While mourning for Starbuck, Adama realizes that life must go on. That includes the trial of Gaius Baltar. Apollo is pulled off of combat duty due to his barely contained emotions, and instead is assigned to protect Baltar’s lawyer, Romo Lampkin. As Baltar’s trial heats up, Lee decides that the fleet is better served with him out of the cockpit, and he joins Baltar’s defense team. Considering the ill will toward Baltar, it will be an uphill battle, especially with Admiral Adama as one of the judges. Roslin is put on the stand, and Lee forces her to reveal that she is again taking chamalla, a hallucinogen, to treat her cancer relapse. Lee gives an impassioned speech, reminding the fleet that many sins have been overlooked, and that Baltar should be treated no differently. Baltar is acquitted of the charges and freed, although no ship but the Galactica will have him.
The Galactica reaches the Ionian Nebula, the next signpost on Pythia’s path to Earth. Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Sam Anders (who is now training to be a Viper pilot), and Tory Foster are hearing a strange melody, as if it’s coming from Galactica itself. The melody draws them together just as power is lost across the fleet. All of them come to the same conclusion, but Tyrol is the first to admit it: They’re Cylons. They’re four of the Final Five, and they have been from the beginning. A Cylon basestar appears and launches an attack, and the four scramble back to their stations, suddenly unsure of both their pasts and futures. Lee Adama watches as pilots rush to their Vipers and decides to join the fight himself. Once in the air, he spots another craft in the distance. He’s amazed to find Starbuck at the helm of a pristine Viper. She assures him that it’s really her, and that she’s been to Earth. “I know where it is, and I’m going to take us there.”
RONALD D. MOORE
(cocreator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
What that time jump ahead one year gave us, and this was important, was a whole new world. I don’t remember when the lunch with David took place, because the way the seasons and the overlaps are, we may not have even finished season two when we actually had that lunch. The show might have still been in production, so I don’t think I’d seen the finale of season two yet, because I know when I did see it, I was so excited about how well the jump forward worked that I was really excited about playing out those stories in New Caprica. I found myself thinking, “How long can I keep a stamp on New Caprica?” So it’s a blur about the sequence of events, but the New Caprica thing, I got really jazzed by the fallout from it. All the repercussions about who collaborated with who once they get back to Galactica, and the rescue potentials and how that was going to reset the decks in terms of all the character relationships, and gave us a chance to really invent the show in a lot of ways. That was really exciting.
DAVID EICK
(executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
Out of all that talk during our lunch came the idea of telling season three from the Cylons’ point of view. We build the Cylon ship, we go inside the Cylon culture, we present the Cylons in a way we haven’t gotten to know them yet. We’re writing brand-new characters, dealing with their whole system of interaction. Everything about their culture we would get to invent and explore. And that seemed to shake off enough of the cobwebs that we were able to at least tell the network that we weren’t going to abandon a third season. To open that season in a kind of occupied territory was just so strong from an eleven-o’clock-news-metaphor standpoint that you couldn’t help but get excited about it. Even as we started breaking the season, that was just so powerful and so timely and it felt urgent. It made you feel like you were writing something important.
JAMIE BAMBER
(actor, “Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama”)
I loved the Cylons, I really did, but it was a bit like the shark in Jaws. The more you see the shark in Jaws, the less the film holds up for me, and I felt that the Cylons were much more interesting in a Cylon-to-human context than they were in a Cylon-to-Cylon context. I don’t know if I’ll still feel that when I watch it again, but at the time that’s really what I felt. I felt it was worth holding the point of view as a human point of view, rather than trying to go inside that world where it becomes a bit more sci-fi, a bit more futuristic. If the Cylons were really coveting man’s relationship with God, they would be even more into something that we would recognize. Let’s not forget, Cylons aren’t aliens, they are creations of Man. They are technology, and I just felt they should have sat more within what it is to be human and, when they got their consciousness, not necessarily to strive for something strange, which that basestar felt to me. But I am more than happy to be wrong when I watch the show again.
BRADLEY THOMPSON
(producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
One of the things we really liked was when we didn’t know about the Cylons, but they kept giving us more seasons, so it reached a point where you have to say, “Okay, it’s now time to let us know what’s going on with them.” But it was fun to explore. They probably do not have the same morals, so to speak, as we do, because they’re machines. They’re not doing biological reproduction, do they have the same sexual kind of things? Is it fun for them to do that? Why is Baltar in bed with two Cylons—outside of their appeal to us and totally horrible male fantasies? It was also, how different was it? Do they care about wearing clothes all the time? It seems that they wouldn’t. There are only however many models we had, so there’s not going to be any real differences. Do you need controls to run the ships? Do you pick up a telephone and call somebody or would they have something else set up? All of that was tremendous fun.
TRICIA HELFER
(actress, “Number Six”)
I don’t think I enjoyed the stuff when we eventually got on the Cylon side of things, inside their ship. That always felt more sci-fi and harder to get into, when our hands were all on this console with the lights and there’s a little bit of water. There were some elements that were great. It felt like a different show. Filming it definitely felt more sci-fi, and there was more green-screen stuff, more technical stuff that didn’t feel as grounded.
