So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  I’d rather just shoot it all, put it together, and then realize, “Oh, this section doesn’t work” or “I’m having problems with this one and I’ve got material.” I like having more than enough to play with and don’t like making the final decision on stuff at the script stage. I’d rather shoot all this stuff knowing it’s not all going to fit in the show and, yeah, it’s going to be wasted footage. Yeah, it’s too much money, but you know what? So what. It’s just money. In ten years when I’m having conversations like this one, no one’s going to give a shit. No one will care. We don’t care today, and we’re not going to care tomorrow and it’s going to make the show better, so just shut up and leave me alone.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  Being able to cut from New Caprica to Galactica and Pegasus was fantastic. One thing I remember is that we wanted to play Lee getting fat physically and emotionally. Also, when Adama decides to go back to New Caprica, we wondered what we would do with Lee. I used the example of the Sam Peckinpah film Ride the High Country, where Gil Westrum, Randolph Scott’s character, escaped but in the end he’s the guy who turned on his friend. But his friend is provoked, challenged him morally, and in the end he has to come back and rejoin the fight and shows up as kind of a surprise at the end of the film.

  I brought up the idea of Lee coming back with Pegasus as a surprise, and Ron said, “Yeah, that’s like Star Wars,” which I’m actually not that familiar with, I’m sorry to say. But George Lucas probably got the idea from Westerns. So I remember it was Brad, me, and Ron who came up with the idea of Pegasus showing up all of a sudden, coming in and helping Adama. Ron came up with the idea of Battlestar Galactica coming down into the atmosphere, which I know the fans went nuts over. That was a completely Ron Moore inspiration. It was such an audacious and risky move on Galactica’s part that threw the Cylons into chaos. And it probably would have led to Adama’s death, except that Lee then came back with Pegasus.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  Felix Alcala was the right director for “Exodus.” He’s like a field marshal on the set and did an amazing job of that, and all the stuff on New Caprica with the fight that happens until the human race escapes. And Harvey Frand, who was our line producer, one of the best line producers I’ve ever worked with. They built an entire city out there on what was, I think, a sand dune. It was all this loose dirt that they built the city on and I remember going there with Brad for “Exodus” and it felt like a movie. We had an entire city built out on this sand. It was a thrilling thing to be a part of. You felt the show just growing in terms of what it was able to achieve.

  And for Gary Hutzel and his crew to make all of those sequences work so fantastically. Gary was a genius and I think that he always looked from the point of view of making the visual effects sequences different from what he had done on Star Trek, where everything was very objective when you saw a space battle. It stayed stilted in a way. Gary revitalized the whole approach to space battles by thinking like a filmmaker and about point of view when he created those battles. Which gave them a vibrancy and visceral power that had been lacking in television space battles certainly before that.

  In “Exodus” there is also a climactic moment when everyone is leaving New Caprica, and Saul Tigh has to take action against his wife, Ellen, for her seeming betrayal of the humans to Cylons during the occupation. His plan is to have her drink poison.

  FELIX ALCALA

  Now, the scene is very difficult to do. It’s difficult, because it’s emotional and then she realizes what he’s going to do and she takes the cup from him. She says, “No, I’ll do this myself. I want to save you from doing it.” And that’s the kind of shit Ron would write. It was so heavy. There’s so much information of this woman and what they’re going through and she doesn’t want her husband to suffer even though she fucked him over and she’s going to do it herself.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In the aftermath of New Caprica, Lieutenant Gaeta certainly went through a big change. You know, he was the loyal officer on the flight deck or on the CIC until then. And he started to raise objections to things here and there, but once he started helping with the human government and throwing himself firmly into that camp and then being accused of being a traitor and all the ramifications … The repercussions that happened to him after the New Caprica episode ultimately aligned him with Tom Zarek and led to his death in season four. It was a decisive turn for that character, and Baltar as well. Baltar becomes president and it’s a major thing for him. We also saw, in those episodes, him struggling with his own moral dilemmas probably more deeply and profoundly than he had, even in the two years leading up to that.

  JAMES CALLIS

  What was interesting about him being president is that if you don’t have quite the understanding or the respect for the office, it shows immediately. The whole thing about Baltar and politics is it’s not his idea. This is a wider agenda. This is Number Six. She teams him up with Zarek. They spot chinks in Roslin’s armor and the planet becomes a rallying cry. And Baltar, in his naïveté, thinks that he’s doing the right thing initially. He doesn’t realize he’s being played. Not that that would be much of a defense in court, necessarily.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  And then there was Colonel Tigh, certainly deeply scarred by New Caprica physically and emotionally. They were all affected in different ways, but those were probably the big ones. The Apollo/Starbuck/Sam triangle gets scrambled a lot. She marries Sam, then throws over Lee, and that sort of psychic and emotional scar never really healed between those two characters. But that felt, in some weird way, almost like that was going to happen whether they were down on New Caprica or not. You know, you kind of felt like that wasn’t so much about that particular experience as it was that that was the road that these three characters were going down. Yes, it was Lee and Kara were sort of soulmates in some weird way, but she couldn’t quite embrace that, so she was going to go for Sam and break Lee’s heart. And he was going to be embittered about that. Look, if it was someone else, eventually they would try to make their way back to each other, but by the end of the show they never quite made it. That probably wouldn’t have been their arc whether we’d gone to New Caprica or not.

