So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  It just made things infinitely more tense when we did that, and it also made the Cylons, again, more like they are just people that were treated badly and rebelled. They’re constructs, but they didn’t care for being pushed around as much as anybody does. What you also ended up with was that the Cylons, for better or for worse, had been introduced into the highest levels of the command structure, both civilian and military, when Tigh and Tory turned out to be Cylons. Which really motivated later on the mutiny with Gaeta and Zarek.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  We had such a great team of writers by the last couple of seasons. You know, Mark Verheiden, Michael Taylor, Jane Espenson, Michael Angeli. All were great, phenomenally talented writers who brought different colors to the show, and they each took their shows and their shows added slightly different character and sensibility, and yet it fit into the whole sensibility. Everybody was able to do that, to write the show and write their own episodes and bring them all the way through with notes from Ron. So this team, this incredible team that was assembled, when it came time to write something like “Rapture,” there’s a scene where Tigh is going to confess to Adama that he’s a Cylon. He’s been knowing it, he’s been holding on to it, and we were supposed to write that. I, not having an experience in my life of having to confess to somebody that I’m a Cylon, a killer robot, really was intimidated by writing that scene. So at first we tried to skip over it in the draft. We had Tigh go, “Bill, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” Then we cut away to another story and come back and Adama’s slapping him across the face and calling him a Cylon and dah, dah, dah. Ron read the draft, he goes, “No, I want to see him tell Adama.”

  I didn’t know how the fuck to write that. It seems silly, right? Like, how do you write the dialogue in a way that’s not silly or weird? So in desperation, I followed Mark Verheiden to his car; he was going home. I go, “I just don’t know what to do with this scene.” Mark came up with the idea of Adama first trying to not take it in, saying, “They did something to you. They put an implant into you. Let’s go to the doctor. We’ll get you checked out.” And Tigh goes, “No, I’m telling you, I’m a Cylon.” That was a good piece, something I could grab on to. Then I ran to Michael Taylor’s office to talk about it some more, and he goes, “Maybe Tigh could say, ‘I lied to you. I lied to you, because I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know what you’d think.’” That was another great little element to the scene that he added.

  Having those elements, suddenly I could write the scene, because you could give it a build, Adama’s denial, Tigh’s forcefully making him face the truth, and then Adama’s breakdown, which was what was so amazing about writing for Eddie Olmos, who never had notes on any script of mine. He might have notes on the set, or talk to you about how he’s going to do it. Instead of airlocking Tigh, he can’t do it because it’s his best friend. He can’t do it. Instead he breaks down. He punches the mirror. He becomes a blubbering mess on the floor, and Edward James Olmos showed up on the set and just said, “Ah, another great day with Adama.” So we rolled the cameras and he did it. I have so many stars that I could tell you would never, ever in a million years do that. “What, I’m weak? I break down? I can’t do it.” You know?

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  (actor, “Commander William ‘Bill’ Adama”)

  There was an incredible amount of courage and real security by everybody. The writers, the actors, the directors. Everybody had a secure feeling about what we were doing. So much so that you could explore situations that were not even really brought out. You’d go there, and you’d touch it, and you’d go, “Whoa, that’s crazy. That’s good.” One of the situations was Admiral Adama taking pills and lying on the ground, then throwing up and he just became a mush. Here’s our hero and, you know, he became nothing. That wasn’t really written. I took him there and I said, “This is going to be the most difficult situation for all who love Adama; it’s going to be heartbreaking to see him groveling on the ground, throwing up and the whole thing.” I remember when I did, the producers didn’t know I’d shot that. I was in the bathroom painting the thing, and I had learned that my son had been killed by Starbuck, and my best friend was a Cylon.

  It was over. As far as I’m concerned, I gave up. How many times do you ever see Kirk give up? Never. How many times have you ever seen your hero give up? We all felt it when we saw him. I remember getting the phone messages from military leaders who thanked me for bringing about the understanding of how difficult it was. How they could not take it. They had never been able to see themselves the way that they really were until they saw themselves in me. They saw that what I was doing, they had done. They had broken down, but kept it quiet. They didn’t let anybody know that they were having a nervous breakdown, because they were the heads of the military. That took courage on behalf of the producers, and especially the writing team, because they augmented it. They said, “Let’s really go there.” So they let me completely destroy Adama.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  Adama has to be able to accept the enemy that he has fought all his life as essentially his equal, so to speak. He had to go through the death of his son. He had to go through the fact that his favorite girl caused the death of his son. We just kept hitting him. His best friend was his deepest enemy. All those things. The guy had to learn to accept a lot of shit.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In “Sometimes a Great Notion,” Adama is nudging Tigh into shooting him, wanting to die over Dualla’s body in season four and Lee saying, “Why would she do this?” The first couple of drafts I wanted Adama to try to explain it, and Ron said, “Maybe he just doesn’t know.” So I finally put in this thing where he’s getting drunk and he looks at Lee and goes, “I don’t fucking know.” Olmos just played that so fearlessly, so great. You could see Lee looking at his dad and feeling put off and let down. Those were great experiences in terms of writing, but I wanted to tell you about that one, about Tigh’s confession, because it shows you how a writing team helps each other. You know, if you didn’t know how to do something, you run into another writer’s office and you go, “I don’t know what to do with this scene.” Through talking it through, you come up with a solution together. When you have a great staff of people, it’s like a great jazz band, and that was the best staff I’ve ever worked with, those people.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  The Cylon reveal that was the hardest was Colonel Tigh, but, boy, he did such an amazing job with that. A great actor. His own horror at realizing that’s what he was, then having to turn that around somehow. And Adama’s reaction, which, again, was hard, sick, and fraught with potential violence. That was fun stuff to work on. When we got toward the fourth season and it’s revealed that Anders is one of the Cylons, and we get into the ending where he’s a Hybrid and been put into this tub, it was a game performance in a very difficult situation. My feeling on Anders was, he just again gave us a guy with a lot of strengths who, when you reveal that he’s a Cylon, is also forced to deal with how did this happen to my life? How did everything get turned upside down? He was able to play that really well.

