"Q: The prequel concept sounded so promising, but fans never embraced Enterprise the way they had the other shows. Assuming you agree with that statement, why didn’t Trek fans connect with Enterprise to the same degree they had the previous series?"

"Things were dictated by the times, by it being post-9/11, but I wanted us to hopefully get back to having a little bit more fun on the show and to get out of that whole Xindi thing. That would have been fun. I think we were pointing in that direction. I think the group was ready to go. The cast was ready to get there, and I think we could have had a blast. But we just didn’t get to go there. And I wanted Archer to kind of grow up and lighten up a little bit."

"Interviewer: If somehow the Star Trek writers were to tap out one more Janeway story, with an assist from you, what story would you want to see told? Would you want her back on a ship and in command? Maybe you’d like to see her now that she’s been home for a while…"

"Interviewer: You were always honest and open at the time about your displeasure with how Chakotay was utilized on the show. When you raised your concerns, did the powers that be listen?"

"Beltran: Chakotay was kind of a solitary character, at least from season four to seven. I think the first three seasons there were a lot of interesting storylines, and then I think a shift happened in the series after Jerri Taylor left. I think any time that a character has an interpersonal relationship that shows growth, and you could say that clearly about Chakotay and the captain. But after Seska left, it was only that relationship with the captain that had depth to it. Chakotay and Tuvok didn’t have much. Chakotay and Paris didn’t have much. Chakotay and the other characters, there wasn’t much of a relationship there. I always regretted that because there was a lot to explore."

"Jennifer Lien – Kes [Seasons 1–3]"

"Jeri Ryan – Seven of Nine [Seasons 4–7]"

"Ethan Phillips – Neelix"

"Robert Picardo – The Doctor"

"Garrett Wang – Ensign Harry Kim"

"Robert Duncan McNeill – Tom Paris"

"Roxann Dawson – Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres"

"Tim Russ – Tuvok"

"Robert Beltran – Commander Chakotay"

"Kate Mulgrew – Captain Kathryn Janeway"

"A new gate will open. A lost city will rise again."

"Battlestar Galactica went beyond the usual space opera tropes and did what good science fiction has done for generations, from Jules Verne to Star Trek — it took the issues of the day into outer space, stripping them of the controversy of the moment, and allowing us to look at issues from a different perspective. Battlestar Galactica begins with a catastrophic attack on the human race, organized as the Twelve Colonies of Kobol by the Cylons, a robotic civilization spawned by humanity and beaten back years before. Just as many of today’s conflicts are the products of mistakes made long ago, so is Battlestar Galactica’s."

"As a general rule of thumb, we should encounter an actual Cylon raid every third episode and in between encounters our people should constantly be studying and testing new ways of fighting their implacable enemy. It's important to note that while the Cylons were virtually invincible in the pilot, that there will be a more level playing field as the series goes on. This will be a result of the natural tendency in warfare for both sides to learn from their enemy, and develop new counter-measures for their opponents' strengths. As a general rule, Galactica's fighters are generally outmatched in combat with the Cylons, but the more we fight them, the more we learn, so that this week we have a temporary advantage and next week it's gone again. The on-going struggle will force both sides to constantly improve their technology and tactics to keep pace with their enemy."

"A useful way to think about this is to take any piece of equipment and strip out its ability to talk to another piece of equipment. If your cell phone did not have access to a computer network, how efficiently could it operate? Could it operate at all? How do you design a navigational system for a spacecraft if the various components cannot be networked together? How do you design a fighter that relies more on human brainpower to identify threats and make decisions than anything built into the cockpit? One of the most important concepts is that there is no "master computer" aboard Galactica or any other Colonial ship. In fact, our computers are very dumb in comparison to even the PC sitting on the average writer's desk. We should always endeavor to find ways of forcing human beings to do the hard work involved with operating and maintaining a spacecraft. Human brains need to crunch numbers, organize data, and come up with solutions to complex problems."

"The opening episodes to this season are as much a story rooted in political tales like the Vichy France or Vietnam," says Eick. "There are a lot of different sort of reference points for us that aren't necessarily current that inform our culture in profound ways. Battles from the second world war have been used for several of our more actiony episodes. I've always said from the beginning, it's a war show - that was always our initial touchstone. We watched the movie Black Hawk Down as a reference more than any science fiction film. Though I have to say between Black Hawk Down, Alien and Blade Runner, we should probably be cutting Ridley Scott a cheque after every episode."

"It's hardly fortunate that producers David Eick and Ron Moore found themselves developing the remake in the wake of September 11, but the story's broad premise - the human (read: American) military's struggles in the wake of a massive terrorist attack - suddenly gained resonance. In making the humans look, talk, shag, smoke and govern themselves so closely to how we do ourselves the show went way beyond sci-fi. Placing the action in space removed it sufficiently enough to hold a mirror to the one part of society that's normally off-limits: the way we fight right now. Giving the murderous Cylons human form - anybody could be one and probably is - meant the show could plough a chilling allegory on civil liberties crackdowns and western paranoia about sleeper cells. Painting them as religious fundamentalists who justified the genocide as a means of carrying out God's will in the face of human corruption forged a fierce parable on the war on terror that good taste would never allow so called "proper" drama to go near. "Our antagonists are not villainous necessarily," says Eick. "Yes they're out to kill us, but they've got an awfully sympathetic point of view in many respects. They're much more like the audience in terms of their being monotheistic. They're not moustache-twiddling villains and that's a strength of the show.""