  Overall, season three was meant to be a lot of fallout and repercussions of the New Caprica experience. They had divided themselves. Some had aligned themselves with the Cylons, some had not. There were war crimes and accusations. We wanted to do a lot about collaboration and a lot about what people did due to circumstances, and how other people would judge them for that. You know, how some of those wounds would never heal. We didn’t really have a clear sense of what the end of the season was going to be for quite a while. At the beginning, yeah, we were more focused on, “This is great. We love all these New Caprica episodes.” And then, “Let’s do fallout after that. What’s the next big thing that would happen to them as a result of what happened on New Caprica?” It wasn’t until probably midway through the season that we started really thinking about where this was going.

  The next big thing, dramatically, was the dual exploration of the Baltar character and Cylon society by having him brought aboard a Cylon basestar.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  There were two things at work there. Part of it was the journey of Gaius Baltar. The man who never intended to do most of the things that had happened to him. Never intended to really betray the human race, didn’t think he was going to be a survivor, didn’t intend to have this relationship with Number Six in his head, gets pulled into politics without even really intending to, becomes president—almost out of spite for Laura Roslin—then is a Cylon puppet and at the end he has no choice but to go live among the enemy. How does that journey play out for him?

  JAMES CALLIS

  For Baltar, politics was not important. Politics was only the art of the possible, essentially, or it should be the art of the possible. But look at it, it’s so internecine, the battles between whoever the diametrically opposed parties are, and then becomes more
about fulfilling one’s party agenda over another, and that would infer and incur planning. Like real planning. And Baltar was not a planner. He’s like a pinball in one of those machines, getting socketed from one thing to another, and some of them are literally his own making as he’s kind of fizzing around. If he only had planned, his journey might have been a bit easier. It’s a character and a character strength. He’s working on his wits and his science and he doesn’t need to plan ahead, or whatever, in that way. Or at least planning ahead isn’t improvising in the moment to get out of a situation. Surely planning ahead is like you’ve got at least a six-month, a year, or five-year plan. I don’t see Baltar planning things out more than an hour. He’s like this feral creature, constantly afraid that he’s going to be stabbed in the communal bathroom.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The second thing is that it forced us—and me—to sit down and really put together my thinking about Cylon society for the first time. How does the basestar operate? Why do we only see so many Cylons? Once we decided that Baltar wasn’t going to be arrested at the end of the occupation and he was going to go off with the Cylons, you immediately go, “Well, all right, so now what are we going to do?” Because once you go on a Cylon basestar, you’re either going to run into all twelve Cylons quickly and give them all away, or you have to have a reason why you’re only showing some of them. So I came up with this idea that maybe there’s a reason. Let’s preserve the mystery of revealing the Cylons, because that was such a great part the series was playing, “Who could be a Cylon and which among us might have been a Cylon all along?”

  JAMES CALLIS

  Having Baltar go over to the Cylons was like stalking new territory. It was slightly exposed, in more ways than one. It felt like we were really creating something or trying to create something with lots of visual ideas—loads of things—how to play with this thing. There’s lots of reasons for that, and why we’re thinking about it in the sense that when you’re on the battlestar and you were in the CIC, or walking down those corridors, the scene played out and you knew how that was going to work. Walking around the Cylon ship, or being in the Cylon ship, or talking to the Hybrid or things like that, were more complicated. Initially the fun was in the idea of “I’ve been abducted by alien robots.” The idea was that I was going to be naked, initially, and I had to roll down my boxer shorts. I’ve seen now it just looks like I’m wearing my boxer shorts really low, but it was supposed to be that you’ve been taken totally out of your comfort zone and anything can happen. I suppose the thing is the Cylons are initially the big bad enemy, and now we’re on this ship and we’re going to show bits of them.

  In any horror movie or genre like that, in some fashion, the less you see the monster, the better it is. So the more you reveal the monster, the monster is potentially less threatening. Unless threatening things happened to you while you were on the ship, and thus, for example, Baltar was tortured by Gina. That was an important part of essentially keeping the threat level up. I think the show kind of suggested, and I certainly said in an episode to Boomer, “Believe me when I tell you, there are far worse things than death.” I believe now, having gone through them, just as an actor, being tortured is one of them.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Then I came up with this idea of the Final Five; that we had seen seven of them, but there were five remaining. And let’s say that there’s a particular mystique to the Final Five; that they have a meaning in Cylon mythology that is greater than what you know. So there’s this reason why that gives us a bigger backstory. It enriches Cylon society, and it also just meant that we could tease out the reveals for a while. So now you had the Final Five and you were telling the audience, “Okay, now who are the last?” You could really dig into that.

