So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  DAVID WEDDLE

  At first we felt like we never wanted to really see much of the Cylons, because our thinking was that if they remain kind of an enigma, they’re scarier. So we stayed with that for a while, but really Ron started blowing that apart with the episode in which he has Cally shoot Boomer, and we see her kind of deprogramming and resurrected in a new body in the second-season episode “Downloaded.” Really what it is, is you have to develop more story. What are we going to do? We started to realize that our initial thought to keep the Cylons a mystery wouldn’t work. As a show goes over four seasons, you can’t be repetitive. You can’t just keep telling the same kinds of stories, so how do we make it more interesting as they’re being pursued across the galaxy, being attacked by the Cylons?

  DAVID EICK

  The only three Cylons we knew about for sure in the miniseries were Leoben, the PR guy, and Sharon, so anybody who became Cylons or were revealed as Cylons—the Final Five and all that stuff—developed later. All of them have their own origins in terms of folks on staff who had ideas and weird shit Ron and I would come up with, or stuff the network said they wanted more of.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  It was starting to fall into a repetitive pattern, so “Downloaded,” and then from there on really starting to expand on things. It even started in the first season where you have Six and Doral talking about Athena running off with Helo, and that she thinks she’s in love with him. Six admits that she envies them, which shows that they’re conflicted about humans having love and they don’t have it. And they’re haunted by some insecurities. So it started in the first season, but “Downloaded” was really cracking it open into the Cylon world, and then we just embraced that. It turned out to be fantastic, because it not only gave us story material to explore them, but it amplified all our themes. You know, the human beings think the Cylons are not legitimate life forms, that they’re just machines, but we began to see that the Cylons and the humans were really not that different. That they had some of the same common struggles.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  (film critic, Access Hollywood)

  I thought it was interesting that you had Cylons that looked like humans. Among other things, the show really posed a four-year-long question of what it means to be human. Also, the brilliance of the new Galactica was this: In the beginning, the Cylons were bad, and the humans were good. As the series progressed, naturally, organically, over those four years, they became more alike than not alike. You had Cylons that were good, and humans that were bad. That happened gradually. It was a gradual shift that worked.

  Moore admits that the idea of Cylons among us in human form was inspired by the Changeling storyline on Deep Space Nine. In that Star Trek scenario, the United Federation of Planets was being infiltrated by shape-shifters intent on destroying humanity from within in a creepy and effective take on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers sci-fi trope, which had also been effectively mined in the first-season Next Generation episode “Conspiracy.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I like those storylines in Deep Space and I wanted to play more of that in the show. But I think one of the reasons why I limited it right in the miniseries—where I said there were only twelve models—was because I didn’t want it to be everybody. I wanted to kind of put some kind of governor on it that would keep us in a certain box. That it wasn’t a Changeling that could be anybody in the entire fleet and in the entire show, because I just thought that would overwhelm it and you would never be able to escape it. It would be so omnipresent. It also meant that you would have to get into a situation where eventually you’re going to reveal them all and the game is over. And that would be a good thing.

  To keep those same models returning, there had to be a “resurrection” ship, in which the consciousness of a fallen Cylon would download into a new body. The concept of that vessel was depicted in a second-season two-parter.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The concept was something that David and Bradley had in the room prior to the episode. We were talking about how the notion of resurrection worked so far away from the Cylon world. You know, now they’re pursuing us and we’re very far away from the colonies and very far away from wherever the Cylon homeworld was. How does their resurrection happen so far afield? David and Bradley came up with the idea that, “Oh, well, maybe they have a ship. There’s literally a resurrection ship that sort of goes out with them, sort of like a tanker would go out with a fleet to supply them with oil or fuel.” Which is kind of a cool idea.

  TONI GRAPHIA

  (co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Part of the idea for the resurrection ship came from my Catholic upbringing, plus I remembered the cover of that Michael Crichton book Coma. The cover had a picture of all these bodies suspended on ropes or something. It was a very visceral-looking picture. We also had some kind of strategic dilemma, story dilemma, of how we were going to make this happen. These Cylons, how are they going to regenerate? We needed some kind of method, or base. I remember thinking, “If they just had tons of bodies, kind of like this Coma picture, just hanging on the ship, and they’re resurrecting them.” Because I’m Catholic, I was, like, we’ll call it the resurrection ship. I remember that was one of my contributions.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  (co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Essentially the Cylons can’t be killed, because they download into another body and come back. That evolved—this idea of the download and the bodies coming out of the pools on the ship—as we were going forward, looking for a story and looking for interesting new change-ups, and things to do as the series progressed to shake things up. It’s following the stories along a track that feels logical to you, but being open to those side trips and to new ideas and inventions that possibly change how the series feels, which is great. That’s the fun of it, the challenge of it, the joy of it—to have that opportunity to evolve a show like that. We always had a schematic of where to go, but it was getting there that was the fun for writers; figuring out how we get there in the most interesting, torturous way to our characters possible.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In dealing with Cylon religion, I broke the story for the miniseries myself in my office in Glendale. Put cards up on the board and broke down each scene just like I had learned to do at the writers’ office, and just started writing it. There was a moment when I wrote the scene between Baltar and Number Six at the beginning of the mini where she turns to him at one point and says, “God is love.” I just sort of wrote that in the moment and didn’t know what the hell it meant, but kind of thought, “Well, that’s an interesting thing for a robot to say.” I kind of liked it and it fed into some of the conversations that David and Breck [Eisner] and I had had. I said, “Okay, let’s try it out.”

