So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  In a way, the decision to end the show goes back to what we were doing in the first year. You know, there’s a version of Battlestar that’s still on. If we had done it in a particular kind of way—and I don’t mean without any mythological kind of invention, but if it had been built more like a traditional space opera—who’s to say that show’s not still on TV? That’s not the best version of the show. I’m not arguing that I wish that that’s the version of the show we had done. But that version of the show was possible, and it would have been more like a Star Trek–type show that went on and on. Adama retires, Lee takes over; Baltar gets killed, you bring on his son. All of that shit, right? You could’ve totally done it, year after year after year.

  But really I think what happened after the end of season three were a couple of things. One, we realized the show was never going to be that. If we know it’s not going to be that, and we know that we continue to fight with the network about fundamental things—not blisteringly, but it’s an ongoing struggle. We know the ratings have been slipping. And what we don’t want is to have a situation where we’re told the show is off the air, because then who’s to say we’re in a position to end it the way we want? Who’s to say when that decision comes, so why don’t we just call a spade a spade here? The show’s run its course; it’s never going to be the ten-year or twelve-year Star Trek–ian type of show, so let’s end it now. And that’s what we decided to do.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I talked to David Eick and we called the network and said, “We think the next season is it.” They were surprised, but they didn’t really try to talk us out of it. That was because of the ratings. The truth is, they didn’t spend that much on the show, so it really wasn’t that expensive a show.

  MARK STERN

  One of my laments about the show, and I’m sure David and Ron feel the same way, is I felt like it was just before its time in terms of the world we’re in now. Today the audience is so immersed in this kind of serialized storytelling, but it was never a huge hit for Sci-Fi, but it was a solid performer for us. It was a huge critical hit and a huge hit within the network. It really did put us on the map and set the stage for us in terms of what we were trying to accomplish. So we were disappointed when Ron and David called us and said they were going to end it. Which was a weird conversation to have. I’ve never had anyone cancel their own show before. Seriously.

  DAVID EICK

  They were shocked, but it was tempered a bit by their acknowledgment that the numbers were slipping, so it wasn’t a hundred percent shock, but deep shock. It was not what they were expecting to hear at all.

  MARK STERN

  The first response to them wanting to cancel the show is tremendous respect. You know, to go out when you want to go out. And in the way you want to go out. But it was definitely weird and disappointing. When they came to us, it was still in the middle of the run and the show was still clearly creatively hitting its stride. It’s a different situation if a series is starting to tread water, which that show clearly wasn’t.

  DAVID EICK

  I think if they felt strongly that we underestimated the longevity, or the ratings, or any potential of it, they might have tried to continue it without us. But we already knew that they were probably going to see some core value in ending it. Remember, if the creators are ending it on their own terms, that creates tremendous promotional value for them, because they can promote the end of the show as “Three more … two more … One more.…” You do all that, and there’s an upside. The downside is we’re not going to have a season after this one, but they looked at the ratings and the nature of the show had narrowed, which I’m sure in no small part had to do with what was going on with the ratings.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  They were a network that didn’t really want to be in the space business anymore. The show was sort of flying in the face of everything else they wanted to do as a network. They wanted to stop doing space science fiction, they didn’t want to do dark stuff, they didn’t like that it was on and on and on. But it got all this critical acclaim and it had a passionate following and all that. But the ratings were sort of on the bubble. The ratings were not the best. The ratings were always a little sketchy. As I’ve said, at that point the industry didn’t care about DVR numbers.

  There was a point where David Weddle and Bradley Thompson went in for a development meeting at Sci-Fi while the show was on the air, and they told them, “You know, we’re still proud of Battlestar Galactica. It’s an amazing series and an incredible thing you guys have done … and we’re never going to do a show like that ever again” [laughs]. They were sort of really taken aback, because that was the opening statement. Now, of course, they’re always saying they’re looking for the next Galactica.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  One slight clarification: Sci-Fi didn’t say that they did not want to do science fiction. They said they did not want to do complex, dark, intricately plotted science fiction, with layered characters that were deeply flawed. They wanted simple, straightforward science fiction that would be light in tone, wholesome, and simple to follow. Bradley Thompson said to them, “Oh, so you want the kind of shows where people can walk out of the living room, go to the refrigerator and get some ice cream, come back to the living room and still be able to follow the plot.” They said, “Exactly.” Consequently, Brad and I never pitched them a pilot.

  16.

  THE RAZOR’S EDGE

  “Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.”