  That was a big groovy thing that we came up with at the beginning of season three, and then as you got deeper into talking with Richard Hudolin and various directors about what the inside of the Cylon basestar was going to be, we started really throwing around different ideas. I didn’t want it to just look like a generic spaceship. I wanted it to really look and feel differently. I wanted it to operate differently. I wanted it be as alien to our way of thinking as it possibly could. I think we were successful to a large extent. Some of the ideas didn’t quite play out the way I wanted them to.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  I went with a very clean look, with the red line in the Cylon environment. And water was a big element, because that’s the essence of all life. And there were lots of big spaces. For some directors it worked really well and they loved it, but for others they’d walk in and go, “What the heck? How am I going to shoot this?” “Well, I’d love to show you.” I don’t know if I’d call it a complete success or a complete failure, but I thought it was pretty cool. It was also a nice contrast using the rib and the peak red color, and designing stuff for the Cylons. It was a lot more cerebral than the Galactica.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  There was an idea that the Cylons, when they’re walking around the ship, could mentally imagine themselves in any environment they want. They’re machines, so they could be in a room, and essentially be in a virtual-reality space where they think that they’re out in the woods. That’s just how some of the Cylons prefer to think of their environment. They’re completely aware of where they are. They know that they’re really on the base station. They know where every object in the base station is, but they prefer to feel like they’re standing out in the redwood forest. So let’s do that. And at first I thought that was going to save us money. I was like, “This is a great way to save us from having to build all these sets, and we’ll put them out in the woods. We’ll film on location,” and, of course, it became very expensive and difficult and time-consuming. So you only saw us do it a few times here and there to sort of sell the idea. And then you kind of went away from it.

  It’s Lucy with the football with production, always trying to figure out how to save money for the show, and inevitably it comes back, “Well, you didn’t save anything and maybe it’s more expensive.” And it’s just so frustrating, because the people who work on the production side always think that the writers live in ivory towers and don’t care about money. It’s, like, “You guys just write stuff and you don’t think about how hard it is to make,” and we actually spend a lot of time trying to imagine ways to save money for production or make things easier. The problem is, what sounds good or what seems logical, you get into the practical craftsmen and artisans and they come back with these answers that usually shock you: “What do you mean it’s more expensive to do it this way? This is a way of saving money, can’t you see that?” But apparently it doesn’t.

  For both Grace Park and Tahmoh Penikett, an important moment—and not just for their characters—was when a plan was devised for Helo to kill Athena, thus sending her back into download mode on the Cylon resurrection ship where she would be able to rescue their daughter, Hera.

  TAHMOH PENIKETT

  (actor, “Captain Karl ‘Helo’ Agathon”)

  That’s one of the heaviest things I’ve ever done to this point, but because I had such trust with Grace Park, because I had such chemistry with her, because she was such a friend, and we both came up as young actors on this show, we both came from the same acting school, and we were always willing to go to that truthful place. We didn’t have to do a lot of takes. It’s an emotional scene, but I knew I could go to that place, because that storyline affected me. That said, I was a young enough actor that it was hard for me to shake those heavy scenes.

  GRACE PARK

  (actress, “Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii”)

  We knew it was going to be heavy, but it’s weird because she was a robot and she would be coming back. But I think what it represents is trust and faith. That whatever you’re trusting in is really the right thing, because you’re still killing somebody. When we were doing it, there was a lot of flexibility in terms of where we put the gun, do we start it like this, are we sitting? All that
kind of stuff. Part of it was also that Tahmoh was really just pure and vulnerable as well. He’s a generous actor and we always were really great at working these scenes together, which is something I’ve always appreciated.

  TAHMOH PENIKETT

  I would sometimes be in a place for days afterward, because you’re going to a powerful dark place and you have to experience it. I didn’t know how to turn it off or leave it where it was. I think with a heavy scene like that you’ve got to pay it service, to give it the time and respect, and then shake it off and move on. That was hard then. But Grace and I, the moment we met we just clicked. There was an understanding. We were definitely siblings in another lifetime.

  GRACE PARK

  You definitely do scenes where you’re like, “That was amazing,” and then you’ll watch it and be like, “Hmm, that didn’t translate. I guess I’m just going to leave with my memory of it, because that was better.” And there are other times where you do something, it’s not that great, but when you watch it, you’re like, “Shit, those guys are so good in post.” You just realize that you’re just one of the many pieces holding the web together.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The second part of the season was about revenge and forgiveness. And justice. You know, what do you do after you’ve liberated a people from an occupation or you’ve freed a country, but everyone’s kept score and waited for their moment. “Now I’m going back and get the person that killed my father!” Or, “Those guys down the block, they were collaborators and I’m going to finger them.” We were fascinated with those ideas, and they kind of dominated our thinking, in large part because of what was going on in Iraq. The American occupation was well under way and there were all these sorts of sectarian and tribal feuds that had been suppressed during the Saddam Hussein years, and suddenly the Americans come in and now was the chance of a lot of those people to get revenge for all the bad things that had happened to them under the previous regime. What was justice like in those sorts of circumstances? Could you ever forgive what people did when they were under an occupying power? And who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong when you have no choices? Another country, another power comes in and is controlling your land and your people. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? And when that force is suddenly taken out, how people just quickly bring out the long knives and start going after their enemies. We found that fascinating and wanted to watch our characters grapple with that.