Battlestar Galactica articles and interviews

[Karen]

Moderator's note: I'm hijacking Karen's thread and making it the place for all things BG--enjoy.



blog.scifi.com/battlestar/


Link to Ron Moore's - creator and co-producer - Web Blog.

[Sara]

From salon.com.

Where no TV show has gone before
With its hot, androgynous heroine leading the remnants of humanity against evil, God-fearing robots, "Battlestar Galactica" is boldly re-creating sci-fi TV.
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By Laura Miller


July 9, 2005 | It took a gay poet to persuade me to check out the new version of "Battlestar Galactica" on the SciFi Channel. The original series is nothing but a dim, cheesy memory, a haze of well-scrubbed flyboys under the beaming paternal guidance of Lorne Greene. (Surely the one foolproof way to make "Bonanza" even more boring was to put it in outer space?) But if my friend Charles -- who I'm pretty sure never sketched rocket ships in the margins of his homework as a kid -- thought the new "Battlestar Galactica" was worth a little TiVo space, I was willing to give it a shot. Two episodes and I was hooked; the second season, which begins on Friday, July 15, should be one of the rare bright spots in the summer TV schedule.

The SciFi Channel emits space operas faster than Tom Cruise gets engaged. Some of these series use the "rag-tag band of misfits" premise so beloved of American pop culture; others more or less mimic "Star Trek" by sending off a team of earnest multicultural middlemen from some indistinctly virtuous intergalactic federation on weekly missions that amount to a string of pat civics lessons. All feature stock figures, including but not limited to, the wisecracking maverick who always comes through in the end, the barely pacified (and usually quite hairy) noble savage, the goddess/nature-worshipping telepath, the pseudohuman troubled by the rumblings of genuine emotion, the tech guy, and of course freakish aliens, who, however bizarre their reproductive processes and skin textures, will, if female, be endowed with sizable breasts and skin-tight costumes.

These shows have ranged from the passable ("Farscape") to the appalling ("Lexx," a sort of R-rated "H.R. Pufnstuf"), and without a doubt each of them has its own cadre of fire-breathing hardcore fans, just as the hokey original "Battlestar Galactica" does. For someone never that thrilled by original "Star Trek" (or any of its permutations), they hold little charm. So what put the new "Battlestar Galactica" at the top of my Season Pass queue? Let me count the ways.

It began with Starbuck, the best pilot among the marines on the battlestar, which is the last remaining warship belonging to the remnants of the human race. In the series' back story, humanity has been at war with the cylons, robots that have rebelled against their makers. The cylons went into hiding, then returned with a devastating sneak attack facilitated by their recently developed ability to simulate the appearance of human beings. Only 50,000 people have survived from 12 planetary colonies, and most of them are on an assortment of civilian ships, now on the run from the cylons, with only Galactica to protect them. The battlestar's fighter pilots are crucial to the future of the species.

Starbuck is blond, cocky, insubordinate, a cigar-chomping, card-playing showoff; another stock figure, really, with roots as far back as Shakespeare's Hotspur -- if not for a clever twist. In the original series, Starbuck was played by Dirk Benedict; in the new version, it's Katee Sackhoff, a gender switch that knocks the character well out of type. Starbuck's no kick-boxing babe in stiletto heels, either. Like all the other pilots -- in fact, like all the soldiers aboard Galactica -- she wears a uniform, a flight suit over a tank top-T-shirt combo, a distinctive Galactica military outfit that makes everyone who wears it look buff; Starbuck is a tomboy.

She's also the only TV character who's ever sent me back to a fascinating book, "Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety," by Harvard professor and Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber, in search of the key to her appeal. Technically, Starbuck isn't a cross-dresser, or even a tomboy, because the society she lives in doesn't seem to subscribe to our own gender roles. Civilian women sometimes wear skirts and pumps, it's true, but the military appears to be seamlessly integrated. No one ever accuses Starbuck of being insufficiently feminine, although her friend and immediate superior, Capt. Lee "Apollo" Adama, has complained that she doesn't bathe often enough.

Still, Starbuck (whose real name is Kara Thrace; Starbuck and Apollo are pilot call names), is a tomboy by the standards of our world, and we all know what happens to a tomboy in pop culture. She tries to be one of the guys while harboring a secret, unrequited crush on her best guy friend, but the guy doesn't even see her as a girl until she has the sense to put on a dress, lipstick and a suitably demure manner at the big dance, whereupon he is wowed. Well, you can scratch that scenario. Late in the first season, Starbuck did put on a dress for a party, and Apollo was duly wowed, but he was already in love with her before that, and she wound up in bed with another man anyway, and then that guy fell for her, too. This is one tomboy who never has trouble getting laid.

