So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  BOONE NARR

  (animal trainer, Battlestar Galactica)

  We had this elevator scene where it fills up with smoke. The effects guys put a little too much pressure on the smoke, so it made a real loud hissing sound. When we opened the doors up and the smoke cleared, Evie was up in the rafters.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  You couldn’t quite predict what the chimp would do. Often to me it would steal a scene doing something goofy off in the background, because it was a chimp. I would have to bite my tongue to not laugh during a shot. So, we had to send this poor little chimp down these tubes that we had and, of course, we had the fire effects and light effects and stuff. The first time the chimp got in there it came running toward us. We shot up some flame in the foreground and it just spun around and disappeared at the other end. It took its helmet off and climbed up to the top of the scaffolding of the stage. We had to give him a little acting lesson, I guess. Anyway, poor thing. It was completely safe but I think we just startled it a little more than we expected.

  By the middle of the first season, Larson’s series had begun to evolve. Driven by cost and the realization that greater attention needed to be given to character for the series to survive, Galactica moved in a new direction. As planned, the role of the Cylons was diminished and new adversaries, such as the Borellian Nomen and the Eastern Alliance, were introduced. Episodes such as “War of the Gods” and “Experiment in Terra” explored the spiritual foundations established earlier in the pilot. Stories began to focus less on combat and more on character-driven solutions to create drama.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  I wanted to find out more about these other ships in the fleet and who was on them. What were they doing and how were they contributing to the whole process? There could be drama as you got to know these characters. You can’t really compare the first version of Galactica with the second version of Galactica, where everything was opened up. Cylons were legitimately dangerous. We couldn’t kill anybody on the show. We did an episode called “Take the Celestra.” It starts out with a firefight going on aboard the Celestra because there is a mutiny. Then we cut back to Starbuck and Apollo, and they are doing something on the Galactica, and by the time they get over to the other ship the firefight is still going on. And we’re going to cut back and forth. ABC at the time had this weird Standards and Practices rule where you can only have between four and six incidents of violence per episode. So they were claiming that this one had like twelve, because you’re in a firefight and then you cut away and then you come back and that’s another incident of violence. We’re going, “It’s the same firefight!” We finally won that, but that took a long time. It was nuts the notes we’d get. They’d say, “She’s wearing a revealing costume. No nudity.” Seriously? Really?

  GLEN OLIVER

  I’ve always felt the show’s gimmicky use of goofy terms to denote time and distance measurements also undercut dramatic intent quite a bit. “Centon,” “micron,” “centar,” and “secton” were often vague and undefined, and not always easy to intuit on the fly, in the heat of a sequence. Some of these time units could be inferred, maybe, kinda, sorta, but clumsily. I never felt they were clear. So much so that, in one of the show’s few meta moments, a newly introduced character, Randolph Mantooth’s Michael, a more recognizably contemporary human from “Greetings from Earth,” actually ponders what such terminology means. Tellingly, he doesn’t get an answer from our leads.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  If you watch the show the terminology is so inconsistent. It’s just all over the place.

  So, there was no bible. Nothing that we could refer to except the other scripts. Glen’s first drafts on a number of episodes made no sense, and pages would be going down to the set all the time to clarify things. That was the way he worked. He’d write two-part episodes and knock ’em off relatively quickly and there were problems.

  I made some notes, because Glen had a proclivity for calling the same things different things in various scripts, like a centon was a micron.

  I went up to Glen’s office and I stuck my head in and said, “Could I see you for a second?” He nodded and I went in. I said, “I’ve got some notes on your script.” And all it was going to be was the terminology, but all I could see is Mount Vesuvius starting to move up his chest into his face, and I realized this was a really bad idea. I never went back into his office again unless I was called, and I never had any notes.

  So if there are things that don’t work in various scripts, it’s not because we didn’t find them. It’s because those kind of things were unwelcome. I wanted to print out a little bible of the terms, but we thought that would be rubbing Glen’s nose in it. He was furious with me. So we kept our distance for quite a while, but we still did our work. He was very nice to us, don’t get me wrong, it was just one thing that I absolutely remember because this was my first job as a story editor and I didn’t want to screw it up, so I learned a big lesson that day.

  GLEN OLIVER

  How close are those attacking Cylons, exactly, and how worried should we actually be? How much time do our characters really have before “X” calamity strikes? How long have our heroes actually been looking for Earth, anyway? Orientation and immediacy are lost, and that’s not a reasonable obstacle for any story to overcome. Those kind of questions shouldn’t be obscured in a narrative about desperation, struggle, and life and death. I’m all for some mysteries being left vague for the sake of audiences discovering as they go, but to not have a clear sense of time flow simply deflates or convolutes tension unnecessarily.

  However, one aspect of Battlestar Galactica that is rarely written about, and is often overlooked in this age of “binge TV,” is how much it preliminarily paved the way for the serialization that is de rigueur in television today. While series like Lost in Space and even the original Star Trek rarely connected the dots between episodes or the emotional stakes therein (Kirk isn’t fazed by the death the previous week of Edith Keeler as he confronts the death of his brother in “Operation: Annihilate” a week later), Battlestar Galactica would often elaborate on elements from previous episodes even though it sometimes bungled its own continuity.

