a sequel, and according to Moore, "We wanted it to feel like a period piece, because it is a period piece within the Galactica setting. It’s set 58 years prior to BSG. And we wanted to communicate different cultural identities...The Taurons are more overtly 1940s. There are hats and ties and cigarettes." Or as Espenson explained, "It’s also before the political unification of the colonies, so there’s more sense that we can differentiate people from the colonies by dress and tattoos and culture."

Eick shared that there are other visual differences between Galactica and Caprica: "Photographically it’s not as wild or as vérité. We’re making a comment that this is before the fall of Rome, so it’s not as visually chaotic. It’s a little bit more elegant, a little bit more subtle." Still in the midst of that serenity and beauty, there are the seeds of disaster. Eick said, "There are tensions and discriminations and biases. There’s a certain racist thread that runs through the relationships in terms of Taurons and Capricans. We’re definitely trading on some of those more allegorical social issues like we did on Battlestar."

By the way, Jane Espenson (who wrote on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then Battlestar Galactica and who will be the Caprica show runner) wants you Joss Whedon acolytes to know that they should consider watching Caprica. "There’s a little tiny essence of Buffy in this. We’ve got an angry teenage girl and a robot." Nice.