So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  David might be the one that came up with the idea of Sharon shooting Adama at the end as a shock moment and making that the big cliffhanger. Then that was an element to sort of work in eventually—that she would come in, get into the right position in CIC and really holding the cards, the gun in her hand, until she lifted it up. All that took a lot of detail; a lot of fine-tuning work.

  We can probably say the same thing about season one as a whole. Season one, I think, fulfilled the promise of the miniseries. I think the miniseries set up a promise of what the show could be, and season one fulfilled it. The miniseries sets in motion all these characters, sets up this premise, establishes a way that we were going to shoot this stuff. But can you actually do that every week? Can you actually be true to that vision? Will it be entertaining? Can you make it interesting enough to pull the audience through? Can you really live up to these kinds of goals that you set for yourself, or will it kind of fall off and just become another normal sci-fi piece of an action-adventure sort that comes and goes? And I think season one really took the miniseries and kept going and really made it even more challenging, even grittier, and even more shocking in many ways. A lot of the characters deepened the backstory, expanded the universe, and met our goal of going beyond the miniseries.

  14.

  I AM LEGEND REDUX

  “Commander, why are you launching Vipers?”

  As the second season begins, Adama, having been shot by Boomer, is bleeding out, and everyone now knows that the Cylons look like humans. Colonel Tigh takes command of the fleet, keeping Roslin and Apollo imprisoned. Tigh tries to hold the fleet together, but after Roslin announces that she’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, many in the fleet believe that she is indeed the Dying Leader from Pythia’s prophecy. She is rescued from her jail cell and hidden by her former enemy, Tom Zarek. Colonel Tigh, sensing control slipping from his fingers, declares martial law.

  Starbuck and Helo are abandoned on Caprica when Sharon steals Starbuck’s ship. After stopping for supplies at Starbuck’s old apartment, they head into the wilderness. They encounter Sam Anders, a former pyramid star and leader of the human resistance. After spending a raucous night with Anders, Kara is captured and subjected to experiments in a Cylon breeding farm. She escapes from Simon, her captor, and is rescued by Anders, Helo, and the pregnant Sharon. Starbuck retrieves the Arrow and says good-bye to Anders, with a promise to return for him and his people.

  On Kobol, Tyrol, Crashdown, and Baltar are fighting a guerrilla war against Cylon Centurions. Crashdown orders the crash survivors on a suicide mission to destroy a Cylon installation. At the last moment, Baltar shoots Crashdown in the back, saving their lives. After being rescued, Tyrol is interrogated by Colonel Tigh about his relationship with Boomer. While being transferred, Boomer is shot and killed by Cally. Egged on by Ellen, Tigh’s iron-fisted tactics lead to a massacre of civilians. When Adama returns to duty, a third of the fleet has jumped away, following Roslin back to Kobol.

  Starbuck and Helo return with the Arrow of Apollo and join Roslin on Kobol. Starbuck, Apollo, and Roslin represent the only semblance of family Adama has left, and he can’t let that family fall apart. He goes to Kobol, and together they find the Tomb of Athena, which contains a map of constellations as seen on Earth. Apollo recognizes a nebula, giving them their first signpost on the road to the Thirteenth Tribe.

  While they jump toward salvation, the fleet encounters the battlestar Pegasus. Another miraculous survivor of the Cylon holocaust, the Pegasus once shepherded her own civilian fleet. That is, until Admiral Cain took vital components from the civilian vessels, abducted “useful” passengers, and abandoned the rest to fate. Cain is a counterpoint to Adama, a hard-edged warrior whose conscience never instructed her to forgo revenge and preserve human life. Since she outranks Adama, she is now in command of the fleet. Cain assigns one of her officers to interrogate the pregnant Sharon, and things get out of hand. With Tyrol’s help, Helo stops the attempted rape, but Cain’s officer is accidentally killed in the scuffle. Cain sentences Tyrol and Helo to death, which leads to a standoff between the Pegasus and Galactica. Kara stops a bloodbath by returning with images of a resurrection ship, the Cylon technology that allows them to be reborn. Adama and Cain agree to a joint mission to destroy the resurrection ship, but each secretly plans to have the other assassinated.

