So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

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

  I remember we were trying to plot out this big thing in the writers’ room and we had the revelation that it’s not about the plot, it’s about the characters. Ron went and wrote these wonderful little vignettes that were sprinkled through the story. That, to me, was what the finale was all about. It was weaving together all these character threads from past and present and future. Laura Roslin and her sisters in her youth; Starbuck and Lee and Lee’s brother; Starbuck was an angel or something.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

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

  What worked for us with the show is that we just tore everything—every expectation, every cliché—apart, so that by the time you got to the finale, you just didn’t know what to expect. And speaking of the finale, Ron showed me his first draft of the finale and I told him, “Dude, this is the best thing you ever wrote. This is just fucking amazing.” He said, “Really? I left a lot of stuff out.” So he went back and he added it. Then we had a two-hour finale. Then other people read it and the network read it, and we had a three-hour finale. Then they realized it was going to be too expensive, so it was back to being a two-hour and it was just stunning.

  MARK STERN

  I loved it. Look, it’s very hard to end a series of caliber. I kind of feel like you’re on a ride, and I thought it was very in keeping with the rest of the series. Bringing it home to us, so you couldn’t just kind of resolve it as, “Oh, well, that was a whole other story, with a whole other group of people.” Instead, it’s, “Are we the next Caprica?” We kind of are. It’s a cautionary tale and, without hitting it too hard on the head, it was like, “Yeah, this is a cycle. The whole show is about cycles repeating themselves. Here’s another cycle.” It felt appropriate.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  One of the beauties of Battlestar is the fact that ultimately, in the end, the Cylons and the humans do come together, and they do bring sort of a utopia that, granted, we know in the end it’s going to happen again, it’s going to go to shit at some point, but it is interesting to watch through all the conflict and everything else that has gone on, they ultimately put their differences aside and they are together on Earth. I think it’s a hell of a message.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  (film critic, Access Hollywood)

  It’s very hard to do a series finale. Sometimes they ruffle feathers, like the ending of The Sopranos, where people were infuriated over the way that show ended. You have a show like Breaking Bad, which was perfect. I think the ending of Galactica was perfect. Just that coda; it happened once, it can happen again. They get to Earth, and clearly, we sprang from them, which I can’t say was a surprising development. They did that in the comic book once, but who read that?

  RONALD D. MOORE

  All this has happened before and all of this will happen again, which is a line from the Disney version of Peter Pan. I was watching with my kids, and I went, “I love that line,” and it was something interesting and it kind of felt, at that point, as sort of a nod toward the original series. It was sort of acknowledging in some subtle way that there was an original series, and we were telling the same story all over again. But as we got deeper into the show and started thinking about that idea, it was in their version of the Bible. It was a piece of prophecy. It had a deeper resonance, and I started feeling, “Well, this is a cycle of man. This is a cycle of technology turning against itself, and awakening,” and there were existential questions within it, and there was something interesting about then getting to the finale and basically saying, “And it will happen here, too.”

  Optimistically, there is the feeling that the repetition of certain things toward some goal feels like there are key things that you get better at in an ideal world. Practicing, doing things multiple times, you learn more the second time through. You perfect things through repetition, through practice, and the cycle of time that we were positing. Eventually this was moving toward a place of higher understanding. It was a positive circle of time.

  And looking at our current society, where the machine is evolving to the point where sex robots are not too many years away from becoming a reality for ordinary people, it’s a message that seems to have brought with it a bit of prescience when it originally aired.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I think it’s exciting and disturbing all at once. I remember when we were doing Galactica and I was in Vancouver, [my wife] Terry and I happened upon a documentary that was talking about those Japanese sex robots, at that point. I was fascinated with it, and certainly, like, “Wow! This is crazy.” The thing to me that speaks most strongly, though, was the movie Her. That was an emotional connection to an artificial intelligence without the body. So it was strictly like an emotional and intellectual relationship that was established with this synthetic person, or this true AI. And I thought that was fascinating, because that felt very close to the world that I’m starting to live in now. I talk to my Alexa, and I hate Siri, but I’ve used her on occasion. You kind of start to see how this is going to change as your relationship with technology and with AI is going to change. Not quite clear that we get to the walking-around humanoid synthetic person yet. Sort of a question of why you would want to build that. Like maybe it gets built because people just want to do it. But it’s one of those, “It’s because it’s there and somebody does it.”

