MARY MCDONNELL
That ending completed the circle and it gave us a stop. It gave us a place to stop and go back and watch the whole thing again. I like how it brought us back to wanting to go back to the beginning. Here we are in New York City, and huh? What is that about? Where are we in time? That’s what I liked about it. I was suddenly unsure of where I was in time, and that I actually found intriguing. It made me want to do the whole thing all over again, and I think that was awesome. It was hard for me to really receive in full, because when you finish in a series yourself, and then you try to watch the rest of the story, you’re not an innocent observer. Your observation is a bit tainted. I thought it screwed around with us one last time in terms of time and space; all this happened before and will happen again.
EDWARD JAMES OLMOS
The concept of a human/Cylon child drove so much of the series, and I think that Ron knew that the coup of coups was to really infuse the understanding of how close these two different cultures could relate and come together. To me it’s stunning. And you go to the end, and that’s where Baltar and Six are walking through Times Square and Six says to him, “This has happened before, it’s going to happen again.” And he says, “I don’t agree. I think humanity has learned its lesson.” And then it cuts to a little robot and they go walking off into the streets of 2008 in downtown New York. What we’re saying with that one stroke is that humanity came from another galaxy, arrived here and mingled with the human elements that were here, and then spread and evolved the humanity that we know today. So we all come from that combination of cultures.
MICHAEL ANGELI
With Baltar and Six on modern-day Earth, what we were going for was a string theory/alternate reality kind of thing. Them going into a movie theater and all that other stuff—we didn’t see him as an angel—certainly not—but this being science fiction, we just felt like we could play fast and loose with string theory, where there are nine realities that coexist of individuals in time, and how time becomes warped. That’s what we were going for, and it left us open if we wanted to continue—which we didn’t.
I had no problem with the ending myself. Our fan base, they flipped out. They were like, “This is an outrage.” They were comparing it to The Sopranos’ ending, which I think was great, too.
JAMES CALLIS
Those entities represented by Baltar and Six on modern-day Earth were supposed to be angels. Essentially Ron had kept the mystery going for myself and Tricia all the way through. He was like, “Whatever works for you, and you think works for you.” We’d had a conversation about the Lord’s Prayer earlier on, and when he explained to me at the end, the way he was thinking, he was like, “But surely you knew. We had that conversation about the Lord’s Prayer, and ‘forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me.’” So for a man to say, “Forgive me my trespasses,” it was like, “God Almighty, what have you gone and done?” And he was like, “This is what the thing is like. Those voices in your head, or him and Six, the apparitions, they are energies of light, and they’re not necessarily corporeal when you see them.” Looking at the robot in the window, we’re not quite sure.
TRICIA HELFER
(actress, “Number Six”)
I was happy with those final moments. Of course, when we were shooting what was the finale, there are so many emotions going on, because it was coming to the end of our five-year family. Every time somebody would say it was their last scene or whatever, there’d be tears or one scene just hit you funny and somebody breaks into tears.
MICHAEL RYMER
Emotionally, Ron got it right. He went for character and he went for depth. We learned more about these people’s past, and I loved the structure and the cross-cutting sectors of the early days, but I think once we got to the planets it would’ve been better to have left it unsaid. I love the planet they ended up on and I love the way they dispersed and the fact that it could have been our world. You know what I’m saying? On some level, it could have been. There were just certain things that could’ve been left unsaid. When I handed Ron the director’s cut, it went from flying over the world in a Central Park, and then you just saw a crowded street and Baltar and Six walking through the crowd. And that was it. You didn’t know what that meant. Have the Cylons come back? What did it mean? It was open-ended. Now there’s quite a bit of explanation about what exactly it means and doesn’t mean and so forth.
Ron always had a genius for the popular gesture. He’d also make an argument saying, “That makes no sense,” or if there was a better way to do it, if we were a bit more realistic, and he’s going, “No, we’re telling a story. It’s mythology. I don’t feel as bound by that,” and I think that’s interesting.
SCOTT MANTZ
They knew by the end of the second season that the show was going to be done after four seasons. The show didn’t go on, it didn’t wear out its welcome like The X-Files. It didn’t have ridiculous seasons like Lost. There’s not a bad episode in that bunch. I loved the show. I was staying home every Friday night to watch it on Syfy. I thought it was great.
Beginning on March 13, 2009, and concluding a week later, Syfy aired the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. A show that the network had reluctantly put on the air, initially fighting against but ultimately embracing all of the things that frighteningly separated this show from most of the others on the air, but ended up making it the science fiction series by which all others would be measured. And nothing could have driven that point home harder than, just three days before it all ended, the show being celebrated at the United Nations in New York. It was an unprecedented event, promising to examine issues like human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faiths.
