RONALD D. MOORE
It was a pretty knock-down, drag-out fight about it; about how it was depicted, whether it was going to happen or not. How far it would go, how graphic it would be. I felt strongly that if you were going to do a story that had that as a moment in it, that you shouldn’t shy away from it. You shouldn’t just look away and cut quickly. It should be brutal and ugly, because it’s a brutal and ugly thing and it was important to the characters to understand how ugly things had gotten on Pegasus and what kind of people we were dealing with.
GRACE PARK
I was feeling so powerless when the cut went in and everyone freaked out. Okay, we take it back. Crop a little bit more. They send it over. The network loses its shit. Shave off a little bit more. And then they’re like, “What the fuck are you doing? We cannot rape one of the leads.” But at that point I was completely uninvolved. Plus I’m actor number seven; you don’t have any power.
MARK STERN
I get on the phone with David, and I think it’s the only time I lost my temper, and was like, “Guys, we don’t give you many notes, because you’ve earned that. The notes we give you, we feel very strongly about. And this one in particular was very important to us, and to feel like you just went ahead and did it anyway, even when you’d written it otherwise, is not okay.” So they changed it, but that’s one of the few times when I really think we actually ever got into any kind of a back-and-forth about anything. Generally what we talked to them about were things that we thought would just help liven it, make it better or, you know, give them some perspective from the outsiders’ point of view.
RONALD D. MOORE
He might be right about the way the scene was shot. I don’t really remember. I know that we argued through the script phase and that there was another fight after he saw the dailies, and another fight after the edits. They all kind of blur together as one long fight about the scene.
GRACE PARK
I thought to myself, “We’re throwing people out of the airlock, shooting people, killing loads of people, and yet this happens?” Why is something like this not allowed anywhere in here, and yet this other end of violence is all over the place? It’s a point when I definitely felt like this was something they were trying to squash, and I really didn’t like that. It’s a human story. Why are we telling all these other human stories, but not this one? Because this one also has a path of grief, of helplessness, or powerlessness and of shame.
RONALD D. MOORE
We knew that Cain was a big juicy role, so you go through that same process where the network says, “Well, we should talk to Susan Sarandon.” And you’re going, “God, how much time are we going to waste trying to get Susan Sarandon? Can we get to the real list?” So Michelle Forbes’s name was on the real list. I saw it and I was like, “Oh, I know her. And she would be great,” and knew she just has a certain toughness to her character. I thought she could play it really well. She brought a real sense of power, which was an important characteristic. She had to be Adama’s superior and Adama had to say yes to her and back down initially, ceding control of the fleet. You had to believe not only that, but that she had commanded this battlestar and seen it through some horrific things and made them do horrific things. There had to be a real sense of presence and gravitas that just communicated, “Wow, the new commander in chief is here.” Michelle really brings that. She can walk into a room and command a room really quickly. She just has this certain presence and force of personality when she wants to play that. It’s the old thing about playing a king onstage. There are certain actors who can just command the stage, and Michelle is one of those. When she’s in charge, or something like that, you say she is the admiral, she is the admiral and it just clicks. It was just an immediate thing.
DAVID EICK
I’m particularly proud of that bit of casting, because it was a total lark. I’d only seen Michelle in Swimming with Sharks, which had been over a decade earlier. But I never forgot that performance; it was the bull’s-eye balance of strength/sexy/scary/mysterious we were looking for. We got early word she wasn’t interested, and I panicked. I got her agent to give me her number, and I cold-called her and basically just begged. I found out her reluctance had something to do with a Star Trek arc she’d done years earlier, and she worried that the fan base in sci-fi was a bit rabid. I assured her we were nothing like Star Trek and then probably proceeded to say whatever I thought she needed to hear before I heard yes—which, to the great benefit of our show, I eventually did.
She’s absolutely brilliant in the role, and in person couldn’t be more of a polar opposite to Cain. She’s really funny and vulnerable, intellectually curious, with zero attitude or affect. It was almost like she didn’t know how awesome she was, but she’s certainly my pick as the best “guest casting” we ever did.
RONALD D. MOORE
In part one I wrote the sequence where we’re cutting back and forth between Adama talking to Starbuck and Cain talking to somebody, and each of them is plotting to assassinate the other commander. And they’re each finishing each other’s sentences. I really liked the way it was laid out, because Adama would start the sentence and then we’d cut to Cain and she would complete the sentence. And then she would start a sentence and Adama would complete it. I just had this epiphany and wrote it. It was all about rhythm. The rhythm of the dialogue, who would start the line and who would complete it. I just wrote the whole sequence in, like, ten minutes. I loved it when we cut it together.
We had it in mind from the beginning that when we first brought the Pegasus and Admiral Cain into our series, at the outset we talked about maybe it gets destroyed or disappears again, which didn’t feel right, even though the original series did it. So we started talking about the idea that the Pegasus would stick around even after Cain was gone. We all got kind of excited about that, that it would change the dynamic of the show in certain ways to have another full battlestar, new crew, new Vipers. We could really start playing around with different elements of the show. So we really liked that. “Resurrection Ship”’s primary function was ultimately to sort of take Admiral Cain out of the show and leave us with the Pegasus.
The problem became that it was hard to use it too much. Even though we had a set, we had the CIC and Admiral Cain’s quarters as sort of semi-standing sets, we didn’t really have the rest of the ship. And because we had boxed ourselves in a little bit and said that the Pegasus was a very modern battlestar and was a completely different style and it didn’t look like Galactica. It just meant it was really hard for us to go back and use Galactica sets and say they were Pegasus sets. Also, it had to be a whole new cast, it had to be new visual effects. So it was cool having that second battlestar for a while, and part of me wanted to keep it even longer, like all the way to the end, but it became problematic on a production basis week-to-week. But I loved what it gave us in terms of story. It gave Lee something specific to do, and later we made him commander of it. I thought that was cool. Giving Starbuck the CAG responsibilities, just all that stuff was really great.
JAMIE BAMBER
Having Lee take command of Pegasus was a massive buzz. Every change that my character went through, in terms of the jobs that he did, I just couldn’t wait to get going, just to find the whole new world that’s suddenly it, and it’s always exciting to push a character to a different place. It’s weird how your chest swells slightly when suddenly they’re calling you commander rather than captain, and it’s sort of irrational, but we’re weird as actors and quite vain. Just getting a new outfit and being measured for it is part of the fun.
RONALD D. MOORE
Season two was angling toward finding a new home, the election and the year jump forward. We started talking conceptually about that—to jump the show ahead a year was something I had always kind of had in the back of my mind, because it was a notion for something I was going to do at Carnivàle, if I had stayed with that show. That was just interesting, to take the audience out of the linear timeline w
here they were. In that case, I was going to go backward. I wanted to start the second season back in the 1920s or the teens and see how the carnival itself had started. I just wanted to open the season apropos of nothing, just sort of shocking the audience, and you’re in a completely different time frame, and just play a bunch of episodes like that.
DAVID EICK
When we get closer to season three, I have to take you back a beat. Season one was the culmination of a thirteen-episode first season, which was just grueling. It was tons of fights with the network, it was a lot of struggle just to get it on its feet for a whole host of reasons. It was just deeply challenging in ways other first-season shows don’t reach. I mean, it was really fucking hard, okay? And the network turned around and said, “Do twenty season-two episodes.” Well, we barely had caught our breath. We begged them not to do twenty. We didn’t want to do twenty; they insisted. So we have to figure out how to break the show and expand the staff. We do twenty and it’s really great, but we’re just done. It was a year to do the miniseries, it was a year to do season one, year to do season two. And I’m not even the head writer at this. That’s Ron. So I’m done, but Ron is really done. Ron’s like, “Fuck. This. I’m. Done. Don’t even talk to me. I don’t want to talk about the show.”
RONALD D. MOORE
Yeah, there was a bad moment in time where I was truly just brain-dead. I had rewritten every episode of the first season and the second season, and it had become an all-consuming task. And the difference between doing thirteen year one and twenty the second was enormous. It was exhausting and I was profoundly tired by that point. It was all that time in the writers’ room. Then all the time writing the scripts, then all the time in postproduction and sets, and the ongoing, never-ending arguments with the network about everything. Then there was the budget and sweating out the pickup. Just a long, long battle. There was a time when David and I went to Disneyland and Club 33. I had a couple of drinks at the club and was like, “I can’t do it; oh my God.” It was just a low point. I was mind-fried. He did help me get back on the horse.
DAVID EICK
As per our usual routine, we have these early kind of meetings. For this one we went to Disneyland and Club 33. We met there at like ten in the morning or something like that. Whenever they open. The reason you go to Club 33 is that’s the only place they got a bar at Disneyland. So we started drinking, and Ron says—I think he was half kidding—“Hey, Eick, I’m really not ready for this.” Turns out, he’s not kidding. He’s like, “No, dude, I don’t have it. I don’t want to do it. I’m not into it; there’s nothing left to do.” And through that kind of gallows humor we wound up talking. Like, what’s the thing we could do that shakes it up the most? One of those things became Ron’s idea for a time jump.
RONALD D. MOORE
I remember as we got into the second season, I started thinking more seriously about the justification for a time jump. And then, separately, we had sped up in season one that there was going to be an election at some point; in the prison ship episode and the deal Lee Adama struck with Tom Zarek was that there would be a presidential election in the fleet. That was a great marker we knew we would pay off at some point. And with the way we were starting to get Gaius Baltar more involved in the political aspects of things. We quickly started talking in the second season about bringing all these different elements together. So then you can kind of see there was sort of an effort toward generally arcing the show in that direction. So that by the end of the second season we could do something dramatic. Laura could lose the election somehow, Baltar could be in charge and maybe we’d do a big time jump at the same time. So all of that was kind of in place.
TODD SHARP
(production executive, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
Ron and I were always on the same page throughout the series, except for this one instance, which was the one-year-later jump that is now TV lore. It’s the moment in the last episode of season two where Baltar puts his head down, and he pulls his head back up and it’s a year later. Well, that episode was having some financial challenges. We were at a place where we essentially ran out of money as we were budgeting it, before we shot it. I told Ron and David that I didn’t think we could afford to do that bit, that we should end the season before that jump in time, and we’ll make the jump going into season three. And Ron said in a very passionate, but very nice, way, that this was a load-bearing wall for him. He said, “I am not going to end the episode prior to that.” So we all put our heads together and made the economics work. I said it then and I’ll say it now, Ron was right. Because not only was that episode better for it, not only was the series better for it, but it was considered one of the boldest things that ever happened in television. People talked about it then, and they talk about it now.
15.
ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
“Fear gets you killed. Anger keeps you alive.”
With the start of season three, in the four months since the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, Tyrol, Anders, and Colonel Tigh have created a resistance group. Their efforts have landed Tigh in a detention cell, and cost him his right eye. Ellen sleeps with Cavil in exchange for Tigh’s release, but the colonel’s freedom comes at a high price. Cavil convinces Ellen to give up the secret meeting place where Adama’s returning forces are going to meet Tigh’s resistance fighters. Tigh is forced to poison Ellen to prevent her from suffering a worse fate. In response to a series of suicide bombings, the Cylons decide to round up and execute troublemaking humans, including Roslin, Tom Zarek, and Cally. Tyrol is able to stop the execution thanks to the help of Lieutenant Felix Gaeta, who is working as an informant inside Baltar’s government.
Adama leads Galactica back to New Caprica, where they engage in a daring atmospheric jump that leaves the Galactica burnt and scarred. With the help of Sharon (now given call status and the call sign Athena) they are able to evacuate the colonists from the surface and jump away. Anders rescues Starbuck, who has been held in an eerily domestic prison by Leoben. There, Leoben convinced her that she had a daughter (Casey), the result of Cylon breeding farms on Caprica. In truth, Casey was the abducted daughter of another human woman.
While providing cover fire for civilian ships, the Galactica is overwhelmed by Cylon forces. Moments from destruction, Pegasus arrives and draws fire away from Galactica. Apollo sacrifices his ship to save his father (and the rest of humanity) and the Pegasus takes several basestars down with her. With Baltar gone, Tom Zarek is technically the president, but he steps aside for Roslin to return to power. There’s a celebration on Galactica as the heroes return, but for some of the crew, life has been irreparably changed.
Baltar, no longer welcome with the humans, leaves with the Cylons. To secure his place, he hands Hera over to them, despite the implications. Several of the models don’t trust him, and he has to prove his worth. When the Cylons contract a fatal illness, he takes the opportunity to investigate for them. The disease is highly contagious (but only to Cylons) and was spread by a beacon left by the Thirteenth Tribe. The Galactica stumbles upon an infected baseship, leading them to realize that the virus could destroy the entire Cylon race. Roslin and Adama decide to go ahead with their plan, but Helo sabotages the effort by killing the infected prisoners before they can download to a resurrection ship and pass on the disease.
Running desperately low on food supplies, the Galactica and the ragtag fleet jump through a dangerous stellar cluster, losing several ships along the way, to reach the algae planet. They are able to recycle the algae into edible forms, working around the clock to harvest it before the Cylons find them. During the mission, Chief Tyrol is inexplicably drawn to the Temple of Five, an abandoned monument built by the Thirteenth Tribe. The scriptures say that the Eye of Jupiter is contained inside the temple, and that it will lead them to Earth. Unfortunately, the Cylons arrive before they can find it. D’Anna calls Adama’s bluff and sends a team to the surface, which starts a ground war with Apollo and Anders’s team. St
arbuck is injured, and Dualla risks her life to save her. D’Anna reaches the Temple of Five just as the nearby star supernovas, revealing that the star itself is the Eye of Jupiter. D’Anna is granted a vision of the Final Five Cylons, a group that the other seven are programmed not to think about. She recognizes one of them, but Cavil deactivates the entire D’Anna line before she can tell anyone her secret. The Galactica is barely able to jump away to avoid being destroyed. Baltar is abandoned by the Cylons and brought back to the Galactica to face trial.
During the crisis, Athena learns that Hera is still alive and being held by the Cylons. Helo shoots Athena and she downloads aboard the Cylon ship, where she kidnaps Hera. Boomer, who has been caring for Hera since New Caprica, has been unable to console the child. Caprica Six helps Athena escape, and they return together to Galactica, where Caprica Six is put into the brig that once held Athena.
After Athena returns, Helo shows Starbuck a picture of the temple interior. There was a marking on the wall in the shape of a mandala—the same mandala that Starbuck drew on the wall of her apartment. Later, Starbuck spots a Cylon Heavy Raider in the clouds of a gas giant. She follows it and begins to have strange visions of Leoben and her mother. She approaches a massive storm on the planet’s surface, which also has the appearance of the mandala. Leoben tells Starbuck that she’s ready to see what’s on the other side of the storm. While Apollo looks on, she plunges her ship into the storm and is apparently destroyed.
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