So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  Starbuck arrives on Caprica and finds the Arrow. She’s forced to fight and kill a Number Six copy, then reunites with Helo. She sees the Sharon that he’s been traveling with, and realizes that she’s a Cylon. Starbuck tries to shoot Sharon, but Helo stops her. She’s not just any Cylon. She’s pregnant with Helo’s child.

  Boomer, armed with a nuclear warhead, flies into the Cylon ship orbiting Kobol. A dozen identical Sharons greet her, confirming her worst fear. Nevertheless, she completes her mission and returns to Galactica. Shaken, she reports to Adama that the basestar was destroyed. Without warning, she pulls out her sidearm and fires two bullets point-blank into Adama’s chest.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The episode “Water” got us into a conversation about the Galactica herself and how it functioned. It has a big recycling plant, so it was pretty much independent. But maybe the other ships of the fleet wouldn’t have the same facilities. Galactica would have to be the big water tank and be topping off the other ships periodically, but they’d still have to find sources of water out there in the galaxy.

  DAVID EICK

  We originally thought the show was going to be much more about how do people survive in space when there’s no water and there’s no booze and there’s no farms. We got bored of it. We did some good ones, but we just didn’t care. It just wasn’t interesting to do a show that was all about that. In a way, it meant you were constantly focusing on housekeeping shit, and you weren’t getting into interesting character shit.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I enjoyed dealing with the infrastructure of how you would survive in this diminishing-returns world you’re in. At first, basically they still had everything that they needed to keep going; some of the basic comforts of life. They could pretend a little bit that they could still live life like they did before, but as we went further into the show, obviously things got much more desperate and dire. In some ways, it felt like their situation had become darker and a little more real, because that’s really what that situation would have been.

  I think of a show like Star Trek: Voyager, where they’re seventy-five years from Earth. I thought the reality of that is that they would just be killed. An entire ship would be taken over by pirates and they’d go to hell in twenty minutes, because I don’t have a high opinion of human nature sometimes. I felt like we played with the reality of that on Battlestar Galactica. Not to the point of everybody being killed, but certainly, in later seasons, mutinies and talks of colluding with the Cylons becoming a huge flash point for people. I just found those very rich and really great worlds to play in.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We saw an opportunity to set the table on a bigger scale. Okay, what kind of show is Battlestar Galactica? “Are they going to run into aliens” was one of the quick questions we wanted to answer. Lying to rest that sort of vision of the universe, there’s a speech by Colonel Tigh where he kind of talks about, “Look, the universe is pretty much a barren, empty place. There’s not much out there. Most planets aren’t habitable, there’s very little life, and it’s a big empty universe.” I wanted to put that in the audience’s mind early, so that we took off the table the whole notion of not only aliens, but also that there would be a planet of quality for the series. That it wasn’t going to be a series about continually pulling out to a new potential home and then having to have a plot that told us why that one wasn’t going to work. I wanted the audience to realize that that really wasn’t going to be part of the story. It was another effort to set the show apart from Star Trek and, to a certain extent, from the original Battlestar. I was definitely still in the mode of walking away from anything that felt like Trek.

  DAVID EICK

  It looked like we were abandoning the original plan, and the network was like, “Well, then what is the show? You guys told us it was going to be a show about we’re out of shit, and if it’s not that, what is it?” That made it a little more difficult.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I remember Toni Graphia was writing the script for “Bastille Day” and we started talking about the fact that I was on the lookout for a character that could be right for Richard Hatch. As the story started to develop into an Apollo story, that was going to be sending Lee out to deal with the prison episode, it felt like the perfect opportunity to bring in Richard to play the leader of the mutineers, Tom Zarek. Then we’d get to have these scenes with old Apollo and new Apollo that we got excited about. It just felt like a really unexpected way to go, to bring him in and to have him be the character voicing skepticism about everything that they were doing. There was just a lot of fun in that idea. That Richard, who vocally had not been supportive of this iteration of Galactica, would then be the guy to be in the show and saying a lot of those kinds of things. The redirection of Galactica and questioning the people doing it and running everything. We just thought that was a lot of fun.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  Ron’s concept of Zarek was as the guy that would say all the bad things that Ron thinks we’re doing with the show and the people, and him being right about a lot of it. I thought that was brilliant. It was fun to write him that way, as the gadfly, the revolutionary, and the fact that he was right about so many things really helped. It’s one thing to create a villain that’s twisting his mustache and saying, “I’m going to kill everybody and I’m going to dominate the world!” Instead, he’s the guys that says, “You know what? You’re acting like a petty despot,” and Laura Roslin’s going, “Yeah? Well, there’s a good reason for it.”

