So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  6.

  I AM LEGEND

  “Cain, the greatest military commander who ever lived. He was my idol!”

  On the heels of the three-hour debut, “Saga of a Star World,” Battlestar Galactica aired another massive two-parter the following two weeks, on September 24 and October 1, 1978, “Lost Planet of the Gods.” The episode is stuffed with multiple storylines in which, as Apollo and Serina prepare for their wedding, the Viper pilots are sidelined by a pernicious, life-threatening virus, forcing the women of the fleet to be trained as fighter pilots. At the same time, Apollo and Starbuck discover a magnetic void that, according to legend, hides the mysterious planet Kobol, the origin of all human life in the universe. Given its vast scope, the episode is nearly as ambitious as the three-hour debut that preceded it.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  (creator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  I think the network was so nervous about this show being a hit and because it’s science fiction, they kept front-loading us. I got this letter once and it said the idea of a disease coming on the ship and knocking out all your pilots is a good idea for an episode. And the idea of discovering the planet you came from, that’s a great idea for an episode. And the idea of them getting married and then her dying is also a great idea for an episode. But all in the same episode? The truth of the matter is those were all on my list of three different things we were going to do and the network pushed to get them all going at once because they were so nervous about whether we’d be a hit. It’s called front-loading. You put too damn much in there, so you don’t have a chance to explore any one of them appropriately.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  (film critic, Access Hollywood)

  “Lost Planet of the Gods” was a good episode to better establish the characters and the dynamics introduced in the premiere. What I liked about it was the way it really played into the mysticism of Egypt. When you’re watching the pilot episode, a lot of the buildings on Caprica look like pyramids. Then, they get to Kobol, and it’s Egypt. It’s the pyramids. But Jane Seymour, who is Apollo’s love interest, she was just going to do the pilot episode. They asked her to come back and she said, “Well, I’ll do it if I can have a good death scene,” and she did. That was a really sad ending to that episode.

  I would say that of all of the episodes of Battlestar Galactica, “Lost Planet of the Gods” is the one that’s the most dated, because of the storyline involving the female fighter pilots and that you can’t have a woman flying a Viper. They’re not shuttle pilots, but they had to do it because the male fighter pilots contracted a disease on an asteroid that has a Cylon base, and the only hope for the fleet was to train the women to fly Vipers fast. They flew erratically, but they still beat the Cylons.

  The episode called for the cast to explore the ruins of the desert world of Kobol, eventually entering one of the ancient tombs under a massive pyramid. To ensure authenticity, a second unit was sent to Egypt to shoot exteriors of the Sphinx and Great Pyramids at Giza, while principal photography continued in Hollywood.

  Doubles, dressed as Adama, Apollo, and Serina, were photographed in long shots walking among the ruins for sequences depicting the surface of the ancient planet. Because local religious doctrine would not permit a woman to wear a man’s clothing, a young boy was used to double for Jane Seymour.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  They hired some little boy to put on the outfit, and he had the biggest butt. He was walking away from the camera and I knew if Jane saw that, she would kill me, so I had to cut around some of those terrible shots.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  (journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)

  For close-ups, front projection was used to create shots of the principal actors standing in front of the ruins. To achieve these images, the Egypt unit photographed a series of stills of the pyramids. These “plates” were transferred to large transparencies for later use on the soundstages at Universal. The north wall of stage twenty-eight—the old Phantom of the Opera stage—was outfitted with a huge 3M screen. The actors would perform a scene while a transparency, in this case an Egyptian temple, was projected onto the screen behind them.

  H. JOHN PENNER

  (director of photography, Battlestar Galactica)

  You have to balance the whole front stage with the images that you’re projecting. Front projection is a very tricky thing to do, because the 3M screen has multiple reflective microscopic beads as a surface, and the optical axis has to be dead center to that. If you’re off half a degree one way or another, the magnification of light completely falls off. It’s rather tricky and you can’t really hurry.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  When they get to Kobol and they have to go through the tomb, it’s like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for a little bit. It was a great moment when Baltar goes to grab the staff from the tomb and then it starts shaking. Adama and everyone in the tomb thinks it’s a supernatural force because you’ve disrupted the tomb, and Adama turns to Apollo and says, “What do you think?” Apollo says, “About fifteen-megaton loads,” and you cut to the Cylons firing on the freaking pyramids of Egypt. This was 1978, and it still looks amazing.

  RICHARD JAMES

  (art director, Battlestar Galactica)

  In building the tomb, I took a lead from the Egyptian designs, and I came up with the idea of the eye Adama was wearing so when he stands up there is a light beam that comes from the upper window. When his medallion hits it, it makes a triangle with the sphinx guarding the tomb and it would open and reveal the room below the slab. They liked that idea very much and we did do that.

