So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  You can outline the arc of the character quite well. During New Caprica we talked about him in the room as being the flunky under Baltar who saw him in idealistic terms and blind to all this and that. But as the drafts started to develop, and as the writers sort of took all those drafts and embroidered on them, Gaeta became something greater than himself. From New Caprica forward, he became this much more complex character who had really sacrificed, who had extended himself and put himself far out there for ideals that he believed in. I remember different discussions in the writers’ room about where we could take that character.

  ALESSANDRO JULIANI

  Gaeta started out as a real company man. And certainly a bit of an idealist, believing in the leadership and the hierarchy and how the world just seems to work. And as a person who had been a sort of scientist, he had a healthy that side of the brain that determined a certain logic to how things would happen. And a sense of order and of morality. I suppose like many of the characters in the show, that was completely uprooted and shaken over the course of the series. He certainly had mentor figures and idols, which he chose and who proved false. He began to see that the world was probably a lot more complex than when he started out.

  DAVID EICK

  Well, you know, the actor, too, has something to do with that. If Gary Burghoff in M*A*S*H had been responsible for coordinating an attack on the United States by the North Koreans, you would have gone, “Radar is the one?” And we had that option with this actor, because he was so versatile and he started off being sort of, you know, Sulu. But by the end he had really evolved into this very multidimensional actor. Writers are inspired by and helped by what they see onscreen. How they view their jobs can be made, if not easier, then at least more interesting by what actors provide them with. And AJ, as we call him, is an actor who was reading off jumble jargon and scientific coordinates, and yet there was a quality that made you go, “Wow, there’s something about him that we can take chances with that guy.”

  JANE ESPENSON

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

  It’s one of my favorite things to do—to take a secondary or tertiary character and put them in the center. Nobody in real life is a supporting character. Everyone’s the hero in their own story, so we can tell those stories. They’re often the most interesting stories, because they’re a character that you’ve never looked closely at before.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  Very few people are actually evil. I think most people are well-intentioned. They can be delusional and dishonest with themselves, they can have all sorts of problems, but essentially they’re trying to sleep at night. They’re trying to do the right thing in difficult situations, and they may make terrible mistakes, and that’s what Battlestar really did. There were very few baddies. We had weak people, we had scared people, and Zarek is the perfect example of that, where you could read that on the page and it could be an archvillain—someone very broad, out for their own ends and nobody else’s—but that’s not what we got, because we had Richard Hatch, who is a noble person, in charge of that. Although he struggled with the whole mutiny storyline.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Richard had one note about when Zarek orders the execution of the Quorum, and how that happened. In the original draft, he goes in and he asks them for a vote of confidence or something, or no confidence. And the vote went for him, if I’m remembering this right. He was surprised that, at the moment, the Quorum actually supported him, supported Zarek. Then he walked out the door where the guards were and said, “I’m surprised they supported me, but we’ve still got to get rid of them.” And he ordered the soldiers to go in and shoot them anyway, which is pretty dark. I just thought that there was something interesting about, “It didn’t really matter if they supported him or not. They were the old regime, and the old regime had to be wiped away so they can succeed.”

  Richard objected to that. He was like, “Look, if he’s gone in there and they’ve given him what he wants, I just don’t think he’s going to kill them for the sake of killing them.” He thought it made him look too bloodthirsty and too maniacal, and I went, “All right, I get it. I was trying to go for some irony to it, but, yeah, maybe I’m thinking one level too far.” So I rewrote it so that the Quorum vote went against him and then he executed them. And it plays fine.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  Richard liked and believed in Tom Zarek, and you have to do that as an actor. Anybody who then takes that character and goes, “Oh, I can really be evil here; I can really go for it,” you’re going to fail, because the reality is that people don’t think that way. I don’t think even in North Korea, the regime there—even there—I don’t believe are consciously trying to be evil. Even though in the West, we have that perception of them. From beginning to end with Ron, there’s no character that hasn’t been shaded with every hint of gray, from near white to near black, and everything in between. It’s my sort of modus operandi as an actor to find that in every character. If someone’s coming across as good, then find what’s really a problem. And if someone’s coming across as bad, then find the good and play that. You’ve got to fight for the character, and Richard did that to the very end with Zarek. He was really disappointed that Zarek could be seen as a bad guy by the end. He fought against it all the way.

  ALESSANDRO JULIANI

  I’ll never forget sitting side by side as Richard and I were about to be executed and sharing that moment with him. It wasn’t literally my last moment on the set, but it was close to it. There was so much going on for us as characters, but as human beings what a journey for Richard, at that point, and for me, someone who was just still at the very beginning of their career. I knew that it was the end of something massive and seminal in my life. As the years go by, that only intensifies, that memory, that sense of “What a thing!”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Executing them was hard, and it was obvious. I really felt that if they did this mutiny, heads would have to roll. They would just have to. They couldn’t just send them into jail. It felt like we would be cheating if we did that, and the show was ending. There wasn’t a problem doing it, it was whether or not we were going to see it. And whether or not you were going to be there with them. Or should they die in gunfire when the rebellion is put down and they die a quasi-heroic death? Or should they be executed? Do we see Adama execute these two men? And I said, “Yeah, we do. We’re going to go right to that—we’re not going to shy away from it. We’re not going to be TV, we’re not going to give them the easy out, and the easy out is they just take a bullet somewhere in the fight for control of the ship, and they just end up dead. But the tougher one is Adama executes them, and he executes two characters that we really like.”

