So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  The Japanese in World War II were considered to be animals who don’t care if they live or die. Unlike us. We say that to this day about ISIS, and they say it about us. The Japanese said it about us. So it was great to explore that with the Cylons, because it was easy to do. Like I said, they’re just robots, killer machines. They don’t have feelings, so then it was interesting to challenge that assumption and do a thing about what we do to our enemies during war.

  TONI GRAPHIA

  One of my favorite parts of the episode is when Kara eats a sandwich in front of Leoben during the interrogation. That was Ron’s idea. He was like, “Do something you don’t do in a normal interrogation scene. Throw a curveball in there. Like, a regular interrogation scene you wouldn’t think of doing that, because a person’s human. But that’s one way she could be testing him to see if he’s human. Is he hungry?” So Ron said, “Just have her eat a sandwich in front of him, and see what he does.” I remember being like, “What kind of sandwich…”—I felt like I was taking his lunch order. He was like, “Just a big sloppy sandwich. And she just eats it; enjoys it in front of him.” And we came up with a few other things, like does he sweat? He’s sweating during it and she’s watching his forehead.

  The end scene where they throw him out of the airlock—there were lots of discussions about that. About whether President Roslin should stop the execution, or condone it. I love at the end that she’s the one who does it. It’s kind of like good cop/bad cop, because Laura Roslin goes in there and berates Starbuck for, like, “How could you do this and treat this guy this way?” And then she talks to Leoben, gets the information she needs, and is like, “All right, throw him out the airlock.” I thought that was awesome, because that was her role. She had to do it.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  To me it was a small thing, but it was important in terms of telling the audience that these characters are not just cookie-cutter heroes. They are capable of lying. They are capable of doing things that are ethically questionable. I wanted characters to occasionally do the wrong thing for the wrong reason, and for us to kind of go, “Ugh, Laura. Jesus.” You know, the good-guy character never does that. That was important for me, to sort of lay out a marker of, again, what these characters are capable of. To sort of say this is not a traditional show.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  I thought Katee and I were going to get fired over that scene, because we literally could not stop laughing. It was horrifying. I mean, we were really upset. We were backstage crying, because we couldn’t stop laughing. Then we promised each other that we wouldn’t laugh … and we would laugh and laugh.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  It wasn’t a funny scene.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  It wasn’t funny at all. I was supposed to be ejecting Leoben and we couldn’t stop laughing. Poor Callum [Keith Rennie] is trying to figure out how to act the scene and these two women are just losing it.… You notice we didn’t have too many scenes like that.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  “Flesh and Bone” was where Leoben was waterboarded. When we were working on that episode, it was, like, well, we’re going to really lean into this story, too. We’re going to have our characters do this. And they’re going to do it to a Cylon. And doing it to a Cylon, what’s the ethics of that? Is this a person? It is a machine? If it’s a machine, why do we care whether it cries and screams in agony or not? And if it’s a person, then why are you doing it? So it was just a great way to illustrate some of the core ideas of the show, one of which is that we’ve cast human actors to play the Cylons, but we’re saying that they’re not people. But if it acts like a person and feels like a person, cries like a person, at what point is it a person?

  TONI GRAPHIA

  The end, where Starbuck puts her hand up to the glass to meet his, that was very much inspired by Dead Man Walking. It was kind of like Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn in that film. The thing is, the more you get to know someone, even if they’re guilty, even if you know or think they did this crime and they deserved this punishment, they have become more human to you. And so Leoben, more than his sweat and more than whether he was hungry and wanted that sandwich, what made him really seem human is the fact that he got Starbuck to care about him in some bizarre way. There’s a moment where he says, “I want you to be there when I die. I want you to witness my execution.” That was inspired by Dead Man Walking.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  The interesting part about Kara in the early part of that scene is the callousness and the immaturity that she’s bringing to it as well. Which was such an interesting thing, because a lot of times we take for granted how young soldiers are forced into situations that are so adult, and so big. There are moments where we hear about the terrorizing of prisoners, and there is an immaturity that goes along with that. That was something that Kara had in that scene the whole time. When people are going through things in real life, very rarely do we realize the weight and magnitude of what we’re actually living until afterward. Hindsight is such a beautiful thing.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  He gets humanized, and at the ending we’re just not sure: Is he really just a robot? At the end Kara isn’t sure if he really is just a robot. Toni Graphia wrote an excellent draft, and Ron did a polish, and he had the concept that Kara had a destiny, that she was kind of a guardian angel and didn’t know it. And he put in all of these things that were insights about her and her mother, and Leoben saying that she thinks of herself as a cancer that destroys the people she cares about, because her mother told her that. When we read it as a staff, we were really kind of scared of that stuff. You know, “What is Ron doing?” I can’t answer for him, but right there he started making the Cylons even more complex. He wasn’t just human, he had insights that we didn’t. He had spiritual insights, and the whole metaphysical and spiritual dimension of the show became a huge theme as it went on. It started right there.

