So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  What I remember most is the strike landing right in the middle of our final season, and it was a big sort of shock. What stands out the most to me is I felt like I had to go up to Vancouver and talk to the crew on the eve of the strike, once it became clear that everyone was going out the next day. I flew up and back down the same day.

  When I arrived, I had production get the whole cast and crew together, and they all assembled in the CIC, since it was the biggest space and the only place you could literally get the entire cast and crew together. Once they were all there, I walked in to CIC and there was the entire family, everyone in the round on both levels. I talked to them for ten to fifteen minutes, and I started off by saying that when Admiral Cain was being attacked in the original Cylon attack on Caprica, she did a blind jump and that’s what we’re all about to do here. We’re just going to do a blind jump to somewhere. They all laughed. I said, “The writers are going out tomorrow and I’m going with them, and that means there aren’t going to be any changed pages and the scripts you’ve got, that’s going to be the script.” I said that—I believe it was—Michael Rymer was directing, so he and Harvey Frand were in charge. I said, “The line of authority after this moment will go from God to Harvey Frand.” Then I added, “And to be clear, there are no issues here about crossing picket lines. There’s no picket line outside the gate to Vancouver Film Studios, so that’s not what this is about. I’m not expecting people not to show up. I want you to show up and do your job … and get all the overtime you can get.… I trust you and hopefully this will all end soon and I’ll see you after the jump.”

  I walked out and it was very emotional and people applauded and hugged and all that on the way out, then I got back on a plane and flew to L.A. and was on the picket line with the writing staff literally the next day. It was just surreal that the show was kind of going on without us. That was a weird moment in the whole thing.

  GRACE PARK

  (actress, “Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii”)

  Shooting that sequence on Earth was really eerie, because that really could have been the end of the series. It wasn’t expected, but it wasn’t just some random side episode about Tigh and Ellen getting drunk. It really could have been it. On top of that, Eddie told us it was the end. Years later I said to him, “It’s the only thing that you’d said that didn’t come true,” and he said, “I had to tell you guys that to prepare you in case.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  You didn’t really think that Sci-Fi was going to cancel the show, but you start talking about it more and worrying about it more. It was in the air. In retrospect, you look back and realize they probably wouldn’t have canceled it unless the strike went on for a year or something. But at the time, it was the uncertainty of it all that was really a big deal.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  (actress, “President Laura Roslin”)

  I remember the day we shot that, because it was a very funny situation in that there we were in a nuclear wasteland, and we were sort of walking amongst the ruins and there was a big crane shot happening. Every time they said, “Cut!” all the actors pulled out their cell phones, because it was the beginning of the writers’ strike and we were trying to figure out what we would do. Suddenly they’d be, “Okay, rolling,” and everyone’s phones would go away and there we would be again. But it just came to me that on that day on the set, when we were trying to figure out where we were on this planet, we were trying to simultaneously figure what the future of our industry was. The feeling was like, “Wait a minute, are we shooting our final scenes?” Everybody was calling their agents in between trying to get somebody to figure it out, because honestly no one knew. But it had this spooky kind of synchronistic life-as-art-is-life feeling, and that kind of stayed with me as my overall image.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  (actor, “Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama”)

  That was definitely a false ending, where we thought it all might be taken away from us and we were never going to end this thing, because of the writers’ strike. That night we celebrated like it was the end—I even stole my costume just in case. But, of course, we got a second life and we got to come back to get the perfect curtain call.

  AARON DOUGLAS

  (actor, “Chief Tyrol”)

  We shot that thing where we finally find Earth and it’s a burned-out mess, and there’s that long, slow panning tracking shot. I’m thinking in my head, how would Chief react to this? Every single person is devastated and they’re shaking their head and they’re looking at each other, and some of them are crying and stuff. I made the choice that I just stood there giggling to myself. Camera rolls past me and nobody said anything. A couple of days later I got a call from one of the writers and they said, “I can’t tell you how much I loved that. It’s the perfect Chief reaction.” That reaction is, like, “Hey, we found Earth, and of course it’s a fucking burnt-out shitshow and we can’t live there.” It’s the great cosmic joke. Of course we’re not going to be able to do the thing that we want to do. Of course it’s just going to get worse and shittier. It got to the point where he expects this to happen. He’s the worst-case-scenario guy—“the glass is half full” is just gone. The glass is empty, screw you guys. And then there’s the decision toward the end there, too, where he just says in his last scene, “You know what? I’ve had enough of you guys and I’m going to an island off the northern continent and I’m going to call it Scotland and I’m going to build a castle, and I’m going to have sex with sheep and make Scotch. That’s my plan.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Eddie would have been very happy if that was the ending. His pitch for the last episode was we get to Earth, everyone is excited on the Galactica. You know, “We made it, we made it, we made it.” And then, all of a sudden, you cut to the White House and in the Oval Office is George W. Bush and somebody comes in and says, “Mr. President, there’s a spaceship in orbit,” to which Bush replies, “Launch the nuclear missiles.” They destroy them and that’s it. There’s a barn burner.