  Baltar gains crucial information about the resurrection ship from Gina, who is a copy of the Number Six model and a prisoner on the Pegasus. Baltar forges a deep connection with Gina, and as the battle rages around them, he frees her. The resurrection ship is destroyed, and both Adama and Cain call off their assassination plans, but Cain is hunted down by Gina and killed anyway. Roslin promotes Adama to admiral, since he now commands two battlestars.

  Roslin is at death’s door, with only days left to live. In her near-comatose state, she remembers seeing Baltar and Six together on Caprica the day before the attack. She’s left with serious doubts about his ability to lead the fleet, and expresses them to Baltar. Outraged, he hands over the nuclear bomb from his Cylon detector to Gina, who is now in hiding with a group of Cylon sympathizers. Despite their disagreement, Baltar cures Roslin’s cancer using stem cells from Sharon’s half-Cylon baby.

  Starbuck is overwhelmed with guilt for having left Anders behind on Caprica. When Kara resolves to rescue Anders, Lee is given command of the Pegasus after her previous commander is killed. This complicates his budding relationship with Dualla, Galactica’s communications officer.

  On Caprica, Anders continues to wage a war of attrition against the entrenched Cylon forces, which are starting to use human buildings and live out their lives as if they were human. Boomer, whom we haven’t seen since she was killed by Cally, has yet to accept her true nature. D’Anna, another of the Cylon models, convinces Caprica Six (the Six who seduced Baltar and infected the CNP code) to speak with Boomer. When Anders’s resistance group bombs their building, Boomer and Caprica Six come to an understanding: Maybe humans and Cylons are better off working together.

  Roslin doesn’t share that opinion. Sharon gives birth to her hybrid child, Hera, but the child is stolen. Cottle tells them the child died and was cremated, but Roslin arranges for Maya, a woman who lost her own child, to care for Hera. Another child-related debate is started when Roslin outlaws abortion in the fleet in the interest of increasing the human population. Baltar uses that as an excuse to oppose her in the upcoming presidential election. Roslin has the support of the religious sects, but the discovery of a habitable planet sways the votes to Baltar’s side. The planet, dubbed New Caprica, is hidden in a nebula that will prevent the Cylons from discovering it. Roslin wants to continue following the path laid out in the Book of Pythia, but the promise of breathing fresh air outweighs the hope of Earth, and Baltar is elected president. Remembering her vision of Baltar with Six on Caprica, Roslin is terrified of a Baltar presidency. She conspires with her new aide, Tory, to steal the election. Adama’s conscience won’t allow it, and he convinces Roslin to accept defeat.

  In the midst of the election, Starbuck returns to Caprica and rescues Anders and his resistance fighters. When they return, Tyrol recognizes Cavil, a priest traveling with Anders. Cavil is a Cylon, and he brings a message of peace. The Cylons are leaving the colonies, and think that man and machine are better off leaving each other alone.

  When Baltar is sworn in as president, he decides to settle the fleet’s population on New Caprica. Gina isn’t pleased, and as Baltar makes the public announcement, she detonates the nuclear warhead, destroying Cloud 9 and several other ships. As Baltar reels from the attack, we jump ahead one year. Baltar’s presidency is a failure, Tyrol (now married to a pregnant Cally) is a union leader representing the disaffected workers, and the crews of the Galactica and Pegasus are gradually mustering out into the civilian population. Starbuck and Anders are married, Apollo has grown fat and complacent aboard Pegasus, and Adama has a mustache. Then, the Cylons
find them. Baltar has no choice but to surrender, and Adama and Apollo have no choice but to jump away.

