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FROM MARK A. ALTMAN
Steven A. Simak, without whom this book would not be possible and who is the biggest Galactica fan I know. He provided incalculable help and assistance in completing this volume. Can’t tell you how many times I went to his house and watched Mission Galactica on Super 8. Of course, his wonderful mom Nilda’s baked ziti didn’t hurt either.
My parents, Gail Altman-Orenstein and Michael Altman, who let me stay up waaaay late to see how it all ended on September 17, 1978. (Spoiler alert: the Colonials escaped from Carillon, it was a cookbook … and Begin and Sadat signed the Camp David Peace Accords.)
Those who believed that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens; our intrepid editor, Brendan Deenen, and Tor Books publisher and founder, Tom Doherty.
And, of course, all the charter members of The Galactic Club of Science Fiction (Kevin Costello, Ira Altman, Kenny Feinleib, Wayne Meyers, but not you Lance Schulman) in 1978 that nurtured my love of science fiction movies, television, novels—and especially Battlestar Galactica—for many years to come.
The East Coast Altmans: Ira, Becky, Tyler, and Emily, because they got left out of all the other books … and I never heard the end of it.
Ed Gross, the best collaborator one could ever wish for, despite the fact that I keep trying to get out, but he pulls me back in …
Finally, and most importantly, Ella and Isaac, my own Colonial Warriors.
And Naomi, because she still tolerates me after all these yahrens.
FROM EDWARD GROSS
Ronald D. Moore, whose enthusiasm for this project mirrored the authors’, and without whom this book would never have been possible.
Our Tor editor, Brendan Deenen, and Tor publisher, Tom Doherty—thanks for believing in Galactica as much as we do.
My coauthor, Mark A. Altman—what an incredible ride this has been; I appreciate your collaboration and your friendship.
My wife, Eileen, who, in a turn of a sports phrase, became a Galactica widow throughout the writing process. It was a long haul, but we got through it. I love you.
Our sons, Teddy, Dennis, and Kevin; daughter-in-law, Lindsay Saier; and, taking up the “hey you could be next” positions, Nicole Plaia and Yumi Matsuyama. Our own personal ragtag fugitive fleet on this journey through life.
Fleeing from Cylon tyranny, the last battlestar, Galactica, leads a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest: a shining planet known as Earth.
THE BOOK OF THE WORD
“I see the party is not a huge success with all my children.”
BY Mark A. Altman
There are very few things about middle school (or, as we fashionably called it at the time, junior high school) that I can still recall. It was, in fact, four decades ago, so you can hopefully forgive me for my rather vague recollections. I sure do remember Ms. Radiloff, my toweringly tall and delightful science teacher, who was prone to breaking into bouts of the now very politically incorrect Randy Newman song “Short People (Got No Reason to Live)” in the middle of class. I recall Mr. Rubin, my rather dour science teacher, and his uncharacteristically impassioned lessons about quasars, which were apparently quite in vogue at the time (along with, of course, black holes), and Mrs. Rosen, my septuagenarian typing teacher, whom I will forever be indebted to for teaching me to type at warp speed on an old IBM Selectric; and, of course, I remember the loathsome Lance Schulman, who revealed to me that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father in the Marvel Comics adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back before I saw the movie. Fuck you, Lance, wherever you are.
But the thing I do recall better and more clearly than anything that happened during those halcyon three years attending Roy H. Mann Junior High School in Brooklyn, New York, during the late seventies, long before Brooklyn was remotely cool, is Monday mornings. What was it about Monday mornings that even now continues to resonate in my ever-depleting synapses? Well, it was gathering in the schoolyard during lineup in the morning to discuss Battlestar Galactica from the previous night. And perhaps there is no more vivid memory of those years than our shared horror at President Jimmy Carter for interrupting the broadcast of “Saga of a Star World”—just as the Galactica crew was arriving at Carillon—to speak to the nation about the Camp David Peace Accords. To an eleven-year-old, this all seemed extremely trivial compared to the fate of the survivors of the Twelve Colonies of Man, who were desperate to elude the clutches of the devious Cylons and survive an interstellar genocide. Thankfully, my parents let me stay up way past eleven o’clock to see how it all ended, for which I will be eternally grateful.
Back then, I certainly didn’t get the fact that compared to Star Trek, with its laudably optimistic, liberal, progressive politics (ocassional right-leaning missteps like “A Private Little War” notwithstanding), Galactica was far more militaristic and neoconservative in its viewpoint. It’s the liberal President Adar, played by Lew Ayres, who seems to be a thinly veiled Jimmy Carter analogue, who is easily tricked by Baltar into disarmament, and who pays an apocalyptic price for his naïveté (shades of SALT II—in fact, the series even inspired much outrage from the Soviet Union, which accused the show of trying to poison relations between the United States and the USSR). And it’s the politicians, like the gluttonous and self-serving Sire Uri, who are as devious as the metallic automatons hell-bent on humanity’s destruction.
