Chicago Tribune's Maureen ("Mo") Ryan (via Ain't It Cool News) reports that SCI FI Channel may be planning to spool out those final Battlestar Galactica episodes - all the way to 2009.
The fourth and farewell season of the Peabody award-winning Battlestar was expected to launch sometime during 1Q '08. (The two-hour Battlestar tv movie prequel, Razor, premieres November 24.)
According to Ryan, Battlestar actors appearing onstage at Atlanta's DragonCon over the Labor Day weekend spilled, saying that the twenty-episode season will be split into two blocks. The first half of the final season will launch February '08 but the back half won't be coming up for air until February '09 - at least according to reports filtering out from the con.
Naturally, the message boards on Ain't It Cool went bonkers.
Ryan spoke with SCI FI Channel's executive vice president Mark Stern who confirmed that the network was planning some sort of split but gave no further details.
Ryan's reaction? "Nearly a year will have passed between regular-season episodes by the time Season 4 debuts. If we have to wait another year between the first half of Season 4 and the final batch of episodes, I have one word for you: Arrrgh."
Okay - it's the midwestern, Irish sisterhood here. May I join "Mo" in a banshee wail - noooooooo! February 2009 is just too, too long of a hiatus. Haven't television networks learned any lessons from the Jericho debacle when the hiatus between fresh episodes threw a wrench into the momentum?