The first two episodes of the long awaited “prequel,” ‘Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome,’ made its official debut on November 9 on the Machinima Prime YouTube channel and to help promote the web series, producer David Eick and British actor Luke Pasqualino (who plays William Adama) were on hand to talk to reporters about the show.

ScienceFiction.com was present to ask a few questions but what surprised us the most was the fact that ‘Blood and Chrome’ was always supposed to be a web series and not a pilot for a series to be shown on the Syfy channel as was thought. As producer/creator Eick explained:

“(Blood and Chrome) was originally developed as an online project… there’s a certain record to set straight which was a little frustrating for me a few months ago when I saw the headlines that the ‘Blood and Chrome’ project was somehow been rejected or was a failed pilot or wasn’t gonna make it on the air and all those kinds of things. It was never intended to be a traditional pilot, so to speak, such that Syfy not picking it up in a traditional manner to an episodic series was some kind of rejection or failure. It was always developed, at least from my point of view, as a project for an online environment and it was something we would develop and structurally, narratively build as a 10 part serial. Kind of like the ‘Raiders of the Ark’ style adapted the 1930’s style movie serials where you have 10 minutes of story and a cliffhanger followed by 10 minutes of story and a cliffhanger and after 10 of these episodes it would resolve itself and react structure as a whole movie. So when I set out to develop this, my thinking was to design a mission, sort of speak, of course once the characters and the overall ideas were approved by the network, a mission that could be, as missions are often are in the military sense, divided into 10 smaller missions. And that’s really what we wound up with and what the audience is going to see.”

So where did the confusion come in?

“I think what the confusion came in is that for a moment the network after seeing the script said, “Gee, we don’t want to rule out the possibility of just advocating the online venture altogether” and throwing this up as a pilot for a traditional series for Syfy. There were discussions about that but for a variety of reasons, I think not the least of which was because there was a genuine feeling that we had really designed something altogether groundbreaking from a visual effects standpoint, (they decided to) stick with the original plan.”

In the end, ‘Battlestar Galatica: Blood and Chrome’ is currently being shown the way it was meant to be seen – as an online series. Although the thought of bringing it in as a television series sounds like it was an idea thrown as a possibility, Eick is happy with Syfy’s decision to keep the series as he envisioned it. “It was never any kind of rejection or failure that this didn’t wind up as another Syfy pilot,” he says. “This was always designed to be something much more unique and special and I’m thrilled that it’s finally reached its distribution and it’s going to be seen by the people as was intended for.”

If you haven’t had a chance to see the first two episodes of ‘Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome,’ you can catch them below! And check back here for more of our conference call with Eick and Pasqualino!

‘Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome’ – Episode 1:

‘Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome’ – Episode 2: