So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  In the episode “Final Cut,” Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess) appeared for the first time in what would become a recurring role, the Cylon D’Anna Biers. Only in this case, she was a TV reporter assigned to shoot a day-in-the-life-type documentary aboard the Galactica.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  From the very beginning we said this show was like a documentary series. We talked about doing a docu-style show, handheld. The idea had been kicking around the writers’ room for a while of, “Well, let’s do a documentary.” Mark Verheiden wrote it, and it was shot as if it was a piece of film. It eventually broke down; it was too much to wrap our heads around how to do that. I was thinking a lot about the M*A*S*H episode where a documentary crew comes in and the whole episode is shot black-and-white as though it’s a documentary film. I was like, “Let’s do it like that,” but it just was wildly complex. And how do you do that for an hour show? Trying to write the dialogue that’s supposed to feel so natural? We realized we would use a lot of the documentary footage in the show, but we’re not going to do it completely like that.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I think it shows sort of my obsession, which was a chance to go behind the scenes of what was keeping the fleet going. To see people in situations that weren’t quite as ultradramatic, where you would see them in whatever situation Lucy Lawless’s character found them. The upshot that she’s a Cylon was fun. But for me that was a chance to explore another aspect of the show that in a way wasn’t quite as fraught as “We’re under immediate attack today, and the ships are going out” or something. It was a way to look at the infrastructure of how this world works.

  One of my favorite moments was in the episode. This is going to sound funny, because I’ve said I wasn’t a huge fan of the original show, but at the end of the final cut of the documentary within the episode—and I don’t know who put this in—but they showed a sort of montage of people mopping up and doing things on the ship, and they put the original Battlestar theme underneath it. Even I got chills, man, because that was such an inspired idea. I wish I could take credit for it, but that was such a nod to the other show. It just worked on so many levels for me.

  And then there’s Lucy Lawless, who is an incredibly kind, incredibly good actress, and just such a pleasure to have added to the show.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Lucy Lawless brings this sort of devilish quality to everything she does. There’s something you see in her eyes and in her smile. There’s always a little bit of the devil in there; something wicked and something fun at the same time. She just kind of carries that with her as a person, and it always comes into characters on camera. I’m pretty sure that Lucy’s casting came from David, because David’s first experience in the business goes back to Xena.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I could be wrong about this, but I’m not sure we anticipated she would become sort of a regular that would last through the entire series. She was a semiregular, which is how much we loved that character.

  Another beloved character who returned to the genre after his long tenure on Quantum Leap (and, of course, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet) was Dean Stockwell as Brother Cavil.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  My vague memory is that when we were casting the John Cavil character there was another one of those lists with big names on it, and Dean Stockwell’s was there. His agent responded positively, got him the script, and he said yes. I didn’t have any conversations with him before he took the role. I just talked with him a few times during the run of the show, and he was just great. Such a pro, and he’d been around forever and done so many things. He was just really respected on the set. The cast really liked him and he was easy to work with. He brought this really interesting gravitas and quirky edge to everything he did. The character really allowed him go dark. The only note I ever got from him in the whole thing was in the finale. He wanted to just shoot himself; that was his idea. I can’t remember what it was in the draft—I think he got killed by somebody else or something. Thrown over a banister or something by one of the characters. But he called me up and he said, “I think that my character, he would look around, realize it’s over, and just pull out a gun and blow his head off. He would just recognize that would just be ‘it.’” That was brutal and quick, and we could do that.

  In “Flight of the Phoenix,” Chief Tyrol builds a stealth Viper out of spare parts. The ending of the episode was particularly powerful as far as Moore was concerned.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Our department had this cockpit that was kind of a stripped-down cockpit that they used for certain shots of Vipers. We’d used it before. It wasn’t a full Viper, literally just a cockpit. It was used in certain scenes when they were flying. You could put the camera right in their lap and get it much closer, because it wasn’t the full vehicle out there. So they had this sort of cagelike cockpit, and that was what we used to sort of build the Phoenix from. It was built outward from it. They were very excited about it, because they really liked it. I remember the art department really digging the Phoenix; the aspect of watching it being built through the show was really cool.

  I do remember also on this particular show I was on the set, and there’s a scene where Laura comes down toward the end of the episode. She’s there and they unveil it to her, and they revealed that they named it Laura in honor of the president. It was this very emotional, touching moment in the show.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  The idea that they would name it in honor of her was one of those moments, too, where you felt like the walls between military and government were beginning to fall a little bit, despite a bunch of hell yet to come.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  She had come down to them and, given all the problems that had gone back and forth between the president and grunts and military and all this, this is like a really healing moment. It was such a lovely scene. I remember watching it. I was standing over in Video Village and I got very emotional. There were tears in my eyes and I was very, very moved by it. I hadn’t been on the set for a while, and Mary and Aaron came over to talk to me. They said, “How’s it going?” and I literally couldn’t speak. I sort of backed away and I was very choked up. I put my hand on my heart and just waved or something. They were kind of startled. It was just one of those moments where you really stopped and smelled the roses. I was like, “Wow, this is an incredible show I’m doing. This is an amazing experience. The people are special. Look at what we’re doing here.” I was just really overcome.