  The network blanched over that a little bit. Mark Stern was a little, like, “Really? You really want to see these guys get executed? Is that necessary?” There were qualms, but we just pushed it through.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  We really tried to build that so it didn’t feel like it was coming out of nowhere. It felt like a character turn that made sense, and Zarek was further along that path. He was easier to get there, but with Gaeta, we really wanted to understand his disappointment with Adama and how this desire to make a deal with the creatures that were making their lives an utter misery and wanted to destroy them, how the man he respected was going to try to do that would destroy his faith. This guy that he respected became the core of that series of episodes.

  ALESSANDRO JULIANI

  When you get that unexpected call from Ron, then you know, “Oh, shit, I’m not gonna make it to the end of the series after all this.” But, then, when we got on the phone and he told me what they were planning for the next four or five episodes … well, what a great frakkin’ way to go. Without putting too fine a point on it, I think that ultimately Gaeta’s actions shook everyone out of their various stupors and in a way saved the fleet. Saved them all. Without that mutiny, things were
kind of inexorably doomed. In a strange way it galvanized everyone and bonded them together.

  DAVID EICK

  When you’re nearing the finish line, you have to start casting people in bronze. The characters are about to become what they’ll always be known for, and you’re about to resolve them in a way that in some respects is kind of permanent. To that extent, I think you find yourself making less-nuanced choices, because when you think of the character, you tend to think in simple, bold, loud terms. What stands out about that character, you’re not thinking about the time they did three things that are uncharacteristic.

  My point is, I think Tom Zarek was a damaged guy and he was a Machiavellian guy. While I think Zarek had compassion and understood, we wanted the character to understand and be sensitive to human pain and suffering. That still doesn’t trump the Machiavellian impulse and the lust for power, and the sort of insanity that occurs when you can’t get it. Again, you get to the end of the run and you have to start saying, “This is who this guy is.” When you look back, this is who this guy was. So in a nutshell, with Tom Zarek you’re talking about a dark guy. Now if we talk about him longer, there’s a lot of beveling and nuance, but in a thumbnail sketch, yes.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  One thing that I actually tried to do in “The Oath,” which was the second mutiny episode, was to inject a little bit of the fighting spirit that our guys had. Specifically, there’s a scene where they’re about ready to shoot Lee Adama as he gets off of a diplomatic shuttle. The people on Galactica that are mutinying, they don’t have any interest in negotiating with the Cylons and they know Lee’s been doing that, and they’re just going to shoot him. They’re going to kill him as he gets off the shuttle. You hear a bang, and there’s Starbuck standing there with a gun. She says, “Let him go.” Another guy draws a gun, she shoots him, too, and says, “I could do this all day.”

  Basically they have to let Lee go, and as she’s leaving she says something like, “Follow me. Please.” I think the audience was hungering to see the Starbuck who would fight for Lee, who would defend herself, who would do the right thing, and basically we were able to do a little more … action’s the wrong word, but the movements that earlier shows had in terms of the struggle they were having. I really wanted to capture, “Okay, Starbuck’s back. Good. Yay,” after her being in a bit of a fog, because she didn’t know who she was, either. What she did know is that she wasn’t going to let people shoot Lee Adama and she wasn’t going to let them fuck with her ship. That’s who we knew she was.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Part of the fun of doing the mutiny was watching the power slide back and forth. It’s control of a discrete thing, a ship, as opposed to a political mutiny or a cop, where you’re trying to take over the reins of government. Whether you’re killing Hitler and trying to get the troops to do things in Berlin, it spread all over the place, and there’s lots of weight power centers and lines of communication. It’s a very complicated thing, but when it’s on a ship, it’s very specific and you can control the power and you can control the weapons. You can lock things, you can cut off certain corridors so it becomes very tangible, and you can watch on camera as certain things are shut off to them, and then somebody gets control and, yes, someone’s locked up and then someone’s released. You can really dramatize it in a very literal way.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  With mutinies, there are a lot of negotiations that have to go on. We tried to play that it wasn’t just this monolithic black-and-white situation. Once you’ve turned into a mutineer, that’s it. Now, some of the characters were that way, but there’s a scene where Tigh and Adama are being escorted to basically a prison cell or something, and clearly there were some arguments happening between the guards that are leading them along. That escalates to a point where Adama is able to take advantage of that, basically using his Edward Olmosness, being a guy you don’t want to mess with, and actually sort of turned the tables on those guys. The greatest part of that entire story is that Gaeta was actually right. What were they doing trying to make a deal with the Cylons? The murkiness of saying that we like Adama better than we like him, but here’s Adama’s best friend and first officer who is a Cylon. I would have a hard time wrapping my head around that as a crewman myself. So it was a really fun one to work out. I thought we got some really interesting and, frankly, fun places in those episodes. With dark scenes at the same time.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The mutiny grew out of real issues. There were good people on both sides, and there were characters you cared about on both sides. We had started the thing with Gaeta. We started putting him at odds with the rest before we ever thought that he was going to end up as a mutineer, which really made it work, because there was an organic quality to his story in particular that made you believe where he was going. And Tom Zarek, way back, all the issues that came that they were focused on were true. They weren’t wrong. Adama and Laura had led them all to nothing, to ruin. They had legitimately pissed away the whole thing, and so the rebels really had a strong point and you could understand completely why people would get behind that banner and follow it, because, man, you couldn’t really argue with what they were saying.