  TONI GRAPHIA

  It’s really poignant at the end. I believe she goes back to her locker and says a prayer for him, for his soul. That was the whole question: Does this guy have a soul? Because that would be what made him human. We don’t know if he has a soul, but the fact that she prayed for his soul, to me that means that he has one. It’s a human connection, and you can’t make a human connection if you’re not a human. It stirred the pot of all those really fascinating thematic questions.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  It took it beyond its initial concept and the show got even more complex and more profound because Ron introduced that. And once he introduced that, it naturally evolved that we would explore that with the Cylons. He thought from the beginning that we were monotheists and polytheists and it was an exploration about how monotheism is not necessarily the superior religion, which we in the Judeo-Christian world think—that we’ve gone beyond that polytheism, which is obviously pagan or primitive. That was what we used to start exploring these things, and then he did that thing in the first-season finale at the Opera House, where Six is showing Baltar the shape of things to come. That she’s prophetic and raises the question of whether or not she is just a chip in his head, or is she a guardian angel? Where all of this was going, I didn’t understand at all, but it was Ron expanding on making the Cylons more organically complex, and they were growing beyond our initial concept. And a lot of it started with “Flesh and Bone.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When we were doing “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down”—the return of Ellen Tigh—the network was still on my ass about lightening up the show, and this episode was indicative of how tired I was of fighting with them. At that point I was fighting with them about the tone and the feeling of the show almost daily. Weekly at least. And it was getting to me, you know? And this is before the show’s on the air. This is when the network’s at their most nervous and least likely to be cooperative, because they’re scared of what people are going to say. They haven’t really seen an audience reaction, so this is when it’s always tough.

  So w
e were struggling with this episode, trying to figure out the meaning of bringing back Ellen Tigh. Was she a Cylon? Wasn’t she a Cylon? What was really the point of it? We were just struggling internally with how to make it work as an episode. It had gotten to the point where I did a page-one rewrite. Eddie was going to direct that one, but while rewriting I decided to turn it into a comedy. I rewrote it with an eye toward making it the first time we should try to do a lighter episode. It would be more overtly comedic and start to play the French farce of it. You know, like them sitting around the table and Ellen Tigh’s foot going up Lee’s pants. Crazy stuff in the hallways, and just having a little bit more fun with it. I remember Eddie being really taken aback by it. We ended up swapping the episode order on him or something at the last minute, so he was going to direct a different episode, a heavier, more serious episode. Suddenly he was going to direct the French farce episode and he just kind of swung with it and said, “All right, we’ll lean into it. We’ll make this one as good as we can.” But that’s why that episode is the way it is.

  Things were definitely more serious—but not too much so—in “The Hand of God,” which was about Starbuck leading a mission to capture a fuel-rich asteroid from the Cylons.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  “Hand of God” came out of David Eick’s desire to do what he would call a Big Mac episode. He’d be like, “It’s all great we’re doing all this really intense and philosophical deep drama, but every once in a while I just want a Big Mac.” You know, popcorn. Empty calories. Let’s just go do an action piece. I want to find a target, I want to blow it up, I want to enjoy it. So we went, “You know, there’s a validity in doing a Big Mac.” David and Bradley wrote this one, and this was a perfect one to hand them, because it was all about, “Okay, how do you reinvent some of the language of the space battle and a lot of the tropes that have gone before, and make it really interesting and make it fun and just have it be unusual?” They came up with a lot of the detail work in that episode. This is also where we introduce the table models. You know, the big war table with the models of the Vipers and so on on top of them. Which I thought was a great device to use. It works really well in those World War II movies and it made perfect sense for us, because we were sort of antitechnology. I’d also tried a couple of times in Star Trek, in similar situations, to do it with animation on a big screen with a map and dots, and logos of ships moving to attack positions. It never really worked very well in Star Trek. It was always disappointing what you ended up with. It never told the story very visually. There’s something about those three-dimensional models on a tabletop and people moving them that just kind of somehow brought you into the story a little more easily, and it was just more fun to look at.

  The popcorn action was important, because it allows you to expand the story. Anything that can keep you out of having to do core mythology shows allows you to extend, ultimately, the life of it. This was another chance to sort of get into the religious thing with Baltar and Six. Him literally just pointing randomly at the board at where he thought the key vulnerability was, and having that be the actual key vulnerability. Moments like that were built in to kind of say, “Look, there is something at work here. There is another power that has to be acknowledged that does appear to influence the events and lives of our characters.” It’s the classic fate versus destiny. Or free will versus destiny. So you want to be able to play that question of, “Are we in our lives just fulfilling destinies that are written for us or do we have free will?” You want to be able to search the evidence of both.

