Study The Classics

Faithful Sitrep reader and eagle eyed BSG fan Wendy Towne, points to an interview with Ronald D. Moore in Agent DVD by John Latchem, about what is coming along for BSG in home video, new webisodes, and extended cuts of episodes in the second half of season 4. Excerpts follow:

The first 10 episodes of the fourth 
season recently aired and are likely to see a home video release later this year in anticipation of the final stretch of episodes, which Moore says will answer a lot of the questions raised during the first three seasons.

In the lead-up to the final episodes, Moore says the production team will create a new series of online shorts, similar to “The Resistance” webisodes that were made before the third season. Unlike “The Resistance,” the new webisodes will not take place between the episodes, but will go back and explain things that happened earlier during the course of the show. In this sense, Moore says, the shorts will serve a function similar to the Razor direct-to-DVD movie produced last year.

Also, Moore says the eventual DVD release of the final half of the fourth season should include a longer version of an episode he directed, called “The Disquiet That Follows My Soul.”

“We’ll probably do an extended cut of that with a new commentary,” Moore says. “And I imagine we’ll do a new cut of the finale.”

To follow “Galactica,” Moore is developing a pilot for Fox called “Virtuality,” about astronauts on a 10-year mission. He also has signed to do a trilogy of sci-fi movies for United Artists and is preparing what he calls a companion piece to John Carpenter’s The Thing.

But Moore is not completely abandoning the “Galactica” universe. Production is underway on a spinoff prequel, called 
“Caprica,” which delves into the origins of 
the robotic Cylons and the political rivalry between two families. The cast includes Eric Stoltz, Esai Morales, Polly Walker and Paula 
Malcomson.

“It’s coming together great,” Moore says. “It’s a very different time and a very different setting. It’s not about space, but about these families and their machinations.”

Justine of All About Tahmoh Penikett found a series of amazing pro photos taken of the BSG cast at Comic Con.

Crazyvictoria on the BSG Blog has an update and photos of upcoming BSG action figures, including Adama and Roslin figures, and figures tied to RAZOR.

Laura Bramley of Hamilton College reports on a new Battlestar Galactica academic study:

Texts like the Iliad may be old, but they are called classics precisely because they are timeless, turning up over and over again – sometimes in unusual places. Christopher Bouton (class of'09), a rising senior from Beverly, Mass., is spending the summer researching the connections between Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and two slightly more recent productions: "Blade Runner" by Ridley Scott and the television series "Battlestar Galactica" by Ronald Moore.

Bouton is collaborating with Winslow Professor of Classics Carl. A. Rubino on the project, which is funded by the Emerson Foundation Grant program. Created in 1997, the program was designed to provide students with significant opportunities to work collaboratively with faculty members, researching an area of interest. The students will make public presentations of their research throughout the academic year.

A history major with a minor in classics, Bouton is no stranger to research. Last summer, he won a fellowship from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, which enabled him to attend an intensive three week program along with nine students from other colleges. Bouton worked with professors to examine school integration in Nantucket in the 1840s, a project that will be the basis of his senior thesis.

This summer the work is slightly different, however. Bouton has already studied modern ties to the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid in Rubino's "Heroism, Ancient and Modern" course, and he says that studying "Blade Runner" and "Battlestar Galactica" is very different kind of research from his work about Nantucket schools. "Listening to dialogue and watching action is much more engaging than looking at microfilm," he comments. At the same time, doing research on popular media brings its own challenges, one of which is making sure that the research is relevant to others. Bouton says he was drawn to studying "Blade Runner" and "Battlestar Galactica" because of his own interest in the productions, but to pursue a research project, it was important to have a broader underlying motivation than mere fandom.

That foundation lies in thematic connections on issues such as the nature of humanity and heroism. In the classics, explains Bouton, the characters are set apart from normal humanity, the "universal us," and the figures of the Iliad seem to be superhuman. "We get the sense that this is a story, but this isn't us," he says. In the dystopian future of "Blade Runner" and the world of "Battlestar Galactica," those same questions resurface, since each production features a small population of isolated humans in surroundings dominated by human-seeming robots. The classical themes turn into a discussion of what makes humanity unique when it can be simulated almost exactly by machines.

Now beginning the writing phase of his project, Bouton says that it has allowed him to extend his knowledge of the classics, something that he will not be able to pursue after leaving Hamilton, since he plans to attend graduate school and earn a Ph.D. in history. The chance to follow diverse interests is one of the reasons he came to Hamilton, he says, and his research this summer has been an opportunity to do just that.

I'd love to see the results of that research.