  ALESSANDRO JULIANI

  To the bitter end, Gaeta certainly stuck with whatever his moral sense was. He definitely went down thinking he had done the right thing, all the way to the airlock. I think there was a sense of peace, if you will, by the end for him. Which, given some of his actions, it’s a long way to that point. What a complex character. He was like the most reliable, faithful, consistent, and dependable guy in practically the whole fleet. For him to then be turned, or to think that the leadership had been so corrupted there, mutiny was the only choice for him. It was like he was the only one who had retained his sanity in all of this. Which, to be frank and from his perspective, I totally get it. Even through all the craziness, the shifting allegiances, the inconsistency, at times, of leadership, I totally sympathized with him. All the way to the end. He just didn’t really pick his allies particularly well. That was his big flaw.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  As an aside, there was a theater in Portland, Oregon, that would play the episodes off of the Sci-Fi Channel feed. They’d fill the theater up for free, because the theater sold beer, which is how they made their money. I went up for that to catch my episode of the mutiny and watch it with a crowd of about five hundred people. That was awesome, because you could see the visceral reaction people were having to this these. These are true fans who are just caught up in every moment. As was I. To see them respond so positively to this show. The episode ended with one of the mutineers rolling a hand grenade in on Adama, and then it stated it would be continued. Well, the place just erupted. That was one of the more fun moments of my time on Battlestar, to see it with the crowd.

  The last major piece of the puzzle to be revealed in the series was who the final Cylon was. The revelation did not disappoint when the curtain was pulled back to reveal that Kate Vernon’s Ellen Tigh was the last of the Final Five Cylons.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  One of the early paths was talking about who was the final Cylon. Who was it? And we went through all the possibilities. Through the whole cast, right? Who could be the Cylon? A guest star from the past or a brand-new character? We went through all of it. But I think Ellen Tigh just kept coming up. She was the character that we just kept gravitating back to for a variety of reasons. One was everyone loved Kate Vernon and it was hard when we decided to kill her character, and everyone kind of missed her. So you kind of felt like there was a missing part of the family going into the home stretch. It was a good way to bring her back and it also allowed us to get into that character one more time and look at the relationship between her and Saul in a different way. Now you’re talking about two Cylons in a relationship and we could play that out as they had a turbulent, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?–type relationship for eons. There was something really interesting about that, about
what it said about these two characters who seemed to have this bizarro marriage between the two of them, but once she said they were both also Cylons, you started thinking, “Well, that takes us deeper into some interesting backstory.” I was really attracted to it for that as well.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  Look, everybody’s got their opinion. Again, we ran through many permutations on who would be the Final Five Cylons. And that’s the other thing: No decision is bulletproof. I guarantee if you ask the writers, there’d be writers who worked on the show that would say I didn’t agree with that, but I went with it, because that’s where we were going. It’s never a hundred percent acclamation, but we were pretty much on the same page working through the show.

  MICHAEL HOGAN

  (actor, “Colonel Saul Tigh”)

  You never know when you sign on to a series—and not necessarily just Battlestar Galactica—what the writers are going to come up with. Who would have thought Tigh would be a Cylon? And the same with Ellen? Where does that come from? I know that Kate Vernon was ecstatic about it, because here’s this different take on the character.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Ellen Tigh was also sort of the one that gave you a big shock, because we had killed her. We hadn’t been doing a lot of flashbacks with her or anything, so it would be a big surprise to suddenly have Ellen Tigh resurface. And then her backstory itself kind of lent it … It was cloaked in mystery. She was not with them originally. She had come to Galactica late in the first season under mysterious circumstances. Her story was a little suspect. Adama overtly suspected her of being a Cylon, so we’d already sort of gone down some of those paths. And someone inoculated her from that. It just felt right. There was also something about, “If Tigh is one, maybe Ellen’s another,” and then you’re in a situation where, “Well, okay. So who were they really?” and “What’s the nature of the Final Five?” Once you started talking about, well, if these core five characters are the Final Five, why were they special? We had to kind of face that question finally. What makes them special? What is their backstory? How did that all come about?