In the end, Galactica—with Adama leading a coalition of humans and Cylons—manages to defeat the plans of Cavil, ending the threat of Cylon attacks forever. Then Starbuck—whose resurrection became one of the major mysteries of that last year—uses enigmatic musical notes to lead the fleet to another habitable planet, which turns out to be our Earth in the ancient past. It is here that the collective crew settles, dispersing and planting the seeds that will lead to the future of humanity and our current world.
DAVID WEDDLE
In the fourth season, Brad and I wrote “He That Believeth in Me,” “Sometimes a Great Notion,” and “Revelations.” “Sometimes a Great Notion” is where Kara finds her body down on planet Earth. The idea behind that was never wanting to concretely say, “Yes, Kara Thrace is an angel from God or from the gods, sent to guide us to Earth.” We never wanted to make that concrete, so we wanted to leave multiple ways of interpreting it. So by her finding her own body, it not only asks, “Am I really alive or what else am I?” But is it some kind of weird theory of relativity through a black hole, you know, a doppelgänger created by the mysteries and the physics of the universe? So that was the idea of finding the body down there, and then it throws Kara into real doubt about who the fuck she is. She comes back, sort of, “Hey, it’s me, but I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember.” But by the time she finds that, it throws her into a crisis of—which is kind of the final movement of her character—“Who am I?”
DAVID EICK
The real thing that was a point of contention for everyone was the death of Starbuck. When I say I might have pulled the leash less toward something kind of ambiguous and mysterious, that’s an example. That’s not to say I didn’t approve it. I remember we talked about that at our big meeting. I kind of threw up my hands and said, “Let’s see if we can make it work.” It’s the most controversial, because, on some level, it feels to some people like we didn’t have an answer, so we just didn’t give it to them. I can confirm we did have the answers. We had the answer from the beginning of that season. Whether the audience accepts that or thinks that it’s a terrible idea or not, I had to own that right along with Ron.
RONALD D. MOORE
When she came back, it kind of works. She comes back and goes off in the freighter, and she’s drawing the mandala in her cabin. It did feel like we wandered there a bit; I know we were trying real hard to bring focus into that, and it felt like once you had resurrected her, she had to have a huge storyline that justified that—that it was important then to the rest of the show. But I do feel like we never quite brought that into focus. It feels like those episodes do wander around a little bit as she’s on this vision quest, and trying to find answers. The point where it did come into focus for me, ultimately, is when we do the episode with her father and the piano. She realizes there’s a message in the music, and that pays off in the finale when the musical notes then get translated to the coordinates that take us to Earth. That I love. So I love where it ended up, but I was never quite happy with the first half of season four with Kara.
DAVID WEDDLE
I can tell you that in the writing room, there were multiple theories as to who Kara Thrace really was, how did she come back, why did she disappear in the end. We never answered those concretely, nor do I think we ever should. The opinions of the writers in the room are just like the opinions of the viewers. It’s open to interpretation, and there are multiple ways to interpret it. It’s a fantastic journey for the character, and I’m so proud of it.
DAVID EICK
If you ask me what I would have done, I probably wouldn’t have veered in quite as inexplicable direction, but I don’t think I would’ve had the idea to kill her, bring her back, and then have to decide what to do with her. So it cuts both ways, you know? It’s easy to complain that there wasn’t a more satisfying solution to the character, but as you’re complaining about that, you have to acknowledge that you enjoyed the shit out of several episodes where you were made to think she was dead and then made to think she came back, and couldn’t figure it out. So, you know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. I can say, “Gee, I don’t know if I would’ve done that, even though I absolutely approved that and absolutely own it.” At the same time, I have to say I may not have made or presided over as many compelling, juicy, nougaty episodes that sprung from her death that we did benefit from.
MARK STERN
The only thing that really bugged me about the ending of the show was Starbuck as an angel, or whatever the hell happens there in the wheat field. But sometimes you just have to give your folks a gimme every now and then. For all the cool stuff they did with her, the fact that they didn’t quite, in my opinion, have a real answer for how to resolve her storyline is, like, “All right, if that’s your worst sin, go with God.” It is kind of lyrical, though, isn’t it?
KATEE SACKHOFF
(actress, “Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace”)
They wanted to leave it ambiguous and they wanted to give the viewer the ability to determine what the show was for them. So they had to leave some characters open in the sense that they couldn’t wrap it up with a pretty little bow. I had said to Ron the entire time, “Please do not have Kara walk off into the sunset with Lee Adama. She will not be happy. This is not this character at peace. This character at peace is back at war. That’s who she is, that’s where she’s comfortable.” I didn’t want her to have a pretty ending, so for me to have her disappear was actually perfect, because it was such a metaphor, in my opinion, for everything that she had been through. And how history would have painted her as the person who led humanity to the New Earth, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who led them, because she’s not there anymore.
