According to the Hollywood Reporter, Murphy has taken over as showrunner, but Espenson is staying on as an executive producer, alongside Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. THR notes that Murphy was originally hired back in October as a co-executive producer, to work on scripts in the second half of the show's first season. But now he's the head honcho. (Variety's story is a bit vaguer on the matter, for what it's worth.)

Update: Espenson tells io9:

I'm still at Caprica. Running the room was very intensive and took a lot of time away from actually writing this amazing ambitious show. I missed the writing more than I expected and this was my decision to concentrate on that as we put together the big end of season one. Kevin is extremely smart and talented and brings fresh eyes and fresh energy to the project — we're so lucky to have him!

So let's hope that's all there is to it. Syfy has continuously denied rumors that Caprica was having creative difficulties — if anything, the show was racing forward too fast, and any halt in the show's production was purely due to the upcoming Vancouver Olympics.

A month or so ago, Vancouver-based site CinemaSpy quoted Syfy's Mark Stern as telling a Vancouver press tour that the main reason for Caprica's delays was indeed problems with the show's scripts, and the Olympics were merely a complicating factor in a creative decision to take a break:

Trying to find [the] journey with these characters has been really interesting. I know for the writers - in terms of where you think you're going to go - turns out to be, not exactly where you ... there are things that have been pitched out ... this, episode 8, we're going to do this, and it's going to be a whole torture sequence on this other planet, and it's like 'no, actually that doesn't work in terms of where the stories have taken us'. And we actually took a break. We shut down for a few weeks so that we could, at the mid-point ... so that we could regroup and say, 'OK, what have we learned from the first ten; where do we want to go from here?'

If it wasn't for the Olympics, there wouldn't even be a discussion, but unfortunately, because of the Olympics, we've been really up against when we really have to be out of production. So what would normally be a very easy decision in terms of 'let's take a hiatus and take a break and write more scripts', became a very difficult and expensive proposition... but we did it anyway because it was worth it.

Variety quotes Murphy bursting with excitement to be coming on board Caprica:

As a rabid 'Battlestar Galactica' fan, it's hard not to go in that writers room and not just grin ridiculously. These are the people who made the best TV show ever. To be able to be a part of the legacy of that show, I'd be willing to pay them for that.

To be fair, the Desperate Housewives thing is the first thing people usually mention about Murphy in articles, but he also worked on Reaper. And he's co-creating a musical based on Heathers, which could be a good sign. Fingers crossed, anyway.

The Plan debuts on Blu-ray and DVD on October 27th.

CinemaSpy asked whether Caprica was on the brink of cancellation, citing a "100 percent accurate" source:

A trusted industry insider informed CinemaSpy on Saturday that production faces suspension on Caprica due to serious script problems/shortfalls, and that the future of the series may well be in jeopardy. From what we've been told, the producers haven't been altogether happy with the caliber of the stories.

This would make Caprica the second new show this year to face a shutdown allegedly over script concerns. Last week, Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello said the production shutdown at V was over script issues, and specifically over concerns about producer Jeff Bell (who'd been showrunner on Angel's final season.) Writes Ausiello:

Officially, Warner Bros. says it is taking "advantage of our November premiere to maximize creative opportunities and deliver the audience the best show possible." Unofficially, I hear the studio wasn't happy with the quality and the timeliness of the scripts show-runner Jeff Bell was delivering, so they bumped him to the No. 2 spot and put exec producer Scott Peters in charge. Too bad. I like Jeff Bell.

But this isn't the case with Caprica, insists showrunner Jane Espenson. She tells AirlockAlpha that any shutdown on the show's production is entirely due to athletes arriving for the 2010 Olympics and causing disruptions, not script problems:

I'm one of the producers and I'm absolutely thrilled with the work my writers have done... The Olympics might require a couple scheduling adjustments," Espenson said. "Those are probably being misunderstood.

Update: Syfy's Craig Engler draws our attention to his Tweet from the other day, in which he responded to a fan's question:

Q) Is Caprica on the verge of cancellation? A) Nope. Expecting ep 2 rough cut this week, premieres 1/22

Most of Warehouse 13's charm comes from two sources: the chemistry between the characters, and the more surprising and goofy artifacts located inside the Warehouse itself. Artifact-hunting agents Peter Lattimer and Myka Bering aren't quite Mulder and Scully or Booth and Bones, but the actors' ability to play off one another — and the dialogue by Buffy and Battlestar Galactica writer Jane Espenson — result in the sort of amiable sniping that's always fun to watch. And Saul Rubinek is a brain-addled force of nature as Artie Nielsen, a senior agent at the Warehouse who seems to have forgotten how to communicate with normal human beings, but his role has been much improved by the addition of Allison Scagliotti to the cast as Claudia, a young tinkering genius who has become both Artie's assistant and his verbal sparring partner.