  I recall they were trying to get prices out of me and I said don’t put any detail in these drawings because they get more expensive. Leave off as much as possible and I will say I am not finished. The way they worked at Universal was you had estimators. You were not allowed to turn in your own estimates. I had to submit my drawings to the estimator and they would say how much these sets would cost and I would go in and haggle with them over it. Their prices were outrageous.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  (actor, “Lieutenant Boomer”)

  I got one of the great lines from [writer/producer] Don Bellisario. It was after Boomer and Jolly bring back a virus to the Galactica and they end up in suspended animation until they could find the cure. The girls end up on the planet and the Cylons have attacked and they’re losing the battle and the next thing you know there’s Boomer and Jolly and all of the [male] fighter pilots, who were in very bad shape, staggering up and I say, “Lieutenant Boomer, reporting for duty, sir.” And Colonel Tigh looks up and says, “You can’t even stand.” And Don wrote the great line for me where Boomer leans over and he says, “I believe the Viper is flown from the seated position!”

  For the cast, the first season proved to be one of change as well. Starbuck and Cassiopeia, initially supporting characters, would emerge to the forefront, while others—such as Athena and Boxey—would see their roles slowly diminish, with the two disappearing altogether after the airing of the midseason two-parter “Greetings from Earth.” Baltar, who was killed in the initial three-hour pilot, would later be spared in the first two-part episode when producers, now tasked with taking Galactica to a weekly series, felt the need for a villain with greater dramatic potential than the monotone Cylon robots. Leaving the series was Jane Seymour, whose role was short-lived. Serina was originally killed off in the pilot, but the subplot was omitted from the three-hour premiere and a new demise was plotted for the character in the following episode.

  RICHARD HATCH

  (actor, “Captain Apollo”)

  She didn’t feel she was going to get enough to do on that show as an actress, because it was a very testosterone-oriented show. I loved working with Jane. I think we really had a chemistry together, and I was extremely sad to see her go.

  JANE SEYMOUR

  (actress, “Serina”)

  I was only supposed to be in the pilot and die of galactic cancer.
Then they called me up and said that I had tested better than their regulars so they wanted me in the series. I told them I was dead, but Glen Larson said, “We’ve done some reshooting.” They cut in anywhere I looked like I was dying or ill. Sure enough, I was still alive. I said no about a hundred times and they doubled, tripled, and quadrupled my fee. I finally said I’d do two more hours on the condition that I die. They had me fly battleships, marry the guy, and I got to do everything I would have done if I had been in the entire season. It was pretty wild.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  The common myth about Galactica is true. The two-part episodes are much, much better than the single-part episodes. “Lost Planet of the Gods” is not the best two-part episode, but after that you had “The Lost Warrior,” which is a Western with a Cylon. It’s Shane. I thought it was chilling to see a Western setting, and in the corner was a freaking Cylon sitting with his laser pistol. When Apollo goes over and he starts making conversation with the Cylon, he goes, “You want to destroy me?” He goes, “No, I don’t.” He goes, “You’re lying.” I was scared. It was a great moment, but it’s not a great episode.

  In the episode, after running low on fuel, Apollo is marooned on a frontier planet. There, he discovers that a single Cylon under the control of the local bad guy, Lacerta, threatens the town. In an homage to Alan Ladd’s iconic (and laconic) character, Apollo goes mano a machine with the Cylon in a classic Western showdown.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  I am not sure we pulled off the Shane story as well as I had hoped. Maybe we had built an appetite for only the big shows. With the smaller episodes, I guess I worried that they might have been disappointing. You lose some of the people who are only there for the events. We were certainly reacting to the fact that we couldn’t hold the kind of audience you get on a premiere big night, but then Sunday night is a cutthroat night for television. You’re competing with an awful lot.

  RICHARD JAMES

  The episode was filmed on Western Street at Universal Studios’ backlot. I built a frame and stretched canvas over it and we painted them to get these strange shapes. I would cover the windows and get these strange looks to Western Street to make it look a little foreign. For the swinging barroom doors, out came the silver paint. The whole series was Wagon Train in space. It got to that point during production meetings where our guys are walking down a strange street in an alien town and they would say Western Street and I would say, “Western Street? You have to be kidding!”

  The thing that was so frustrating with Universal was they invested all this money and then they slammed the door on you. I would see these scripts come out and it was obvious they hadn’t thought about where these scenes are going to take place. Where is this strange alien street that they are walking down? That would be the original description [in the script]. It was not Western Street. Western Street [on the Universal backlot] came up because that’s what they could afford.

  GLEN OLIVER

  (pop-culture commentator)

  When taken on the whole, the writing wasn’t particularly bad, especially when compared to other genre entries of its era—even when compared to other Glen Larson titles of that era. If you step back to compare the metaphysics and mythology of Battlestar’s “Ship of Light” conceit to fucking B.J. and the Bear or Sheriff Lobo, Battlestar looks Kubrickian by comparison.

  It should also be noted that the late seventies/early eighties was a strangely pregnant time for science fiction storytelling on television. Galactica predated the “made for cable” series revolution by many years. Other science fiction shows which were shaped by big networks? Many of them were fun, to be sure, but at their core they were often a bit dodgy and narrow in scope and vision and execution. I don’t think it’s hard to argue that Galactica, for all its eccentricities and warts, was easily the most boldly conceived and expansive television concept out there at the time—as well as being the biggest risk commercially. I wouldn’t say it ushered in the megaseries like we see today—like Game of Thrones, Westworld, or some of the current costly and high-profile Netflix shows—as too much time passed before those came around. But I do think it portended their existence in terms of anticipating a scale and thought process we’d eventually see more frequently on TV.

