So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  In the miniseries, it’s established that the Cylons were created by Man. Intended to replace human soldiers on the battlefields of the Twelve Colonies, they came to resent their masters. Fifty years ago, they rebelled, starting a decade-long war that ironically united the Colonials together under one flag. When the Cylons suddenly ended the war and disappeared deep into space, the battlestar Galactica became a relic of an era when humans feared technology.

  On the fortieth anniversary of the Armistice, Galactica is being turned into a museum (a concept that Moore initially came up with for the starship Enterprise in the “All Good Things” series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation and appropriated for Galactica). Her commander, William Adama, is about to enter retirement. Lee “Apollo” Adama, Commander Adama’s estranged son, is assigned to participate in Galactica’s decommissioning. Lee is unwilling to forgive his father for the accidental death of his brother, Zak. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, Galactica’s resident hotshot pilot, was engaged to Zak and has become a surrogate daughter to Commander Adama. Lee has a tense reunion with Kara in the brig, where she’s held for punching Galactica’s alcoholic XO, Saul Tigh. Secretary of Education Laura Roslin is also on board for the ceremony, despite her recent breast cancer diagnosis. Belowdecks, Galen Tyrol (Galactica’s deck chief) is in an unauthorized relationship with Sharon “Boomer” Valerii, a rookie Raptor pilot. Their affair is overlooked because of the impending decommissioning.

  On Caprica, Dr. Gaius Baltar is one of the leading proponents of advancing artificial-intelligence technology. The Cylon War is forty years in the past, and he believes that it’s time for humanity to move on. Baltar is responsible for creating the Command Navigation Program, a networked defense system that will automate many functions in the Colonial fleet. A mysterious blond woman was instrumental in the creation of the program, and in return he gave her access to the defense mainframe. She reveals herself to be a Cylon agent just as the first nuclear bomb detonates outside Baltar’s window. The machines have evolved to take on human form, and of the twelve models, she is Number Six.

  The Colonial fleet is disabled by Baltar’s CNP code, and unable to repel the attack. Only Galactica survives the onslaught, saved by her antiquated technology. Boomer and Karl “Helo” Agathon are forced to land their damaged Raptor on Caprica, where they recognize Baltar among a crowd of refugees. Helo gives up his seat for Baltar, and Boomer reluctantly leaves him behind. Baltar’s overwhelming guilt is manifested in the haunting form of Number Six, a specter visible only to him.

  Galactica retreats to Ragnar Anchorage to rearm. There, Adama discovers Leoben, another of the humanoid Cylons. After Leoben is killed, Adama consults with Dr. Baltar about uncovering other Cylon operatives in the fleet. Baltar’s “Head” Six prods him into accusing Doral, the public-relations director for Galactica’s museum. Meanwhile, Roslin, forty-third in line of succession, is sworn in as the new president of the colonies. She and Apollo gather the surviving civilian ships and rejoin Galactica. Adama plans to attack the Cylon force, despite the overwhelming odds. Roslin believes that, to survive, humans have to start having babies. Adama ultimately, reluctantly agrees, and announces that they’re crossing the Red Line into unknown space. They’re going to find the home of the fabled Thirteenth Tribe—a place called Earth.

  Roslin calls Adama on his bluff. He doesn’t know where Earth is, or if it even exists. As Galactica travels toward an uncertain future, a group of Cylons converge on Raptor Anchorage. They find Doral waiting, ready to report on Galactica’s movements. Baltar’s test turned out to be accurate, but another Cylon agent still lurks in the Colonial fleet: Sharon Valerii (Boomer) is also a Cylon.

  For Moore, the moment he began seeing dailies from miniseries footage directed by Rymer, he recognized that everyone involved was achieving everything that he had envisioned.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  There wasn’t a big difference between David [Eick] producing and me producing. I was really impressed by what he did on the miniseries. I mean, he truly realized everything that was in the show and then more so. I was at Carnivàle, and one day this big box came to the offices, and in this box were, I don’t know, fifteen or twenty VHS cassettes of dailies of the first week of production, and I went, “Oh my God, here we go.” And with great trepidation I put it in the VCR and turned it on, and the first thing I saw was Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck jogging through the Galactica corridors, and I was just there. I was like, “Wow, this is even better than I thought.” He totally got what we were going for. We were so on the same page of what the vision of the show was, the realism of it, not making it hokey sci-fi, really being honest with it. Michael Rymer was dedicated to it. What they produced, I don’t know that I would’ve done any differently in that miniseries. It set the tone and set a marker for really what the show is.

  That being said, one of the early ideas jettisoned was the notion of doing split screens during key moments, particularly during dogfights.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I was afraid that the dogfights were still going to look a little too traditional. That they were still going to look like what Star Wars had done twenty years before. So I was playing around with the idea of split screens; here you’d have one corner of the frame being in the cockpit, one would be out on the wing, another would be from the enemy’s point of view. And you would just play them simultaneously as a way to reinvent the dogfight. As a result, there was a lot of time and energy spent in editorial trying to pull that off, and ultimately couldn’t. We decided to side more on just the docu-style handheld approach in space battles, and treating ship and the fighters as true spacecraft as opposed to fighters. Because what George Lucas had done in the original Star Wars was treat them all like airplanes. They were all sort of like World War II fighters going at each other, and we said, “No, these are spaceships. A Viper can clip around and shoot backward while it’s traveling forward. You know, don’t tie them to aerodynamics in the atmosphere. Make them spaceships.” And that, combined with the style of cinematography and the advancement of CG, was enough to make the dogfights fresh and bold and different without doing the sort of elaborate split-screen idea that I had originally. So that had already gone by the wayside.

  I’d like the show to take credit for really inventing that style of photography, because I see that used a lot now. There was a TV show called Dogfights that was CGI re-creations of classic World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam-era dogfights. And they were all using this sort of handheld photography that we did in Galactica just a couple of years before. I think people just got into it, because they kind of realized that it did draw you in and it did make it feel real to the audience in an intuitive way.

  Once the miniseries went through production and was waiting for its airdate, there was a growing sense of apprehension over how it would be received by the television audience, as well as by fans of the original ABC show, from which the new series diverged substantially.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  A big moment in the life of the show was, what were the ratings going to be on the miniseries? Traditionally what had happened—or what used to happen—was night one of the miniseries we have one number, and then night two would be a lower number. The big question was, how big of a drop-off is there on the second night? Now, there’d already been a test of the miniseries in Houston, where they had brought people in as the focus group, showed them the miniseries and done a whole focus group on it, and they hated it. I mean, they, like, really fucking hated it. The cover sheet said something like, “This is one of the worst testings we’ve ever had. We see no reason why you would want to pick this show up as a series.” And analytics were even worse. They sort of liked Eddie Olmos as Adama, but he was the only one, and even that was kind of a mediocre number. Sci-Fi went into a full-blown panic, but they were already so pregnant with the show. The show was done. We were completing visual effects. There wasn’t much they could really do. We were only a few weeks away from broadcast, so they were kind o
f screwed. It took all the air out of the momentum of the show. Sci-Fi was essentially at this point saying, “This is a fiasco. Fuck. Let’s hope it’s not a total money loser.” It was kind of that attitude at that point.

  MARK STERN

  Nerves before it aired were enormous. You have so much money and time and effort and resources put into something like that. It was the first big project of the new regime, as it were. It was the first big thing that I had taken on. It was a big statement, I think from Bonnie to the rest of management. I want to say it happened right after we’d gotten bought by GE, so there’s a lot of corporate stakes there as well. And just everything you feel when you’re mounting a big tent pole like that, and you’re hopeful that people will show up. And, you know, there’s a certain amount of whistling past the graveyard when everyone’s just kind of not talking about it. Or they’re looking for all the scraps of sunlight that they can find.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  We went into the ratings conversation on the miniseries with a sense of, “Oh, if we could just get a good number. It’s our only hope.” Night-one numbers come in. They’re okay. They’re fine. Now, what’s the night-two number going to be? And the big surprise was that the night-two numbers went up. And it was shocking. No one had ever seen that before, and no one had a case to compare it to. No miniseries ever went up in the second night. So that changed everything. Suddenly you were in a different conversation, where there’s a possibility that ordering the show to series was really on the table.