  RONALD D. MOORE

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

  I remember that between seasons one and two they made us sweat out the pickup, which they did every year. We were worried that they weren’t going to pick up the show, and then they did some kind of market research, and so you get all this network bureaucratic stuff back. You know, the things they’re considering. The show’s dynamic, and blah, blah, blah. But we’d gotten significant amount of critical acclaim at that point even off of the first season, so it was pushing them to want to pick it up even though they were sort of harping on our numbers and the fact that they wanted us to appeal to more women in the second season. That was actually a thing. Sort of like a “condition” of the pickup is that you expand your female demographic. We nodded and said, “Sure,” and promptly ignored them. You know, what does that mean anyway? How are we going to expand our female demographic?

  But it was good in that it was a bigger order so that there were twenty episodes the second season, which was good news and bad news. Good news, sort of a sign of success. Felt like no matter what they were saying on the one hand about us not having good enough numbers, they were also willing to order a lot more for the second season. So that was good. It also made it easier, just in terms of producing the show, in a lot of ways, because with more episodes you amortize certain costs over more episodes, which brings down the per-episode cost. So it just makes it kind of easier to do the show. But, yep, that meant more scripts to write. That meant more stories to break. It’s a longer, more daunting haul for everybody. But I do remember starting the second season kind of feeling like we had a little bit of a wind in our backs finally. You know, the skepticism had finally been put aside. Definitely starting to make noise and it was going to be a positive year. That was kind of the mind-set I remember starting out with.

  Our goals were to expand on what we had done in season one. I was proud that we accomplished what we set out to do. I wanted to deepen that. I wanted to make even tougher choices for the characters. I wanted to challenge who they were and have them make more mistakes and really screw up a lot of the relationships we had formed in the first season. To push the envelope in terms of the style of shooting it and the style of storytelling. I definitely wanted to be more serialized in the second season. First season you could see that we were still kind of trying to be somewhat episodic while maintaining a bigger arc. Second season I was trying to move past that completely. Let’s just do a straight-up more serialized show, which they were still not overtly saying “okay” to. So there would be times when we had to call things “part one” and “part two,” and that always made them nervous. They didn’t like it. It was, “How many of these two-parters are you going to do?” So we always had to talk them down off the ledge when we were doing that. In the meantime, they weren’t even really noticing that all the other episodes were becoming more serialized even without formally saying that they were two-parters.

  A significant change to the writing staff in season two was the addition of co–executive producer Mark Verheiden, who at that point had already worked on such shows as Timecop, Freaky Links, and Smallville.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

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

  When I was asked to become part of the show, I sat down and watched the miniseries and the first season. What drew me in was the seriousness with which they approached the science fiction concept in the show, and the sheer inventiveness of some of the character stories. Six being the key one. Where did that come from? That is amazing. I think the episode where I said I absolutely wanted to be a part of it was “Act of Contrition,” where Adama learned that Starbuck may have been involved in his son’s death. That’s a scene that could have gone a lot of different ways. It’s a scene where Adama could have said, “I forgive you,” or pick any number of ways you could have done it. I was so impressed that they went the really human, emotional way, which was to have Adama tell her he never wanted to see her again, which just destroyed her. What they managed to do in that scene was take this world of science fiction with spaceships and being chased by what are essentially killer robots, and in the middle of that create a scene of such dramatic intensity and it felt so real. Science fiction show or not, that would have been a real angry scene in any show. It was an episode where I just thought this was a show trying to do something in the world of science fiction that I had not seen on television before.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Mark was an incredibly calming presence in the writers’ room. He was the guy that was going to get it done, and he never worried about getting it done. I could let him run the room; I could leave and go do something else, take a call, and Mark would make progress and he could wrestle all that ego. He wasn’t threatened by any of it. He was confident in himself and his storytelling abilities. And he could just sit back and let people yell and argue, but then kind of say, “Okay, well, we still need to solve this problem, guys, so let’s just solve it.” He would do it in a very matter-of-fact way, and the other writers respected him and liked him. He was pretty personable, and you really like Mark when you meet him, and then he’s just got a warmth to him. He had good story chops and was a really important member of the show once we brought him on.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I think in some ways that was my job. Look, there were many great writers there. So to say that was my job, I was nominally the head of the writers’ room seasons three and four when Ron and David weren’t there. Obviously it was Ron and David’s show, but I was there to keep the stories going forward. My theory of that, and that’s gone on to where I’m running shows now, is that there are no bad ideas. However, there are ideas that are maybe not worth pursuing very long or ideas that we could come back to later. The mutiny in season four being a good example. I have a five-minute rule, that basically any idea we’re talking about for five minutes and it’s not working out, there has to be a voice that says, “That’s interesting, but let’s put that aside and let’s try this or let’s go this other direction or let’s see if we can pursue this this way, because that’s a direction we want or a direction that Ron has pushed us toward.”