  Battlestar … and Space: 1999 before it … went shamelessly “big” in a way which didn’t feel self-conscious or apologetic. It would be many years before we’d again see such audacity evident in small-screen science fiction.

  JOHN COLICOS

  (actor, “Count Baltar”)

  I got so sick of that goddamn child and that stupid dog. That was sentimental slop shit as far as I was concerned. When Don [Bellisario] wrote the scripts, they were very much in line with what we had all discussed. When other people were involved in writing the scripts with other directors, then we would concentrate on the daggit.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  (cocreator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I remember being sort of disappointed over and over again. There were interesting moments, interesting episodes in isolation, but the story—the overall arc—just wasn’t carrying me any place that I was interested in going. I mean, right in the first episode, when they went to the casino planet, even as a kid I was sort of like, “This feels really disconnected from everything else in the story. Didn’t they just have this giant, terrible thing happen? And now they’re jumping around and, you know, gambling.” I just thought that was so weird and I didn’t really get it. And I really detested the daggit. I hated all that when I was watching it in its first run.

  I was interested in all the pilots. I wanted to see more stuff with the pilots and Adama. I remember liking all that. When they did the Western episode, that was basically Shane done as a Galactica episode. I remember going, “God, this is so bizarre. It’s like we’re doing a Western, and not a very good one, on this show.” I just remember feeling less and less like the show knew what the hell it was doing. This kind of went on. But I think, when I was a kid I just kept having this faith that it was gonna all work out, they’re gonna figure it out.

  My dominant influence was Star Trek, and as a Star Trek fan, I guess, I was comparing it unfavorably to the way Star Trek would do these shows. But I just kept feeling like it was going to be a really great show eventually.

  DONALD BELLISARIO

  (supervising producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  If you look at my shows, I always do character shows. They may have action or something but they are character-oriented shows. They tell heart stories. That’s what I like to do. I like to have twists and do the unexpected by the end of the show. I think I put a pretty good twist in “The Hand of God,” where they pick up the Eagle landing on the moon. It was typical of the shows I like to write and that’s the direction I would have liked to have taken the show.

  When I joined Galactica, Glen was struggling with all the problems of the show. It was a massive show to mount, it was an incredible accomplishment to get it done on a television budget since it was so expansive and large. It was an enormous undertaking. People expect to see what they see in feature films, and that’s very hard to do and turn it out every week. Glen deserves a helluva lot of credit just for pulling it off. But it was a little bit like an oil tanker; you had to make an adjustment five miles back in order to make the turn you want, and what we were doing was trying to take the show and make some adjustments and take it in a more personal direction in a way that we could make it and mount it. We were beginning to accomplish that and take it in a direction that viewers would have loved and would have continued to make good television instead of just hardware stories, but by that time it was too late.

  RICHARD HATCH

  In the first-year show, they tended to go toward the Baltar character, and the Starbuck character got played up a lot. By the end of the season, they actually started giving my character more stuff to do, which I think was the direction the show needed to go in. By the second season, there would have been a cha
nce to take Apollo out of that box of basically being the straightforward leader. That character always tends to be the most boring, but I was looking in every way I could to bring humanity to that character. Having my son helped sometimes, and some of the scenes with Sheba allowed me to show a little bit of that, but I was searching to find a way out of being the straightforward, ultraserious leader guy.

  Following on Colla’s and Levi’s work on the pilot and Christian Nyby II helming the “Lost Planet of the Gods” two-parter, young director Rod Holcomb, who remains active as a television director today, shot what would be the first of several episodes of the fledgling series with “The Lost Warrior.”

  ROD HOLCOMB

  I didn’t start my career until very late. I graduated from San Francisco State when I think I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. I didn’t know anybody and I was throwing my sixteen-millimeter films over the fence, hoping somebody would pick it up and go look at it and say, “Oh, this is good,” because you didn’t have the internet. I actually got a job in the mailroom at ABC over on Prospect and Talmadge in Silverlake, and from the bottom, looking up, you can really learn a lot, fairly quickly. Then, after I went through that for about a year, I think, I got a chance to go over to the promo department, and somebody gave me a chance to do some of the writing and producing of the promos, which I thought was a great thing. Then, I did some main-title kind of stuff for Kung Fu. I got the idea of the titles in the bathroom, so that’s where I got my inspiration, and they were nominated for a Clio Award.

  Then I got offered to be the associate producer on Harry O, with David Janssen. Jerry Thorpe was the executive producer, and a really wonderful director himself. I got to learn what postproduction was all about. It was a short-lived journey over at Harry O. My next job was actually doing the pilot for Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter, and then I got a job at The Six Million Dollar Man as an associate producer. I went to dailies and always had something to say, so I guess they heard a few things they liked and said, “Well, you want to try it?” In those days, that’s the way you got to direct. They thought the young guy has a few good ideas, let’s give him a shot and see what happens.