  MICHAEL TRUCCO

  I was in a car accident! We had finished midseason four and the writers went out on strike. We didn’t even know if things would be continuing. So I was back home in L.A. on a Sunday morning at about ten thirty. I was in a car with my agent at the time, and we were going to a car show in Thousand Oaks. We were in his Ferrari and he was taking the scenic route up to Cayman Road, up to North Park Highway, and he fucked up and we went across the road, the car flipped and I broke my neck in three places. I was airlifted to a hospital where they rebuilt me. It should’ve killed me, or at the very least I should have been in a wheelchair, breathing into a tube, but I got lucky. In truth, I was lucky across the board, because not only did I live, not only was I not paralyzed, but the writers’ strike made the show go dark for four months and my recovery was four months. In that way it could not have work
ed out better; they would have had to have written me out.

  There was a scene where Anders was jumped; they put a hood over my head and then I end up getting shot in the back of the neck. Then Starbuck’s cradling me and that’s what put me in the hospital. They had to shave my head, and that storyline was, I believe, informed by my physical condition. They were like, “Well, what are we going to do with him?” That led to him becoming a Hybrid and I got in the tank with all that goo and started speaking gibberish. I didn’t see that coming. Six months earlier I was pretty sure that if the show was going to be coming to an end that Anders would be one of the guys out there, guns blazing, but because of insurance they were like, “Get in the goo and shut up” [laughs]. And by the way, a little footnote: That was a bald cap that they put on for the last four or five weeks of filming. What a pain in the ass that was; had I known, in retrospect I just would’ve shaved my head. It would have been a lot easier.

  Before the reveal of the four Cylons, there was the even more audacious death (or, more accurately, apparent death) of Starbuck in the episode “Maelstrom,” as well as the trial of Gaius Baltar, in which veteran character actor Mark Sheppard (who was interviewed for this book at length and, in true Lampkin form, subsequently asked not to have it included) played the sleazy, cynical, but brilliant Romo Lampkin, who put Star Trek’s Samuel Cogley to shame.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  It was interesting to play a lawyer character like that, and a different way to go in the series. We didn’t have anyone in that profession and we didn’t really have people, other than court-martial scenes, where we had done the sergeant major and stuff in the first season. There was something fun about this lawyer in this context. “What does a lawyer do in the Colonial fleet at this point?” It was a great question and kind of funny. It was great to imbue him with the smarts and the cynicism of the character. The episode where he’s carrying around the dead cat in his briefcase. That went through so many changes and revisions. We struggled with it, the network didn’t like it, and we went back and forth on it, and I can’t remember who wrote that, if it was Mike Angeli or Michael Taylor. I think I might’ve been the one that made it the dead cat in some moment.

  I’m not sure if anyone grasped what I was quite going for, but I liked the idea of him hauling around this cat as an expression of his internal guilt. There was something I liked in that it was such a broken character, psychologically, that he was still attached to it. He was still attached to things that had happened back in the colonies, during the original attack. I thought that was great, too. I liked that we had someone on board, who still hadn’t left the attack in some proud way; that had never moved beyond that moment for some crazy reason. Even after all the things, all these people and these four years, the basic psychological wound of the original attack was still unhealed for the vast majority of these people. I thought there was something great to dramatize that in this one man.

  JAMES CALLIS

  During the trial, there was lot of it that I really didn’t enjoy, because I’m Baltar and every time somebody looked at me and sneered at me, or whatever, it was personal as it can be. But you’re acting, and when they say “Cut” you can all smile at each other a little bit. The people who were speaking against me in the trial, we were chatting beforehand. One of the things about the trial was, and this is the really great thing, Baltar is not allowed to speak, for really the first time in the whole show. It’s so good. You just don’t hear him for a while. The very few things that I did speak, I ad-libbed in the sense that they weren’t scripted, because I just wasn’t supposed to say anything for the whole time. But I just couldn’t resist in the moment of doing that thing that I really enjoyed, which was at a great moment of great importance and everybody’s there to see, and there are people being astonishingly worthy, and there’s somebody talking about something really petty. Something like, “You’re a butterfingers.” It’s, like, “What? Is that your defense, you idiot? You tried to stab me through the neck and you missed.” Like, “What the fuck are you doing? That’s so stupid.”