  One of the strongest arcs of season two was the arrival of the battlestar Pegasus, a re-imagination of a storyline from the original series with Michelle Forbes (Ensign Ro from Star Trek: The Next Generation) in the role of Admiral Cain, a promotion from Lloyd Bridges’s Commander Cain, who was junior to Lorne Greene’s Adama in “The Living Legend.” In this case, Admiral Cain was senior to Adama, which was at the heart of much of the triptych arc’s searing drama, consisting of “Pegasus” and the two-part “Resurrection Ship.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When I looked at what stories we might be able to use from the original, I don’t know if there really was another one that worked, because the original show went in a very Star Trek direction where they would pull up to a planet. You know, “This week we’re going to do Shane.” They were constantly planet-of-the-week kind of tales, and we just weren’t doing that style of show. But “The Living Legend” I knew was a great story. When we got into a second season, it just was on the table and we just kept talking about how cool it would be. I said, “Let’s not do another Galactica. Let’s make this a bigger, badder, and more modern warship.” Because our backstory was different. Our backstory was that the Galactica was an old ship. It was getting ready to become a museum piece. It wasn’t state-of-the-art. So we said, “Let’s do a battlestar that was state-of-the-art. What’s the up-to-date version going to be like?”

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  (production designer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

&n
bsp; The problem with the Pegasus sets was that we had this crappy little stage for them. It wasn’t wide enough, and it wasn’t high enough and it wasn’t long enough. It was just a rotting old building that they called a stage. So I was forced into getting my ship in this kind of setting. I mean, I couldn’t do the figure-eight trick, because the stage wasn’t wide enough. So I came up with the corridor, and then I said, “The admiral’s going to be in these quarters down there, and then, this is over here, that’s over there.” I could modernize, because it’s a different class of ship. That one just kind of came together really quickly. It was a little different feeling in the ship, and especially in her quarters, and the way the doors open and close and all that kind of stuff. We had the main elements. We had the same kind of central cable with the overheard monitors and such. Lots of places to go walk and talk. It was totally different than Galactica.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We wanted to have Admiral Cain in command of Pegasus. In the old version he was just another commander, and he and Adama were equals. What I thought would be fun is if the other battlestar shows up and Cain is an admiral, and Cain immediately takes over command, because it would go down that way. Wouldn’t even be a question. Like the admiral shows up, he or she is in charge in the story. That’s great, because the suddenness of that would have an emotional impact on all of the characters as they try to adjust to it. Now make her a woman, because that was one of our things. And a hard-ass. She’ll have a completely different take on everything in life, and it kind of just sprung from there. We also wanted to communicate really quickly key differences between the two ships, key differences in the commanders and their style of command, and how their ships functioned. You wanted a sense of, “Uh, wait a minute. We’ve all gotten kind of comfortable here.” The characters and the audience were like, “Oh, we love Adama and we love our battlestar and we love the way it works.” It’s kind of this crazy group of misfits who are stuck on this old bucket and they have the old man in charge. There’s a lot of love around here even though it gets hard. Not anymore. Now guess who’s in charge, and you’re going to all act like that. That seemed like a real great way to shake up the show.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  (actor, “Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama”)

  The Pegasus definitely represented an alternate vision of reality. It reminded me of Watership Down, when they come across this other rabbit warren halfway through the film, which is this regime of authority and secret police. It’s kind of like East Germany in the Cold War. Another version of how it is to exist and another solution, another response. It was also a really cool moment in the story to create another storytelling possibility and the clash between the two, and humans were more of an enemy than a friend. Ron was always bisecting and cutting things in half, and so just when you think you’ve been made whole again by finding more people, they are the very thing that’s threatening you.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Then we started talking about the Pegasus crew torturing a Cylon. What does that mean? What’s that about? It will be another one of the Six models, so now we’re getting back into all that kind of territory of torture; what’s right and wrong for a prisoner of war. Go back to the idea of, are the Cylons people? Are they machines? Do they have rights? Do we have sympathy for them?

  TRICIA HELFER

  (actress, “Number Six”)

  On Pegasus I was Gina, tied up on the floor. Tortured. When it turned on my coverage in one take, I just broke down in heaping sobs. We’d already done James Callis’s coverage, and I was very much more kind of comatose as the character. In this one particular scene, it turned around on me and Michael Rymer gave me a different tone and, I don’t know why, I just broke out in sobs. He lets it roll a little longer and then we cut. I’m still laying there, because I didn’t move the entire time we filmed that scene. I stayed chained up. They changed angles and changed lights and worked around me. Michael comes in, he just looks at me and he goes, “Did you mean to do that?” That was his version of saying, “That was really good.” Then he’s like, “Okay, we’re using it. That was good.”

  After that episode I got an email from David Eick, and he complimented me on my work and was basically saying, “We didn’t know you had this in you.” I remember thinking at the time what an honor it was getting an email like that from the producer. It’s a lovely email to get, but then I’m also going, “Why is it such a surprise? Give me stuff; I can prove anything,” because Head Six was so limiting. “Give me more!”

