So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  On the Galactica, Baltar’s manifesto (essentially his views of the universe and all that he has undergone) has given him a large following. His sermons about the Cylon God attract Tory’s attention, and she is soon one of his devotees. Her true beliefs are clouded, however, by her new Cylon identity. When Cally learns Tyrol’s secret, Tory kills her and makes it look like a suicide. Soon after, the Baltarites attract the ire of the Sons of Ares, a militant polytheist group, leading to a vicious attack. Lee, now a member of the Quorum, uses the opportunity to confront Roslin about her controversial political decisions, including a measure meant to shut down Baltar’s “sex cult.” Roslin, now in full treatment for her breast cancer, is frustrated with Lee for taking the high road instead of the smart road.

  Starbuck’s mission takes a disturbing turn when they find a Leoben stranded in space. She agrees to follow him back to his basestar, where he claims the Hybrid will show her the way to Earth. That is not a popular decision among Demetrius’s crew, forcing Anders to shoot Gaeta in the leg to prevent a mutiny. Kara takes a small team to the basestar and meets with the Hybrid, who tells her that she’s the harbinger of death before spouting a cryptic message about the Dying Leader. They use the Raptor’s computer to jump the basestar back to Demetrius, but they arrive too late and Gaeta’s leg will have to be amputated.

  The basestar jumps back to the Colonial fleet, putting the entire population on edge. The Cylons are embroiled in a vicious civil war, and the Sixes, Sharons, and Leobens are losing. They want to reunite the Cylons with the Final Five, and they need Galactica’s help to accomplish that mission. In exchange, they’ll help destroy the Resurrection Hub, the central server required for Cylon resurrection. Without it, Cylons would be mortal. Starbuck repeats the Hybrid’s “Dying Leader” babble to Roslin, who goes to the basestar to hear it for herself. At the same moment, Athena has an Opera House vision (like the ones she has been sharing with Caprica Six and Roslin) wherein Hera is kidnapped by Six. Athena finds Natalie (a Six) hovering over Hera, her worst nightmare come to life. She shoots Natalie, killing her, prompting the basestar to jump away with Roslin, Baltar, and half of Galactica’s air wing aboard.

  Adama is distraught over Roslin’s disappearance. The Colonial government is in shambles, with no clear line of succession. Everyone knows that Adama will not accept Tom Zarek as the new president. An emergency vote names Lee Adama the new president of the colonies, but it’s a bitter victory. His father decides to stay behind in a Raptor and wait for Laura’s return … even if that return never comes.

  Meanwhile, the basestar jumps toward the Resurrection Hub. Once they reach it, they plan to resurrect D’Anna (who knows the identities of the Five) and then annihilate resurrection forever. Their mission is successful, and they begin jumping back to the Galactica. On the journey, Roslin tends to a wounded Baltar, who finally admits to his role in the fall of the Twelve Colonies. Roslin has a vision of the priestess Elosha, who tells her that to lead humanity to salvation, she has to be able to love. Despite everything he’s done, Roslin forgives Baltar.

  Once the basestar reaches the fleet, D’Anna takes control of the situation and holds Roslin and the air wing hostage until the Final Five surrender themselves. Tory willingly joins the Cylons, with the excuse that Laura needs her medications. To break the stalemate, Tigh admits to Adama that he’s a Cylon. Adama is devastated, and leaves Lee in command. Lee threatens to launch Tigh out an airlock, but D’Anna is ready to call his bluff. Simultaneously, Tyrol and Anders begin hearing the same haunting melody that activated them. They’re able to localize the source—Starbuck’s pristine Viper. Tyrol and Anders are thrown into the airlock with Tigh, but Starbuck stops Lee from executing them. There’s a signal coming through her Viper’s emergency radio. Humans and Cylons converge on the Viper, and both sides agree that it is pointing them toward Earth. They decide to travel there together.

  JAMES CALLIS

  (actor, “Gaius Baltar”)

  When I think about that storyline—that Baltar cult, as it were—I find myself thinking of a few things and they all come out at the same time. One is that things are made for television. This is something that we spoke about while we were doing the show, and had we had, I suppose, more years or longer to tell the story. We could have done more. Some episodes are so multipacked, I used to think, “My God, just one of these elements could be an episode, really, and then I could have four more episodes.” One of the discussions we had was that prophecy takes thousands of years to come true. When we look at the history of our own planet and see the clues that have been left—for example, fossils—and decipher that information by carbon dating it, the things that we find out that were important were millions of years in the making. So there’s a certain aspect of television that these things need to happen a bit quicker, because otherwise what are we going to do?