RONALD D. MOORE
They invited our cast, David Eick, and me and it was hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. At the UN there’s the big classic hall where they give the speeches for the General Assembly, but there’s a couple of rooms where you can fit the entire assembly in. We were in one of those rooms and went up to the dais. On the tables, where normally there would be all the names of all the different nations of the world, they had replaced with the names of the Twelve Colonies. It was like, “Oh my God!” … and completely mind-blowing.
Then we sat up there and the conversation was about what Galactica was talking about and how they were also things that served the UN’s mission, talking about terrorism, talking about human rights, talking about freedoms and democracies. It was a fascinating discussion, because it was about all the themes and ideas that we dealt with in the show, but talking about it in this very rarefied forum. There were some ambassadors there. Some UN officials. There was a high commissioner for, I think, terrorism there. Then there was a reception afterward and I met lots of delegates and staff and ambassadors to the UN and they were fans of the show. They were like, “The show is really talking about things that matter to us here a lot. We just think it’s a really interesting opportunity to do this kind of thing.” They had classes and students that came and sat in the audience to listen. It was one of those amazing moments. It was really something. That’s the sort of thing that makes up for the lack of more mainstream Emmy recognition.
SECTAR FOUR
GALACTICA & BEYOND (2009)
Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.
17.
HATCHING THE PLAN
“Earth is a dream … one we’ve been chasing for a long time. We’ve earned it.”
Although Battlestar Galactica was winding down as an episodic series, there were several attempts to sustain the franchise over the subsequent years, first in the form of the 2009 made-for-DVD film Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. Designed to show the events of the miniseries and the first two seasons from the Cylons’ perspective, this sci-fi Rashomon follows two versions of Dean Stockwell’s Cylon, Cavil, offering up points and counterpoints on the validity of the Cylons’ planned attacks. A number of actors from the show reprised the
ir roles for the film, which was shot after the series wrapped.
JANE ESPENSON
(writer, “The Plan”)
I look at The Plan as being nice for completists. It’s really only a joy to those who are interested in some creative tying up of loose ends. I don’t know that it really works on its own. You have to be not just a fan of the show, but a pretty obsessive fan of the show, to get what we were going for with The Plan. I loved doing it, and working with Eddie. The scope of it was just very hard to keep in my head working on it.
What did Baltar whisper? How did that Six escape down the hallway? Just little fun things that you wouldn’t even know were loose ends. “Oh, look, they re-created the shot of Boomer from the ‘Water’ episode.” They did a lot of re-creating of shots so that we could add dialogue. That was a lot of fun. I don’t think it really worked a hundred percent, but little moments in it worked great.
BRADLEY THOMPSON
(co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
There were a couple of things I wish we hadn’t done, and The Plan was one of them, because I like the plan being a mystery. I didn’t want to explain anything. But they wanted it, it worked, and a lot of us were driven by having to pay the rent. We were trying to say, “If it did exist, what would it be?” That was a challenge and could we do it? In retrospect, I would rather these things stayed a mystery.
DAVID EICK
(executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
It wasn’t viewed—internally or by the BSG fans—as successful as Razor, which I wholeheartedly agree with. In retrospect, Ron and I might’ve been better off passing on that deal, but at that time we were also committed to supporting other writers and directors from the show, and that project kept many of our people employed during the off-season.
A year after Galactica left the airwaves, the newly rechristened Syfy Channel produced a single season of a prequel television series called Caprica. Starring, among others, Eric Stoltz (Mask) and Esai Morales (La Bamba), it was set on the titular planet about fifty-eight years before the events of the main series. The focus is on the creation of the Cylons as told through the Adama and Graystone families. Despite the success of Galactica, the prequel series failed to connect with viewers in the same way.
Initially, Ron Moore was keeping his distance from the show, so veteran TV writer Jane Espenson (Once Upon a Time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who had joined Battlestar Galactica in its fourth season, was picked as showrunner, a position she was reluctant to assume.
RONALD D. MOORE
(executive producer, Caprica)
It’s the great missed opportunity. It had a lot of potential, but for a variety of reasons it just didn’t click. Creatively it was pretty close, and you can see it kind of finding its way through season one. We got really lucky with the cast again; we just lucked into another great group of actors that were really good in the show. It was a strong ensemble we could build on. But the problem was the behind-the-scenes issues just kind of infected the show. It lacked a certain focus of what it wanted to be in that first season.