  TRICIA HELFER

  There were moments where I was utterly confused about Six and the Cylons. I was like, “I don’t understand what this ‘God is love and we have a plan’ is. What is the plan? I don’t even know what I am, and I don’t know why Gaius can only see me in his head.” My character in particular, I think, had to kind of just go with the flow quite a bit. It started from the beginning in the series bible, where all the characters had a two- or three-page backstory—except for Six. Her backstory written by the creator of the show was “the machine as woman.” I go to Ron and I’m like, “I am the newest actor of the show in terms of experience, and you’ve given me the least to work with.” He’s like, “I haven’t decided everything on the Cylon yet. And because you are the Cylon, I don’t know what else to say.” Boomer became a known Cylon fairly soon, but she was a sleeper agent; her backstory was all the sleeper agent information. From the beginning, I had to just kind of make my own backstories.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  (director, Battlestar Galactica miniseries [2003])

  When I first read the script for the miniseries, the religious angle didn’t exist. The whole allegory of al-Qaeda was clear a
nd strong to me. They added a lot of stuff to make the allegory more pointed, which I didn’t think was necessary. I actually had a hard time getting my head around the God stuff, because I didn’t feel like it had been realized specifically enough. Okay, robots are going to have a god, but we need to know what it is. But as we did the show and it was put together, I think that I was wrong and that the whole aspect of their spirituality is quite fascinating and is something that’s not defined clearly, but certainly something that adds a complexity to them that makes me want to know how did this evolve. What does this mean? What do they believe? So I do see parallels to fundamentalism—not just Muslims, but people who have a clarity of belief.

  DAVID EICK

  It was certainly part of the Cylon mythos that they had adopted a monotheist religion. That was in the underlying material about the Cylons, but the emphasis on using it in the pilot as part of Six’s character and actually making it part and parcel to her discussion with Baltar … that came very late. I don’t know that we had intended to make it an overt character point in the miniseries until very late. “God is love” was just a weird line to end the scene on. It didn’t mean anything.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When we turned in the draft, Michael Jackson—who was a network executive, he really liked it and he gave back a specific note saying, “And you know the thing you have about the Cylons talking about God is fascinating. You’ve got all this other stuff in here that’s sort of reminiscent of al-Qaeda and religious fundamentalism. I just think you could really go further in this direction in the script.” I remember getting that note and saying, “Wow, I’m never gonna get the note that you can do more religion in the show again, so I might as well take it and seize on it and make it a bigger philosophical construct.”

  DAVID EICK

  On the next rewrite, Ron was like, “Well, if the goddamn suit is telling me he wants me to be this subversive and to risk flirting with sacrilegious, who am I to say no?” I started thinking at that point more in terms of the Cylon religion versus the human religion. Since there were all these names in the human culture drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, that sort of implied a belief in a pantheistic—or a polytheistic—point of view, so it became, “What if I made the humans polytheistic? And they believe in the many gods, and then the Cylons could believe in the one true God and this is a way to sort of do a replay on Western civilization; of the one God coming to drive out the many, except we’re on the other side of that story now.” And I started really feeling like this is really rich and interesting territory.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  And then there’s Cylons having sex with humans. It’s part of what I thought was a mature science fiction piece. It was weird to me that most science fiction on TV and in movies was very sexless. I mean, there’s no sex in Star Wars to speak of. The original Star Trek had a sexy quality to it. You know, Kirk had many women in his life. And then it all kind of went away from that. The Next Generation was pretty chaste, and it all just felt weird that human sexuality was not really a part of the conversation anymore in science fiction. So I just felt like this was also a part of making a mature show. It was an adult show. It was not a show that was meant for kids. They were adults and adults have sex, so we were going to have sex from the very beginning. Baltar and Six were going to go at it right in the first episode. And in fact, day one of shooting was Baltar and Six having sex. That was the very first scene.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In that miniseries scene where Six kills the baby, when she walks away there’s a sadness in her eyes, as though she resents the fact that human beings can procreate. So that led us all to brainstorm that, yes, there can be endless amounts of duplicates of Sharon or Six, but they’re limited to certain prototypes. They can’t sexually reproduce. They can’t combine their DNA and create something totally unique and different. And maybe there’s an insecurity beneath all of that.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  The idea developed that if you got two human beings, you can populate the universe if things go correctly. If you’ve got two Cylons, you have to build all the downloading equipment, you have to build all of this gear that makes Cylons. They don’t replicate. That is a thing to say, “Well, if we were really alive, we could just do this ourselves.” We also wondered what would it do if we had essentially a human consciousness. You’re going, “I’m not really human, because I can’t make more of me, unless I build all of this machinery. Do I feel somehow inferior?”