  In the series Caprica, we tried to sort of lay out the steps that took you down that path in some ways. The tools to soldiers to people who are quasi-slavelike to you. But I’m fascinated to watch that the society I live in is actually moving in the direction Galactica was starting to talk about.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I just had one of my girlfriends tell me that the problem with dating when you’re divorced and you’re in your forties is that the men your age want younger women, and the older men that are sixty-five don’t have the energy to actually hang out with you anymore, so you’re sort of fucked. So maybe sex robots would be great, because she said, “Honestly, I really don’t need anyone but my girlfriends, but I am a little lonely and could use a handyman.” Maybe the Japanese are on to something. We should just have sex robots for all the divorced forty-five-year-old women who don’t want a sixty-five-year-old and don’t want to just go fuck thirty-two-year-olds.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When we did the episode in season one where Starbuck is interrogating Leoben—and the whole crux of that show was “Is he a person or is he a machine?”—he’s acting like a person. He’s acting like he’s in pain and like he’s suffering, and you start to feel sorry for him, because he seems to be emulating all of the human signs of someone in distress and suffering. So it becomes this complicated thing where one part of your brain is saying, “Yeah, it’s just mimicking human response. Don’t be fooled.” And the other part of your brain is being stimulated to feel like, “Well, this is a person in front of me, and how do I ignore their suffering?” And in Her, that was the moment when he’s talking to her on the AI, and I think he starts to realize that she sounds like she’s upset or she’s feeling bad and it gets into this really complicated place where, well, once you imbue them with feeling and thought and sentience, are they sentient by definition? Or is there still some objective way of figuring it out? It’s fascinating territory once you go down these paths.

  I tried to leave them all in a place where they were about to embark on a different chapter of their lives in different ways. Adama has lost the woman he’s come to love and his soulmate in a lot of ways. And now he’s alone. And it kind of felt like Adama would want to remain alone. He had left it all behind. He wasn’t going to seek out his son. He was going to live alone up on that ridge in the cabin and talk to Laura at her grave, and it was very sort of bittersweet and kind of an ending. It reminded me of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, where John Wayne’s character lives at the fort, and he goes out and talks to his wife’s grave at the beginning of th
e movie, and it’s implied that he’s been doing this ever since she passed away. I sort of always liked that image and loved that movie. So it was reminiscent of that. So Adama was in the last chapter of his life. He was going to live out his life in this little cabin and talk to Laura until he died.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

  I remember when Roslin and Adama got high together, lying under the stars and her talking about the cabin she wanted to live in. The connection between them was just so lovely, and that relationship came to an equally lovely and even more affecting and tough conclusion with Mary’s character’s death at the end. You felt you’ve been on a real journey with these two, and that journey comprised my tenure on that show, from the episode of the two of them out there becoming intimate in a way, and that conclusion. For me it’s that journey. That finale was a very apt conclusion to the journey for all the characters. And for the writers and cast.

  DAVID EICK

  That relationship was one of those things that could only end that way. It’s like putting the last brick in the house, and it fits perfectly. So I loved it. I loved the pain of it, the sadness of it, and the fact that, in a way, it was like he had lost his wife. And that makes me love Adama more. I just thought it was perfect.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  In that very first breakfast with Ron Moore, I said to him, “You’ve got to be honest with me. Is this a long job or do I die fast?” He said, “She’ll go back and forth. She’ll feel very healthy some days, and she’ll have a hard time others. She will probably at all costs try to hide it from the people, but I’m thinking that she’ll probably die once we reach Earth.” Now neither he nor I knew what that meant, but we found out four seasons later. What became obvious to me is that he did understand the bigger arcs, but he was interested, fascinated, longed for the how of the journey.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  You know, that love story between Adama and Laura Roslin I don’t think was envisioned at the beginning at all. In the beginning, it started out as the classic confrontation between the schoolteacher/liberal politician and the admiral. So they kind of started in a place that was pretty familiar. But as we watched that chemistry between Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos in the times that they would forgive each other and come back together and realized they needed each other, we started to see a chemistry in that. We started to see the way he kind of admired her and admired her strength. That was something that sort of evolved as we wrote it, watching those two actors together, and it wasn’t a planned thing that we do a love story. It just sort of organically evolved as we watched them. It became one of the most moving, powerful things in all of Battlestar.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  When Laura was sick toward the end and she was bald because she had lost her hair from treatment, Adama embraced her. They lay down together and he just held her. They talked. It was a gorgeous scene, but that is not the Adama from season one and season two. At the end, it’s this weirdo Driving Miss Daisy thing where he’s just going to stay with her until she dies, which is another un-Adama kind of quality where he’s going to be kind of a spiritual custodian. That’s how I think that character changed the most.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  What an amazing love story, that he gets her to Earth and she can barely make it. This was Michael Rymer’s idea, that we go over the Earth and see all the plentiful game, and the wild, unspoiled land, and that’s her last vision. And then he ends up building her cabin beside her grave … I’m getting emotional just talking about it.