The previous episodes have also introduced us to some of the gadgets and mystical thingamajiggers that populate the Warehouse, including a kettle that grants wishes (impossible wishes become ferrets; no one knows why), Pandora's Box (empty), and a magic mirror that lets you interact (and play ping pong) with your reflection. Yes, they tend a bit to the goofy side, but they give the series a sense that it doesn't take itself and is interested in having a bit of fun with its ideas.

However, this week's episode, "Burnout" suffers for pulling back on that sense of humor and focusing far too much on the mystery of the week. Warehouse's primary plots, in which Peter and Myka travel to a town being terrorized by an artifact, identify said artifact, and take it back to the Warehouse for safekeeping, has been the weakest part of the show, and "Burnout" is no exception. Peter and Myka discover a device called the Spine of Saracen, a Turkish machine that pulls electricity out of the wearer's body and causes them to electrocute anyone they touch until their body runs out of energy and they eventually die. And it's too predictable when the Spine becomes attached to Peter and Myka, Artie, and Claudia must determine a way to remove it without killing him.

"Burnout" is also a tad darker than previous episodes, pulling way back on the humor that's made the other episodes fun to watch despite their flaws. A running gag in previous episodes has been that Artie often forces Peter and Myka to ask victims of the artifacts a ludicrous series of diagnostic questions ("Do you smell fudge when no fudge is around?" "Do you have the sense that today is yesterday?"), a gag that could get old, but could also be easily built upon. But we get none of that here, nor are we treated to more of the Warehouse's fun and funky artifacts.

But even where "Burnout" falls flat, I have high hopes for this rough-around-the-edges show, provided it can move a bit beyond its artifact of the week format. I just hope that next week's episode brings us back to the land of shiny Warehouse toys and screwball dialogue.

So the BSG TV movie, "The Plan," is airing some time this fall, and it retraces the first two seasons of the show from the point of view of the Cylons. And, we've been hearing, the Machiavellian Brother Cavil will take center stage. So we asked Park if we'll come away from "The Plan" with a greater understanding of her character's sudden love affair with Cavil in BSG season four. She says yes:

Are we going to understand more about Cavil and Boomer's relationship? Yes, we are... It's kind of fun because it would get scripted one way, and then Eddie (James Olmos) would have us do something in the middle of it, and it would kind of change it, so it would either make it more intimate or creepier... It's not a normal relationship at all. And I don't think she understands it fully herself. What's really cool about is that because you have the seeds planted way back then, you realize... it makes way more sense later on why she's with him. She kind of inexplicably is drawn to him again, and they're a couple again.

And she says the TV movie explains a lot of stuff that we never really saw about Boomer, including how she got into the position she was in. Boomer never really knew that stuff, so we, the viewer, never knew either. At the time, she had come up with her own explanations, in her own head, for that stuff. But now she's learning that the official explanation is something different, and she's having to revise her own internal version of events.

She also says that it was really "quick and dirty" when Athena shot Boomer. She knew it was coming, and yet it was still shocking when she filmed it from both sides. "To me, that's really good storytelling."

We also talked to writer Jane Espenson about how this TV movie makes us see Cavil in a new way:

It's not until fairly late in the series that we start seeing Cavil as a pivotal villain among the Cylons. He turns out to be the one who erased the Final Fives' memories and left them on Caprica to live through the genocide, and he's the one who wants to enslave the Centurions and exterminate the humans. The sudden Cavil-centric villainy at the show's end feels a bit surprising. So will we discover in the TV movie just how important Cavil was all along?

Says Espenson:

This is going back and saying, "Okay, if Cavil is such a big villain, what was he doing during seasons one and two of Battlestar Galactica?"... He was up to something. He had found himself in this situation where they didn't think they needed a plan, because the plan was "Everybody dies." And now he's got to make it up as he goes along.

And we talked to director Edward James Olmos, who said William Adama isn't really in the TV movie that much. And he says it was "fantastic" to go back and relive the moments from the early years of the show, because he could paint with a fantastic pallette. "It took me eight months to edit it." And he says we'll realize how bad things really were, in those dark early years. And Olmos really believes that more BSG TV movies are inevitable — if we can sell half a million units of "The Plan." You'll do your part, right?

BSG and Caprica creators Ron Moore and David Eick, showrunner Jane Espenson, and actor Esai Morales, who plays Bill Adama's Tauron father Joseph, spoke at yesterday's Caprica/Battlestar Galactica panel about what we can expect from the show's first season.

If you were hoping the show would retain the topless nightclub shots from the DVD pilot, you're in for a bit of disappointment; the network demanded all nipple-y bits be digitally erased for the television premiere (officially announced today as January 22, 2010). But fans of Battlestar Galactica should still keep their eyes open for other visual goodies, says Eick:

The relationship between the two shows is very tangential, but there will be easter eggs for fans along the way. I think as fans of Battlestar watch Caprica there are occasional nods to Battlestar, to some knowledge that I think the fans will have.

