Tuesday, March 10, 2009

My Own Battlestar Galactica Series Finale Script (teaser)

So, I'm a writer and one of the things I used to do when I still lived in Los Angeles, was write spec(ulative) scripts in hopes of selling one someplace in Hollywood. I got so good and so fast at writing these things that I could bang out a first draft in a week.

Something else I got good at over the years was writing scripts for TV and the movies. I'm really good at fixing damaged stories and (I think I) can come up with some really neat ideas inside of pre-existing universes. So, as I've been watching Battlestar Galactica (a show I loved deeply, at one point) get more and more messy, I started thinking about how it would end. It didn't take me long to decide that I probably wouldn't like the ending if things continued on the way it was going. TheWife and I started joking about how we'd just decided that the series really ended at the halfway point of the fourth season (for reasons obvious to anyone who watches the show).

But then it hit me, why allow myself to be disappointed? Why not just write my own spec series finale for one of my favorite shows ever? A few years ago I did the same thing after seeing Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, so I figure, why not do it again?

Last night, after coming up with my own ideas for how the series should end, I began writing. In series TV, if memory serves, the general structure is a teaser and then five acts with a commercial break in between with the entire project working out to about 43-53 pages, depending on the level of action in the script. Below is a link to the teaser I wrote last night.

http://drop.io/thepetecom/asset/bsg-the-big-end-pdf

Here, is a a Scribd embed of it from drop.io:



It's just a 7-page teaser (a little long as teasers go) for now, but I'll be posting each successive act as I write it. These are all first drafts with very little (if any) proofreading. So, expect mistakes and typos and words that maybe aren't even used on BSG (why can't they just call it the bridge??).

Obviously, the characters and setting are copyright Universal Studios and no one's ever going to buy this off of me, so I thought, why not just post it? No point in writing something if I'm going to be the only person to read it. So, there ya go, I'm not claiming ownership of anything but the story structure and elements. And it's all so integrated into the BSG universe there's no way anyone could steal it and there's no way I could use it again for anything.

PLEASE NOTE: this is not me trying to predict anything. I'm not trying to one-up Ron Moore or any of the other folks involved with writing the scripts on Battlestar Galactica. I'm just interested in telling a cool story that I would have liked to have seen shot.

Orignal From: My Own Battlestar Galactica Series Finale Script (teaser)

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