  Two episodes into the second half of the fourth season, Moore wrote and made his directorial debut on the episode “A Disquiet Follows My Soul,” which, among other things, takes a closer look at the growing human/Cylon alliance, and the dissent—flamed by Tom Zarek—that will soon lead to mutiny.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  It had come up through the years, was I going to direct an episode. My standard answer was always, “Well, I’m still kind of learning this job and that’s taking on a whole other set of responsibilities.” I always kind of pushed it down the line, but as we got into the last season I think it was kind of now or never. If I’m going to do this and do it for the first time, I should do it on my own show when the crew is well into the run and everybody knows what they’re doing and do it toward the end so that I can step out of showrunning for a few weeks. Because that’s really what it requires. I had to focus on prep and then shooting it and cutting it, and so it kind of took me out of prep and post in other episodes. At that point in the series, I just kind of felt like, okay, it was time to do that and I could do it. So I put myself on the list and just decided I’d direct and write. And what I wrote was just a character piece of these people and the aftermath of the disappointment of finding the nuclear Earth and what are they going to do next, and starting to plant just the seeds of what was going to explode shortly thereafter.

  The strangest thing about the whole experience was that I found it relaxing. I realized later that that was because showrunning is all about constant interruption. I can’t focus on one thing. I can’t focus on this script, because I have to answer this email or I’m going to get a phone call or now I’ve got to go jump to this other story, I’ve got to go to post and work at this other episode; oh, the writers want to pitch me a new version of that episode; and, oh, they’re calling from the set. Am I ever going to get back to my script? You’re constantly juggling and constantly multitasking all these things, from prep to sho
ot to post, every day. But when I was directing, they don’t want you to do anything else. The whole system is designed to make space. All I had to do was focus on this scene, and talk to these actors about this, and it was just freeing. The cast was great, the crew was very supportive and helpful. They would catch me if I was going to do something dumb, or give me a suggestion on how to do something a little different. It went great.

  In some ways it may have gone too well, in that on the last day of directing, he went home to the house he and his wife were renting in Vancouver, went outside, sat on a rock, and cried. It was, he says, the weight of the fact that he and David Eick had volunteered the end of the show.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  It was so great and we were ending the show. I was just, like, “What am I doing? Why am I ending this thing I love so much and these people I love so much? What a fool I am.” I was just devastated. Then I got over it and I wrote the crew a letter that went out on the call sheet the next day, just thanking them for making it such a great experience and then telling them about that experience and how much I loved them all and loved the show. I knew that ending the show was clearly the right choice, but it just hit me emotionally what it was going to mean to really walk away from it.

  Prior to that episode was “Sometimes a Great Notion,” which dealt with the aftermath of the discovery of the irradiated Earth. One result was Lee Adama and Anastasia Dualla, former communications officer of Galactica and his estranged lover, being drawn back together romantically, and after a wonderful time with him, she nonchalantly commits suicide by shooting herself.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  (co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I think back to Dualla’s suicide; that she preferred to go on that note rather than the note of chaos that was overtaking the ship. This was right before the mutiny happened. The reason that scene was so powerful is because there were three and a half seasons of Dualla playing this role as Lee’s lover, and as an incredibly competent lover. When I say Lee’s lover, by the way, it could also be that Lee was her lover. You’d gotten to know that character, so to see her do that was so powerful, because I think that was the episode where you thought, “Okay, this fleet is really about done. They are really coming apart.” Then we made it worse with the mutiny, but it was really a culmination of the bad that had been seeping through the entire fleet.

  AARON DOUGLAS

  When I think of the show, I think of things like Kandyse McClure, who played Dualla; when she had that affair going with Apollo. They finished dinner and she goes back to her quarters and is humming. I know it’s coming, but in my brain I completely switched off the part of knowing, having read the script. I’m watching and she opens her books, looks in the mirror, kind of smiles at herself, and then just pulls out a pistol and blows her head off. I literally jumped in my chair, and just was horrified and screamed, “No!” It was just so powerful and so beautiful and just heart-wrenching. Just absolutely gutting.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  Because of the strike, we had to stop writing as of episode thirteen. That was a terrible strike. When the strike was over and we came back, we watched all thirteen episodes. When you watch them back-to-back and you get to Dualla’s suicide, we realized, “We have really gone to a dark place with this show.” Maybe it didn’t hit the others as much as me—or maybe it did—but I just went, “Whoa, the crisis level on this ship is sort of beyond belief.” Some theaters in Los Angeles were showing these episodes, or we would rent a theater to bring friends out, but a theater actually showed the episode where Dualla died. It was a packed house and no one knew this was coming. It was absolutely heart-stopping, and you could hear a pin drop when that happened.