For example, many fans noticed that the nightclub in the Caprica pilot suspiciously resembles the opera house shown throughout BSG:

Yes, as a matter of fact, we're going to some of the same sets. In fact, where Esai [Morales] and Trow have a conversation about what he has to do is the same place where we shot a lot of Helo and Sharon running for their lives in the first season.

At the same time, you won't see any of the twelve Cylon models we know and love, and we probably won't meet any other younger versions of our heroes, or their families, apart from young Willie Adama.

Although the look and feel of Caprica is a world away from the gritty Battlestar Galactica, the design team is the same, and Moore and Eick assure us that they'll maintain the same attention to detail, but to a different effect:

We wanted it to feel like it's a bit of a period piece, because it is a period piece for the Galactica. It's 58 years prior to Battlestar Galactica, so we wanted to have this feel like it's a different time within this particular universe. And yet we wanted to communicate different cultural identities, so we saw that the Taurons feel more like they're in the 1940s, with these hats, ties, and smoking clove cigarettes, the cars more vintage, and they sort of have that flavor throughout...it's a different style, an aesthetic different from seeing the contemporary Caprica during Battlestar.

And in the press roundtables after the panel, Moore told us that there was a deliberate decision to make Caprica look and feel as different from BSG as possible. That includes a lot more outdoor and street filming, as opposed to BSG's mainly interior shots. It's expensive and difficult to recreate Caprica in Vancouver on a regular basis, shooting one episode in seven days, but it's totally worth it, says Moore.

At the beginning of the panel, Moore listed Caprica's major theme as being mankind's relationship with advancing technology and the ethics of dealing with artificial intelligence. But as the panel went on, he, Eick, Espenson focused most of their discussion on the political and cultural conflicts between the humans. We'll apparently get to see more of the world-building around Colonial life that we glimpsed in the pilot. Says Moore:

At this point in time, the planets, the Colonies, are at war with each other periodically. It's not a time of war...the colonies themselves are a loose commonwealth, confederation. There is no president, no equivalent to Laura Roslin at this point in time. There's a prime minister of Caprica and there are heads of state on various other colonies.

There are tensions, reservations, biases. There's a certain racist thread that runs through some of the relationships in terms of Taurons and Capricans.

So does this mean we'll get to see what armed skirmishes look like between the individual Colonies? All signs point to yes. During the press roundtables after the panel, Moore told us that "the twelve colonies actually war with each other" during this time period. And instead of the Cylons being the main "other" that our heroes are threatened by, the humans treat each other as the exotic threat, because the Cylons don't really exist yet. Moore says science fiction can address thorny issues like racism, because people who would get offended by the discussion of such topics don't take the genre seriously enough to care.

Jane Espenson noted that this different situation for the colonies allows the writers and designers to differentiate between the different colonies through their dress, traditions, and — she said rather pointedly into the microphone — their tattoos, like the one on Sam Adama's neck.

The panel's moderator asked Esai Morales whether his character, Joseph Adama, has a tattoo as well:

I may not have done what my brother did, but I may have a tattoo here or there somewhere. But we can't give it all away here. We have to save some of it.

In the press roundtables, Espenson added that she's trying to go against real-world ethnic stereotypes in portraying the twelve colonies. The writers have a bible describing all twelve of these worlds, saying things like "This one is like India, except," followed by a big list of differences. Each of these twelve worlds could be its own TV series, and they're trying to make sure each planet has a varied climate and its own mix of cultures and classes, rather than having planets that are purely homogenous. One example of avoiding stereotypes is Sam Adama, Bill Adama's brother — he's a gangster, but he's self-educated and always speaks with perfect grammar. So he's a total thug, but without any of the usual cues that would make it easy for us to identify him as such.

It's a far cry from any normal star-studded event, but SDCC always brings us our own pantheon of SF gods and goddesses every year. For me personally, this includes a handful of stars (Michael C. Hall, David Tennant, Felicia Day) and Creators (Joss Whedon, Alan Ball, J.J. "You-Make-Life-Worth-Living" Abrams) and, above all, the unsung heroes behind-the-scenes like Julie Gardner and Jane Espenson.

The addition of Dr.Who and its naughty little spin-off Torchwood to the SDCC TV panel lineup has already been big news around here lately. While everyone is lining up to see the sexy stars of these two BBC series, I'm going to see the amazing Julie Gardner. Gardner is the executive producer of Who and Torchwood, and helped co-create the latter along with Russell T. Davies. While RTD is leaving the TARDIS for other adventures, Gardner will continue to executive produce the show and help Matt Smith fill David Tennant's Hi-Tops.