  But there was so much head-scratching about how the test was terrible and people hated it, yet the numbers went up. The critics were positive; they didn’t warm up to it as they did later on in the run of the show. The critics on the initial broadcast were good, but it wasn’t acclaimed. I remember there being negative reviews, mediocre reviews, and then some very good ones. But it wasn’t really until the show was on the air and had the weekly series that we started to really become a critical darling.

  DAVID EICK

  Even before the press got a hold of it, we knew the miniseries was a success, because we had a big screening at the DGA and everyone came and you saw it on the big screen. You’d have to contort yourselves into a stage of phony humility to not acknowledge that it was definitely a pretty successful piece of work. Of course, by that point in time I had already been through all kinds of despair over the cut and the split screens and all of that. The first time I watched it I had asked my whole family to leave the house for the weekend, so I could writhe in pain and hit my head. But that’s just me. I just didn’t know how to watch it. It’s not because of anything that was necessarily bad or wrong about it, but, just like anything else, it needed a lot of work. It was four hours. It was something like fourteen million dollars. You open up a first cut of something like that, you’re opening up a big old can of worms. There’s no getting around it, but after all that work, we knew we had something really good. How it was going to do, we didn’t know. And whether anyone would agree with us, we didn’t know.

  Prior to the airing of the miniseries, Moore and the new Battlestar Galactica most definitely found that they were not the critical darling of fans of the original series or actor Richard Hatch, who had been actively trying to get a continuation of the original series off the ground when word came out that a reboot was in the works.

  Much like the fictitious journey to Earth, the route back to prime-time television for Battlestar Galactica was a tortuous one. Although throughout the 1980s Glen Larson vowed many times, “Galactica will return,” it wasn’t until Richard Hatch, who played Captain Apollo during the program’s original run on ABC, produced his own trailer for a new series that a serious revival campaign took shape.

  Hatch, long the series’ sole champion, created a trailer prior to the Tom DeSanto/Bryan Singer–proposed version, titled The Second Coming, which he hoped would prove to Universal the amount of interest there still was in the property to pick up where the original series left off. Although Hatch did not own any rights to the series himself, he spent more than $50,000 of his own money to complete the two-and-a-half-year project. Yet despite the fact that The Second Coming played to standing ovations at various conventions around the globe, the studio remained firmly apathetic.

  RICHARD HATCH

  (actor, “Captain Apollo”)

  When I was going to do the Battlestar trailer, I had people laugh in my face at how stupid that was, and I heard rumors about people in the industry laughing at me. Who would spend money on something they don’t own? But they don’t understand the value I got and the love and the feeling of accomplishment and the learning and the growth that came from believing in something so much that you are willing to go the distance. I have never in my life done something like that; I’d always wondered if I would ever love something so much that I would be willing to step into the fire and step out of my comfort zone and risk it all. It didn’t happen at once, but it was a step-by-step process and before long I realized that I believe in this so much that I was willing to do anything to make it happen. To bring it back.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  (film critic, Access Hollywood)

  There’s been so much talk over the years that they were going to revive Battlestar Galactica, and then Richard Hatch made it his mission to the point where he created a trailer. He even had Richard Lynch and John Colicos in it, and a bunch of dumb, hotshot Viper pilots. It was a pretty good trailer for a show that hadn’t happened yet.