JANE ESPENSON
(executive producer, Caprica)
My feelings about the show are guilt. I took on a project that I wasn’t ready for. I was not reared to run a show, and I think Caprica deserved better than what I was able to give it. I gave it my heart, but I am not a showrunner and I didn’t realize it yet. Ultimately I ended up stepping down, and Kevin Murphy took over at the end and did a beautiful job. When I was asked to be a showrunner, I couldn’t turn it down because I loved Battlestar so much and thought that every time I have succeeded at something, I’ve also felt very reluctant to try. So maybe I’d get in there and discover that I could do it. Well, no, my original instinct was right. It wasn’t for me.
RONALD D. MOORE
I know Jane blames herself, and that’s unfortunate, because ultimately I’m responsible for making the decision to put her in that position, and she told me right up front when I asked her about it. She said being a showrunner hadn’t been one of her ambitions. She said she liked being a writer, she liked being a personal attendant. I should have listened to that. Like, “Okay, wait a minute, you’re telling me right at this moment, this isn’t really something that you want to do, but you’ll do it and you’re a good soldier.” That may not be the best choice for the showrunner. It just isn’t. But I just wasn’t in a place where I could hear and think clearly about that.
I kind of feel like the key problem, probably, was at that moment in time I just didn’t want to be showrunning. I was in a different headspace. I was very tired by the end of Galactica. I had also started questioning whether or not I wanted to keep going in television. Galactica had become such a thing. It was so great and exceeded my expectations on so many levels. Just an amazing run, and then I had this sense of, What do I do next? How do you top yourself? The Orson Welles curse: You make Citizen Kane and then what do you do?
JANE ESPENSON
Kevin was better at recognizing when the room had the right idea. I got a lot of direction from the network, and every story that the room bought into, I was like, “The network’s not going to like this.” I remember the first day Kevin took over, the room was like, “What if we did this?” And he said, “Great. That sounds good. Let’s do it.” I saw right away I should have been trusting this room of very good writers more than I was. I was second-guessing them, because I was anticipating everything that the network might not like when I should have had more confidence of, “You have a smart idea, let’s sell it.” Instead of saying, “Yeah, but what if the network doesn’t like it?”
RONALD D. MOORE
Eventually the show gets there, but we just kept starting and stopping so many times. It was so difficult to get the show made and approved and to get the scripts approved. We were constantly having to go back and rebreak stories and throw out storylines, redo everything over and over again and it just became chaotic. As a result, when you look at it as a collective whole now, it probably starts in one direction, kind of zigs and zags through that first season, and then toward the end you can just kind of sense an almost desperate quality as we’re trying to get the network off our backs. Trying to do different things and trying to get a pickup there by the end. We didn’t.
MARK STERN
(former president of original content, Syfy)
Caprica was a heartbreaker, because I felt like it really carried the themes of Battlestar forward in a different way. They found really cool ideas in there. There’s a lot you could say postmortem about why it didn’t work. My personal feeling is that it was two main things. One, the marketing campaign didn’t work. We were too clever by half. We tried to ignore the fact that it was Battlestar so that we could hopefully pull in other people. We did this very obscure campaign with this half-naked girl eating an apple. You’re like, “What the fuck’s that about?” We didn’t talk about what the show was about in marketing, because we were a little afraid, so we didn’t really communicate effectively to a larger audience. And the Battlestar fan was kind of confused about what the hell the show was, and we weren’t talking to them.
JANE ESPENSON
The show told the story of the Cylons, it told us all that the genocidal impulses came from one angry teenage girl who became the first Cylon, and that’s fascinating. It talked a lot about really interesting meditations on what it means to be conscious and what it means to be you. Are you you, if your brain is in a different body? How much humanity depends on having a human body, if any? My favorite part was the world building, the cultures of it. What would it mean to have these colonies so close to each other, but on different planets with different climates, different religions, different approaches to religion? Different cultures. What does popular culture feel like on a planet that’s Earthlike, but not Earth? If you’re going to write a show about a new culture, why give it all the limitations of the old one? I thought Caprica really lived up to that. It showed us a culture that had its
own problems, but didn’t have all the same limitations as the culture we already know. I was very proud of that.
MARK STERN
What ultimately killed the series was it was trying to do too many different things at the same time. It was more intellectual than emotional. The dilemma of this girl trapped in this virtual world was hard to relate to or connect with. The themes of the nuns and what they were trying to accomplish, and the larger themes of what their plot was of apotheosis, were really confusing and, ultimately, kind of a big shrug.
RONALD D. MOORE
Jane got stuck in the meat grinder with the network, and Syfy was consciously being at their worst at that point. They were approving things and then changing their minds, and then approving something else and then throwing it all out. You’d be three or four episodes into writing scripts and then they wanted a whole new direction. I’d come back in and argue with Mark Stern about it, but I’m fighting on ground that’s not really my own, and that’s a harder game to play. I’d try to support them, let them get down the road a little bit, and then the network blows that up again.
So Say We All Page 74