  JAMIE BAMBER

  For Lee there was a resentment attached to him still being in the uniform, and then obviously when the opportunity opens up for him to leave the uniform behind and go and do this other thing, and then he gets the big court sequence where he represents the person that he despises the most in the world. It represents something; he’s discovered pragmatism. He discovers a side of himself that he’s never been allowed to express before as a giver and follower of orders.

  JAMES CALLIS

  Jamie was very interested in the nature of the trial, and he had this thing of, “Well, let’s really make it like a trial.” The whole thing with the show was, “Well, we’ve got certain parameters, because it’s television, so we’ve got to address this and we’ve got to finish like this, and there’s only so long we’ve got.” Jamie was like, “Well, then it’s got to go into the next episode, but we need the two parts, because this is a wider thing and it’s actually talking a lot about what we were talking about all the way through.”

  JAMIE BAMBER

  When Lee calls everybody out and describes things as he sees them in the courtroom, it came from me, too. It was kind of an outpouring of the character who has been restrained and he’s about to unshackle, and he’s going to just let it rip. I felt very excited by that opportunity. I ended up asking Michael Rymer, the director, if I could write some of the speech and I used what Mark Verheiden had written and then expanded on it, and wrote it, and came up with a whole chunk of that.

  You know, I can’t think of any other American or British TV series where I would be allowed to do what I did that day. Michael said, “Go for it. Say whatever you have, don’t tell me what it is now. I don’t want to know. Just do your thing and I’ll let you know if it worked or not.” I’ll never forget; we didn’t really rehearse. I just said, “Okay, well, first time I’ll do it…” and did it and then there was a big silence at the end. Michael said, “Cut!” and then the whole place just erupted. It was amazing. I look at it and in a tiny little way for me, as an actor who had some experience, but I wasn’t hugely experienced at the time, it was a big risk for me to take with a set full of all the lead characters in the show and hundreds of extras, and it was a big expensive day. For Michael to let me do it, and then it stayed in. Every single line.

  I felt the character needed it, because he had been tight-lipped and he had explosions, but basically he was repressed. By the situation, by his own idea of what you do in a situation, by his dad’s expectations. There was more to him and I always felt that. I know Ron said they had struggled with him, and I struggled with the writers together. I think the virtue of the character was the pressure cooker. It was the fact that he was under a lot of pressure and he doesn’t necessarily need to vent, but vent we did in the end. That scene was cathartic.

  JAMES CALLIS

  Mark Sheppard’s another genius. Lovely guy and a brilliant actor. Coming into a show that’s already on and you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ve got to find your feet for a few days, or it can be a bit intimidating. We didn’t have any of that with Mark. He was right at home from the first moment. He’s quite in-your-face in that way as Romo Lampkin, but in real life he’s very softly spoken, very thoughtful. It was always a very interesting difference when they said “Cut!” and Mark would become Mark.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  Mark’s a great friend and he came in to steal the show, there’s no doubt about it. He would say jokingly, but not jokingly, “It’s all about me.” He was disarmingly charming. He came up to all of us and said, “Look, I love this show, it’s the best show on television. You guys are so lucky you’ve been doing this show,” but he came with intent and we loved that. We loved it when people came with all their game, and he certainly did. I loved working with him; he was a new, fresh energy, which is needed in shows like that from time to time. Just to react to something new.

  RONALD D. MOORE


  Lee played really well with Romo; it was one of the reasons we used Romo as much as we did. We got a lot of juice out of those scenes, and it felt like it was bringing the Lee character to life as well.

  TODD SHARP

  When Mark Sheppard first appeared on the show, there was some magic there. The writers knew to write more to that magic. And someone like him and the character of Romo Lampkin are the little discoveries along the way. I mean, look, through all of the planning that Ron did and for all the vision that he had, and he did—he knew where this series lived and where it was going. But even then, there were all sort of discoveries along the way. This character was one of them.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  All you ask for as an actor is someone to bring it all and say, “Let’s get it on.” The scenes between me, James Callis, and Mark were great fun, and we were all on it. It was cool.

  In the end, Baltar was acquitted of the charges against him, Starbuck died and miraculously returned, claiming that she had found the way to Earth; and there was still some question as to whether or not year four would be Battlestar Galactica’s last on the air.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Sometime after the wrap of the show, when we started thinking about year four, was when I started feeling like this was it. It just had this sense that we’d entered the third act of the story. We had revealed four of the five Cylons. We also had Starbuck coming back and saying she knew the way to Earth, and it just felt like we had moved the story so far forward that I didn’t feel like it could sustain going much further than another season.

  DAVID EICK