Jane Espenson has been a script editor, writer and producer behind Buffy, Dollhouse and Battlestar Galactica. She wrote the antebellum-themed Firefly episode "Shindig", and spends her free time working with Joss on the Buffy comics for Dark Horse. She's scripted the pilot episode to Warehouse 13 and will hopefully turn up on the W13 panel to promote the new show, and maybe to give us some hints as to what to expect from Caprica, which she'll be showrunning with Ronald D. Moore.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan airs this Fall on Syfy. [L.A. Times]

Of course, that bit of wisdom comes from the show's "villain," Alpha, who's arguably the most perfect product of the Dollhouse's mind-conditioning technology. Alpha used to be a Doll, just like Echo or Victor, but he had a "composite event," in which all of his different pre-programmed personalities blurred together and he went insane. Now he's fascinated with Echo, the only other Doll who seems to have transcended her programming. When Alpha bust out of the Dollhouse, killing a ton of people along the way, he left two people alive: Dr. Claire Saunders, whose face he scarred, and Echo, whom he left unharmed.

Since then, Alpha has been sending pictures and video of Echo (from before her mind-wiping) to former FBI agent Paul Ballard. And he apparently hired a guy to take Echo out on an engagement and then unexpectedly try to kill her, so she'd be forced to develop new reserves of self-awareness to survive. Then he hacked her cellphone and used to to "reboot" her brain while she was in the middle of a robbery, so she'd be exposed to unusual stresses while in her blank "Doll" state. Apparently, none of these moves had the desired effect, because in last night's episode, Alpha decided to take matters into his own hands.

Alpha killed Stephen Kepler the guy who pretty much designed the Dollhouse (using the most advanced eco-friendly self-sufficiency tech — not because the Dollhouse cares about the environment, but because it wants to be off the grid.) And he took the guy's place, manipulating Paul Ballard into taking him back inside the Dollhouse so he could grab Echo. Ballard, of course, has his own obsession with Echo — partly thanks to Alpha's mind games — and he's convinced he can rescue her from the Dollhouse, and then somehow use her to bring the Dollhouse down. (Wouldn't it have made more sense for Ballard, having located the Dollhouse, to leave and come back with an FBI squad? He could have gotten some vindication.)

So while Alpha is pretending to be the eco-freak Kepler, he spills some insights into what the Dollhouse is, and how it works. And it's not pretty — the Dollhouse is the future of the human race, according to Kepler, because it's so efficient. (Actually, at first, he claims that the human race won't even be around in 200 years, and the planet Earth can have a "humans day" to celebrate our existence by shaking our bones.) But then he says the ultra-efficient Dollhouse really is the future of humanity, because nothing is wasted. And of course, part of that efficiency is that humans are turned into interchangeable cogs instead of the messy, unpredictable individuals we are currently.

And that's the other theme that Dollhouse has been sneaking up on us with: if people are just software running on a particular bit of hardware, then you can swap them out. We saw that last week, with Echo being "loaded" with the mind of a rich dead woman who wanted the only kind of resurrection she could have. And this week, we saw Victor being loaded with the mind of Mr. Dominic, the former Dollhouse head of security who's been "sent to the Attic." (Apparently going to the Attic is serious enough that it's easier to load Dominic on Victor's body than to restore him to his own body. It also gave us the chance to see Enver Gjokag doing a spot-on Reed Diamond impression.) There are only two people for whom this seems not to be true: Alpha and Echo. No wonder Alpha is so obsessed with her.

And it looks like next week, we're going to get the final permutation in the weird brain-freaking maneuvers. Alpha's going to load Caroline's brain into some random woman's body, and then let Caroline meet Echo. Whoah.

The only part of the episode that didn't entirely make sense to me was why Alpha needed Paul Ballard's help to get inside the Dollhouse. Maybe it was a two-person operation: Alpha disables the security systems, while Paul goes and grabs Echo during the confusion. But it still seemed like a mega genius like Alpha could have figured out a way to do it without Paul's help. Maybe he just knew Paul was going to be invading the Dollhouse soon enough, so he figured he'd lend a hand.

Meanwhile, we got the confrontations we've been waiting for, between Ballard and Adelle, and especially Ballard and Boyd Langton. Paul and Boyd seem so similar that you'd think they have to wind up on the same side, and Boyd's been the main voice for the audience's doubts about the Dollhouse for a while now. Really, the only argument the Boyd had to offer in the face of all Paul's righteousness was that you can't simply take the Dolls out of the Dollhouse, because it's not that simple. Adelle, meanwhile, doesn't even make much of an effort to justify herself to Paul, although she does turn it around by accusing him of assaulting one of the Dollhouse's "residents." In the end, though, Boyd is shamed enough to try and hang on to his last sliver of morality. Adelle wants to erase Paul's brain, and Boyd insists that Paul hasn't "consented" to that. It's almost impossible to believe that Boyd still considers the Dollhouse's wholesale erasure of human beings to be consensual, especially after what happened to Dominic, but apparently that's the thin reed he's been clinging to all this time.