  The fourth season of Battlestar Galactica debuted with the two-part “Razor,” which in itself had actually been a made-for-DVD film later aired on Sci-Fi Channel (the show’s continued success on home video had helped sustain the series despite less than stellar ratings on the cable network). Told through a number of flashbacks combined with footage from previous episodes, it serves as a prequel to season two’s “Pegasus” storyline, chronicling Admiral Cain’s response to the Cylon attack that wipes out most of her people, and her transformation into a ruthless military leader. In the present, Lee Adama, serving as the Pegasus’s executive officer, has to come to grips with Cain’s legacy.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  (cocreator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Home video saw an opportunity to sell Razor as a DVD, because DVD sales were very strong on the show and this was at a point when DVD was very big. In fact, DVD sales were propelling a lot of the revenue and there was also an international play to make it as a two-hour movie. So it kind of came out of Universal Home Video wanting this and then Sci-Fi Channel seeing that there was a market for a two-hour version as well, so both of them came to us and said, “Look, we’re interested in doing a two-hour movie. Would you guys be interested in doing it and what would it be?” I threw it to the writers’ room right off the bat and asked, “What do you guys think? What possible story could we do?” It was tricky, because it had to be part of the show, but it couldn’t be just two episodes put together. It wasn’t going to be part of the actual season; it had to be kind of a standalone, which meant it couldn’t really be part of the strongly serialized story that we were telling.

  So that took a bit of thinking, and ultimately we go to the story of Razor, because everyone really liked Admiral Cain, and she had been such a great character. We somewhat regretted killing her off, even though we had to kill her off. We couldn’t keep that character in the show without fundamentally changing the show. But everyone missed her. She was just so great and there were great stories to tell with her. So the idea came up of, “Why don’t we tell the story of the battlestar Pegasus and what it was before it got to the Galactica?” Everyone kind of got excited about that. Plus we had the sets, so they could be used and it kind of went from there.

  Writer Michael Taylor, another veteran of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, who had joined the show in season three, was chosen to write the script for the film, which, it turns out, was actually inspired by the film Patton, which had starred George C.
Scott as the military general.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

  Ron and David came to me between the third and fourth seasons and asked if I wanted to do a movie. It was a wonderful experience trying to find a story that could bridge the gap and also a chance to sort of, for me, hark back to the original series, which I watched back in my college years—I’m that fucking old. You see the old Cylon Raiders and the old Cylons, and I thought it was really cool. I got to write a movie and it was a movie; they actually showed it in theaters as a promotional stunt.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  There’s a scene early in Patton where he’s just taken command in North Africa and the command is a mess. The soldiers aren’t looking like soldiers. They just got defeated by the Germans and there’s a moment in there where Patton says, “I’m gonna turn them into razors.” The phrase kind of struck me, something about turning them into razors. So I said that to Michael as we were talking about Admiral Cain, and she was based in part on Patton. Back in the original series, Patton was definitely a strong influence on the way they did the original Pegasus storyline, so all of those connections are there. Then it became, all right, let’s talk about her as a literal razor and talk about what her backstory was, tying it into the Cylons and the first Cylon war. It was a pretty in-depth conversation in mythology. It was a lot of fun. It was just a really interesting story. It was great to see a battlestar run in a completely different way than Galactica, by a different commander.

  FELIX ALCALA

  (director, “Razor”)

  There’s a scene where the Pegasus crew invades a civilian ship to loot their supplies and equipment for the war and one lady says, “You can’t do that.” Our lead gal comes over, makes her get on her knees, and executes her. What I remember is the Vietnam War and that famous photograph of the general shooting the guy in the head. We literally duplicated that shot. We said, “Literally, let’s do that moment in time when this guy looks around and very casually reaches over and, boom, kills this woman.” And she did. It was really great.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In addition to getting into who Cain really is, we wanted to get a sense of who Gina—Tricia Helfer’s Cylon—was as well. I remember Michelle Forbes calling me up at one point after she had gotten the script and her saying, “Talk to me a little bit about this lesbian thing with Gina and what that’s about.” I said, “Here’s the deal. I’m not trying to do it for a salacious way or to make it just sort of shocking.” I was looking for a reason for why she acted. Her reaction to this woman when we met her in the original episodes was so strong and she had taken such strong security measures, that there was a sense of betrayal in it. And there were references, too, that Gina wasn’t just some person. That she was someone pretty important. And I thought to understand the viciousness of what happened, and the sadism of it, and the profound anger of it, it felt like there had to be a relationship there. That this was something else. This was like a personal betrayal as opposed to a military one. Then Michelle was aboard. It came from a character point of view and made sense in the story.

  With the Razor telefilm being written by Michael Taylor, it fell to Moore and Eick and the rest of the writers’ room to engineer a satisfying final season for the series, a goal that eluded many other high-profile shows of that era.