  In “Lost Planet of the Gods,” women are finally allowed to become Viper pilots. In future episodes, we would see female Viper pilots fly missions. Later, in “War of the Gods,” Apollo, Starbuck, and Sheba would be given a clue to the location of Earth, and in the following episode, “The Man with Nine Lives,” Adama would pick up on that thread. The fate of the disappearance of the battlestar Pegasus would be an ongoing concern, as well as the evolving love triangle among Starbuck, Cassiopeia, and Athena and the relationship between Apollo and Sheba, although character drama was less likely to be explored in depth. Another plot thread that was serialized through the latter half of the series was Baltar’s fate after he surrenders to Adama in “War of the Gods,” and still another was the disposition of his Cylon fighter in “Baltar’s Escape,” which plays a key role in “The Hand of God.”

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  It wasn’t like where you do big story arcs like you do now. That’s not the way television was. It would have been so much more interesting to see people grow and develop. I remember when I was writing Six Million Dollar Man the one episode I kept pitching was where Steve discovers that there was a guy before him and everything is going to shit in his body. I thought it would be such a fabulous episode and it was like, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen to me?” But they wouldn’t let us do it, because the characters were the characters. They never had moments of doubt.

  7.

  LET THERE BE LIGHT

  “Isn’t he wonderfully evil? We can learn much from him.”

  Every science fiction series tends to have the one seminal episode that defines it. In the case of the original Star Trek it was “The City on the Edge of Forever,” for The Next Generation it was “The Best of Both Worlds,” for The Outer Limits it was “Demon with a Glass Hand,”
and for The Twilight Zone it was “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” In the case of the original Battlestar Galactica, it was “War of the Gods,” a clever, mysterious, metaphysical two-parter introducing The Avengers’ Patrick Macnee as the enigmatic Count Iblis.

  In the episode, a Viper patrol vanishes after encountering a mysterious Ship of Lights. Apollo, Starbuck, and Sheba are sent out to investigate, and discover the wreckage of a vessel on a nearby planet. There, they meet Count Iblis, an elusive stranger, who returns with them to the Galactica. Iblis quickly rises to prominence by performing powerful miracles, such as delivering Baltar to the Council of Twelve for justice. Adama questions his true motives as Iblis comes closer to gaining control of the fleet while Apollo tries to unearth the sinister secret of Iblis’s true identity on the planet where they first discovered him.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  (creator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  I think I started to lose the network executives. I don’t think they knew what to make of the series. They had been trying to overlay all of these basic soap opera principles on us, but at that point we were writing faster than they could keep up with us. They didn’t know what to do with us at that point, and I think some of them had written us off.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  Glen would generally write big, two-part episodes and then he’d use up all the money in the special effects for those shows. What we’d wind up doing is little bottle shows. They’re self-contained in the fleet, with stock footage we’ve used before.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  (actress, “Sheba”)

  There is a famous line which is cut [in “War of the Gods”] because the censors cut it and it is the end of the scene where Iblis kisses me in the agroship. I am in a pretty pink dress—the only time I got to wear a pink dress, which Jean-Pierre designed which was gorgeous, and I am in a trance and moony-eyed because he had me in his spell. I am afraid and Iblis says, “What are you afraid of?” and I tell him I don’t know. He leans toward me and is getting ready to kiss me and says the scripted line, “Oh Sheba, nothing can harm you as long as I am inside you.” Well, I would just lose it every time he said this to me. We got a bad case of the giggles. He was this dear man, a professional trained man, who would say this to me and I would lose it. I tried looking at the top of his head. I tried looking at his ear. I tried everything I could to compose myself, and I couldn’t. I have never done this before or since in my life, I excused myself and I went to the telephone on the set and I called Glen and I said, “You can’t have this man say this to me, we can’t even look at each other and do this scene,” and he said he’d be right down.

  Glen said there was nothing naughty about it. It’s just the intent of Iblis taking your spirit and he’s possessing you and all this stuff. Glen insisted on it, and we finally pulled ourselves together and actually shot him saying the line, my reaction, and the kiss. They edited the show and sent it to ABC’s Standards and Practices and they cut it.

  Fans of the series have long questioned a mystery raised in the episode’s conclusion. Returning to the planet to investigate Iblis’s ship, Apollo, Starbuck, and Sheba make a shocking discovery in the debris which is “as big as a battlestar,” leading many to speculate that it could be the wreckage of the Pegasus. What the characters saw, however, was never shown onscreen, and the intention of the writers was never revealed.