The irony is that she doesn’t get to experience it with them, because she’s not there. I thought that it was a beautiful thing. One of the truths of death that we have such a hard time understanding as people, is that when you’re gone, you’re gone. People remember you, but life carries on almost instantaneously. That is the circle of life, so it made complete sense that she fulfilled her mission and then left. I also thought it was such a beautiful thing, too, that she left as soon as Lee started talking about the things he was going to do.
DAVID WEDDLE
I know a lot of people were pissed off with how it ended, where she just vanishes, but I love that. You know, I think our least successful episode was where we tried to explain the Final Five, and let’s answer every little detail of it, which was not a good impulse, I think. We felt the need to do it, but in the end, I think we would have been better off not doing it. Ken Kesey, who wrote the novel Sometimes a Great Notion, which that episode is named after, has a great quote about fiction. He says, “Don’t look for the answer, look for the mystery.” I’ve seen people find what they think is the answer, but when they do, they stop thinking. So the job is to look for the mystery. To plant a garden in which mysteries bloom, and if you’re pursuing a mystery, you’ll always be searching. So that aesthetic, I think, was a fundamental setting of Battlestar Galactica.
RONALD D. MOORE
We debated various options. There really wasn’t a good one, because every definitive answer felt deflating. If you had said, “Oh, she’s literally a guardian angel,” you go, “Oh, she’s a traveler from another dimension. She’s from the future.” There were all these alternatives that you could come up with, and none of them felt as interesting as just not answering the question. Making it ambiguous that she was truly representational of a power that could not be understood. God could not be understood by man, and Kara had touched that; it was part of that, and she had been brought back by that power. For a time and a place, and a purpose that was somewhat mysterious, and then was taken away. I just think that’s a much bigger statement on her than to try and answer it definitively. It’s just a more memorable ending. Starbuck disappeared, and what did that mean? I think it’s a great question and I’m happy to leave her character on a question.
One of her main concerns and one of the things that she was doing was that she was sort of wrapping up and saying good-bye to the people that mattered to her. For her, when she said good-bye to Lee and she asks him what are you going to do now, and he starts to explain what he’s going to do, she realizes he’s going to be okay and she leaves, because her job is done. He doesn’t need her anymore.
RONALD D. MOORE
Similarly, at the end Baltar has a speech in the CIC where he says, “We all have seen stuff, things have happened, and it can’t be denied that there’s something else. We don’t know what it is, but there’s something else at work that has some connection to us, and some interest in what is happening in our lives.” And that’s as far as I thought you could go, because it didn’t feel like you could answer the question, “Are the Colonials right? Or are the Cylons right? Is there one god, many gods, or are there any gods?” It just felt the show could go as far as saying, “Well, there’s something else. There’s some other something; some greater power. Some other entity with an intent in their lives, that had some connection to it.” For purposes that we cannot comprehend, for motives we cannot understand, and whose actions may not always make sense to us. But there is something there, and that felt like that was also about as far as you could go without becoming too cute, or without giving it a really simple answer that becomes unsatisfying. It felt right to leave it on a tone of mystery, but acknowledge that it existed, whatever it was.
DAVID EICK
I’ll give the other side of my feeling about these sort of mythology issues: Had I been more successful at choke-holding the mythological esoterica, so to speak, in the late first and early second seasons, I don’t think the show would’ve had nearly the appeal. I think I would’ve been too conservative in trying to keep it more on the rails of a traditional type of conflict and so forth, as opposed to getting into metaphysical things. The show not only benefited from but, in an existential sense, needed that element in order to elevate it from an excellently done Star Trek or an excellently done Stargate. And so, as I say I might have argued at times to pull it a little less David Lynch, I also understand that had I succeeded every time I wanted that, the show wouldn’t have been as special.
RONALD D. MOORE
This is the downside in a lot of ways of the method that I preferred to do the show in. I really liked the improvisational nature of the show. I liked figuring things out and making it up as we go along.
MARK VERHEIDEN
I’ve always equated the process to wanting to go to Seattle. Well, you can take the scenic route or you can go to the Grand Canyon, or you can take many different roads to get to that place. To shut yourself off from being open to the creative impulse that comes when things are evolving during the actual writing of a season is, I think, crazy to stick to some sort of preordained plan that you may have come up with because you just decided to do that and not take into account as you’re watching episodes go by and you say, “Wow, this relationship between these two characters is really getting fraught and interesting.” Or, “Boy, wouldn’t it be interesting if we’d go this way or that way.” It’s a long way of basically saying that things like we want to make five people that are very close to our cast into Cylons was, admittedly, not planned from the beginning, but it was something that felt like we could get into it in season three once we made that decision to go there. After that, it became planning on how to get to that place.
MARY MCDONNELL
Ron was completely open to the new information that was coming to him through characters, through some of the ideas of the other writers, and in that way, if it’s a really strong journey, it steers itself at moments. The very, very confident writers embrace that, and he did.
RONALD D. MOORE
I’ve talked about this before. I love the surprise of it. I love the spontaneity of it, to create a frisson that you sort of get in the writers’ room, and you find all kinds of things you never would have thought of if you mapped out everything in advance. Well, the downside is then you get into these kinds of situations where you backed yourself into certain corners, and you’re like, “Okay, now I really have to straighten out this mythology and really figure out how it all works.”
