So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In the beginning, I didn’t want to settle on an idea of what their relationship was. I wanted to have a lot of possibilities. You know, what is she really? A chip in his head is the one we talked about the most frequently. Is she a manifestation of his subconscious trying to grapple with the enormity of what he’s done, so it’s all literally in his head? Is she an agent of an outside entity? Of God? Of whatever they believe God to be? What is it? I didn’t want an answer to that. I didn’t want to settle it. I wanted to be able to play different things for a while and not get an answer until much further down in the show. So early in the series, I just wanted to make sure that all of the above explanations were fluid.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  The spirituality aspect that Ron started to introduce gave that relationship a whole other dimension. It very much came out of the fact that we can’t keep playing this dynamic over and over again; it’s going to get boring. It started off physical but it became a much more dimensionalized, amazing kind of story. Then he’s with them on the fleet, and then becomes part of the rebel Cylons—a lot of those big kind of turns that Ron came up with all so that we didn’t fall into a rut.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In the episode “Six Degrees of Separation,” the other Six comes aboard. I felt I was deciding a couple of things. There was a great idea that somebody had in the room of just the thought that somebody would show up and it would be Number Six. That Six would walk into Galactica in the real world, and how would Baltar deal with that? So we loved that sort of notion of throwing him back on his heels right from the beginning. It was also a feeling that we needed to deal with what he did in the miniseries. That we hadn’t really done too much with the fact that he had given information to the Cylons on the defense mainframe. That was the key element in their ability to pull off a surprise attack, and we wanted that to threaten him at some point. We wanted, suddenly, his biggest secret of all would be directly threatened and how would he deal with that? So it was just a very sort of sexy idea from the word go.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In the end, Ron came up with the idea that Six really helped him with his father, who was senile, that she really did something emotional for him that meant a lot to him personally. So it wasn’t about fucking even then, exclusively. That was part of his tie to her, and I thought that was a great revelation. You know, we start the series thinking Baltar’s just a slimy womanizer, which he was, but his relationship with Six and his ties to Six were actually deeper even at the beginning, we just didn’t know that as an audience and that gets revealed in that flashback with his father.

  There’s a certain irony in the fact that Kara “Starbuck” Thrace hates taking orders and military protocol but loves flying. Notes the show’s bible, “Her record at the Academy and then at flight school was littered with demerits, reprimands and negative evaluations by her superiors. She drank too much, gambled too much, broke curfew almost daily, somehow always managed to be involved in any bar fight at the local watering holes and had a reputation for leaving a string of men with broken hearts and broken backs after sexual encounters that were more akin to a game of tackle pyramid than lovemaking. Simply put, she was a disaster as a military officer. But no one could argue with her flying.”

  She took a position at flight school, where she met and fell in love with Zak Adama. Writes Moore, “Zak failed a key flight test. A test Kara was administering. Zak was on the bubble as far as flight school was concerned and failing this test was a sure ticket out. It was Kara’s duty to fail him. But she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t destroy Zak’s dream of becoming a pilot like his father. She passed him and made a promise to herself that she would teach Zak everything he needed to know and make sure he became a great pilot. It wasn’t enough.” He ended up dying, though his death was chalked up to “pilot error” rather than attributed to instructor negligence. On the day of his funeral, Adama asked her to join him on Galactica, and she agreed; over the next two years the duo developed a father/daughter relationship.

  Katee Sackhoff, a native of Portland, Oregon, got her start in acting by starring in the TV movies Fifteen and Pregnant (1998) and Locust Valley (1999). Some TV guest-starring roles followed, though she appeared in four episodes of MTV’s Undressed, thirteen episodes of the series The Fearing Mind, and twenty-two episodes of The Education of Max Bickford, with Richard Dreyfuss, before becoming a part of the Battlestar Galactica ensemble.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Making the character of Starbuck a woman was literally one of the first things I thought of, honestly. This was at a moment in time when we were just starting to see women in combat. You would start to see female fighter pilots for the first time. So it was kind of new, and I thought, “Oh, well, how would that play out? Wait a minute, she has all the same characteristics of the original Starbuck. She smokes cigars and she gambles, and she’s the first one to throw a punch, and she’s a little unstable.” I thought, “I haven’t seen that character before as a female fighter pilot. That’s kind of cool.” I thought it might be sort of a minor controversy, but I didn’t really think it would be a thing. Then once it became a thing, then I was like, “Yeah, just stoke those flames, man. We need all the help we can get. Yell about it. Get angry. I need the publicity. Please. Go to chat rooms. More males demanding Ron Moore’s head. Please. Give it to me!”

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I was a lot younger than they had anticipated, or had been thinking about casting, or at least that’s what I was told. When I read the script, it was this big thick thing and I was on a plane heading home for Christmas in 2001. I read this thing and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, I’ve been searching for this for, like, five years. I get to shoot a gun. This is amazing. My dad would be so proud. I have to do this.” I called my people as soon as we got off the plane.

