The animated Sackhoff found it difficult to lie to her fellow actors about what was going on. (Deceit doesn't seem to be her forte, generally speaking: In the first minute of this interview, Sackhoff admitted that she was hung over, because, she said, "I don't want you to think I'm stupid. I'd rather you think I'm, you know, a drunk.")
Eick soon realized that this part of the plan simply wouldn't work among the close group of friends in the "Battlestar Galactica" cast. "It wasn't fair to her," he said. "She was going to have to lie to literally everybody in the cast: 'Yeah, yeah, I know, it's awfully sad. I'm gonna miss you guys!' It got ridiculous at a certain point. She was a trooper; I think she would have done anything we asked her to. But she's not inhuman!"
So the cast was told that Sackhoff and Starbuck were there to stay, but anyone else deemed a potential leak was kept in the dark. Including Sackhoff's own father. "My dad has a big mouth, and I knew he would get on his e-mail list and tell everyone," she said.
As Season 3 progressed, Eick and Moore teased the press and fans with bits of information about how it would build toward a climax. In interviews, they said that Starbuck would have a big episode in early March; that after that episode, an actor would be gone from the opening credits; and that by the end of the season, it would be discovered that a major character was an undercover Cylon, the robotic race that looks human but appears to be set on annihilating mankind.
Those three plot points were all true -- Sackhoff was removed from the credits after Starbuck's "death," and in fact four Cylons were revealed in the finale -- but turned out not to be related. On the dozens of sites devoted to "Battlestar Galactica," fans mushed them together anyway, turning them into "foilers" rather than spoilers, as Eick and Moore hoped.
"My goal was to mislead the audience into thinking Kara Thrace was a Cylon," Eick said. Being a Cylon, after all, would mean that there were many copies of her, and therefore Sackhoff could come back as a different version of Starbuck.
"For the fans really paying close attention -- reading the message boards, consuming all the details -- I think they were adequately misled," Eick said. "They thought they knew the answer; they were wrong, and that's ultimately what they want -- to be surprised."