  RICHARD HATCH

  I didn’t set a budget, but I maxed out my credit cards and spent something close to $50,000. I never intended to spend that much; it started off as a small thing that grew into a big thing. I remember shooting at a big hangar where they used to have the Spruce Goose, but being the neophyte that I was, I didn’t realize that a location is wonderful but then you have to light it and dress it, and this costs money. Then you have to fill it. It was one monumental challenge after another. Filming these eighteen-to-twenty-hour days with no sleep and everyone singing songs and having the best times of their lives, because they are part of a new Galactica project, was the most extraordinary experience of my life.

  I thought, “My God, we’re just doing a presentation in order to demonstrate to Universal what can be done with this series.” Obviously I couldn’t sell it and I couldn’t make money from it. It was just a presentation, and we kept thinking we could just continue and make the whole movie and just show up at Universal and say, “You may hate us, but here it is. Take it or leave it.”

  Toward the end of production of the trailer, word got out that Glen Larson had heard about what Hatch and company were doing and started claiming he had all rights. And that there were plans for a movie focused on the battlestar Pegasus (to be produced by Todd Moyer, who at the time was producing the film adaptation of the Wing Commander video game). Hatch contacted Larson, questioning why he would want to do a film based on the Pegasus storyline rather than Galactica, all of which became a moot point, as the critical and financial failure of Wing Commander ultimately resulted in the project collapsing.

  RICHARD HATCH

  We didn’t challenge them about doing Battlestar, but they didn’t want to do the original show. We spent two and a half years at Universal putting the trailer together in order to lay out our case for doing the original show with the original actors plus a new generation of our kids born in space, all serving as a bridge between the past and the future and demonstrating how we could bring the show back. And here’s Glen Larson coming in saying we’re going to do the Pegasus story and we are not going to use the original cast. From there it became a fan war in all the publications.

  And then, a couple of years later, as information on the new Battlestar Galactica series reached the fandom, there was a growing anti-reboot fervor growing among them, not unlike the fervor of the anti–Next Generation fans who had said about the fledgling series in 1987, “Without Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, you don’t have me.”

  RONALD D. MOORE<
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  The script for the miniseries had leaked, and there was a lot of fan reaction about making Starbuck a woman. You know, “What are they trying to do?” Glen Larson, who I didn’t have a lot of happy feelings for, came out and said, “They’re just doing a show with a lot of dirty words in it.” What the hell does that mean? A lot of dirty words? So it was a fan backlash that we were starting to get, which I didn’t really care about because I knew that the Galactica fan group was a pretty small one and I was convinced that what we were doing was going to work.

  MARK STERN

  There was some concern on our part about Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel, that people would say, “Oh, it’s just another Sci-Fi thing,” and it was going to feel limiting to people. There was also the other side of that, which is people were not going to come because they remembered the old one. And then there was the concern that the people who did remember the old one wouldn’t come because they don’t want to see it reinvented. There was a relatively big outcry—certainly from the fanboys and the fan base—about turning Starbuck into a woman. In fact, we had a panel at Comic-Con, a small panel in one of the smaller rooms, the summer before the miniseries aired that December. So not a lot of people really knew about it. But there was a whole conversation about how people were going to throw popcorn at the stage, because I guess Ron had made some comment about the old version being very popcorn-y. They were going to protest the Starbuck thing and we were like, “Man, we have this real potential to alienate everybody.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I got this invitation to appear at Galacticon, which was going to be at the Universal Hilton about a month before the miniseries was on the air. They invited me to come. It was a con put on by Richard Hatch and some other people that was dedicated toward celebrating the original Battlestar Galactica. So they invited me to come talk about the new one. And let’s face it: I kind of knew I was going into the lion’s den on this, but I said, “I want to take a bunch of clips.” I wanted to take the entire first act, but Universal wouldn’t let me. So I pulled together five or six minutes of material from the miniseries. Full scenes, like the poker scene where Starbuck punches Tigh, and the first battle. Some other key scenes. Cobbled them together in a five- or seven-minute piece.