Prior to Battlestar Galactica, a time jump on a series had only been done twice before, during the final season of the Vietnam-era China Beach, which shifted to 1985; and in the second-season finale of Alias, which saw that show’s spy Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) mysteriously finding herself two years in the future.
MARK STERN
(former president of original content, Syfy)
We had a bit of a ritual where we would have this call in which Ron, David, and their team would get on the phone with us and tell us what they wanted to do to end the season. I loved those calls, because they were inherently unnerving. You knew that they were going to break something that was not going to be comfortable. They did that all the way through the show. That moment where he said, “Okay, we jump to a year later, and he lifts his head up and we’re now in the full occupation,” was revelatory. That was awesome. Scary as shit, right? Like, “Wait a minute, what are you doing?” but for the right reasons. It was so bold and cool, and it really went right there. You knew it was going to be a real moment.
RONALD D. MOORE
For us, it was a bit of an unknown quantity. Like, “Wow, what would this do to the show?” The reasons that we did it were very specific to Galactica, because I really liked the idea that they would find a planet and a potential new home, and go there. Which was an idea that got pitched in the writers’ room all the time: “Well, they come across an Earthlike planet and they want to stay.” You knew that it was definitely going to be one of the shows at some point, but I kept pushing it off and pushing it off, because I wanted it to have meaning. It’s like we’re only going to do this once. I didn’t want to keep finding new potential homes and then be like, “Oh, this one’s riddled by volcanoes; this one’s radiated, and then the bad guys…” You know, you could never really have a true home, because it would go against the concept of the show. So if you’re going to do it, it felt like you were going to do i
t one time and it should really have meaning.
DAVID WEDDLE
(producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
Ron had this idea, what if they found a planet that was somewhat habitable? And what if that became a presidential campaign issue? Then he wrote that finale where the Cylons just come in, and then we cut to a year later. Super influential episode that’s been copied, and that device used by many other shows since, but Ron Moore was one of the first to do it. It was incredibly dramatic. It was great. Ron had those brilliant insights to knock all the chess pieces off the board, and then we as writers would have to reassemble them. For us it was always anxiety-producing, like, “Jesus, where do we go now?” But what we would quickly discover is he gave us all these new stories, and Ron had the idea that we, bam, cut a year ahead. When we start season three, we don’t answer all the questions right away. He wanted to hold off for a while.
MARK VERHEIDEN
(co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
It was definitely a fun way to put everyone in a different environment. The whole New Caprica story had to be very carefully conceived, because it was quite expensive to go to that place, so we knew we had to get there, do it, and get out of there to stay on budget. A lot of thought went into those episodes.
BRADLEY THOMPSON
I thought the jump was great. It saved us a lot of what we would call shoe leather, because the other obvious way to do that is we get there and civilization happens and relationships change. Ron’s gift was, let’s just knock all the pieces off the board, set them up in a new place, and then figure out how we got there. All of a sudden, Starbuck and Tigh are best buds. How did that happen? Why is Lee running around in a fat suit? It was spectacular, because we were all doing some amazing stuff. Everybody in there was top of their game at that point. You had somebody you totally and utterly respected as a storyteller running the thing. You’re sitting there beating your head on something and it’s feeling a little bit conventional, and Ron would just come in and go, “You know, I’m trying to get here with you, what if … this?” Why the hell did we not think of that? Because it’s totally unexpected.
It’s like when we did “Exodus,” and we pretty much came up with a military tactic. What we wanted to do was distract everybody and bring these guys from Galactica in. Ron took a pass on it and came up with the whole idea of just dropping the Galactica in the middle of the atmosphere, which was totally unexpected. That’s what he was looking for. That was his gift that he could do that.
RICHARD HUDOLIN
(production designer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
The challenge was finding a location to represent New Caprica. We had this area that we called the Dunes, which was basically a big dumping pit of sand. And we said, “Okay, A, how are we going to do this? And, B, what’s it going to look like?” And that’s where we came up with the idea of using all of the scaffolding to create the whole city. Almost like a boardwalk or a Western town. Just to be able to walk around and stuff was great. I pulled elements from all over the place, and we set it in this wonderful location. With the help of effects, it looked even bigger. So it was a bit of a hodgepodge of design elements that we stuck in there. Some were hard, some were soft.
You sit there and go, “What am I going to do now?” Then you get together with your art director and the construction coordinator and whoever we’re talking about, and say, “What have we got a lot of?” Obviously there’s a budget there, so what can we deliver? And how much time, how much money do you need? Because I was seeing this as a pretty big thing. So, anyway, we evolved all of that, and then we started doing some drawings, sent them up to Ron and the boys and they bought it, so we were off and running.
RONALD D. MOORE
If we were going to make a go of it on this world and Baltar is going to be president, we were going to let that play out and you had to give it months. They had to spend a lot of time down there. Because if we made a big deal out of this and said, “Wow, this is the potential new home and this is what the election’s all about,” and they make a big announcement, but then the Cylons show up next week, it just meant it was all kind of bullshit that didn’t go anywhere. So in order to make it work, they had to be down there for months if not a year, just to really see if they can make a colonization effort. What would Baltar’s government really be like?