  At the time, I was playing very stereotypical blond-chick roles and was sort of over it. I had just wrapped a series in New York, and really wanted to find something different to change the course of my career. We started looking and everything I was being offered was, like, “The chick in a horror movie that gets her head cut off.” Been there, done that. So I read this script when I was, I think, twenty-one years old, and they had said, “You’re way too young for this; they won’t see you.” I was like, “Okay, well, let me know if they change their minds, I love the script.” About a month or two later, I got the phone call that they would see me. They were opening up a little bit, and I was like, “Okay.” I went in and the entire time we just kept hearing back from them that I was too girly, and I wasn’t right for it, and it wasn’t the direction they wanted to go. It was just everything you don’t want to hear when you really want a job. I just kept saying, “Will they please see me again? I’ll go back and I’ll do this and I’ll change that.” They’d say, “Hey, Katee, maybe you shouldn’t wear heels to an audition to play a fighter pilot,” and I was like, “Well, I feel like she would wear heels. I think she would not give a shit.”

  I auditioned like six or seven times. I cut my hair in the process. I took off my stilettos, because I guess Starbuck doesn’t wear those. Eventually I got the part and I had no idea that it was ever going to be what it became. I tested against Grace Park for the role, and when I found out I got it, my parents just happened to be in town, and I turned to my parents and I said, “I feel so bad for the girl I met there. They should make her Boomer.” And when it actually happened, I was like, “Oh, that’s awesome!”

  Come to find out they weren’t testing her against me. They were probably testing both of us individually for those roles. The story goes that David Eick’s ex-wife was watching the tapes sort of on silent, in the living room or his bedroom or something, the audition tapes, and his ex-wife walked by the tape and I guess he was begrudging the fact that they couldn’t find Starbuck, and she walked by and said, “What are you talking about? That’s her right there.” So I guess that’s how I got the job.

  RONALD D. MOORE
>
  I didn’t know Katee before the role, but I always kind of thought, “This is a perfect marriage of actor and role,” because, man, she seemed like Starbuck. There was a mischievous quality to Katee and a tough part. There was a “don’t fuck with me” part of Katee; a somewhat dangerous part. It just felt so right that she played that role, and it just felt like she and the character became one.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I had never seen the original, so one of my best girlfriends and I decided to watch it, because I called my dad and said, “I found a role. You’d be so happy. It’s Battlestar Galactica,” and he’s like, “That’s great. Who are you playing?” I told him Starbuck and he said, “Do me a favor. Go to Blockbuster, rent it, watch it, and call me back.” So my girlfriend and I were drinking wine, as you do, and we get ten minutes into it and they’re talking about Starbuck and Starbuck’s obviously in the room. She looks at me and goes, “Did we miss it? Where is she? Rewind it.” So we rewound it, pushed play, and I went, “Oh, shit,” and called my dad back. I was like, “I get that.” So I marched down to the internet café, which was four blocks away. I paid my $11.99 for one hour, logged on to a chat group just to see what they thought about my being cast. I learned in that moment, “Fuck ’em.” There you go.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Katee was capable of doing almost anything Starbuck did. I wouldn’t blink if she pulled out a gun in the middle of a fight or slugged somebody on the set. Not that she got into big fights like that, but just that the actress had this toughness and resiliency and this wicked sense of humor that was so close to what we were writing that you stopped thinking about whether you were writing for Katee or for Starbuck. It was really one idea that you were writing for. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. She didn’t go off on binges, and she didn’t actually hit crew people and she wasn’t out of control, but there was this dangerous, unpredictable, mischievous part of Katee that you just saw the character through really easily. She was Starbuck. It was just that perfect in terms of casting.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I’ve been saying to people lately that I actually need to go and rewatch it, because I’ve actually never sat down and watched the series from front to back. I originally watched the directors’ rough cuts, probably in my trailer while I was filming other things, and that’s sort of how I saw every episode. I never actually watched it while it aired or anything. My experience of the show is purely just from an actor living it and not as a viewer yet. But I sure felt like Kara went through a lot. She grew a lot during the series, from the moments we first met her and she was one step above an angsty teenager. As time went on, we saw her maturing and realizing the magnitude of the responsibility that she had been given. In the beginning of the series, so many people in this world didn’t understand this circumstance in anything other than history. So when it actually happened to them, I think that the responsibility for their position that they held took a while to hit some of the younger soldiers, Kara probably being the most evident of that.