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I remember the challenge Grace had doing “Pegasus,” which was a very brutal episode for that character. I don’t care who you are, it’s difficult to go through those experiences even when you’re “pretending” to be raped. The very brutal sort of attacks that she suffered there … She went through a lot. She got killed! She had a number of very intense scenes. But you always felt that humanity inside of her. When she realized she was a Cylon at the top of season two, and was torn between what she was going to do or not do.

  One of my favorite scenes in the whole series was between her and Adama, where they’re having a conversation about who she is and how could she do what she’d done. It was very low-key, because Adama had an affection for Sharon. There was something about watching that happen live that was so interesting. To see the pauses, the sense of reflection both in Sharon and Adama. That scene took, like, twenty minutes, and it wasn’t a twenty-minute scene. But the pauses, and the thoughts that were going into it, were fascinating. Once you cut it down, it wasn’t twenty minutes but it would be interesting to actually go back and watch those dailies with all the moments in it. Not to use a current reference, but when I think about it now, I think about the pacing of the new Twin Peaks. Now everything is very somnambulistic. David Lynch lets everything play out forever. There’s a new sense of reality you get when you just let scenes play with enormous pauses in them. They become almost unnatural pauses in Twin Peaks.

  Between Sharon and Adama, the pauses were not unnatural, but it was a real conversation. It has pauses, and has digressions, and moments where you’re reflecting and trying to figure out what to say next. It was a really nice piece of acting from both of them in that moment. On that show there was a responsibility to be prepared and bring your best and all that sort of thing. She, like everyone else, brought her best in some very challenging stuff. Playing multiple personalities isn’t easy.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I wanted that Cylon to be really sympathetic. I wanted her to be horribly abused. Physically abused, mentally abused, so that we’re shocked and not sure how to feel about all this. Really push the audience into very difficult circumstances. We did have big fights with the network about the rape of Number Six. And the attempted rape of Sharon. It was pretty tough stuff, especially for basic cable in those days.

  GRACE PARK

  (actress, “Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii”)

  I remember that it was very clear in the stage directions of that script. It had said “no penetration” or “before penetration” in bold type. It was really clear what they wanted, and I was quite fine with that. When I went to do the prep, I borrowed the movie Irreversible, a French movie done in chunks backward, with Monica Bellucci, which has a seven-minute uncut rape scene. It is so graphic and intense that people were leaving movie theaters. I was watching that in my trailer just before shooting the scene, and Michael Rymer knocks on my door. Usually the directors aren’t coming to your door; you usually get called by one of the ADs. And he said, “Are you ready?” Then he added, “So how do you want to do this?” I said something like, “Well, it’s Battlestar Galactica and it’s you, so let’s go do it.” The meaning was, “We’re going to shoot a rape scene.”

  For prep, it was supposed to be “before penetration,” but I’m not going to be wearing underwear where you can see the sides, because they’d have to cut that out with CGI. We hadn’t told the other actor that I would basically be wearing a double-stick
taped triangle to the front and underneath. So the other actor is pulling down your pants on the profile and it just looked like, “Oh, she’s not wearing any underwear.” But he didn’t know and here’s this respectful actor, on the day, and it’s, like, “Oh, shit,” and he tried to pull them back up. But we shot it like a full rape scene and, timing-wise, Helo and the chief come in. The rape has happened and then they burst in, grab the guy and whatever else happens. So we shot everything as we did, fully, and we didn’t listen to the stage directions. I remember that so much of Battlestar was so intense. It was draining in a lot of ways because of that intensity.

  MARK STERN

  (former president of original content, Syfy)

  The moment with Boomer almost getting raped in the cell, they had scripted that originally as a rape. At the script phase we said, “Look, if you’re going to rape this character, then that is something you need to deal with in terms of a multi-episode arc where she grapples with that and we see her go through that. And if you want to do that, we’re all for it. Let’s take that one and all the brutality of what that is and how that changes that character, but you need to have that depth.” They decided, ultimately, that wasn’t really where they wanted to go with the character, and so they rewrote it without the rape, where it gets close and then it gets interrupted. But when we saw the first cut, it was rape.

  GRACE PARK

  The weird thing is that while we were shooting it, I remember not feeling like, “Oh, I need to be in this space or get my mind and emotions in this head space.” But the weird thing was, while I was filming it, the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was going through my head. But I wasn’t doing it on purpose. It was just this weird thing, and what I think happened is that I just disconnected from that scene. Some part of your head is like, “I’m just going to sing a nice little light tune,” because you have to disassociate to some degree. Even talking about it at this point, I feel goose bumps and I’m actually kind of sweating. The scene just went to this whole other level, and I’m actually happy we did that, because of the reaction I had during it. You almost allowed yourself to play the whole thing fully, and even if you subtract that one piece, you’re still telling the whole story. It’s still horrifying and freaky. But then, not to air it the way we shot it …