Ronald D. Moore, how prepared are you to let the show go?

Moore: Oh, it's hard. It's been such a great ride. It's been such a great experience. It's going to be hard to let it go and to know that there's not a Battlestar sitting up in Vancouver anymore. So it's bittersweet at best.How will season four differ from what's come before it?

Moore: Well, season four is different in that this season it's one long, continuous season. It picks up, literally, where season three ended, in real time. Lee [Jamie Bamber] and Kara [Katee Sackhoff] are still on their Vipers. The Final Four have just revealed themselves. We're in the middle of what's about to be a space battle. We just pick up in real time, and then it's sort of one long story that branches off in a lot of different directions. There's going to be a lot of shakeup in the Cylon world. A lot of divisions are forming. Different alliances and counter-alliances form over there. Starbuck comes back and says she's been to Earth, and there are immediate questions of who believes, who doesn't believe her. What is she? Do we trust her? Is she a Cylon? Isn't she? That develops its own long storyline. There are a lot of different things that are in motion.You're about to make your directing debut with an episode of Battlestar Galactica. How eager are you to get cracking on that?

Moore: I'm very excited. It should be a treat to work with the cast and crew in a different context. It's my first time out. I'll make plenty of mistakes, but I'll have a good support system to sort of save me from myself. And it'll be fun.Is there a single place you put the camera that no one else has in four years?

Moore: I don't think so, and that's the kind of [trap] you try not to fall into, because then you start just trying to be clever and do something that no one else has done. I think what's important to me on my first time out is to tell the story well, to really tell a good story, to really make it an interesting character piece and just have a piece of film at the end that I'm proud of.What's your sense of the fans' feelings about the imminent end of Battlestar Galactica? Are they collectively thinking it's better to go out on top, or do they want more?

Moore: No, I think the fans pretty much just want it to keep going. And that's really the feeling that you want. It's the old showbiz adage, "Always leaving them wanting more." So I think it's great that the fans are sort of upset. They want more Galactica. They're going to miss it, but I think we'll really be able to give them a strong ending to the series.What's next for you once Battlestar Galactica is completed?

Moore: I have a couple of pilots in development. I have one in development at Fox. I have a pilot in development at NBC. There's Caprica, which is going now. I've been working on a couple of features. So I have a few irons in the fire, and we're just going to see which one breaks.How involved will you be with Caprica?

Moore: I'll be very involved with the pilot, certainly. And then if it goes to series, it kind of depends when that happens and what I'm doing. We'll just wait and see.You worked for a long time on the Star Trek shows The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. If you were to put Caprica in a Star Trek context, is it the equivalent of Battlestar Galactica: The Next Generation or an Enterprise-style take on things?

Moore: It's a different animal altogether. Unlike those shows, which are all riffs on the same notion of what Star Trek was, Caprica is really a completely different kind of genre. We're trying to do something different. Instead of it being action-adventure and space-based and a war show, we're going back to before any of the wars ever happened. This is really more of a sci-fi Dallas. It's a political story, a family story. It's about the creation of the Cylons, and it's about a company. It's planet-based. It's very character-oriented, very serialized and very much about the characters. It's a whole different genre, and that's what makes it exciting.Speaking of Star Trek, you recently visited the set of the new J.J. Abrams film. How much of a déjà-vu-all-over-again experience was that, especially considering that you'd also worked on the Trek features Generations and First Contact?

Moore: Oh, that was amazing. It was really great for me. They were shooting on one of our old soundstages on the day that I was there. So to walk on one of our old stages and see a Federation starship again was a treat. There was a positive vibe in the cast and the crew. I really appreciated the visual look of it, and I was excited to see the uniforms, and all that kind of really hardcore Trekkie geek [stuff] came flying back to me.

Mary McDonnell, how sad and/or relieved are you that the show is coming to an end?

McDonnell: I'm very sad to let go of the world. I think that's going to be difficult, because it's been an extraordinary opportunity to kind of externalize what we're going through. So it's been a real gift as an artist to be able to play in the realm. It's very hard to let go of the people. But I am very excited about completing this saga. I find that the energy going into the last nine, and knowing that we're completing the telling of the story, is a very unusual experience on television. You have the choice to go ahead and finish the story, and it's very specifically laid out to be bookended. So on that level I'm thrilled. I think it's a great idea. But I honestly don't even know yet what kind of hole it's going to leave. I'm probably just going to have to work for Hillary [Clinton] or something.What kinds of stories will you be involved with in season four?

McDonnell: I can only tell you that, as we all know, I have to struggle once again with the cancer. That's a whole different level of struggle than we have seen so far. I [also] have to struggle with the ideas that one commits to as a leader and whether or not they have value. Those are kind of the broad strokes, and other than that I don't know yet.

Edward James Olmos, how ready are you to get back on set and close out the Battlestar Galactica saga?

Olmos: I would love to just take the slowest, slowest train we can. This is really going to be a very, very sad ending on all the levels. The storylines are very, very dark. The fact that this is the final season, the fact that we won't work with this ensemble again, it's really heartbreaking.A lot of people were surprised that you actually signed on for Battlestar Galactica ...

Olmos: I was surprised!So how worthwhile has the experience been?

Olmos: It's the most worthwhile piece of television I have ever done. I did The American Family for PBS, which was so fantastic. I did, of course, Miami Vice, which was a wonderful show, but it was exploiting those two guys, and they exploited everything on that program. That's their style. OK, I got it. This one, 100 years from today you'll get to know what we did here. They'll study this and they'll realize ... God willing, we won't be correct. But we may be. Now with North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, China, Russia, ourselves having the nuclear weaponry that we have, this could become a reality at any given moment, annihilation of the human species and knocking the Earth off its orbit, and the only people left are whatever astronauts are out there. How long can they survive? How would they take it? What would happen to them? How many days could they go? And if there were men and women up there, would they try to go on? That's the questions that we're faced with every day we go into work. So it becomes really, really difficult, because most people are saying, "Wow, this is really an incredible, dramatic show." What they really are starting to get is that it's a commentary on our times and [done] in a way only science fiction can handle. Rod Serling understood it. [Ray] Bradbury understood it. These guys really understood the power of science fiction and being able to comment. Ron Moore has taken it to the highest level on television, ever.Taking all of that into account, what do you need to see for Adama, to properly write the final chapter on this man and his mission? Does he need to live? Die? Does he need to get his people home to justify all that's come before?

Olmos: Basically, if it's true to form, no one makes it.