* * *
But none of that mattered to me back in 1978; my friends and I sure dug Battlestar Galactica … a lot. Yes, even as preteens, we knew it wasn’t nearly as literate or allegorical as Trek or as smart and sophisticated as The Twilight Zone, and the science was an utter mess with galaxies being confused with solar systems constantly and ships traversing the galaxy from week to week at sublight velocities among other things, but at a whopping $7 million, the pilot really delivered on its promise to be Star Wars for the small screen. With its glorious Frank Frazetta artwork in TV Guide beckoning you to watch along with its story of swashbuckling spacefarers, malevolent mechanical Centurions, and a robot dog, this was a show that promised a lot … and, for the most part, delivered. It was cool. As an eleven-year-old, I was utterly entranced with the magnificent space vehicles designed by Star Wars’ Ralph McQuarrie, the stirring Stu Phillips orchestral score, and the even more stirring Maren Jensen.
Battlestar Galactica was also the show that prompted me to publish my first magazine, Galactic Journal, a fanzine that my junior high school friends and I started (and was covertly mimeographed by my mother at work, plowing through gallons and gallons of ink in the process—thanks, Mom!)
and continued to publish till our college days, now completely typeset and printed in full color, with a substantially increased circulation. Our premiere issue, in 1978, had a drawing of a Colonial Viper on it, sketched by Galactic Club charter member Kevin Costello, still a dear friend. Man, we loved that show a lot.
Years later, as a co–executive producer of the TV series Agent X for TNT, I was lucky enough to work with the great Rod Holcomb, a veteran director who worked on such legendary TV series as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Wiseguy, and ER (shooting the pilots of the last two groundbreaking series) as well as, you guessed it, Battlestar Galactica. Some of my favorite memories of working on that show are of chatting between takes with Rod about the lonely quest, working with everyone’s favorite Alpo pitchman, living legends and lost planets of the gods … and, of course, Bigfoot, but that’s a story for another book.
Given how important nostalgia is to me when it comes to Battlestar Galactica, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that while we were writing this volume, what may have amused me the most was when Battlestar Galactica story editor Terry McDonnell, reflecting on his work on the series, said, “I went down to the stage a couple of times just by myself at lunch when they weren’t shooting. If I could have only had this in my backyard when I was a kid playing pirates.” At this recollection, I broke into a wide grin and confessed that as kids we would actually play Battlestar Galactica. He laughed, “Nobody has ever said that to me before.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we played Space: 1999, too.
Years later, when the reinvention of Battlestar Galactica was announced, I could not have been more ecstatic. I was particularly excited because the project was in the hands of a brilliant writer/producer like Ronald D. Moore, who had not only been responsible for The Next Generation’s greatest episodes, but later helped Ira Steven Behr make Deep Space Nine one of the most compelling and unique science fiction TV series of all time. That’s why I’m embarrassed to admit now that when I first watched the miniseries, I disliked it intensely. I thought it looked cheap and was way too grim and lacked the fun of the original series. I particularly missed the Ralph McQuarrie visual aesthetic of the 1978 show’s groundbreaking design and felt the allegory for 9/11 was a little too on-the-nose. Not to mention, I thought the new bridge was unimpressive compared to the stunning, massive one-million-dollar set of the original series (full disclosure: having recently rewatched it, I can now say that the miniseries is much better than it seemed to me at the time).
So when the show was green-lit to series, I remained trepidatious. I still had faith in Ron (who I knew had been showrunning Carnivàle during the miniseries production, which might have been part of why I found it lethargic and unengaging), but I wasn’t sure Syfy Channel (still called Sci-Fi at the time) could and would deliver the goods. In my mind, they hadn’t spent the money they needed to on the miniseries, and it lacked the iconic polish of the 1978 series, not to mention the malevolent metal machine robots that I had first fallen in love with as a kid. Fortunately, I was proved very wrong. With the brilliant debut episode, “33,” a nail-biting pressure cooker of an episode, it was clear Ron Moore and David Eick had a powerful and original vision for the new series. For years, fans (myself included) had bemoaned why there couldn’t be a sci-fi Sopranos, a genre series that was as complex, riveting, and sophisticated as the best of what is now branded “peak TV.” Battlestar Galactica was finally it. It was a show that rightly belonged in the pantheon of television classics such as Hill Street Blues, The West Wing, Twin Peaks, The Wire, Mad Men, and, yes, the original Star Trek.
There were no daggits, no alien Ovions or Borays, no rip-offs of Shane, The Dirty Dozen, or The Towering Inferno, just morally complex characters and dynamic storytelling unlike any the small screen had ever seen in a sci-fi series, and that never changed over the course of its entire run, culminating in one of the most divisive series finales since Lost. For the record, I loved it.
That said, it’s such a thrill to be writing the final volume in our trilogy of oral histories of legendary science fiction TV series ranging from Star Trek (The Fifty-Year Mission) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Slayers & Vampires) to Battlestar Galactica (in case you missed it emblazoned on the cover, So Say We All). These were all shows that changed the genre forever and will always remain touchstones for a generation of fans who grew up with them, including Ed and me. The 1978 Battlestar Galactica was the Rodney Dangerfield of sci-fi shows, never quite getting any respect, and the magic of 2004’s incredible and groundbreaking reinvention has never been explored in depth. Until now, that is. I hope you enjoy this not-so-lonely quest to once again bring the battlestar Galactica home to Earth.
