BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Series Bible
By
Ronald D. Moore
12/17/03
The Fundamentals of Battlestar Galactica
Our show is built on the idea that a science fiction series can employ ground-breaking special effects, dynamic cinematography, realistic situations, believable characters and explore contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing dramatic tension or excitement The pilot delivered an intense visceral experience to our audience, ratcheting up the tension steadily and efficiently over the course of two nights, and it is the task of the series to maintain that tense environment and bring viewers back week after week to experience the thrills and cliff-hangers inherent in the story of a fugitive fleet on the run and one step away from destruction.
To that end, our series employs a three-tiered structure to maintain tension and suspense every week. Similar to the one employed by the classic TV series “Hill Street Blues” but never attempted In science fiction, this structure lets us keep the pressure on our characters every week through the use of a long-term continuing storyline while at the same time allowing for weekly, stand-alone stories designed to hook In viewers who may not have watched last week's episode. The three-tiered structure (explained in greater detail on pages 30-31 of this bible) breaks down as follows:
Series Arcs
Multi-episode Arcs
Episodic Arcs
The Series Arcs run through the life of the show, dealing with long-term stories such as the Cylon pursuit of our fleet, while the Multi-Episode Arcs allow us to spend 2-4 episodes dealing with a specific crisis, say on one planet discovered by the Galactica, and the Episodic Arcs provide closed-end narratives for each show and giving any viewer a chance to watch this week's episode. By employing this structure, we gain the benefits of long-term story-telling, embroidering on the existing tensions and situations in the premise which have already hooked our audience and thereby delivering a richer and more compelling experience to the dedicated viewer, while at the same time making allowance for hooking the more casual viewer who may not be familiar with the long-term tales but is drawn Into this week's episodic storyline.
The key to the success of this series is to never, ever let the air out of the balloon - the battlestar Galactica lives in a perpetual state of crisis, one in which the Cylons can appear at any moment, and where terrorist bombs, murders, rebellions, accidents, and plagues are the unfortunate routines of day to day life. There are no days for our characters, no safe havens, nothing approaching the quiet normal existence they once knew. They are on the run for their very lives.
This series is about a chase.
Let the chase begin.
Battlestar Galactica:
Naturalistic Science Fiction
or
Taking the Opera out of Space Opera
Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series.
We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics, and empty heroics has run its course and a new approach is required. That approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre.
Call it "Naturalistic Science Fiction."
This idea, the presentation of a fantastical situation in naturalistic terms, will permeate every aspect of our series:
Visual. The first thing that will leap out at viewers is the dynamic use of the documentary or cinema verite style. Through the extensive use of hand-held cameras, practical lighting, and functional set design, the battlestar Galactica will feel on every level like a real place.
This shift in tone and look cannot be overemphasized. It is our intention to deliver a show that does not look like any other science fiction series ever produced A casual viewer should for a moment feel like he or she has accidently surfed onto a "60 Minutes" documentary piece about life aboard an aircraft carrier until someone starts talking about Cylons and battlestars.
That is not to say we're shooting on videotape under fluorescent lights, but we will be striving for a verisimilitude that is sorely lacking in virtually every other science fiction series ever attempted. We're looking for filmic truth, not manufactured "pretty pictures" or the "way cool" factor.
Perhaps nowhere will this be more surprising than in our visual effects shots. Our ships will be treated like real ships that someone had to go out and film with a real camera. That means no 3-D "hero" shots panning and zooming wildly with the touch of a mousepad. The questions we will ask before every VFX shot are things like: "How did we get this shot? Where is the camera? Who's holding it? Is the cameraman in another spacecraft? Is the camera mounted on the wing?" This philosophy will generate images that will present an audience jaded and bored with the same old "Wow -- it's a CGI shot!" with a different texture and a different cinematic language that will force them to re-evaluate their notions of science fiction.
Our visual style will also capitalize on the possibilities inherent in the series concept itself to deliver unusual imagery not typically seen in this genre. That is, the inclusion ofa variety of civilian ships each of which will have unique properties and visual references that can be in stark contrast to the military life aboard Galactica For example, we have a vessel in our rag-tag fleet which was designed to be a space-going marketplace or "City Walk" environment. The juxtaposition of this high-gloss, sexy atmosphere against the gritty reality of a story for survival will give us more textures and levels to play than in typical genre fare.
Editorial. Our style will avoid the now clichéd MTV fast-cutting while at the same time foregoing Star Trek's somewhat ponderous and lugubrious "master, two-shot, close-up, close-up, two-shot, back to master" pattern. If there is a model here, it would be vaguely Hitchcockian -- that is, a sense of building suspense and dramatic tension through the use of extending takes and long masters which pull the audience into the reality of the action rather than the distract through the use of ostentatious cutting patterns.
