Comic-Con reports, Day One

Our man on the ground in San Diego, Greg Dewar, has begun posting photos in this Sitrep Flickr pool...If any of you folks who are at Comic-Con want to add to the pool, go right ahead, it's open to everyone.

Turns out he is lucky to have arrived on time and in one piece, as many folks (including Mark Verheiden) faced huge delays stuck in traffic caused by highway accidents and...er...railway murder.

Fans at the Sci Fi forum have a pinned thread to discuss the Con and share experiences and photos, like this one by Scarbuck:

Richard Hatch & Bear McCreary

Wired, Discover blog, TV Squad and io9 were at today's BSG 30th Anniversary panel with Richard Hatch, Bear McCreary, Tom DeSanto and Kevin Grazier.

According to io9, DeSanto discussed the aborted Bryan Singer version of BSG being developed with Fox in 2001, and shared concept art and animations:

...The new-old BSG, which would have been a continuation of the original series, was eight weeks away from filming, with sets partially built — when Sept. 11, 2001 happened, and network execs panicked that the story of a Cylon sneak attack was "too close to home."...Singer's production company was working on a $13.5 million backdoor pilot for a new BSG, which would air on Fox and then on the Sci Fi Channel. The episodes would have been letterboxed, and the repeat airings on Sci Fi would have had extra footage. DeSanto said the story of the humans "forgetting their purpose" and living in super-capitalist decadence on New Caprica mirrored what he was seeing of his friends during the tech boom around 1999-2000, with people obsessing about their stock portfolios. And just like the Cylon attacks in the abortive Singer pilot, 9/11 brought people back to a sense of purpose.

Sounds like they screened that hilarious faux documentary that McCreary showed at his Los Angeles concerts recently. Can someone confirm that?


io9 also made it to Kevin Grazier's other panel, in which he discussed the accuracy of the science in BSG:

Grazier said that sometimes the actors on the shows are as rabid about getting the science right as he is: James "Baltar" Callis and [EUREKA's] Joe "Henry Deacon" Morton often do independent research to verify that the science on their respective shows is correct. Apparently Callas was particularly fascinated by whether "black body radiation" was represented accurately.

...One more little tidbit from Grazier had to do with cylon downloading. An audience member asked if there were any rules for cylon downloading. Grazier said there are a few, and that he doesn't see the downloading process as a cylon's entire personality being broadcast at death. "I see it as a live update every day," he explained. So the cylons are downloading daily, and when they die they can use what they've already got backed up. But another panelist issued a warning: "I've been trying to BitTorrent Tricia Helfer and it didn't work."

As for the SCREAM LIKE A GIRL panel with Lucy Lawless, so far only this Spout liveblogging post has appeared. More as it develops.