What makes Starbuck so hot? Sometimes a girl dressed like a boy is sexier than any boy or girl in the "proper" outfit can be. According to Garber, this type of figure -- she calls it "the changeling boy," a theatrical staple from the Renaissance to "Peter Pan" -- is like a mirage, someone who hovers impossibly between genders. No one can possess Cesario, the boy that Shakespeare's Viola disguises herself as in "Twelfth Night," because Cesario doesn't really exist. Considering how most people feel about what they can't have, it's no surprise that Cesario is irresistible. Sackhoff's Starbuck has some of the same allure, which is why she looks so much better swaggering around in her T-shirt than she does in a dress.

The show's creators like to fool around with Starbuck's androgynous glamour. Last season, when she crash-landed on a barren planet and had to hot-wire a cylon raider to get back to Galactica, it turned out that the enemy's ships are as much animal as they are machine. Starbuck crawled inside to find a gooey cavity lined with weird tissues, sinews and organs, all of which she was able to sort out and operate, Boy Scout-style, by keeping in mind the principle that "every flying machine has four basic controls: power, pitch, yaw and roll." When she got the raider back to Galactica, she told Apollo that the plane was a "she"; then in the next episode, she starting calling it a "he." At any rate, she's the only one who can fly it.

Starbuck does have her problems, but so does everyone else on this show, which brings us to another strength of the new "Battlestar Galactica," the sort of thing that makes viewers want to stick around after being drawn in by the flashy and new. This is a character-based drama, not something you often see on a spaceship. In a way, once you get past the trappings (which aren't very high-tech to begin with -- Galactica is an outdated model that escaped the cylon's crippling computer virus because it wasn't networked), the series has more in common with "The West Wing" than it does with "Star Trek." Granted, trying to lead a small group of fugitive survivors on a flight across the universe differs a bit from running a stable terrestrial superpower, but as Machiavelli would probably point out if he were still around, the dilemmas of power are surprisingly consistent.

The remnants of humanity are led by two individuals: Cmdr. William Adama, captain of the Galactica (and father of Apollo) and President Laura Roslin, the former secretary of education and 30-somethingth in line for the presidency before the cylons attacked and killed everyone ahead of her. Edward James Olmos' Adama is in most ways your basic fictional military hero, what we imagine we want our leaders to be in the dream world of American popular entertainment: a tough, decisive straight-shooter, the proverbial man who does what has to be done. But, as tradition dictates, Adama's emotions are never entirely submerged and are sometimes allowed to overwhelm his judgment ("This time it's personal!") because, as in our real lives, we want to be shown that our leaders are both better than us and the same as us.

Roslin is something else, something you rarely see on television, a consummate politician who is nevertheless treated sympathetically. As played by Mary McDonnell (the performance is similar to another great McDonnell role, the mother in "Donnie Darko"), she is a woman whose composure almost never ruffles, whose strength lies her ability to dissemble expertly and act expediently when necessary. In the first season, when a vice presidential election was forced by a dangerous political opponent, she switched her backing from the more qualified candidate (who was also a good friend) to the weak and inexperienced but more popular Dr. Gaius Baltar. She knew this was one battle she couldn't afford to lose.

Both Adama and Roslin are "good," but they aren't always right, and "Battlestar Galactica" is exceptionally comfortable with allowing some of their decisions rest in the gray regions between the right and wrong. When Apollo was ordered to destroy a civilian ship that had probably been infiltrated by cylons, he was haunted by the possibility that he'd killed innocent human beings. He tried to talk to his father about it, but Adama told him to suck it up and stop dwelling on it: "A man takes responsibility for his actions, right or wrong." Roslin, detecting Apollo's distress, told him that, on the contrary, a good leader should remember and learn from his mistakes, even if he must show perfect confidence about his past decisions in public. She keeps the name of the destroyed ship written on a piece of paper in her pocket.

Apollo, the Prince Hal of "Battlestar Galactica," wavers between these two models of leadership, civilian and military, and in general he's veered toward Roslin. But late last season, after Roslin's credibility had been carefully built up, the president suddenly seemed to go off the rails. She's dying of breast cancer, taking a strange, hallucinogenic herbal remedy and now believes in an ancient prophecy supposedly foretelling that a leader like herself will guide the people to a fabled promised land: Earth. (Yes, these folks are meant to be our ancestors, not our descendants.) Roslin defied the skeptical Adama by sending Starbuck off on a risky prophecy-related mission. This precipitated a military coup.

Roslin's visions have been so prescient it's hard not to think there might be something to the prophecy after all, but Adama's rebellion is perfectly understandable, too. Faith in "Battlestar Galactica" is as fraught as it is in real life. The cylons are monotheists who talk about "God's love" and the salvation that awaits those who repent of their sins, even as they proceed to brutally exterminate those they consider to be "corrupt." The human beings are pagans who worship a pantheon of gods with the names of ancient Greek deities. The prophecy Roslin believes she's fulfilling, of a leader who takes her people to the promised land but doesn't make it there herself, echoes the Old Testament, while the prophecy's emphasis on an eternal cycle in which "all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again," has intimations of Eastern religions.