  It gets you into instead of a comic book character, you’ve got the problems that Abraham Lincoln had, which is, “I’ve got a civil war going on here. You know what? Habeas corpus does not serve here. I need to put all these Confederate leaders in jail without any actual charges other than that they’re making me annoyed and I’m worried about them.” Basically he got rid of habeas corpus for all of that. Then again, he had the balls to say, “We’re in the middle of a civil war, but I’m still going to hold an election.” That is a multifaceted character. Zarek was pointing out, “Hey, wait a minute, Abe, you’re doing some wrong things here.” She may have good reasons, but does that make those reasons correct? “Do you deserve to have your society or are you just going to be another petty despot? In which case, do you swear you’re going to have free elections once the crisis is over? How many times have I heard that?”

  The show needed that, and Adama did, too, though he’s coming from the military point of view. And the military mind is mission, whatever it is. What’s going to accomplish the mission? He had a conscience about it in terms of the witch hunts. Why we have posse comitatus laws is that the military is trained to fight enemies, but now they’re working with your civilians and patrolling them as police. They start to see the civilians as the enemy and that’s not a good thing.

  Ron and David, coming from political-science backgrounds, had a heavy interest in politics. All of those things kept coming up. It’s, like, “How do you design a government?” You see that every day on the news. You’re still trying to figure out whether they were right or wrong in setting this up. You’ve got the two sides saying, “Well, it can be whatever we want it to be, because we’re the majority.” They’re going, “Wait a minute. No! These rules were set up a long time ago to protect the minority against your majority.” What is a representative republic as opposed to a democracy? All those questions are still valid and they’re still being argued today.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  When I was a kid, America was the promised land of everything that was good. All the best food, all the best toys, all the best movies. They all came from America, and Battlestar was on TV. I remember it distinctly. We rented a home in Old Lyme in Connecticut for the summer, while my dad was doing some work in New York City, and I watched Battlestar. And so to then meet the guy that was from this world, so far away from mine, it was amazingly special. And on my first experience of doing an American TV series! So the whole thing was romantic and glamorous
and exotic, but on the flip side of that, Richard had been sort of outspoken to the press about his antipathy to what we were doing. So there was the added pressure that not only was this guy, this figure from my childhood, there, but he didn’t like me.

  I was terrified and a bit resentful, to be honest, if I’m really open about why I was the character chosen to have to come across his alter ego. Why couldn’t it have been Herb [Jefferson] and Boomer or Dirk Benedict and Starbuck? Why couldn’t it be somebody else? But I could see why Ron had done it. I could see what he’d gone for in the story to create another dysfunctional mentor-pupil relationship to sort of mirror the father-son relationship he got in there with Adama. And there were so many metatextual kind of references to a freedom fighter that I had admired, but was disappointed to meet in person. And he saw something in me within the story of Zarek and Lee Adama.

  JAMES CALLIS

  I always thought Richard was a prince of a man. He was kind and generous, gentle and thoughtful. He had a certain quality that you couldn’t quite say exactly what that thing was, but that’s why he was who he was. I remember just thinking of him as a real hero, watching him as Apollo in the original—I just thought he was pretty incredible. Playing Tom Zarek was something I think Richard loved and enjoyed, but it certainly brought some challenges, because Zarek was nothing like Richard at all. I hope people realized it was just acting, because he wasn’t that guy.

  I had some funny scenes with Richard, because when he came in for the first time and he had a scene, he wasn’t quite sure how Head Six was going to work. Like, with Tricia coming out from behind the scenery. That was just amazing, in the sense of us all falling apart just laughing. The whole thing sometimes is rather silly. You’re doing this very serious thing, and it’s, like, “Wait a minute, is she coming from behind the scenery? Can I see her?” We’re like, “No, you can’t see her. You’re not allowed to look.” He’s like, “Well, that’s a bit tough,” but we said, “No, sorry, Richard, you’re not allowed to look at Tricia.”

  MARY MCDONNELL

  My memory of Richard is watching him so gracefully surrender to the current Battlestar. He did it with such dignity. He was a very kind, wise human being, so to watch him slowly surrender to this situation and also begin to realize that the more he did, the more Ron Moore got excited by his performance and this character became such an interesting force … I’m just very happy it was a part of his life.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I just called Richard up and I said, “Look, we talked about this at one point, now it’s happening and I want to send you a script.” I think he was a little skeptical, but he really liked it. He responded to it; it was a great role for him, so he said yes and we brought him aboard. I have to say that Richard was one of the most professional actors we ever worked with. He was really a pro.

