So, now we probably know why new episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" aren't coming back until October. Speculation was that NBC-Universal, the parent company of the SciFi Channel, was moving the premiere of the series' third season out of its planned July start as part of a plan to pull the series from cable and put it on the fall schedule of its flagship NBC broadcast network.

No, nothing as cockamamie as that. Even from television executives, to whom the cockamamie is their stock-in-trade. The series producers and the SciFi Channel have greenlit a new BSG spin-off to be called "Caprica."

Amazingly, they were able to do so in virtually total secrecy with no word of it leaking to the Internet prior to the official announcement.

So what seems to be happening is that SciFi Channel plans to hold the start of "Battlestar" to coincide with the premiere of "Caprica," and in so doing launch a second night of original programming on its schedule.

And a new science fiction franchise is born.

For at least as long ago as Paramount's debut of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and later several more Trek spin-offs, it's become apparent that a really good scifi series can build a universe and a mythology that's larger than any one individual show or set of characters.

Fans are so drawn to such a well-developed concept or deeply imagined universe that they hunger for more stories to be told within it. Studios and networks launch spin-off series with new characters set within the same general continuity, creating a "franchise" that is more than a single property.

In some sense, what Paramount did with Trek, or what the SciFi Channel is about to do with "Battlestar," is just commercialize a phenomenon common to fan fiction for decades.

Virtually the moment the original "Star Trek" went off the 1969, fans have written their own adventures that start with the mythology of Starfleet and the Klingons and so forth and then create their own crews and own ships to adventure forth and populate it.

Maintaining and building such a franchise on commercial television, though, is a fairly demanding proposition. Ask anyone who watched as the once-thriving Trek franchise that once boasted multiple series on the air simultaneously was ultimately brought low with falling ratings and, ultimately, cancellation.

A third great TV science fiction franchise, Stargate finds itself at something of a crossroads.

Itself a spin-off of a Kurt Russell movie, "Stargate SG-1" has grown over the years to verge on becoming the longest-running scifi series in history and gave birth to progeny of its own with the addition of "Stargate Atlantis." Watched by more than 10 million people in more than 100 countries, "Stargate SG-1," the anchor of its franchise faces a somewhat uncertain future.

At the end of the series' eighth season, producers seriously considered ending the show and re-starting it as a new series to be called "Stargate Command," particularly since former series lead Richard Dean Anderson was out and new faces like Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Beau Bridges and Lexa Doig had come aboard.

In the end, they opted to make all the changes and leave it as the ninth season of "Stargate SG-1."

"Sadly, it could have gone on longer had we rebranded it," executive producer Brad Wright said. "One of the problems of SG-1 going into its tenth season, and potentially further on into its eleventh, is that when a show has been on for a very long time ... there's a lot of money that is spent that stops going on screen."

In another interview, Wright said, "A lot of television franchises go off the rails because there's a turnover of the creative people behind the show." Yet making a television program -- let alone an entire franchise of multiple series -- is hard, demanding work and over time, it takes it's toll.

And there are signs of fatigue on the Stargate set.

"If there really is [to be] a Season Fourteen, I hope that whoever is making it is having a good time!" Wright said. "It probably won't be me. I'm hopefully still making something called 'Stargate.' Maybe it's a movie."

A new Stargate film probably would be easier on the producers to make and in some ways, it could be really neat.

But what's made "Stargate" so successful is precisely the qualities that makes a great franchise, the sort of week-to-week story continuity and character development that is possible only on television.

No one wants to watch Stargate repeat the kind of slide into creative oblivion that marked Star Trek's end, so better to end on a high note.

But if Brad Wright and his team can find a way to keep it strong, it would be wonderful to keep "Stargate Atlantis" from becoming an orphan and to keep Stargate a true television franchise.

A former entertainment journalist, Scott Nance is a member of the USS Chesapeake, an independent science-fiction and Star Trek club in the Washington, DC, area. He is a columnist for Airlock Alpha, and can be reached at scottnance@airlockalpha.com.