The LA Times has finally broken the date every Galactica fan has been waiting for. And waiting is the appropriate word as the Emmy-award winning series will, it can now be revealed return in April of next year. This means that fans left clamoring for answers after the cliffhanger filled conclusion of the third season will, by the time the fourth season airs have been doing so for just over a year.

To make matters worse, speculation continues that the SciFi Channel are considering splitting the final season across another full year and airing the final twelve episodes in 2009, following comments made by both Jamie Bamber and Aaron Douglas at this year's DragonCon and later confirmed by Moore himself. When asked about it by the LA Times, he replied “I’d probably prefer to see the entire thing air next year to maintain the momentum, to build excitement as it pushes to the end,” Moore said, “not to mention it means less chance of spoilers getting out.

Should the split happen, it may be down more to the imminent Writers' Guild strike than the SciFi Channel getting as much as they can out of the series and audience. With staff members unable to work and a finite amount of episodes in hand, the series may be forced to go on hiatus until the strike is resolved.

However, there is some good news in amongst all this. Moore, who is also currently writing both the sequel to I, Robot and a new version of The Thing, will make his directorial debut in this final season. He refused to be drawn on the exact nature of the episode, only admitting that it was set both on Galactica and deep in the 'Cylon world' and that things on the Battlestar were 'really starting to fall apart' by this stage in the story. Whether the episode is a return to the deeply unsettling Downloaded from season 2, a story told entirely from the point of view of a 6 and an 8 Cylon remains to be seen.

In the mean time, story-starved fans can look forward to Razor, premiering on the SciFi Channel on the 24th November. The story of the Battlestar Pegasus' flight from the 12 Colonies, it's released on DVD, in an extended unrated edition on December 1st.