The other ethical justification for the Dollhouse, of course, is that it helps people — and we see that in full effect this time around. In another totally bizarre permutation of the Dollhouse's brain science, Echo gets sent to help Susan, an 11-year-old girl who's at risk of all sorts of stuff. She was put out on the streets at a young age and pimped out to whoever wanted her, and now she's a mess. So Topher gets the weird but brilliant idea of taking a brain scan of Susan and updating it to become a healthy adult brain, but with the same memories. And he puts that brain into Echo, then sends her to provide a positive role model. It's totally demented, but also kind of sweet. And of course, Topher's feeling of pride and moral awesomeness lasts exactly five minutes before he's asked to do something morally reprehensible and dehumanizing — who didn't see that coming?

Of course, Echo's way of providing hope to Susan relies on a metaphorical pretzel twist — she tells her the story of Briar Rose, a fairytale princess who gets put under a spell for 100 years, at the end of which a prince comes to rescue her. Susan points out, rightly, that the prince showed up when the spell was about to end anyway, and then takes credit for everything. But Echo says Susan should think of the prince as another aspect of the princess — someone the princess created to rescue herself. Except, of course, that you can't quite negate the existence of another person quite so easily. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. Of course, we're supposed to read that fairytale re-engineering as meaning that Echo somehow drew Paul Ballard there to rescue her, which is a somewhat selective reading of the facts.

All in all, this was another pretty great episode. I had a few minor issues, like the fact that Alan Tudyk overdid the wackiness just a tad when he was playing Alpha-as-Kepler. But it sort of underscored that Alpha and Topher have a lot in common, since Alpha's "nerd" mannerisms were very Topher-esque. More than ever, I'm left wishing that Fox had led Joss Whedon use his original pilot, which set up the show as a tense, twisty thriller about Paul Ballard trying to uncover the truth about the Dollhouse and what it means for the future of the human race. That's what the show has turned into by now, but I suspect a lot of people would have liked it better if it'd been that way from the start. As it is, last night's episode got the worst ratings yet — which means that even if the Dollhouse is our future, its own future isn't so assured.

Also, here's a new clip from Friday's episode, "Blood On The Scales." It looks like Roslin makes it to the Cylon Baseship, but her problems aren't over. Here's our new Q&A with Jane Espenson, including minor spoilers:

After Friday's BSG episode, I couldn't help thinking about "The Face Of The Enemy." Gaeta's actions make so much more sense after having watched those webisodes. But I know you made the webisodes after season 4.5 was already in the can. What made you and Ronald D. Moore decide we needed more build-up to the Gaeta mutiny?

It's true that "Face of the Enemy" didn't shoot until the end of the series, but we had started work on it many months before that. When Seamus Kevin Fahey and I started thinking, with the rest of the staff, about stories for the 'sodes, we originally wanted to make sure the story wouldn't affect the main body of the show. In fact, we weren't even going to use any characters as prominent as Gaeta, in order to keep things really separate. But Ron pointed out that Gaeta's motivations, although already supported, could benefit from an extra push. That was really when the 'sodes caught fire, got exciting, because suddenly they had a real reason to exist. We threw out what we'd been working on and started working on a new story. A lot of the rest of the elements were dictated by circumstance — we knew we would have limited sets, cast, and time, so the "lifeboat"-type story seemed like a natural way to keep things contained.

Was the Gaeta-Hoshi relationship in anyone's mind during the making of season four? I could have sworn I noticed a couple of little moments between those two in Friday's episode.

I agree, I saw moments between them.

I totally loved your recent Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic. Best Harmony storyline ever — even better than the Angel pyramid-scheme episode. What's next with Harmony — will she be living in a house with Ron Jeremy?

Thank you! Glad you liked it! And I could certainly see Harmony wanting to appear on other reality series, as long as she isn't required to tan on camera, which eliminates a lot of them.

Seriously, does anybody still think Andy Dick is a celebrity?

Even a small fame-flame keeps you warmer than none at all.

Is there any chance you could just do a funny horror/science fiction comic every month? In your spare time? It seems like all your writing projects lately are more serious.

Spare time is starting to seem like something I imagined once. But when you see my episode of Dollhouse, I think you'll see that there's still some funny going on. And — you heard it here first — Caprica is absolutely going to have moments that will benefit from a very light touch.

Congrats on becoming the showrunner at Caprica. Do you get a lot of input in crafting the first-season character arcs in Caprica, as the showrunner? How much of that stuff was already in place when you came on board?

I'm pleased to say that I will have a lot of input in crafting season one of Caprica. Ron is still the ultimate king of us, and I hope that doesn't change, but I will be getting a lot of my ideas in there. We also have an amazing staff — Michael Taylor, John Zinman and Patrick Massett, Kath Lingenfelter, Matt Roberts and Ryan Mottesheard — and they will be contributing mightily.

The thing that intrigues me most about Caprica, from what I've read so far, is the idea that these super-powerful robots, the Cylons, actually come out of human grief. Does this give you the chance to look at the Cylons in a whole new light?

