The end is nigh.

MediaBlvd Magazine has a pretty good interview up with Ron Moore and David Eick from this past week’s TCA tour. All oldies but goldies. The end of Battlestar, Caprica, and what projects they’ve got coming up.

On Battlestar…

There are questions remaining and hopefully they’ll be answered in these final 10 episodes. But how do you answer them without making it feel perfunctory?

Some if it will just be on a crawl in the end credit. By the way, in case you were wondering. Well, you know, I mean it’s – that’s the trick of doing it. You know, you, we – the first decision was not to try to answer every single thing in the last episode. Because then the last episode just becomes, you know, a running tally of, oh and there’s this question, and oh and there’s that question and so and so and so and so. And we wanted to kind of, you know, there were certain things that would be raised naturally earlier in the story line. And then you could sort of deal with them on a case by case basis. And you just wanted each sort of revelation and each sort of answer to sort of have its own kind of moment in the sun, and not to make everything a giant mystery. And to sort of let it proceed organically. It was a bit of a trick. But it didn’t seem like it was too burdensome as we went through it. It felt kind of natural. And as we broke out the last 10 episodes there seemed like there were natural sort of places where we could explain this. And oh that revelation can go here. And, you know, and oh we’ll fill this detail in there. And we’ll still save these pieces for the end.

On Caprica…

What’s the latest on Caprica?

Caprica has been picked up for a full season. We start shooting that probably in July. We’re putting the writing staff together now and the crew. And, you know, just staffing up and getting ready to go. We’ll start breaking stories probably in February or maybe even as soon as the end of this month, kind of depending when all the pieces go together. We have a game plan of sort of what the general story line is and sort of some direction. So we’re not starting completely from scratch. So things are well in hand. In Caprica we feel really good about that.

The entire interview can be read here.

FOX Head Honcho talks Virtuality.

Maureen Ryan from the Chicago Tribune got a chance to talk with FOX head honcho Peter Ligouri at the Television Critics Association press tour this week. During their conversation, they talked a little about Ron Moore’s Virtuality…

MR: What’s going on with “Virtuality”? It seems like there’s so much positive buzz about it, but that doesn’t always translate into a pickup [to series].

PL: Yeah, look, this is why do you pilots. Especially, the more ambitious the show, the more important the pilot is – just being able to do that exercise and figure out, do we have the characters right, can we [execute] this. Ron Moore, honestly, he’s the real deal. When you sit there and talk to someone and say, “Does he have a strategy? Does he have a 100-episode plan, does he have a grip on his characters?” He’s got it. It’s a very ambitious pilot, it’s a very ambitious premise. I think we cast it really well.

MR: It sounds like you’re more inclined to go with the whole pilot model versus what I’ve heard other executives say.

PL: It depends on the show. [Fox entertainment president] Kevin [Reilly] and I really wrestle [with the idea] of going directly to series with some shows. “Dollhouse,” [we made a] series commitment (that cast is pictured at left). That’s when you’re sitting there with a showrunner who’s proven, he sits there and talks you through the first 6-, 8-, 12-episode arc, and given a writers strike, you say, “Let’s go, staff up, do your thing.” In some instances it’s worth doing that. In something like Ron’s project – it’s a very ambitious concept. Even he wants to try it out.

MR: What’s ambitious about it – a lot of green-screen stuff, special effects and all that?

PL: It’s this delicate balance act between the claustrophobia of the spaceship and opening the world with [the scenarios glimpsed through technology known as] virtuality. I am sure they are going to take a long time to edit that pilot, because you don’t know exactly what is the right balance.

MR: So there’s a gay relationship on the show. Can you talk about that, about things you find interesting about the show?

PL: What I think is interesting about it is, it’s the first 21st or 22nd Century office show, office drama. It’s a bunch of people working in a claustrophobic environment, working for a business with a specific mission. Where do you have to go to with that? You have to go to character, you’re not going to go to “Star Trek”-ian moments. You’re really going to go back to the characters to get to the core. And that is the genius of Ron. Plus there’s a social commentary, he does that in “Battlestar” and he has that here. The gay relationship is one part of that.

The full interview can be found here.