And finally, and most importantly, maybe the biggest delight of writing this book (and I must say a personal triumph) has been introducing my eight-year-old son, Isaac, to the joys of classic Battlestar Galactica. Isaac has had the sophistication and good taste to appreciate the oft-maligned genius of the original series that has (mostly) aged like a fine ambrosia (albeit Galactica 1980 not so much). He is the living proof that this has all happened before and it will all happen again.
May the Lords of Kobol Bless You.
September 17, 2017
A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALACTICA FAR, FAR AWAY …
“It’s been a while since I’ve had a woman throw me to the ground. Not quite as much fun as I remember.”
BY Edward Gross
While conducting interviews with cast and crew from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, I was the one who kept getting hit with a recurring question: Had I seen the Galactica episode of the Portlandia TV series? I replied that I hadn’t, and in fact had barely even been aware of the show’s existence, hardly a surprise these days.
Time was that I would know pretty much every new TV show out there, what they were about and when they would air. In fact, it was something I prided myself on—for years my wife (Eileen) and I would pick up two copies of TV Guide’s Fall Preview issue just so we could read about what was coming and check off what we would or wouldn’t watch. Now, of course, the sheer quantity of television is so overwhelming that I’m suddenly hearing about a show in its third season that I’ve never even heard of at all.
We’ll get back to Portlandia in a second.
During the writing process, there came a point where I felt like I needed a Galactica 2003 refresher, having not watched the show since its first run. I streamed the original miniseries, which made perfect “background noise” for the writing process, though I found myself paying attention to it more than I probably should have been. Next thing I knew, I was making my way through season one, with all the others streaming before me over the next couple of weeks. The writing of the book needed to continue, but Galactica wouldn’t. It was over. They’d found Earth (and thank God not the Earth of Galactica 1980), and now I was the one feeling lost. Searching. My first impulse was to start watching the original series, but then I remembered Portlandia. Or, more accurately, what I’d been told about it. A bit of searching on Netflix, and there it was: season 2, episode 2—“One Moore Episode.” In it, characters played by the two lead actors, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, decide to check out an episode of Battlestar Galactica, which leads to another and another and another … to the point where they lose their jobs, electricity is turned off (briefly, but painfully), and they find themselves so obsessed that they decide to go this side of Kathy Bates in Misery on Ron Moore’s ass to get him to write another episode. Won’t spoil things from there, but you should check it out for yourself if you haven’t.
Needless to say, “One Moore Episode” was pretty reflective of what I felt rewatching the series, its power once again completely capturing my imagination, and, it being one of the few shows (particularly in the sci-fi genre) to live up to the true potential of the medium, standing as the model by which others are still measured all these years later.
Personally, it’s an ironic feeling to have, considering
that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Battlestar Galactica when the original series debuted, in 1978. I can still remember the excitement leading into the series—at that point I was a massive Star Trek fan and had been swept up by Star Wars along with everyone else—and I was pretty impressed with the three-hour event “Saga of a Star World.” Unfortunately, with the exception of several two-parters, that feeling didn’t last all that long. The series (at least for me) felt as though it quickly fell into a certain repetition, and drove home the notion that Battlestar Galactica was an incredible premise that failed to live up to its own potential. And when Galactica 1980 followed as a failed apology from ABC, that feeling remained with me. For decades.
Which is part of the reason that rumblings over the years of a revival barely elicited a Spockian rise of an eyebrow. Oh, sure, talk of Bryan Singer doing a new version with Tom DeSanto was intriguing, but didn’t inspire a tremendous amount of hope in me. And neither did Richard Hatch’s attempt to get the show revived, which felt like it was going to be more of the same (not entirely fair, since I didn’t know much about it). But when word came out that Ronald D. Moore was writing a new version, then I was interested. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t because I was suddenly filled with hope of Battlestar Galactica being all that it could be (my bad), but more because I was already friendly with him, having interviewed him numerous times regarding his work on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. He’d always made me feel welcome to contact him, and my initial impulse was that I could have an interesting exclusive on my hands.
So I contacted Ron, and we chatted about how it all came about and what he was hoping to achieve. We probably spoke for about forty-five minutes, and afterward I thanked him, both of us figuring we’d talk again at some point. What neither of us expected was that my tape recorder would malfunction and the interview was not recorded. Just to show you what kind of a human being Ron Moore is, when I told him what had happened, he took a deep breath and we dove right back into it as though the first conversation hadn’t occurred. End result was that I came away from that first chat—both of them—with more excitement in my heart for Battlestar Galactica than I’d felt since those days leading into “Saga of a Star World.” And, as it turned out, for good reason. The show was everything that was suggested in the premise, the writers, cast, and crew pulling together to create some intergalactic magic.
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