  I don’t know how many episodes there were that particular season, or how many more there could have been, but you may have had some episodes where Baltar disappears for a couple of shows, and you see him picked up, you see the journey toward this place. On some level it makes perhaps more organic sense. Totally opposite to that, look at the real world. The chance of somebody today beating a trial and having some dreadful things said against them, but beating that and winning out, and then becoming leader of a cult is possibly not so unusual.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  One of my favorite things I ever saw in the dailies was when James Callis comes down and they’ve rescued him, his cult. He comes in and he sees that big altar of Baltar. There are takes in there that are just astounding. Of course, you didn’t get to see all of them like we did. It was just such a wonderful moment, there was this thing where James is going, “Really? Really? This is everything I ever wanted, but really these guys are nuts.” What is it to be admired by all of these people? In one way this guy deserves a bullet, but then one of the most annoying things to do is make him a god. There’s a certain perversity of “Can we take the audience on this ride, too?” Everyone knows he did all this, despite his rationalizations. It’s just, like, “All I want to do is get laid and get a lot of money.” All his goals are human goals. They’re not “I am the embodiment of evil.” It’s more like, “I just wanted to do this and it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I’m kind of a little bit of a sociopath in the sense that I’m not really thinking about how it’s going to affect other people.”

  JAMES CALLIS

  So I think the powers that be needed to have him in the mix. I remember when the idea had come up, that Baltar was basically going to be abducted after the trial, it was, like, who was going to abduct him. They didn’t want it to be some terrorist or fringe unit, because that would mean putting it on another ship, and that would mean building another set, etc. So then they were like, “Let’s think of something very unusual. Like, you think these people are out to kill him, but…” I remembered then about so many people who might be in prison for the one offense or another, sometimes dreadful offenses, and they’re developing a kind of cult. There are some women who fall in love with this particular person.

  So it was this idea that through the trial, there had been a silent minority of people who were following him and wanted him and felt like he had something to give them. We tried to have as much fun with that as possible, in the sense of that thing of, “Do as I say, don’t do as I do.” Sending out some spiritual message, being very venal, I think the word is in real life. I suppose there was a transformation in there somewhere, where Baltar is beaten to bits in front of Lee and starts saying, “The Lord loves you as you are…” I’m not sure how long he remembers that.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  What could we load on him that would just spin his head around? He thinks he wants that. Then you give it to him and it’s, like, “Do I really want that?” Because here it is, Gaius Baltar. You wanted all this from back on Caprica and now you’ve got it. Now it’s in the bo
wels of the ship. You just barely got out with your life from the whole thing. The Adamas saved you. It’s just nuts that we could go there. Obviously it’s entertaining, too. It’s like, “What do you do when you put this guy in this cult with all these people?” Again, this isn’t the National Society of Scientists saying, “You’re wonderful.” This is a bunch of whack jobs.

  The cult of Baltar was about as “light” as things would get in season four as the show pushed itself, the story, and the characters toward their collective resolution.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  Basically season four is the fleet is coming apart, both emotionally because of the realization that we’re going to have to make a deal with the Cylons, and that we had Cylons in command positions inside of the fleet all this time. And infrastructure-wise, we’re running out of everything. The ship is starting to crack down the middle.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  In the end, a faction of the Cylons rebelled and joined our side and it made them complicated and it really made a statement about war. You dehumanize your enemy, and usually in that process of dehumanization, you do that so you can feel okay about killing them. And, really, it’s a fiction. It’s a fiction that we create so that we can come to terms with killing fellow human beings. So by gradually revealing the human elements in the Cylons and opening questions about, “Well, are they really that different from us? Are they really just machines or are they a legitimate life-form?,” it made all the issues and the drama more complex, and complicated it, and so it was great. I’m glad that we did it. Initially we were reluctant to do it. But in the end, it’s a group of Cylons and humans that find Earth, and it’s a hybrid child—Hera, the child of Helo and Sharon—that becomes the Eve of the human race. Which is all pretty amazing stuff.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  That’s an old science fiction trope. This goes back to Star Trek when the emotion grabber has taken over the Enterprise and Kirk and the Klingon leader are beating each other up [in “Day of the Dove”]. Then they realize that this enemy is feeding on their anger. They’re never going to get rid of it as long as they’re shooting at one another, so they have to make nice. We’re all humans even though we’ve got differences. Well, if we all are the same, do we have the same principles? Or at least can we unite for survival? In history, we have done that, deciding to align with Stalin against Hitler. It’s, like, “Okay, we’ll do this, solve that problem. Then we’ll go back to the problems we had with each other.”

  TRICIA HELFER

  (actress, “Number Six”)

  It’s interesting that you think the humans are going to be the ones to logically and philosophically deal with everything, but, no, there are two sides to it. Two sides between you and your enemy. If you only see your enemy as a certain way, you’re not taking full advantage of their abilities. You’re not understanding them fully.

  DAVID EICK

  There was some talk that this was an allegory to what’s gone on in Iraq. It was half and half. We’re news junkies and history junkies, so there was always an initiative to inform the work with current events and sociopolitical realities, and an allegory for our times. But what was interesting was to take what audiences would expect … you say, “Okay, we’re going to do a metaphor for our own reality, therefore the good guys are going to be the Americans and the bad guys are going to be the Iraqis.”

  Instead, we had the good guys be the polytheists, who were suicide bombing, and the bad guys be the monotheists, who were trying to orchestrate some sort of a détente with the humans.