Oh, yes, of course. Caprica is going to shed light on the Cylons, of course, but also on the history and culture and beliefs and prejudices and lives of the human colonists. This is great rich material. All that, plus strong characters and at least ten flavors of conflict — it's the coolest thing ever.

The Sci Fi Channel and Ronald D. Moore have both talked about the hope that Caprica will reach more female viewers. Do you feel a lot of pressure to make it more female-friendly? Or, conversely, does that open up opportunities to do different types of stories?

Huh. I like this question. It has never occurred to me that I would write different types of stories to attract women viewers. Maybe there is some truth to the idea that war stories traditionally held less appeal for women since it wasn't a real-life arena in which women were well-represented, but even that has to be changing, don't you think? Isn't a good story pretty universal? At any rate, the stories on Caprica are simply going to kick ass and I certainly expect some of that ass to be female.

You helped to co-create the new show Warehouse 13. What's your involvement at this point?

I'm not currently involved, but I can't wait to see what they do with the concept and I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for a really long and successful run.

Although Galactica showrunner and executive producer Ronald D. Moore will be running the writers' room for the beginning of Caprica's first season, the Chicago Tribune is reporting that Espenson will take over "at some point" during the season. Moore was effusive with praise for Buffy, Galactica and Dollhouse veteran Espenson:

She’s a great writer, and in the last season of ‘Galactica,’ I started handing over more and more responsibility to Jane on the production side and in post[-production]... [Upcoming Galactica TV movie] ‘The Plan’ was something that she wrote and executive-produced and saw all the way through. She was the showrunner on ‘The Plan,’ in essence. She did a great job and she stepped up and I have a tremendous amount of faith in her.

The Tribune also revealed that shooting on the series begins in July, and Moore hopes to have "a bunch of scripts" for the series finished ahead of that date. Espenson reveals that Galactica's Michael Taylor and Ryan Mottesheard will be joining the Caprica writing staff, and repeats Galactica Sitrep's reporting that Caprica will share a composer, production designer and special effects supervisor with Galactica.

Caprica is scheduled to begin on SciFi Channel in 2010.

'Battlestar Galactica' veterans move on to 'Caprica [Chicago Tribune]

Talking to SciFi Wire about the second spin-off movie from the hit show - following last year's Razor - Espenson said,

The events of The Plan are the events that you've seen ... in the show, from the miniseries to almost the end of season two, [so] it's that chunk of time, but sort of seen with the Cylon perspective. So you're going to see a lot of stuff that was going on that you weren't aware of at the time: on Caprica, in the fleet... A lot of loose ends are tied up, a lot of questions are asked that you don't even know you have.

Questions are asked that we don't even know we have? Not answered? She continues to be coy about the movie's perspective with this weird tease:

If you had a copy now, you might feel that you could go ahead and watch it, because it's about stuff that already happened... But don't do it. Of course, you don't have a copy now, because there isn't even a cut yet. ... But it's very much designed to be watched after the run of the series, because it definitely relies on stuff you don't learn until much later.

So it doesn't spoil any of the upcoming final episodes to the series proper, but it's meant to be watched afterwards because it relies on things that we don't know...? I'm confused. Maybe you could come up with something that isn't so ambiguous to sell us on the movie, Jane?

[We] made a ton of [script] changes in the preproduction phase and ended up with a really tight script that we filmed sort of as they were demolishing the sets out from under us. And [we] ended up with something that I think is so much better than our highest hopes had been for what this movie could be. It really sort of caps off the show.

That's exactly what I was looking for! The Plan is expected to be broadcast in the second half of 2009.

Battlestar: The Plan Secrets Teased! [SciFi Wire]

Talking to Sci-Fi Wire, Espenson - a veteran of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica - downplayed rumors of a troubled birth for the Eliza Dushku-mindwipe drama:

We are now rolling along glitch-free... I think people are very confident now that everyone is on the same page with what the show is, how amazing it can be, and I think that a lot of this has been overblown. I mean, very, very often on Buffy we were sort of, 'Oh, we don't quite have that script ready.' That's sort of just how TV goes. It's just when it happens at the beginning like this that it gets a lot of attention, and I think that people were concerned that the Firefly scenario would play out again. But, you know, I think that we're very confident of what the show is, and yeah, it's moving along so smoothly now.

So smoothly that the show may just breakthrough the Whedon faithful to find a new audience, apparently:

"I think it could very well appeal to not just Whedonites, but a much broader audience. I think it's extremely good, and the concept just blows me away: It's fantastic, this notion of people who have been erased and are now imprintable with whatever you want them to be. ... It's sci-fi of the most human kind. It's sci-fi about people, as opposed to, you know, phenomena. And I really love that.

Dollhouse premieres February 13th on Fox.