  The table read on Galactica was usually like the day before shooting the next episode, and the cast was almost always brought in on their lunch hours. So we’ve only got an hour and we’re crammed in and they’re eating and flipping through the pages and reading their lines. They’d seen it before, because they’ve seen all the pages, but never really focused on it. But Richard comes in and he’s off book. He’s playing it, and they all notice. He was that guy. He was really well prepared on the set and never gave anybody a problem. He embraced the show so completely that he then became an advocate for it. He was telling fans how great it was. Just an amazing transformation.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  I’d come in especially for the read-through, and when I walked into the room, there was only one person I could see there, but I deliberately tried not to walk straight up to him, but just to sort of act like I normally would. And then I thought, “No, I’m going to go straight up to him. I’m going to tell him how much I admire his work.” And I was going to just get in there first, make sure I started this thing off in the right way. But he beat me to it, because he’s such a nice, nice man. He was someone who was so warm and generous. He was so thrilled to be there, by the end. And in our many years since, he’s been so encouraging and positive about everything that I’ve tried to do with my career, and he’s shared experiences from his career in a very generous, very humble way in the way that he was. I told him straightaway, there is only one Apollo—I’m playing Lee Adama. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a different character and I wouldn’t try and imitate what you tried to do and what you did so successfully, and you’re a huge part of my childhood and everything like that.

  He then ended up, over the years, saying to me, “Jamie, I’m so envious, because all the things that you’re getting to do with this character are the things that I really wanted to do, but obviously our program and television at the time wasn’t ready to do it yet.” He then said, “I’m enjoying playing Tom Zarek more than I ever enjoyed playing Apollo.” Even though my performance is different from his, he’s a latent part of it. There’s no way in which I can disassociate what I did from what he did, even though I tried not to think about it too much while I was doing it, but there is that nobility that he created that can’t help but be part of the light that shines through what Ron wrote, and what I then brought to the screen was the candle of an honest soul that he brought to that character.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In “You Can’t Go Home Again,” they’re searching for Starbuck. This was a great opportunity for us to really get inside the characters. I remember thinking I really wanted to show Adama and Lee going too far. The way you traditionally tell that story is, “We’re going to find our man no matter what!” and, lo and behold, we do. And no one really questions whether it’s worth the time and resources to do it. I really wanted to push that as far as we could in the show, so that ultimately Laura has to say, “This is ridiculous,” and Tigh supports her, surprisingly. And then get to that place in the scene where Lee says, “What would you do if that was me down there?” and Adama answers, “You? I’d never leave.” Which I thought was a really great thing, especially since up until then the whole thing we had been playing pretty much was just conflict between father and son. That was a turning point in their relationship, for Adama to say that, and for Lee to really hear it and believe that he truly meant it.

  The episode “Litmus” brought with it the idea of suicide bombers, a subject that remains sadly as relevant today as it was back then.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We were looking for a bottle show, something that would stay on Galactica, because we were looking for ways of making up the deficit for the prison episode. So the idea of doing some version of a trial episode is an easy one to do, because it’s going to be one of the basic sets. So we were looking for that concept. It was our first foray into the notion of suicide bombers on the show, which we thought was going to be a loaded idea. I was prepared for a big fight with the network about it, but it never came, to be honest. It was not a big deal to them. Again, what was a big deal was the graphic nature, how much you were going to see and were there body parts flying through the air? Blood! Very little about the political nature of the show, which I was grateful for. That really sort of laid the groundwork for the rest of the show. I had very few, if any, arguments on any sociopolitical aspect of the show, religion of the show, or any of that. It was always about graphic content. And how depressing the show is. But the big ideas seldom had any arguments.

  Moore also believes this episode served as the opportunity to get further into the Cylons themselves, through our first inside look at a Cylon Raider.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I didn’t have a lot in the show bible about the Cylons, and I didn’t really anticipate we were going to get to know them so deeply and intimately as we did, as quickly as we did. So this forced to the surface some pretty fundamental questions. You know, what would the inside of one of these Raiders be like? What was the Raider? What was the Raider in relationship to the humanoid Cylons? Did it have an intelligence? Was it sentient like they were? And if not, why not? And how did that work? A
nd how could Starbuck use one to get back to Galactica? So we started talking about maybe they’re more like animals, more like horses to the humanoid Cylons. Or were almost pets. You know, so they could be trained to do tasks and would do them until they were destroyed, but had no self-awareness, no true sentience of themselves. The humanoid Cylons would not have conversations with them, for instance. But there would be room inside of it for Starbuck to get inside, figure out how this thing worked, and then be able to fly it. That was the fundamental idea, which got us into this melding of organic and biomechanical infrastructure inside of Cylon Raiders, which later would lead to the development of the Hybrid. The Hybrid that ran the basestars was sort of born in this idea that there were these forms in the Cylon world that were cybernetic.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  “Flesh and Bone” was a key episode for us. What we were fascinated with, and I can tell you that from the beginning I was a big proponent of this, was the idea that because they are robots, it’s easy to say that the Cylons aren’t legitimate life forms. In the miniseries there are all of these derogatory comments about Aaron Doral, “You’re just a robot, you have gears and circuits and you don’t have feelings.” I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was a put-down of Doral, and I wanted to make that a theme, because I felt this was very much about war. This is what human beings do to each other in every war. We make the enemy “the other.” The way we say, “They’re not like us; they don’t have the same values, they don’t have the same feeling as us.”