  When we were doing the pilot, I was told so many times that I was not right for this part that you get to the point where you think, “Oh my God, I’m not ready for this part.” We’re doing a scene in the Viper and it’s the first time I’ve been in it. Part of me is going, “Oh my God, this is so cool,” part of me is going, “Oh my God, it’s like eight hundred degrees.” Then the other part is like, “What the fuck is my dialogue? I don’t know what any of this shit means. I don’t know how I’m going to say it, because I don’t know anything.” I literally couldn’t say the dialogue. We must have done it so many times, and I remember thinking to myself, “You stupid little girl, you’re going to get fired.” So I just put my dialogue right up on the screen, because I was like, “I’m just going to read it,” and I did it for the rest of the series. All of my dialogue in the cockpit was on the screen, because I couldn’t remember the science stuff. The one line I couldn’t say was, “We’ve got violent decompressions radiating from the port flight pod.” Now I can’t forget it. It’s in my goddamn head. It won’t go away.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  I get choked up even just to talk about working with Katee Sackhoff, because she’s one of the most phenomenal talents I’ve ever worked for. I say work for, because I wrote for her, and there’s no greater thrill except maybe having kids and having your grandchild, but there’s no greater thrill than to write for an actress of the caliber of Katee Sackhoff, and watching her bring that character to life was one of the greatest experiences of my career, and I feel that Bradley [Thompson] and I just really locked in to that character.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I lived in New York on September eleventh, and up until that moment I had, for the most part, lived a very sheltered life. I had lived on my own since I was seventeen, but nothing really terrible had ever happened to me that could have been potentially life-threatening. I think it was the first moment that I realized the fragility of life, and it was a lesson that hit really hard, really fast. It was a very similar thing that happened to a lot of the younger soldiers on the Galactica and in this world, because up until this moment, everything that she had been told about the Cylons had been read in history books.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  She was, in a way, me. Kara’s father was, in a way, my father. Her mother was my father and me, and I know that sounds confusing, but those dynamics, those personal experiences were very much channeled through. When she talks about the story in “Maelstrom” when she says, “My mother was in a jungle fighting and she had this post-traumatic phobia about bugs, and I put rubber bugs in her closet, and she would try to smash them”—I did that to my dad, who was a marine in the South Pacific.

  We wrote for a show called The Fearing Mind, which was Katee Sackhoff’s very first show. She was a daughter in that show and I put all these scenes about my daughter and me, and Katee played my daughter in the material I came up with. You’d see her on “Maelstrom,” and director Michael Nankin would say, “Do one now where her mother’s dying. Cry your eyes out. Don’t hold it back. Now smile as she tells you you’re my daughter. It’s a happy moment.” Katee would do every color that Michael asked for. Oh, you know just fearlessly run into those emotions, and on an instinctual level is just an amazing actress and just such a thrill that I got to write with her. I love her with all my heart.

  MICHAEL NANKIN

  (director, “Maelstrom”)

  Katee and I had this great rapport right from the get-go. We just understood each other, and it was a sort of director/actor relationship that ran very deep. You know the stuff that she had to do and the places she had to go, and the stuff she had to dredge up to take the character where she needed to go. So it was a very intimate relationship, because you work in almost any other situation, you’re not seeing your coworkers stripped to their core emotionally.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Katee was Starbuck. So clear and perfectly created, that character in the miniseries, that then it became just keep going. She’s set. We know who she is, she knows who she is, just write it.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  Starbuck was in your face. She was tough. She didn’t take any shit and got into it with everybody and mixed it up, right? Perhaps Katee being so moody and capricious and whatnot, maybe she was staying in character. Just to give her the benefit of the doubt, that could have been part of it, but I don’t think so. I think she was Starbuck all the way through. I don’t think she really had an arc. She got this big sort of smack down where we decided that we were going to kill her, and then she became something else. Then she became this more sort of ethereal, whimsical, mythical character. But she was kick-ass until the end. When you think about it, as far as a character arc, the conventional thing would’ve been she’s kick-ass Starbuck and then becomes humbled and realizes that there’s such a thing as humanity. That’s a very conventional turn. We could’ve done that with her, but, like I said, that’s kind of boilerplate. I like what we did. It was a great sort of
violent right turn.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  Brad and I wrote “The Hand of God,” “Act of Contrition.” We did a lot of the writing on “You Can’t Go Home Again,” even though our names are not on the script. Then we wrote “Scar” in the second season. So we really kind of locked in on Kara Thrace, the reckless, self-destructive, yet brilliant Viper pilot. She was the best in the fleet because she had this sort of a reckless abandon; she would go right up to the edge of something that was suicidal. She didn’t care, so you could set up perhaps a kind of death wish behind her bravado. That was very much Ron’s take on the character, and Brad and I wrote to that in our episodes. The other thing that Ron had was a very strong idea that Kara would turn out to be some kind of guardian angel. Not that she would die—we didn’t have that idea in the beginning—but that she would play a very critical role in leading the fleet to Earth, and she wouldn’t realize she had this destiny or these abilities. His ideas were very strong on that, but how we were going to get there or how that story was going to unfold, Ron did not know.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Starbuck’s journey started with something small, in a scene between her and Leoben in the episode “Flesh and Bone.” He’s tapping into the river and seeing things that no one else can see, that there’s something special in her, and that she had a destiny and that she was unique. We didn’t really know where we were going to go with that, but we liked the idea that Kara was special and Leoben saw it. Right away that meant whenever we saw Leoben, there was going to be a Kara story attached to it.