Espenson: Dollhouse Is Just Fine [Sci-Fi Wire]

In Warehouse 13, two Secret Service agents, Pete (Eddie McClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly) save the life of the President. As a reward, they're sent to the mysterious Warehouse 13 in South Dakota, where every weird artifact or supernatural item the U.S. government has ever collected is kept. The Warehouse's caretake, Artie (Saul Rubinek) sends Pete and Myka out to collect more weird items, and they also have to help keep the Warehouse under control. (The inevitable X-Files comparisons have already been made.)

Actually, it sounds sort of Eureka-esque. Firefly/Battlestar scribe Jane Espenson co-wrote the pilot, which is always a good sign.

According to Sci Fi Wire, the show has hired two new executive producers, Jack Kenny (Book Of Daniel) and David Simkins (Blade, Dresden Files). It doesn't sound as though Espenson, who just joined the staff of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, will stay involved, but you never know. Other new producers include Drew Greenberg (Buffy, Dexter, Smallville, Star Wars: Clone Wars), Dana Baratta (Runaway) and Jericho's Matt Federman and Scaia. And the show has hired some staff writers with a background in comics and animation, including Ben Raab, Bob Goodman and Deric Hughes.

Warehouse 13 will premiere in July 2009. As for Caprica? It's anybody's guess. [Sci Fi Wire]

The two main characters are "wild card" Peter (Eddie McClintock) and uptight Myka (Joanne Kelly). I'm guessing these two are in for some sexy head butting arguments, followed like clockwork by shipper-friendly sexual tension.

The series was originally requested as a two-hour pilot, penned by Farscape writer Rockne O'Bannon, Battlestar Galactica producer Jane Espenson and D. Brent Mote. We love Espenson and firmly back any new ideas that come from her mind. Not to mention being glad that O'Bannon is back on Sci Fi where he belongs. We only hope those mysterious objects being warehoused include some alien artifacts.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

Says Douglas:

We're doing a movie that spans season one and two. It's a story about Cavil and Tyrol and Anders. It's going to be like Razor. It's going to air on TV and then go straight to DVD. It's not a feature film, it's basically an extended episode. We start filming that in September, and we'll finish in September.

This is my cue to go into some pointless speculation. The phrase "spans seasons one and two" could mean the TV movie covers the entirety of those two seasons, or it could mean the movie covers the end of season one and the beginning of season two. Either way, these are three characters who had never met each other during this time frame, unless my memory is worse than usual.

Tyrol, of course, gets trapped on Kobol with Baltar, Cally and some other people at the end of season one and gets rescued a few episodes into season two. Did Tyrol have some kind of encounter on Kobol that we don't know about? (Could it have something to do with Crashdown, who's still one of my top picks for the final Cylon, and who was on Kobol as well?) Meanwhile, Anders doesn't meet Starbuck until season two, episode four — the same episode where Tyrol finally gets back to Galactica.

And we don't meet Brother Cavil for the first time until the very end of season two, right? I'd have to rewatch "Lay Down Your Burdens" to be sure, but I'm pretty sure that's the first meeting between Tyrol and Cavil.

[RGB Filter]

The final episodes of BSG season four are currently scheduled to be 11 hours, of which three will be the series finale. But Ron Moore is currently editing the finale together, and may end up with way more material than he can fit into three hours. So it may have to be four hours, if the Sci Fi Channel agrees. No matter how long it winds up being on TV, the finale will be longer on the eventual DVD, Moore promises. The "back half" of the season will definitely start airing in January.

As for Caprica, the Sci Fi Channel will decide in January whether to turn the TV movie pilot into an ongoing series. If Sci Fi decides to keep it as a standalone TV movie, it could air this fall. But if the channel decides it wants a Caprica series, exploring the origins of the Cylons, then the first 13-episode season would air sometime in 2009. Caprica is set exactly 51 years before the events of BSG. During this era, the 12 Colonies still aren't united under one government. We won't be meeting the ancestors of Felix Gaeta or many other BSG characters as a result.

Caprica is written as a pilot rather than as a stand-alone movie, so if Sci Fi decides not to make it a series, you'll be left with a lot of unsatisfying questions and unresolved issues after watching it. And here are some new stills, showing Paula Malcomson and Eric Stoltz as the Graystones, the family that develops the Cylons. And Sister Clarice Willow, who runs the school where the Graystone and Adama daughters attend, until they're blown up.

The BSG TV movie takes place at some point during the show's earlier seasons, and it assumes you'll have all the knowledge about the final Cylon and any other revelations during the final episodes. Moore sort of hinted that it could be retelling some past episodes from the Cylon point of view, which could be kind of fun. Also, the production team is still hoping to make ten BSG webisodes, which would be cowritten by Jane Espenson and Seamus Kevin Fahey, but no contracts are signed yet. [Chicago Tribune]

Here are the crucial ingredients of nerd escapism — if they are ever gathered in one place, the world will IMPLODE:

1) I am the world's smarterest and clevererest. I can instinctively do base-108 fractal calculations in my head — in my sleep — and I know insane amounts about every subject. Like Roger Moore's James Bond, without the wattles. I don't have a piddling badge for mathematical excellence, I have a full-body cybernetic tattoo of scientific AWESOMEness.