  That was something where you just saw the themes between the actors and began to build on it. And then Olmos’s willingness to be harsh and vicious enabled us to do this relationship with both Kara and Lee that we could play the evolving of a father/son relationship and a father/pseudo-daughter relationship that was really more like real families. Equal parts rage and love.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  The end of the series for Adama was kind of bittersweet. Sensing his own mortality, but still feeling as though there was other business to attend to. There was something wanting about him in the end, I do believe. I don’t think there was any kind of sense of, “Wow, I’ve done everything. I’ve fulfilled all of my aspirations. It’s time for me to ride off into the sunset.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Tyrol, I remember loving the idea that he was going to go out into the Scottish Highlands and become the über-Scot. That was where he was going to go. Helo and Sharon felt like, okay, we’re moving them into the family. They’re going to be a family unit. That the surprise at the end was going to be that Helo survived, because it kind of felt like, as we were plotting the story, he felt like an obvious person to kill or sacrifice and so we shied away from that, because we kind of felt like everyone’s going to be expecting to kill Helo, so let’s not do that, because that’s a fun surprise. And then they would have a strong family all the way, and that their child would then become our distant ancestor.

  The one, though, I think we shortchanged was Tigh and Ellen back together, being a married couple. They’re the only two that didn’t really get a good-bye scene in the finale. I think it was shot and it was cut for time or something. But I’m trying to really remember. I don’t remember specifically if we talked too much about what their future was going to be. It was just we were more interested in putting them back, that after everything they had gone through, it was something interesting and ironic that Ellen and Tigh were the most solid couple of all. It was, like, through the millennia, these two just could not quit on each other and just kept coming back, and could not put that love away. I always loved that idea.

  Lee kind of felt like he really would be the great explorer, and he was going to try to go around the world. I remember thinking maybe he was going to build a boat or something, and he would go out onto the ocean, and would try to map Africa. You know, I had these just vague ideas of him as the first great explorer of Earth.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  Being there was kind of a release for Lee. It was like the first day of summer. They’re free. Finally. And I remember a lot of people going, “Free to do what? There’s nothing there.” Well, there’s everything there, there just isn’t the stuff that we’re used to in the modern world, and that these people have been dealing with. But green grass and air was all the paradise these people ever dreamed of in whatever time frame they were all enclosed in; in a prison in space. So I thought it was a massive release and it felt like it as an actor, too. Art and life go hand in hand. This show is wonderful, but at the time I remember feeling the responsibility of opportunity and not knowing what’s coming next. So it felt to me like we’d done it, we’d finished and it was an amazing, emotional moment. And, yeah, there’s a bit of me in there, I think, too.

  GRACE PARK

  In my mind, the series was always going to end on Earth. The new Earth, with Adama, and the president dying, Starbuck kind of disappearing, and Helo, Sharon, and Hera and everyone most likely going off onto the different continents to start their lives. To me, I always make that the ending, because that was really the heart and soul of the family. You don’t know exactly where they went, but you have an idea. To me, that’s why we followed the show. They’re the ones that went through a lot of the things, and I love that not everybody made it.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  Again, if you ally with the Russians, what’s that going to mean? If you ally with the Soviets, then downstream they’re going to have tentacles into your system. But sometimes people are honorable. As dark as Battlestar got, we always wanted to keep the glimmer of hope that basically humanity, under the right circumstances, can do the right thing. Or even under the wrong circumstances.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Baltar and Six were, like, the first couple on the show, so ending with them together seemed right. Again, and in terms of there’s a certain amount of irony there, and there was also something sweet about finding that that meant a lot to Baltar and taking him back all the way to his roots. So he did grow up on
a farm, and then he actually knows how to farm and that that’s actually … For once in his life, that’s a useful skill, and that there was some kind of homecoming for him, too, and I really liked that.

  JAMES CALLIS

  I think that everything in Battlestar is kind of subversive and slightly insidious, and not quite on the page how people think it’s on the page. I’d say that the ending is a similar case in point, where it’s actually slightly elliptical and it’s not exactly stipulated. Having previously arrived on the planet and leaving it, there’s one way out of it, isn’t there? Well, there are two options. The battlestar is blown up into space and that’s it, or you’re going to have survivors and the survivors are going to colonize a planet. I know which one I’d prefer to see, and it’s the one we did.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  Baltar is someone who built this whole persona out of something he didn’t want to be. He didn’t want to be the farmer from wherever it was that colony of his came from. He had that accent that he got rid of. He became this huge public figure. Again, parallel to the Cylons. Then he went back to who he was to start with. He was going back to be a farmer. All the ego stuff in the end didn’t make him happy.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  (director, “Daybreak”)

  In some ways we were trying to portray a parallel world where the people spoke English, they had presidents and all of these things. It was, I think, part of the genius of it. It forced the audience to suspend disbelief in a much more childlike way. You’ve made them buy the lie so deeply that they’re just much more into it. Ron Moore and I used to talk about various episodes that maybe had too many coincidences and too many bits of serendipity. He would say, “Look, the audience will give us one chance to see if they can buy or not,” and I think one of the great buys of Battlestar was that there was a parallel galaxy with twelve planets where they spoke English and had a very similar world to ours. The notion that this was the original god Apollo or the original god Athena, I always thought that was a stretch. I argued during the finale that the show, in reality, was two train tracks that should never cross. I lost that argument and we ended up back literally in our world. Which makes it harder to buy it all in some ways.