  Things were more political in “Colonial Day,” which had Tom Zarek seeking the office of the vice president, but Roslin nominating, instead, Baltar, who wins.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  “Colonial Day” was a tricky one, because it was an unabashed political show, which, of course, made everybody nervous at the network. I think even David was a little nervous about it. I thought it was kind of cool. Let’s deal with things like elections and let’s deal with Parliament, and let’s deal with how these people are governing each other. I was fascinated with the concept of what people out there in the fleet were doing day-to-day. And coming up with this idea of Cloud 9 [a domed ship containing a casino, spa, fancy restaurant, and so on], which allowed us to go shoot it, because we could just get a location and say that it was inside a big dome. It was really a cost-saving thing. Like, “Okay, if we set it in a big dome made to look like a planet, then we can shoot it at BC University or something.” So that’s where that came from.

  But I liked the idea of talking about all these people out on these ships that were just still kind of going through their lives as if nothing had changed, because they didn’t know what else to do. That speech of Tom Zarek where he says, “Look around. The gardener over there, every day he’s still acting like a gardener. The lawyers are still acting like lawyers, you know? The teachers are still acting like teachers, as if the world they knew is still around. And they’re doing it out of inertia. It’s not a choice. It’s just, that’s what they do, because they don’t know what else to do.” I thought that was just fascinating. I thought it was really an interesting take on what all these thousands of survivors were really doing day-to-day.

  Somehow in the course of that episode we came up with this idea of making Baltar the vice president, which was just kind of fun. We knew that he and Laura would have great scenes together. I’m not even sure how many scenes he and Laura had together before this point. I think just a handful. But we knew that there was a great duo to put together and that by making him an important political figure, he would have to deal with Adama and all of our bigger characters. So that’s kind of the reason why we decided to go down that road. And I just thought it was a great way to kind of talk about the colonies.

  The political scientist in me sort of was fascinated by coming up with a new political system for these colonies and kind of saying that they were sort of in a federalized system where each planet had its own government. Its own culture, but they had a council and a president over them. Each colony was much more independent than each state in the United States was, for instance. That the colonies probably used to fight among themselves. That they had wars against each other, and that the idea was that the first Cylon war was the instance that united the Twelve Colonies into this federal structure that has held ever since then. It’s like one thing implies another. That, to me, is how world building works in TV and film. You say she’s the president and you say there are colonies. Well, how would that really work? And the more authenticity you can bring to that, the audience starts to feel more and more like it’s a real place.

  With “Kobol’s Last Gleaming,” I said right at the beginning of the show bible that the end of the first season was going to be the coup with Adama putting Laura in jail. So I knew that’s where I wanted to go. So, bit by bit, over the course of the first season, you kept seeing these two in conflict. We kept seeing Laura being the hawk and, ironically, Adama being the little dove. And Laura’s willingness to do anything it took to protect the fleet, running afoul of Adama’s view of civil liberties and rights, and right and wrong. And that eventually she was going to go a step too far and he was going to have to lower the boom and pull her back. So I always knew that’s where we wanted to get to.

  This was much bigger at one point. Like way too big. We were going to have the guys go down to the planet’s surface. It was going to be a whole thing down on the surface of the planet. It was originally going to be a different cliffhanger, because there was going to be Apollo, Tyrol, Cally, and some others actually got down to the planet and they found a big temple right on Kobol. And the idea was that they were going to get into this temple, and I was looking for something to come out of left field and really surprise the audience at that point. There’s a draft of the show that does exist where they get inside the temple and Baltar’s there to walk down a corridor. It’s like a pyramid or something. I was, again, trying to sort of touch on some of the icon
ography from the original series. So there was a pyramid-shaped temple that they found. They got inside, Baltar’s going down some corridor, and suddenly he’s enveloped in darkness. A voice comes out and he turns … and there’s Dirk Benedict, and Dirk Benedict says, “Hello, I’m God,” and that was the cliffhanger.

  Now I look back and I think, “God, I was out of my mind.” But at the time, it was coming out of Baltar’s vision and the religious aspects that were going on. The whole “all of this happened before, all of this will happen again” idea roaming around in my head. I was reaching for an idea that was saying that this story is the wheel of life. It comes around, is told, is retold many, many times in many different forms, and that there was some connection between the original Galactica series and our series. They were both turns of the wheel in different universes or different parallel existences. Like a multiverse, but nobody was fond of this idea. It was shot down rather quickly. There were all these religious things that are still in the show: the Arrow of Athena, Laura telling Starbuck about her vision, Starbuck going against Adama’s orders and going back to Caprica and all that stuff. So it was sort of part and parcel of all this other religious stuff that was going on.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  It was here that Six brought Baltar to the Opera House, and the way Michael Rymer directed it, with the swirling camera moves, the music and the weird archetypal white cradle, and suddenly it’s elevated into something that’s kind of beautiful and mesmerizing and you’re not sure what’s really going on. That brought things to a whole new level, and they’re talking about the baby, which is going to be a theme as things continue, and the child ultimately becomes the progenitor of what becomes the human race at the end of the series.