According to SciFi Wire, English actor James Callis, who portrayed Battlestar Galactica‘s Gaius Baltar, is joining the cast of FlashForward to play a major role in several episodes towards the end of the season.

There’s also more on the departure of former showrunner, David Goyer, and news of a FlashForward clip show. All this, below the break.

FlashForward co-showrunner Jessika Borsiczky on Callis’ arrival:

“When I watched Battlestar, every time he wasn’t in a scene I couldn’t wait for him to come back,” said Borsiczky. “And I really wanted to have an opportunity to work with him. Honestly, since the show was ordered, we’ve been excited to work with him. And I so just cast him in our show. He’s playing a big role in some of the final episodes this season, and it was for that very reason.”

On his character’s role:

“I don’t actually want to tell you anything about the character, because he’s a really exciting, unusual character. So I think it’s going to be fun for the audience. He’s going to be involved with Olivia’s trajectory … some of Olivia’s journey.”

On the behind the scenes changes, including the departure of show-runner David Goyer, Borsiczky said that they “always anticipated David would leave to go do movies”, and that the team was prepared for it. Leaving mid-way through the season is a bit much though, really. I’m not convinced that was ever the plan so it can’t have been easy. But hopefully the new stewards can take the show forward, because it really needs fresh impetus.

There’s also going to be a clip show to bring people up to speed on the story so far. This will air some time before the show returns on March 18th. I doubt I’ll watch – clip shows are usually dumbed down rehashes of what I already know. Not sure I could sit through that! However, I’m sure it will be useful to those ‘new’ viewers who ABC want to capture and bring up to date.