  What was fantastic about the writers’ room was you could come up with stuff that you would be nervous about pitching in terms of this is pretty out there, and they would be totally receptive to hearing that and there’d be no “Are you out of your mind?”–type recriminations, which if you’ve been on other shows, that can happen. Often the crazy idea may not be the one you do, but it points you in the direction that is something you never imagined until you entertained the crazy one.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

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

  Ron Moore had an incredible vision for the show, yet at the same time you could say there’s a nautical metaphor that comes to mind: He kept a loose hand on the tiller. He hired a lot of writers who were all wonderful writers and loved working together, and he would see what would happen. He’d come in and give us his thoughts and then give us his notes. His notes were sort of lines that nothing is ever truly finished. In that first episode I wrote, “Unfinished Business,” there was a scene in which originally the chief and Adama duke it out in the boxing ring. I was going to have, in my first draft, Adama beat him up; the old man manages to beat him up to sort of teach him a lesson. Ron said, “Well, what if it was the other way around? What if Adama gets his ass kicked? Somehow there was still some lesson, some wisdom being transferred or offered?” That was so cool and I just completely redid it. Ron would consistently do that. He would consistently question things that even seemed good or great. How could they be better? How could they be less predictable, more unexpected?

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I think back to season three, where we had a few episodes where Roslin was off with the Cylons and split away from Adama, and he t
hought she was dead. We actually wrote her out of the show for a while. Well, that’s insane in television, but it was an idea that just came up in the room, where we’re like, “Wow, we’ve got to get her back. We can’t have her out of the show.” But then we were saying, “Well, why do we have to bring her back? Why can’t we play out what happens to Adama when his emotional linchpin of his life is gone? Let’s play that. Let’s play that we don’t know if she’s coming back,” and so you pitch that and in some rooms they go, “Are you nuts? She’s our lead! What are you talking about?” But we did that, which was one of the fun things.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

  Ron was always open to any kind of change that he hadn’t anticipated. He enjoyed working with writers who might have ideas that he hadn’t had. He would also constantly question our choices, to see if we could come up with something even better. That process could be very challenging for writers and enmeshed in an artistic process to the end, never a sense of an assembly line, of a blueprint being fleshed out, as on many other shows—good shows—but a sense of really just being in through the very end. The final edits.

  When it came to the writers, directors, and actors—particularly in season two and onward—Moore had yet another anti-Trek sentiment he wanted to enforce when it came to dialogue being changed by actors during production.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  On Star Trek there was a strict rule that the actors had to say the lines exactly as they were written. I mean, exactly. If they were going to change the lines in Star Trek, they literally had to call. It got to the point where there were beeper days. There was a writer’s beeper that whoever had a show on the stage that week had to carry around twenty-four/seven, because if the actors down on the stage wanted to change “there is” to “there’s”—I’m not kidding—that beeper would go off and you had to call the soundstage. The AP would say, “Brent wants to say it this way. Patrick’s pushing this line that he wants to change.” It was hard-core. That was Rick Berman’s rule. I don’t think any of the writers thought it was necessary, but that was the rule.