  JIM CARLSON

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  What you were going to see there was a cloven hoof, but the network wouldn’t allow that. We were going to have a very stylized hoof so it would look like some unearthly being.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  It was supposed to be something malevolent and deadly-looking when I go in there. Apparently it was on short notice, and this was the best they could come up with, to suggest this Mephistopheles character—but they couldn’t show anything, so they had to cover it. It looked like a dead sheep under a blanket with its feet sticking out. It was about the most unthreatening thing you have ever seen. It was far more effective to not ever show what we saw, because ever since people have been asking about it. I guess I am a better actress than I thought, because what I was reacting to was a furniture pad with four phony feet sticking out of it. It was horrible.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  In retrospect, I don’t think I minded that, because going the other way sort of nailed it down to one specific thing limited to accepting a biblical position which may be as apocryphal as when someone stands up and says, “I died and before the surgeons brought me back I saw heaven and the streets were paved with gold.” And you want to say, “Well, maybe, but what value is gold in some other dispensation?” People tend to interpret things in terms of their own references, and those references could be quite meaningless on some level. I think the hoof thing might have been a limiting factor.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  They didn’t know what to call him, so I went back through Arabic mythology and found that Iblis is a name for Satan, so if you knew that, and I don’t think a lot of people would have known that, they would have been on to it right away.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  I had been influenced by the fact that the top ten scientists in the world at the time all believed in a greater power and a Godlike creature.

  JIM CARLSON

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  We all agreed that we couldn’t just have the Cylons in there every week with those computer voices missing everything they shot at. We were looking for other kinds of villains to bring in.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  (film critic, Access Hollywood)

  This was the episode where Glen Larson, the creator and writer of this episode, wore his faith on his sleeve. This episode is about his Mormon faith. A line from that episode is lifted from Mormonism, “As you are now, we once were, as we are now, you may become.” That’s direct from the Mormon faith, but this was an episode that brought religion and belief into the fore.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  We were very careful to keep it sort of theologically neutral. It was a bit of a stretch to some people probably to even consider the existence of a belief in God in outer space in the first place.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  That was the best of the bunch. This episode was Galactica’s finest hour. There are a lot of reasons for that. First of all, up to that point, every episode was more or less a threat from the Cylons. Every episode was the humans winning, getting away, escaping. Week after week, you did that; the Cylons stop being a threat. They become laughable. When you’re watching the pilot, the Cylons just wiped out the Twelve Colonies. They are a force to be feared. But by halfway through the first season, you stopped really worrying about them. They were establishing good dynamics with characters, bringing in someone like Commander Cain and Sheba, but “War of the Gods” was the first story of Galactica that went outside of the box.

  Because they’re moving further and further away from the colonies, we’re getting further into deep space, we’re going into the unknown. What’s out there? This was the first episode that really brought in a new force, but is it good or bad? It starts off with the Ship of Lights and the pilots that totally disappear and Starbuck, Apollo, and Sheba go to a planet where there’s some seismic activity. They think it might be the pilots who crashed, but it was something else that crashed. I’ll never forget the image of when they get down to the planet, the cinematography of that episode, they’re all red.

  One of my favorite scenes of that two-part episode is where Iblis meets Adama for the first time and they’re sizing each other up. They are on the same level playing field. They’re both older and wiser, and they both have paths. Adama’s trying to be a gentleman and say basically, “Are you sure you want to come with us? We’ve got problems.” Then, Iblis says, “Let me bring you a more optimistic appraisal. You’re searching for a tribe called Earth. Your tribes are scattered. The thi
rteenth journeyed to Earth a millennium ago,” and Adama, in a moment of vulnerability, plays it perfectly. He’s like, “Tell me about the civilization.” Iblis goes, “They have known great rises and falls.” It’s chilling, because it’s true. That sums up the Earth perfectly.

  Then, Adama composes himself. “Is our technology strong enough to help us defeat the Cylons?” Then the bomb drops when Iblis says, “I’ve come to prepare your way to Earth, but I have to lead you.” When you have a vampire, you have to invite him into your house. He has to be asked to lead them, and Adama is resisting that. The Council of Twelve has basically made up their minds. This is the guy, he’s got these special powers. He’s got this very interesting, romantic connection with Sheba, because she sees a lot of her father in this guy, but he is charming, and that moment where Baltar surrenders, that was like a sweeps story. The guy who just fucked over the human race just surrendered to us. Whoa!

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  (actor, “Lieutenant Boomer”)

  It touched on the good-and-evil theme and the morality of the Cylons and that there is a higher power that controls everything. You don’t find many science fiction films in general that touch on that point.

  RICHARD HATCH

  (actor, “Captain Apollo”)

  I believe that a lot of the ancient stories and mythology contain some degree of truth and that life must exist on other planets and on other dimensional frequencies. Therefore, it’s interesting to deal with an entity or someone that man has built into a powerful figure and put him in a science fiction framework.

  GLEN OLIVER

  (pop-culture commentator)

  “War of the Gods” has always spoken to me loudly, as it’s the first full-on indicator that the show had the potential to go far bigger than seemed possible at face value.

  The Ship of Light concept and mythology—and the possibilities it opened up—lay a tremendous groundwork. The Count Iblis character is fascinating in that he so pointedly represents a greater struggle in the universe—and greater danger—than viewers had previously been aware of. I’ve always wondered how or if the show would eventually have paid off his overt relationship to the Cylon backstory.