  It was one of the more powerful moments I’ve had with something I was involved in to watch, because it was so dramatic. It came out of nowhere but made sense when you thought about it that she had finally had one last good day with Lee, and figured that was the only last good day she had in her. I don’t necessarily agree with that attitude, but that’s the attitude she had. She’s someone who went from being the person who essentially gave you information—she was on the command deck—to this fully evolved, emotional life.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The seeds for the mutiny came out of, “What happens once they get to Earth and it’s a radioactive cinder? All their hopes have been destroyed.” It felt like that was the moment of touching bottom for everyone. Everything they had pinned their hopes on since the pilot was to not be. They literally had no idea what to do next. Earth was a disaster and at that point it felt like things would start to come unraveled, and that people would start questioning authority. People would start rebelling, people would start to fight against the power that had been in place all this time, and they would start to tear at each other. So out of that, somebody was going to lead a mutiny and it felt like a natural story, because a mutiny is one of those ideas that gets tossed around all the time in a show like that, because you’re on a ship and it’s just one of the natural things you go to.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  We figured that sooner or later a mutiny had to happen, and at one point we had it done by Tigh, and that would have been earlier in the show. At that point, each of them thought they were Cylons. So we were trying to get to that, but the more we tried to work on that, the more we thought Tigh is never, ever going to think Adama is a Cylon. It’s just not going to happen. Even if he were, he’s so loyal to the guy.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  In an odd way, the mutiny episodes, which were a bit more of action, were a way to lift us out of this incredibly dark place we were at, even though those episodes were very dark, too. But people were in movement. I guess the darkness led to where we could do a mutiny; where we could do sort of that ultimate betrayal of everything. It was such a dark, hopeless place that the idea that former colleagues could turn on one another like that finally made sense. We talked about doing a mutiny as early as season two, but it just came down to feeling like it was too early. We didn’t earn that yet.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I kept pushing the idea away, saying, “No, we’re not at that place.” And for something like that to happen, it has to be a big deal. You just shoved it away, but it was always a viable concept if you found the right story. In the same way that New Caprica was always a viable concept. People were always pitching, “What if they find a planet that maybe they could settle on?” I knew you could only get to play that card once as well. So the mutiny was always sort of in the air, and this was the moment to do it.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  It was also pointed out that mutinies are a huge thing to even attempt regardless of the situation you’re in. In terms of Battlestar, you’re on the run and you’re on your own. There’s really no court system that’s quite so valid, although Gaeta and Zarek certainly got in trouble. But we really felt like that fourth season was the right time to finally approach it, because we knew those characters so well. It was interesting that in the second episode of the mutiny story I had originally written in a flashback from the miniseries that showed how loyal Gaeta had been to Adama, just to show how far they had gone and see how this relationship had gone completely off the rails. We couldn’t end up shooting that for time reasons, but the idea that Gaeta had gone so far that he could turn against the man that he admired and respected more than anyone was very interesting.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  Then when Zarek showed up, we’re going, “Okay, we now have the conditions that are right for a mutiny, let’s do it. What should it be?” We were taking Gaeta down that dark road, blowing his leg off and all. The evolution of Gaeta was great, in the sense that he used to be the guy saying, “This is what the computer is telling me,” to the guy where he finally got pissed off at Tigh. Everything we threw at him he could handle, and then some. It was from that moment of abuse, questioning whether this was making any sense at all and whether you could make a deal with these guys, he would go, “Y
ou know what? The guy’s consorting with Cylons. His executive officer is a Cylon. This has got to stop.” That was when our cast just gave us those things. The ability to go those places; you never saw it in the beginning. We wanted to do Red October real early. We wanted to do Crimson Tide. That came up many times, but we just couldn’t take those two guys—Adama and Tigh—there. We finally built the other two characters, Gaeta and Zarek, enough so that they could hold their own against our guys.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Gaeta was one of the characters that writers tended to give interesting bits to whether they were in the outlines or not. You would often read drafts and there was always something for Gaeta. The roots of the mutiny in Gaeta were just seeds that sprung naturally in that direction. And we kept putting him against the other characters, because you got great drama out of it. It was just great. We had this great conflict between Gaeta and Kara, and Gaeta and everyone else. You just kept playing those scenes because they were fun scenes to play. And then when you really got to the point where, “Well, who’s going to be one of the lead mutineers?” it was so obvious. It was like, “Well, clearly it’s going to be Gaeta.” And also it was going to hurt so much, because he was an original member of the family. He was with them from the very beginning, so there was a great unexpected way to go at the same time.

  ALESSANDRO JULIANI

  (actor, “Felix Gaeta”)

  My expectations were nothing when I became a part of the show. I didn’t expect to come on set, to push buttons on the console and for them to actually light up. That was crazy! I was happily just soaking it in at that point. I never, in my wildest dreams, ever thought that the character would eventually go as far as he did. One of the great things about the show was the trust that the producers and writers had, gradually entrusting us with more and more as they watched and saw what we did. I suppose it’s like that on any show, but at the time I didn’t know that. As things began to expand, it expanded our universe, too, and the challenge was great.