  DAVID EICK

  (executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  It’s really important to note that we met in Vegas before we opened the writers’ room for season four, and we agreed on a few things that the season was going to accomplish. The first thing we agreed on was that it was going to be the end. So the show wasn’t being canceled, we were canceling it. So when you know you’re going to end something, that’s more definitive. There’s less wiggle room. You’re less inclined to say, “Oh, yeah, it could go five different ways.” No, man, it really can only go this fucking way. It really can only go this way, and Ron and I definitely had some disagreements about it. So just the nature of ending a show is narrower and has less wiggle room. Also, at the time I had sold another show and was being pulled away for other reasons. It just seemed more reasonable to defer to Ron. I know he appreciated it, but I don’t mean to say I abdicated or bailed. I absolutely own and stand by all the decisions of season four, despite the fact that I know some of them were controversial.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Then, going into season four, it was a very different kind of game, because we set out to say, “Okay, this is the last season. This is what we’re gonna do. Let’s map out the whole thing.” We took a writers’ retreat to Vegas. Took all the writers there for a couple of days, rented a big conference room at the hotel, and did a couple of all-day sessions where we just talked, overall, on the whole story. We went through just a lot of big-picture “Okay, where’s the show going? What is the meaning of … What’s it all about? Where are we ending up?” I had said over the past couple of years that I thought the show was taking place in the distant past, as opposed to the distant future, or having anything to do with today. So I sort of started leaning in that direction over the course of the series, and so now it was time to say, “Okay. I really think that when they get to Earth, it’s probably the distant past, and we’re gonna get there…”

  And then we talked briefly about all the various scenarios. Do we get there during the time of the Egyptians and tie it into the original series in some way like that? Are we getting there … What period? And we kind of started moving toward even further into the distant past. It felt too cute to do the Egyptian thing. And also, Stargate was very strongly associated with that. So we kind of had at least as a marker that we were gonna get to Earth a long, long time ago, and I also liked the idea that in some way, shape, or form, our characters were the ancestors of us today. I wanted that to be the thread that tied the audience to the characters and the revelation that they were related to us. That was kind of the beginning of a lot of conversations.

  DAVID EICK

  The point of conflict, not necessarily between me and Ron but between the fans and the show, oftentimes boiled down to people who were fans of the deeper, more esoteric kind of ambiguous mythology versus fans of family Adama and the interactions of characters. It’s not that they were mutually exclusive, but the episodes that leaned more toward that deeper mythology or more ambiguity, in my opinion felt less satisfying. Any difference that had to do with how many of those kinds of episodes are we going to do versus the other kinds of episodes was the rub. If left to my own devices, I guess the show might have maintained the mythological aspects at a greater distance than perhaps was Ron’s taste, to allow it to more sort of carry the show in the fourth season.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The writers’ room and I were looking for something new in the show. There was always a search for, “How are we moving the show forward?” I don’t think we were ever really satisfied with where the show was. It was always about, “What’s the next thing? How can we move the storyline? Let’s do something bold, let’s go into this other direction.” And there was this natural progression. Once Baltar ends up on that Cylon basestar, then you’re going to start telling Cylon stories. You’re going to start opening up that world, and that’s how the Final Five were born and all of that. But once you start moving into that head space, and we started talking about it in the writers’ room, all these possibilities started opening up. You’re like, “Well, the Cylons, they could be like this, they could be like that.”

  At the same time, and on a parallel track, we had lost touch with the underlying mythology of the series. The beginning of the series has to do with the lost planet called Earth, the sacred scroll, the prophecies, and there was this mysticism and stuff that had been there all along, but we hadn’t really stayed on it. And it felt like we should go back to that and try to embrace that part of the show. Our view was, “Let’s bring that to the forefront and stretch, let’s not just keep doing the same war story all over again.” Because it felt like we had done that. We had done this
pretty solid, great war story, then we got to New Caprica and had gone through this traumatic story of the occupation and resistance and the escape, and it didn’t feel satisfying to any of us to just start doing the old show. It felt like doing the old show again—not the original show, but our old show.

  But there was a part of David that argued, in fairness, “But that’s part of the great thing of the show. Some of our best episodes, and the audience loves that, and I love that. Let’s get back into doing shows like ‘Hand of God,’ and let’s do some of those big things and do character stuff like that.” As a group we felt, “Been there, done that. Time to try something different. Time to push the boundaries.” Okay, we’re a show that’s dealing with religion and God, and doing these sort of existential ideas. Let’s lean into that. Let’s see what we can find in that, let’s do something that science fiction typically shies away from. Let’s see what’s out there for us in that direction.” And that’s why we did it.

  As things continue, the fleet is outgunned and on the brink of annihilation. Anders flies into the fray, but finds himself unable to fire at the Cylon ships. One of the Cylon Raiders scans Anders’s eye, recognizes him as a Final Five Cylon, and retreats to the basestar. Unable to continue the attack, Cavil’s forces jump away. Roslin and Adama are both wary of Starbuck’s sudden reappearance, especially since her path to Earth doesn’t coincide with Pythia’s. Adama decides to take his chance on both women and gives Starbuck command of Demetrius, a sewage-recycling freighter. She takes a small crew and heads out on a path to Earth.

  Cavil is enraged by the Raiders’ apparent free will. The Cylons hold a vote—should we lobotomize the Raiders and remove their ability to make high-level decisions? The vote is deadlocked until a single Sharon—Boomer—casts the deciding vote: lobotomize them. Natalie, a copy of Number Six, responds by giving the Centurions even greater self-awareness. Their first action is to kill all of the Cavil, Doral, and Simon models on the basestar. In response, Cavil lures the Sixes, Sharons, and Leobens out of resurrection range and opens fire.