Battlestar Galactica Television Program

Like a veteran of the witness protection program, actress Kate Vernon picked a secluded corner table of a very public restaurant for the meeting. She studied the tape recorder sitting next to her teacup on the table and then glanced around the Studio City bistro to see if anyone was eavesdropping. "Forgive me if I'm a little awkward talking about it," Vernon said during an interview earlier this week.

For a while, things looked iffy for "Battlestar Galactica." After the Sci Fi Channel last month moved the third-season drama about a human resistance movement against an occupying race of robots from Friday nights to Sunday nights in an attempt to goose ratings, viewership remained stagnant. The network has ruled, however, that the show won't live by numbers alone: The Sci Fi Channel is expected to announce today that it has renewed the series for a fourth season.

Oh, no, they didn't. They did not just kill Starbuck. In a highly anticipated episode of "Battlestar Galactica" that was set to air Sunday, producers did what they've been threatening to do for several months: They killed a major character. And not just any lead, but arguably the focal point of the show. (That's right. The "Battlestar" producers don't pretend they're going to kill off their protagonists to goose ratings like certain other prime-time show producers.

Starbuck is alive. She could be a Cylon. But wait, there's more! Four other Cylons have awakened aboard "Battlestar Galactica," and the humans look stunned in more ways than one. Among the now-aware robots, a mechanical race that appears human but is actually set on destroying the species, are presidential aide Tory (Rekha Sharma) and Galactica's second-in-command, Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan). Then again, the four could be the key to peace between the toasters and the humans.

Over the summer, Katee Sackhoff, who plays Kara "Starbuck" Thrace on "Battlestar Galactica," received a nerve-racking phone call from Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the show's executive producers. "David and Ron said, 'We want to start this phone call out by saying that we love you,' " Sackhoff recalled last week. Sackhoff knew she might not like what came next. And she didn't. "They said, 'You're not really gonna die -- but we're gonna blow you up.'

The producers of the Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" confirmed Friday that they have decided to bring the space series to a close after the fourth season, which begins in 2008. "This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end," executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said in a statement released by the cable channel.

Ronald D. Moore, the executive producer who runs "Battlestar Galactica," is gearing up for the long goodbye by taking on a new task. He will take the director's chair for the first time next season as his dramatic reinvention of the hokey 1970s' space opera treks toward the end. The final 20-episode run will kick off in -- you read it here first -- early April.

It is difficult to overstate the zealous devotion of "Battlestar Galactica" fans, or their devastation, when it was announced that this, the fourth season, would be the show's last. Providing balm to their wounds, however, is the season premiere, a much-anticipated two-hour movie that looks back rather than forward, giving viewers a chance to wallow a bit in this finely constructed alternate universe of the 12 colonies and their deadly enemies, the Cylons.

So the end of "Battlestar Galactica" is finally here -- the Sci Fi Channel's (soon to be Syfy's) flagship show docks in the port of reruns and DVD lore. But there are a few questions left unanswered. Enter the show's creator, Ron Moore, who supplied some answers without giving any spoilers. Whose job was it to calculate the surviving humans? It was a three-way responsibility. There were people on physical production, people up in Vancouver.

Months before its final 10 episodes begin airing in January, we now know for certain that "Battlestar Galactica" will live on -- in the form of a two-hour special on the Sci Fi Channel to air in 2009 after the series concludes. The unnamed feature will be directed by the show's costar, Edward James Olmos, and written by "Battlestar" writer and former "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" brain Jane Espenson. The stand-alone will document the Cylons' attempts -- those of two agents in particular -- to grapple with human survivors, both those aboard ships and those left alive on planets, shortly after the Cylons' destruction of human worlds.