DAVID EICK
A lot of head writers don’t have that discipline. They say either we’re going to map it out so painstakingly and specifically where there’s no room for improvisation—jazz is not allowed—or, hey, let’s just make it as we go along. I started writing on this show, I wasn’t a writer before Battlestar, and one of my most painful and yet I have to say most instructive quotes from Ron was, “I know that’s what we were saying then; this is what we’re saying now.” And it was really instructive. Because you have to be willing to borrow from or be adherent to the spine that you’ve set up, and we always got together to set up what that spine was, and were pretty religious about it. So there were rules, and yet within those rules there was a great flexibility and freedom. Or, what I like to call “infecting the staff with accountability.” If they feel as responsible for the success of the show as we do, then we’re not going to lie awake in bed at night wondering, hey, they’re actually contributing and worrying about it, and in a very profoundly personal way. The age of “Do it my way, write it my way, write the show in specific terms” is dying, and we’re heading toward a much more collaborative or certainly flexible and fluid medium.
RONALD D. MOORE
The vision of the Opera House on Kobol is a great example. A lot of these were images or thoughts or ideas that were either born in the writers’ room, in discussions among the staff or somebody sort of creating them on the page, or someone had a suggestion and it worked its way into the fabric of the show. We would say, “That’s an interesting idea. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I love the iconography of it.” The Opera House was something that actually Michael Rymer came up with as a place to put Baltar, whatever the original iteration of that was. But there were various versions. And then later the challenge of doing a series like this, in my opinion, is then to sort of take those inspirational ideas where you’re throwing something against the wall, you think it’s pretty, you think it’s an interesting place to go, and then to make a mosaic out of that. Say, “Okay, well I heard something here and didn’t know what it meant, but now it’s a part of the picture and what can I do to make the picture fill in, making the picture interesting?” And then, how do we get to the Opera House? What does the Opera House ultimately mean in this circumstance and how can I bend the story sort of back to there and give it meaning and make it feel satisfying and make it feel like it was all valid? Because in my opinion, whether you sit down at the beginning of the project and say “I’m now going to map out everything that happens over the arc of this story” and you follow it, or you invent it along the way, improvisationally, like jazz or something, either way is valid. All that really matters is what you end up with.
DAVID EICK
In the last days, while we were identifying who the Final Five were going to be revealed as, everybody’s name was on the table. There was debate about it. I don’t think anyone came away from the debate feeling upset that we had done anything wrong, but there was certainly debate about it.
RONALD D. MOORE
So the deep backstory of the Final Five and their previous selves was very complicated, and the problem was, every which way we turned it was always complex, and it was always hard to follow, and it was never a simple story. And that was always the bugaboo. I always wanted it to be easily digestible. I wanted to be able to just tell the audience the story and move on, because the show wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about that secret, but we had elevated the mystique of the Final Five to the point where we really did have to answer this question, and all the writers felt very duty-bound that we were going to answer this question. We had done this and, by golly, we were going to figure it out. Somehow.
We pitched various versions to each other
, to David. We went to the network a couple of times with versions of it, and it just kept changing over and over and over again, until we finally got to the place where it works. It’s kind of rickety. It’s certainly not the easiest backstory to understand, but it felt like it encapsulated everything that had kind of been established. And at the end of the day, it felt like, “Okay, it may sound a bit weird that this is the backstory, but it does hold up, and it is kind of consistent with everything that we had laid out,” which is not that satisfying an answer. But in the scope of things, looking back at the show, I’m less satisfied with that part of what we did. I understand why we did it that way and how we got to that point, and I’m not sure I would’ve done it differently. I’m very sure I would not, if I had to do it all over again, I would not have tried to lay out the mythology first. I never would have come up with so many things that made the show very special, so I think I just liked what we did, and there are flaws in it and this is one of the flaws, and I’m willing to sort of accept that flaw.
The flaw is the complications of it. I think it’s a complicated kind of convoluted backstory. It’s not exactly what you feel like the Cylons are all about. You know, that there was an original set of Cylons and humans. It sort of feels like it’s part of the all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. It does fulfill that idea, the circular nature of these events. So it plays into that very well. But I’m not sure that ultimately it’s that satisfying. I think it works. It works logically. It’s just not a “Ooh wow, that’s such a great story” moment.
It’s almost like we’re tying up loose threads to satisfy the audience that’s paying attention. So we were duty-bound to kind of do that. One of the things we did do, going into the fourth season, is we took a white dry-erase board in the writers’ room, and we listed every plot thread that had not been tied … that needed to be tied up, every question that had been asked, and every bit of backstory that felt chaotic or unfulfilled. So that we wanted to check each one of those things off before we went off the air. It was very important to us that we be consistent, that we honor the continuity of the show, and that at the end, all the big questions were answered, and that no one could accuse us of having ignored things, and pretend that things didn’t happen.
So Say We All Page 72