2) There are mean girls, who harass me for being so clever, but then they get devolved into lemurs. Yes, like Captain Picard. Oh noes! It's up to me to find a way to restore them to normal, which I do... eventually.

3) I have a supercomputer, which runs on beer. Or wait, better yet, it's a bong, with special computon-laced leaves in it, and it also produces awesome "smart vapors." Supercomputer bong FTW! Oh, and I get eye-glowy levitatey superpowers when I masturbate.

4) The world gets totally screwed and roasted — sorry, world. It's necessary for kazillions of people to die in sentient mudslides (caused by an evil alliance between the Federal Reserve (which dabbled in the forbidden science of particle economics to try and create a more awesome M0) and scaly dung aliens) for everybody to recognize suddenly how special I am — for after the crisis, when the survivors are sporting rags and living in skyboxes, I will be the scrappy genius who keeps the last precious remnants of technology going. With the help of my supercomputer bong.

5) But — and here's where it gets good — those evil scaly aliens come back and kill almost everybody who's left. And it turns out I'm the only one who can stop them, because I'm secretly 2/3 alien on my mom's side. (Yes, my mom had three parents, and one of them was human.) So I have to go into space and become the world's greatest space pilot/engineer/pirate/ninja/cyborg, learning secret techniques with Marcy, my cute lemur "popular girl" sidekick, tagging along. (Okay, I never got around to curing them of being lemurs. What do you want?) I finally stop the whole alien armada by debating with their cyber-necro version of Alexander Hamilton until he explodes. But then instead of going back to Earth, I journey off to the stars, Marcy at my side, to find adventure and learn whether it's really true that I'm actually the heir to the throne of Builder City, a huge dyson sphere built around a whole star system where everything awesome in the galaxy is built.

Oh, so you don't like my nerd-power-trip-escapist fantasy? Well, screw you. I'm not going to save you from cyber-Alexander Hamilton and his money-supply adjusting sludge then.

Actually, because it's just barely possible that other people might have their own ideas, I asked a few people who were smarter than I am to contribute their own versions. I wrote to some cool people and asked, "What would the ultimate nerd escapist power-fantasy movie look like?" And here's what they said:

Jane Espenson, writer, Buffy/Firefly/Battlestar Galactica:

Hmm... Nerd wish-fulfillment *movie* — so it's not real, huh? I can't wish myself into being that groovy Romulan Commander who glommed onto Spock that one time? Hmm.

Well, I think Revenge of the Nerds already did a very good job with this. It wasn't about turning into a non-nerd, it was about celebrating the things nerds do well. So, something like that. Maybe another sequel, updated to address contemporary themes: Revenge of the Nerds Finds Ice on Mars or Revenge of the Nerds — Taking the White House? Actually, wait— nerds already dominate science and public policy. What everyone really wants is love. We need a nerd-meets-girl romance in which the nerd wins *because* he's smarter, more genuine and sweeter. The ultimate nerdy power fantasy is When Nerd Met Sally. Final answer.

Gerard Jones, author, Men Of Tomorrow and Killing Monsters, plus a zillion awesome comics:

For me the ultimate power would be to be able to emit a tachyonic web that could slip through the time barrier, capture precious objects from throughout the time stream, and bring them back to our era. Just imagine how we might enrich our culture and our knowledge of the past. Personally, I'd use it to pick up some the early Tarzan comics I don't have from when Jesse Marsh's art was still good. Especially the ones with the Lex Barker photocovers that go for, like, 30 bucks on eBay.

David Campbell, formerly of Daveslongbox and now of Live From ABC:

The ultimate nerd wish fullfilment movie? The Last Starfighter... but with tits. Instead of Robert Preston's ancient carcass, drop a Hot Alien Chick in there and you've upgraded to serious nerdvana.

Chris Sims with Chris' Invincible Super Blog:

In the Grim And Distant Future™ (because, you know, Bright and Cheery Futures rarely allow for antisocial malcontents to rise to power), humanity has evolved in terrifying ways! The human body is no longer as we know it, instead giving way to men whose forearms and thighs make up 90% of their body mass, trotting along on tiny feet that are often obscured by clouds of dust and pulling ammunition for their comically large handguns out of one of the many, many pouches that adorn their clothing. Women have it even worse, with faces that are unable to express any emotion other than seething lust, spines that feature right angles, and hair that moves of its own free will in defiance to any wind or gravity. The upshot of all this is that the works of comic book "artist" Rob Liefeld will be hailed as visionary works of genius that were unappreciated in his own time, and will be as sought after as the works of Picasso or Rembrandt today, a situation that gives rise to the ultimate—and most unlikely—nerd empowerment fantasy: That box of X-Force #1s you've got in the basement? It's actually going to be worth something.