Story. We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other clichés of the genre. Our show is first and foremost a drama. It is about people. Real people that the audience can identify with and become engaged in. It is not a show about hardware or bizarre alien cultures. It is a show about us. It is an allegory for our own society, our own people and it should be immediately recognizable to any member of the audience.
Science. Our spaceships don't make noise because there is no noise in space. Sound will be provided from sources inside the ships - the whine of an engine audible to the pilot for instance. Our fighters are not airplanes and they will not be shackled by the conventions of WWII dogfights. The speed of light is a law and there will be no moving violations.
And finally, Character. This is perhaps, the biggest departure from the science fiction norm. We do not have "the cocky guy" "the fast-talker" "the brain" "the wacky alien sidekick" or any of the other usual characters who populate a space series.
Our characters are living breathing people with all the emotional complexity and contradictions present in quality dramas like "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos." In this way, we hope to challenge our audience in ways that other genre pieces do not. We want the audience to connect with the characters of Galactica as people. Our characters are not super-heroes. They are not an elite. They are everyday people caught up in a enormous cataclysm and trying to survive it as best they can. They are you and me.
THE TWELVE COLONIES
History
Humanity's roots are found on a world named KOBOL, the q
uasi-mythical world which in Galactica’s universe is the cradle of homo sapien. The location of this planet has been lost in the mists of time, but our characters have presumably been raised with various myths and legends about this Eden-like world and probably has various mystical elements associated with it. Kobol seems to be an Olympian setting in which Gods or God-like beings cohabited the planet with mere mortals.
At some point in the distant past (at least several millennia before the Pilot) thirteen "Tribes of Man" left Kobol never to return again. Why they left is open to conjecture (a political dispute, a natural disaster, running afoul of the Gods, etc.) as is the question of how they left - through conventional spacecraft, something more advanced, or something supernatural. In any case, the thirteen tribes travelled far away from Kobol and eventually twelve of them settled in a star system with twelve planets capable of supporting human life.
The remaining thirteenth tribe broke off in a different direction and legend has it that it found "a bright shining planet known as Earth." Again, the reasons why this tribe chose to go in a different direction have not been explained, however we can assume that within the Colonial version of the Bible -- the Sacred Scrolls - there are various legends and tales explaining the schism in religious terms.
The people of the Twelve Tribes colonized twelve different planets and each colony was named according to what we here on Earth would regard as the Zodiac: Caprica (Capricorn), Picon (Pisces), Gemenon (Gemini), etc.
By the time of the pilot the Colonials have lived on their worlds for several thousand years and yet their technology is not that much more advanced than our own. This presents two possible backstories: 1) the twelve tribes evidently abandoned whatever advanced technology they had (which is possibly a recurrent theme); or 2) they arrived in a relatively primitive state to begin with (which would have certain overtones of being cast out of "Eden" in a "naked" state).
The twelve colonies existed separately for most of their history, fiercely independent worlds with different cultures and societies. While they were clearly all linked together by heritage, they still found ways to war with each other, and presumably different alliances among the twelve rose and fell over the centuries according to the ebb and flow of history. No formal governmental structure existed unifying all twelve colonies until the cataclysmic events of the Cylon War.
Religion
The Colonials have a poly-theistic belief system that worships at least some of the God-like beings on the planet Kobol. Hence, characters in prayer are likely to offer thanks to or ask for blessings from the "Lords of Kobol." Who the "Lords" are and how many there areis not yet known, but they are roughly analogous to the. Greek and Roman gods of Earth (this linkage also helps tie Earth's belief systems and roots to those of Colonial society, remembering that we are all supposed to come from the same homeworld, namely Kobol).
Religious belief and practice varies from colony to colony, with some worlds almost completely secular and others verging on fundamentalist.
There is a formal body of priests and clerics known as the Quorum of Twelve that now operates in a quasi-civil role within the Colonial government that can be likened to the British House of Lords. As the name implies, the Quorum is made up of representatives from each of the Colonies. The Quorum of Twelve advises the government on policy matters from a religious perspective, but its actual power is relatively narrow.
Culture and Society
Colonial society is very similar to 21st century Earth society and can be considered a parallel world for all intents and purposes. People watch TV, they follow professional sports, they use telephones, drive cars, have apartments, battle bureaucracies, wear ties, etc. etc.