"Military viewers will enjoy the series for the way it portrays fighting with futuristic technologies while maintaining a sense of authenticity in both the fighting and the atmospherics. The space battles are reminiscent of the great naval battles of the Pacific Theatre in World War II. The lives of the pilots and crew of Galactica are almost eerily like those aboard a modern amphibious ship."

"Under pressure, people exhibit both the best and worst of the human condition. There is the extraordinary courage of the Viper pilots going out to fight the Cylons every 33 minutes for days on end as the fleet executes a fighting withdrawal, going on despite pain and casualties. But there is also the cowardice of Gaius Baltar, a prominent scientist who repeatedly betrays his fellow humans to please his hallucinated Cylon lover. The president of the Twelve Colonies, Laura Roslin, a paragon of principled leadership, is forced to repeatedly compromise her principles in order to safeguard the human race. She must constantly choose the lesser of two evils for the sake of survival. Much as with many real political leaders, her constituents do not appreciate the magnitude of the challenges she has led them through or the difficulty of the choices she faces daily."

"Enterprise, fatally, was not a popular series, even though it lasted four seasons. Just as it was winding down came a much more robust SF response to the post-9/11 world in the form of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. Shedding the disco era look of the original series, this was a much grittier, murky series. The Cylons were not relentless robots, but genetically engineered and emotional humanoids with their own religion (monotheists vs the terran polytheists). The series addressed myriad topics raised by the Global War on Terror and the Iraq War: torture of suspected terrorists, profiling of terrorist-prone groups, curbs on democratic freedoms, enhanced executive powers for national security imperatives, and discrimination based on security fears. The season arc containing the Cylon occupation of the terran New Caprica colony was a parable of the Iraq War, involving common elements of Bush’s conflict: insurgency, foreign occupation/suppression, collaboration with occupiers, and even suicide bombers."

"Brendan Fehr - Michael Guerin"

"Adam Rodriguez - Jesse Ramirez"

"Emilie de Ravin - Tess Harding"

"Nick Wechsler - Kyle Valenti"

"William Sadler - Sheriff Jim Valenti"

"Colin Hanks - Alex Whitman"

"Majandra Delfino - Maria DeLuca"

"Katherine Heigl - Isabel Evans"

"Jason Behr - Max Evans"

"Shiri Appleby - Liz Parker"

"Quinn Mallory: What if you could travel to parallel worlds? The same year, the same Earth, only different dimensions. A world where the Russians rule America... or where your dreams of being superstar came true... or where San Francisco was a maximum-security prison. My friends and I found the gateway. Now the problem is... finding a way back home."

"Quinn Mallory: [season one monologue/opening] What if you could find brand new worlds right here on Earth? Where anything is possible. Same planet, different dimension. I've found the gateway."

"John Rhys-Davies - Prof. Maximillian Arturo (season 1-3)"

"Sabrina Lloyd - Wade Welles (season 1-3)"

"Kari Wührer - Capt. Maggie Beckett (season 3-5)"

"Jerry O'Connell - Quinn Mallory (season 1-4)"

"Cleavant Derricks - Rembrandt "Crying Man" Brown (all seasons)"

"Their attitude was ‘We’ve been off the air for so long no one is going to care, so let’s just say that Quinn got shot but he’s better now, and let’s pretend the other people never came through the gate with them.’ I know people find this hard to believe, but I argued with them over this for months and got the reputation for being a troublemaker or a loose cannon, because I wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer."

"Originally, Ryan was going to be in several episodes at the start of the second season, and I worked out with Jacob Epstein, who was also executive producer that year, the path that Ryan would take. We had in mind three or four shows to do with him. By the fourth show, something shocking was going to happen with him."

"They took the attitude of ‘Oh, we don’t want to get into politics, we don’t want to get into dark humor, we don’t want to get into cerebral stuff. We’ve got four characters, and they’re sliding from world to world, and if they land on the world where everyone’s a pirate, they can chase each other around with swords, so that’s going to be fun. That’s show Number One.’ That was kind of the attitude all year"

"They had us on a schedule and decided to put on a different show which promptly tanked. We're sensitive to where they put us on in the week [Friday nights]. If they put us back where we were [Tuesdays], we would have been fine. Creatively, though, we had a great third season mapped out, but we won't see it now."

"Once we all got in a room in June we just started talking about ‘Who is Max? What would happen in her world?’ I had this notion that Max would go into heat and that became Heat. We had this idea about Max not getting her medicine and ending up in jail, and that became Flushed. C.R.E.A.M. came about because we thought, ‘If we really are positing this relationship between Max and Logan, who is Logan? What makes him tick? Wouldn’t it be cool for Max to get a look at his world?’ That’s really how things unfold."

"Shannon Kenny — The Keeper/Claire Keeply"

"Eddie Jones — The Official/Charles Bowden"

"Vincent Ventresca — Darien Fawkes"

"Brandy Ledford — Agent Alex Monroe"