However, the show is Battlestar Galactica. It’s not New Caprica. So you kind of felt at the same time that you didn’t want them building on the planet’s surface while the Galactica circled overhead in orbit for hour after hour. I honestly don’t remember whose idea it was, it might have been mine but it could have just been something I threw out there and the writers glommed on to, but then we started saying we should jump ahead and get to the good stuff. You just wanted to get to the point where it’s all gone to hell. Baltar is a failed president, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction and disaffection among people. Galactica hasn’t been doing anything for a very long time, and then the Cylons show up. Because that’s really the juice of the fun. Plus it would shock the audience and they’ll think that it’s a big dream. Or that we don’t mean it. Or that we take it back.
MARK VERHEIDEN
I enjoyed how we would occasionally subvert the military reality of the series. The specific case was when our guys landed on New Caprica and we did that year jump and then we see that the Cylons are in control and the humans are under the Cylons’ thumb and the humans have become the suicide bombers to try to stop the Cylons. That was not trying to make it a fantastically on-point allegory about anything, it just felt like it’s interesting to see the fight from the point of view of the resistance that’s been driven to the point of doing this.
DAVID EICK
The politics of Battlestar were always a bit inadvertent, or kind of a delicate analogue. The third season we just went for it. We were just, like, “Fuck it, this is on the front page of The New York Times. We’re doing this!” We were going to do occupation and insurgencies, and we’re just going to go for it. And it just shook the hell out of the show.
RONALD D. MOORE
We were just going to own it and see what happens. And then we really started getting excited about that in the writers’ room, because it also meant that there was an entire year of backstories and things to make up and that we could scramble the relationships. You could suggest certain things that had happened and explore them later. Other things would be a mystery. Suddenly you had a whole giant chunk of story that was fun to play with, but we didn’t really have to delineate and outline in great detail before we did it.
MARK VERHEIDEN
From a creative standpoint, those were really fun episodes, because we came in on season three pretty early. Maybe six months out from production, which is quite early for a show. Four or five of us sat down and wrote about a seventy-page document that would be the first five episodes of season three before we even got started on writing the scripts, and really broke down the whole New Caprica adventure. Part of that was we needed to do that for production, because going to New Caprica was an expensive production situation and we had to know what we were going to shoot, what we needed to get there. So going into it, we could play, but also it just gave us a chance to really work through what we wanted to have happen in those episodes. That’s how we got to Tigh losing his eye, and becoming the suicide bomber, and the arguments between them about whether that was a valid strategy, Baltar is the world’s worst president, etc.
DAVID EICK
When that year started out, it really felt like we were riding a motorcycle with the kickstand down, but then it got going. We had that bizarro Disneyland experience. We got drunk, we went on Space Mountain, and then we went home and it was like, “Hey, we’ve got a season three.” We were exhausted, but we were galvanized by these new ideas. We were being more aggressive in terms of the sociopolitical metaphor. It did add pressure to the process, and I think it did create more conflict during development of storie
s and arguments about cuts and stuff like that, because it felt weightier. Suddenly the argument felt a little bit heavier, a little bit more like you wanted your point of view known perhaps more than in the first two years.
MARK VERHEIDEN
We were able to subvert the idea of who’s the good guys and who are the bad guys in terms of our guys being essentially the suicide bombers, the resistance, and that was fun. It was an interesting opportunity to look at what a resistance against a more powerful force might look like if you’re on that side of the equation, which from the United States’ perspective, we’re rarely on that side of the equation. For American viewers, it was probably, like, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” But we just thought it was interesting to look at it from the other point of view. I don’t think we were trying to say any point of view was morally better or worse—suicide bombing is not good—but that was where they had been driven to by the desperation of the situation.
MICHAEL HOGAN
(actor, “Colonel Saul Tigh”)
Before we started shooting season three, I got on the phone with David Eick and asked him what was up in the new season. He said, “Well, Tigh’s incarcerated. And he’s tortured.” “Tortured? How is he tortured?” He said, “Well, he’s tortured.” I said, “No, David, you can’t just say that. We owe it to all the people in the world who are tortured. We can’t just randomly go, ‘He’s tortured. He’s limping.’ You’ve got to be more specific.” And he says, “We’re thinking that he loses an eye.” I laugh out loud and said, “David, you know what? Phone me when you figure it out.” So then I get the script for the first episode, and the first scene is a beautiful scene with Cavil, Dean Stockwell—who’d have thought you’d be sharing a scene with Dean Stockwell? Anyway, I’m reading through the script and I go, “I have no eye.” I call David up and say, “You took out my eye. An actor’s main tools are their eyes. On the movie screen it’s one thing. On the stage it’s another thing. But on television you’re in close-up. Your eyes are your tools and you’ve taken away fifty percent of my tools.” But it was brilliant, because you knew that they wanted something permanent from the torture, and it’s something you never get over: you will always think of the Cylons and the taking out of his eye.
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