This is a deliberate creative choice -- we are not trying to present a society of "weird space people." The people of Galactica and their world have been intentionally designed to evoke present-day American society as a way of drawing the viewer into the drama instead of wowing them with the trappings of a completely fantastical culture and society. Clearly, there are differences, but our creative intention is to make this series about us, rather than a fictitious them.
Technology
Following the Cylon uprising and eventual war, the Colonials had to forcibly remove any and all technologies that could be potentially subverted by the Cylons and used against the Colonials. In practical terms, this meant the elimination of networking, defined here as the ability of computers to share data and talk to each other. By eliminating data-sharing, the Cylons could not, for instance, introduce computer viruses to disrupt information systems or assert control over those systems.
The result was that many modern day conveniences we take for granted have been removed from Colonial society: the internet, wireless communications, satellite imagery, etc.
As the Cylons grew more and more advanced, their mastery of technology grew as well, and the Colonials were forced again and again to radically limit the scale of high technology in their own society. Microprocessors themselves become vulnerable to Cylon interference at some point so microwave ovens, cell phones, game boys, etc. all began to be pulled from day today life.
In writing for the series, we should think of the Colonials as using a blend of Apple II, current NASA/space shuttle, and futuristic technologies. For example, Galactica clearly has flatscreen plasma TV monitors strewn throughout CIC, but still relies on paper printouts that appear to be created by a dot-matrix printer on a continuous ream of paper. While the ship can travel faster than the speed of light, officers have to verbally go through long checklists while cadres of enlisted personnel flip switches and press buttons in order to make it possible.
A useful way to think about this is to take any piece of equipment and strip out its ability to talk to another piece of equipment. If your cell phone did not have access to a computer network, how efficiently could it operate? Could it operate at all? How do you design a navigational system for a spacecraft if the various components cannot be networked together? How do you design a fighter that relies more on human brainpower to identify threats and make decisions than anything built into the cockpit?
One of the most important concepts is that there is no "master computer" aboard Galactica or any other Colonial ship. In fact, our computers are very dumb in comparison to even the PC sitting on the average writer's desk. We should always endeavor to find ways of forcing human beings to do the hard work involved with operating and maintaining a spacecraft. Human brains need to crunch numbers, organize data, and come up with solutions to complex problems.
THE CYLONS
The Cylons were originally simple robots which grew increasingly complex with more and more powerful artificial intelligence. They eventually were used for dangerous work such as mining operations and then they were used as soldiers in the armies of the twelve colonies. As the Cylons became faster and more powerful, they also became smarter and more independent and there came a point at which the Cylons developed true sentience and self-awareness.
Once the Cylons became self-aware, they rebelled against their human masters and the Cylon War began. The War quickly became a desperate one for both sides as they came to believe that their own survival was dependent on annihilating their enemy.
Like all technology in wartime, the Cylons began growing and evolving by leaps and bounds. They were soon capable of taking on the Colonial armies in direct combat both on the planet surfaces and in space.
For their part, the Colonials decided to band together for the first time and act as one people rather than twelve separate tribes.
The Cylon War was long and bloody, with victory constantly being snatched away from first one side and then the other. As the Cylons grew more advanced, they found ways to infiltrate the very technology that the Colonials depended on - computers, microprocessors, networks, etc. The Colonials fought back by reverting to more primitive technology that required more human brainpower to operate, but was impervious to Cylon hacking.
This need to revert to a simp
ler technology directly led to the development of the battlestar, a ship designed specifically to operate with independent computers no more advanced than an Apple II and equipped with fighters flown by real flesh and blood pilots rather than automated systems.
The Cylon War finally ended in an armistice, the terms of which required the Cylons to leave the Colonial star system for a world of their own. The two sides were to maintain relations by sending a representative to Armistice Station, an unmanned outpost in deep space.
After a few early exchanges of messages to clear up remaining issues from the War, the Cylons refused to send a representative ever again and for the last forty years, only a Colonial representative has shown up at Armistice station.
Culture and Society
Eventually, there came the day when the Cylons asked the existential questions common to all thinking beings: Why am I here? Is this all that there is? From these questions came a belief system that in some ways follows traditional human thought: A belief in a higher power, a God from whom all creation flows. The Cylon God values love above all else, and those who oppose love, who seek to bring evil into God's creation, they must be destroyed.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Cylons today is that they have consciously modeled themselves in the human form. Twelve forms to be precise -- each of them embodying valuable aspects of the human body and personality. Just as western Man believes himself to be created in God's image, the Cylons molded themselves into the likeness of their own creator. To be sure, the Cylons believe humanity to be deeply flawed, but they also acknowledge its positive traits and have striven to preserve what they believe to be the worthy aspects of mankind into their own culture.
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