(S01E03) Now begins the reign of mistrust. With the characters generally established, as well as their relationships to one another, it's time for the show to start sowing the seeds of conflict, and they get right down to it. The first thing they do is establish the Adams Adamas as even more brutish than I anticipated. The hats, coats and the whole 1950s gangster look should have been a tip-off, it appears.

Add to that the difficulties the Graystone's are dealing with now that Amanda has blurted out to all the twelve colonies that their daughter Zoe was a terrorist, and responsible for the train bombing that killed her, her boyfriend Ben and Joseph Adama's wife and daughter, among many other people. The unfair thing to Zoe is that while we know better, how can anything different be proven?

Get ready for many, many Friday nights of having to find something better to do than sit in front of television to watch Battlestar Galactica. You could always dig into your past-season DVDs to reminisce on what's happened before ("and will happen again?") or simply watch BSG online. There's also the unimaginable: spending time with friends and loved ones, stepping out of the house or, gods forbid, getting some extra sleep.

While we all think of what to do with that extra hour we have every week, let's go over a few things going on since last week's mid-season finale.

It took a bit for Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore to get back into his podcasts for this season's episodes, so it took me some time to catch up myself.

As I've done in the past, I'll just summarize some of what I thought were the more interesting parts of the podcasts. If you're interested in learning more about Moore's insights and details about each episode, you really should take the time to listen to the podcasts yourself. Now if only someone could sync up these podcasts with the Hulu videos, that would be awesome.

Here are the highlights ...

Things are looking good for Ronald D. Moore as Battlestar Galactica wraps up its run on SciFi. Brad already posted about the new show for Fox, Virtuality. Now comes word that the former Star Trek scribe has a new deal with United Artists. It seems Tom Cruise has tasked Moore with creating an original sci-fi trilogy. Feel free to insert your own Scientology joke here.

Details of the trilogy are, quite obviously, scarce at this point. That being said, if you want to go out and make a big budget sci-fi epic, having Tom Cruise on board is a great first step. It means this thing has a solid chance of actually coming to fruition. And while I'm not the biggest Tom Cruise fan, I'm on board to give anything Moore pens a shot.

[ Reuters via Yahoo ]

Like many people, I was a little skeptical when I heard that someone was re-imagining Battlestar Galactica way back when. It seemed like an idea that could blow up in so many ways. We know now that Ronald D. Moore and his team pulled it off in a big way, but the reason I tuned in that first time was because I heard that if you looked really closely, in a certain scene, you would see Serenity fly across the screen.

I'm off on a bit of a tangent there, but not completely. The two universes meet again in the world of pen-and-paper RPGs. Margaret Weis Productions, the people behind the Serenity RPG, are now at work on a Battlestar Galactica game based on the same system. Plans call for a quickstart guide in early 2007 with the full game being released in the spring. The MWP site is under construction, but you can read the whole press release at OgreCave.