  And that is when it became interesting. In a way it freed us from the need to feel like we were Dick Wolf on Law & Order, ripping the headlines from The New York Times and saying, “Let’s do this episode.” That was never really the approach. It was really based on story, based on character first, and sort of the continuation of whatever story arc we’d established and whatever cultural or political sort of world relationship the stories had was subtle and tangential. It was sort of a delicate influence as opposed to a deliberate adaptation.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  Another part of them working together concerned the Galactica itself. I’m kind of a nut about infrastructure, and playing with those ideas in context of a science fiction world, so I always want to know, where is the food coming from? Who’s making the oxygen for you? Who is creating the booze? We had an episode where they start discovering giant cracks in the hull of Galactica. It’s starting to give. It just won’t last any longer. Well, that is exactly what would happen to a ship that’s been battered by all these battles, and has been pressurized for how many years. Again, playing with the idea of the reality of this just can’t go on, because, frankly, it’s just going to fall apart at some point. It will not hold. It’s just a piece of machinery. I loved the detail that once we discovered there was a crack down the middle of Galactica, we didn’t just say, “Oh, they fixed it.” Or, “They welded it, now it’s better.” We played that. It’s, like, “No, it’s getting worse.” And then we ended up using Cylon technology to help with repairs. Now they’re saving us. Season four got very interesting.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  That was a big deal for us, because we’re four seasons in and we’re aware that this is the third act. Everything in fourth season is with an eye toward the endgame. I said, “Let’s start developing cracks in the Galactica. The show is going to die, the Galactica is going to die.” The ship was symbolic of the show, so the Galactica’s on her last legs. She can’t last much longer. What else does the old girl still have in her? So we were using that metaphorically in the show. And then Adama, being the one most married to the ship, would care the most, and it would be the hardest for him of all the characters to accept Cylon help and technology on that ship.

  One of the very first scenes that he has in the entire show is his refusal to allow Laura to put networked computers on this ship. He laid that line down really early as a character. It was great to now be able to make him have to accept not just networked computers but Cylon technology on his ship, and what that would do to the man. We just really wanted to take him apart as best we could in that last run. To really challenge the hero of the show and break down the leader of the whole thing, which is, again, in the spirit of, “Let’s do something different. Let’s do something other shows don’t do.” The writers all went, “Yeah, let’s go ahead. Nobody fucks with their hero. Nobody takes Picard apart.”

  DAVID EICK

  Eddie so rarely would have notes on script or big things that he wanted to change. But I do remember how anxious and fervent he was about Adama’s point of view about putting Cylon technology in the ship. It’s Archie Bunker getting a blood transfusion from an African-American. We never would’ve hit it as hard as we did had he not been as vocal about it. I was worried it would be over-the-top, but Eddie was like, “No fucking way; I don’t want those motherfuckers anywhere near the ship”—you know, talking about it like they were Nazis and just the epitome of evil. So you sort of get it and you sense it’ll be fun. And it was. It was fun playing him under such duress having to endure that. So that particular story point had a lot of Eddie Olmos in it.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We wanted to take Adama to a really dark, bad place, and the same thing for his ship. Eddie was totally up for it. He’s up for everything. But that’s the thing, too: for Adama to suddenly be surrounded by his best friend, by these other people who he served with all these years, and they’re Cylons, and he’s been working with them. That’s got to change his perception of Cylons in general.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  There were several occasions where characters would reflect on where they were at and begin to wonder if there was a point to this; if there was any end to this. Adama certainly. I do remember Lee having thoughts like that. Even though Lee was in government at that time and was negotiating some of the deals, I guess for lack of a better word, with the Cylons, he still expressed doub
t about whether or not this was the right move. He wasn’t an avid supporter of let’s make a deal with these guys but he realized it was the only way to survive, so he was holding his nose a bit while he was doing it. But he was as frustrated as anyone else, I think, that they were reduced to this or forced into this.

  I don’t remember the exact scene, but I know that sentiment certainly began even in season three. Certainly there were elements of it all through the show. You can almost put your finger on the beginning of the series with the competing military versus political faction, civilian faction, which is that whole, What are we? What do we hold on to to be the people that we were before? How much do we have to give up to just survive, and what does that leave us with? What are we when that happens? That certainly became stronger toward the end when everything’s really coming down around their ears.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We were taking the audience and the characters on this journey that was going from the genocide of the pilot to a place where they would actually have to work with and embrace some of their most profound enemies that you could possibly imagine. That was important to us; it was part of what the show was about. It was a redemptive quality to what we wanted to do that was a sense of compassion and understanding for that which you hate and that which you despise, and trying to be able to bridge that gap and get to that place. For the humans to accept the Cylons as people was the biggest journey. That was the big one, because that was always the line: “They’re not people, they’re copies, they’re not true, they’re not real, they don’t have sentience, they’re something that has been created to mimic us.”

  As season four moved toward its midpoint, there was a very real chance that the show could have ended with episode twelve, “Revelations,” when the united humans and Cylons reach Earth, only to find that it’s a burnt-out nuclear wasteland. Hollywood feared a similar fate when it became increasingly likely—and did come to pass—that the Writers Guild of America would be going out on strike that year.