  Then does this become a rage against the people that created me in the first place? You built a faulty thing. How could you do this to us? That was why it was, “You are flawed and we are not. We are the next step in evolution.” It’s also that thing where you’re never really free until you’ve killed your parents. All of those things were floating around. Those are the discussions that went on at length, trying to figure out who these guys were and what they wanted. That brought in the whole aspect of love. Can you really have love? Which eventually got the question of what is human and who are we? By looking at them, we got a little bit of definition of what we are and what we are not.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Something we got a lot of questions on was why Six’s spine glowed red during sex with Baltar. That was something that David came up with and I, frankly, never particularly liked. But it was one of those concessions of, “Look, we’ve got to bow to some genre tropes here and there. Let’s have the spines glow, because they’re kind of cool. That’s kind of sci-fi-y.” I was sort of like, “Really? It seems so hokey.” But I went with it, because it was more like, “All right, whatever.” That’s not a hill to die on for me. I really hated the ad campaign that had Six’s eyes glowing, because that never happened in the show and I thought it was ridiculous and silly. So the glowing spine thing was just a concession to giving everybody something weird to talk about. It doesn’t really mean anything, but okay. You know, in case you’re worried that it’s not a science fiction or fantasy piece, here’s proof.

  DAVID EICK

  The question I was asking myself is, How do we show that the Cylons are seeking love? In other words, if you just say this person having sex is a robot and up to no good and that’s it, it’s one thing. But that isn’t it. They’re not just bad guys. They’re complicated. They have yearning and they have needs and they have desires, and one way to show or press that humanity is an orgasm. I just thought, “Well, that’s sort of an echo of the oscillating red eye from the Cylons in the original, and what if their orgasm is an oscillating red backbone?”

  12.

  LESS IS MOORE

  “Grab your gun and bring in the cat.”

  The very foundation of the success of the new iteration of Battlestar Galactica was its ensemble, a cast of characters comprised of veteran actors as well as far less familiar names, many Canadians who were Vancouver locals at the beginning of their careers. The resulting ensemble became a powerful tool to allow the writers myriad opportunities for character exploration and innovative storytelling unlike any the genre had ever seen.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  (executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  We kind of knew we had gold as soon as we saw the miniseries. Think about that poker game. Helo’s great. He’s sucking on that lollipop. Kara’s tossing Tigh and Tigh’s anger is boiling over. Wow, that’s a great little scene. And you got Adama and his son. Just fantastic. We had lightning in the bottle with that cast, because you could just see it in the miniseries. We were so excited about the actors that we had and the chemistry among the cast that when Sci-Fi started talking about, “Well, maybe we’ll pick up the show, but we would want to recast,” David and I were adamant that we wouldn’t do the show if they were going to recast. You would never be able to recast those roles again and come anywhere near the quality of what we had.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  (co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I’ve found in so many cases when you’re on
a show and you think you know the characters really well as the writers and creator, but the people that inhabit those characters, who have to play them every week, bring insights that are often surprising. You’re not always able to take their ideas, but you’re wise to listen, because they inhabit the roles. That’s what they do. If they have a feeling that doesn’t feel like something their character might or might not do, or they have a strong opinion that this is something their character might do, then it’s always wise to listen. The scripts were, I’d say, fairly well worked out before they hit the stage, so there wasn’t a whole lot of argument and discussion at that point, but they definitely brought their attitudes toward those characters to the show. You’d always want to listen very carefully to what is it that’s bugging them about this line or troubling them about this relationship, or where this is going. A lot of that would have happened on Ron and David’s level, frankly, but when you’re on set, you hear it, too.

  Commander William Adama is the man at the helm of the battlestar Galactica. In Moore’s bible for the series, he’s described as follows: “Adama is a bit of an anomaly. He is both a career military officer and a passionate civil libertarian. Adama believes in the military, believes it’s a noble profession. He’s also a fierce advocate for liberties and freedoms on which the colonies were founded. This duality in his personality have often put him at odds with military establishment and has definitely held him back and prevented him from making admiral. He’s a bit of a historian, versed in the classics from a young age by his mother, and views the world through the prism of larger historical content. He’s also an avid sports fan and lover of the great outdoors, often spending his leave in remote wilderness campsites alone.”