It's so easy for a series dabbling in such matters to go even further overboard than Roslin and get lost in the byways of metaphysics and mythology. It's also easy for a drama so interested in realpolitik dilemmas to degenerate into too much talk. "Battlestar Galactica" is exquisitely balanced. The woo-woo philosophizing is evened out by the gritty, workaday sets and the documentary feeling of the hand-held camera work. The palace intriguing gets a regular jolt, courtesy of action and suspense sequences that are believably immediate and intense.

The season 2 premiere has Adama in critical condition after an assassination attempt by sleeper agent (another interesting character, fatally conflicted in her loyalties). His second-in-command, Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), has to take over -- a scary prospect since Tigh, although not untalented as a tactician, tends to wobble in a pinch and furthermore has a drinking problem. While in charge of Galactica, Tigh attempts a risky maneuver Adama would never condone. Meanwhile the occasional flashback shows us why Tigh is so dependent on Adama and fears nothing more than having to go on without him. It's just another example of how "Battlestar Galactica" proves itself a little braver and more grown-up than the standard genre fare; in this case, the faithful sidekick could be more liability than asset.

There are deft citations of real-world events in the series: Roslin's swearing-in ceremony harks back to the presidential oath taken by LBJ after the Kennedy assassination; the unfathomable loss suffered by Galactica's crew is represented by a wall of loved-one photos reminiscent of the ones that sprang up after Sept. 11; the camaraderie of the pilots, who have made a ritual, before flying out, of pressing their palms to a photo of a soldier taken on one of their blasted home planets, recalls the solidarity of the firefighters of New York. None of this is belabored; all of it strikes home.

Season 2 should tell us more about what's left on the 12 colonies, explore the ever-widening rift between the military and civilian leaders in the fleet, and perhaps most intriguing, shed a little light on what, exactly, the cylons are up to. They have a plan, the show’s opening credits keep telling us. Or, rather, their god has a plan, as Number 6, the seductive, praying-mantis of a cylon whose voice and image have been implanted in Dr. Baltar's brain keeps telling him. These androids are true believers possessed of superior technology, something you don't have to be a beleaguered Galactica passenger to fear. I'm guessing we'll discover the cylons and the human beings aren't as different as the colonists would like to believe, but only a summer of Friday night appointment viewing will tell.

[Sara]

From zap2it:

Lawless Live from 'Battlestar Galactica'
(Thursday, September 01 04:21 PM)
By Kate O'Hare

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) On Friday, Sept. 9, in an episode of Sci Fi Channel's space opera "Battlestar Galactica," fans are going to hear something from former "Xena: Warrior Princess" star Lucy Lawless that many have not experienced -- her own New Zealand accent.

"You haven't heard it yet, you know," says Lawless, calling in from the New Orleans set of her upcoming CBS movie "Vampire Bats" (she and the crew evacuated safely before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina), a sequel of sorts to "Locusts."

"There seems to be a spate of things where they really want me to do [the accent]," she says. "I really resisted at first -- 'Two and a Half Men' and everything -- I really didn't want to do my own. I don't know why. I just felt like it's doing a trick or something. Finally, I said OK.

"It's interesting in this case, because [my character's] a journalist, and Australians have such a reputation for having been such a major presence in the world of tabloid journalism."

In "Final Cut," written by Mark Verheiden ("Timecop," "Smallville") and directed by veteran documentarian Robert M. Young ("Children of Fate: Life and Death in a Sicilian Family," "Dominick and Eugene"), Lawless plays D'Anna Biers, a reporter for the Fleet News Service.

In the wake of shootings of civilian protestors on another ship by troops from Galactica, President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) and Capt. Adama (Edward James Olmos) grant D'Anna unlimited access to the space cruiser and its crew in hopes of improving relations between civilians and the military.

When D'Anna stumbles across a couple of hot stories, she has to decide whether she'll go along with her original plan to do a hatchet job or instead do a more balanced portrayal of life aboard the lead vessel of a ragtag space fleet of human refugees fleeing an army of mechanistic Cylons.

Asked whom she used as an inspiration for D'Anna, Lawless cites one of CNN's most visible reporters.

"I thought about Christiane Amanpour," Lawless says, "but I wanted to go a little closer to home [accent-wise]. She's got a pretty plummy accent. But I did kind of based it on her, because I wanted the performance to be visually annoying. With all respect to Christiane Amanpour, but you know how she turns her collar up? I just wanted to have things like that. I wanted her to be threatening, just in terms of fashion.

"Everybody else on Galactica is struggling. Nobody wears jewelry or anything. I thought, 'Well, people have always found ways to adorn themselves.' My character actually has some great clothes and changes of clothes. She's hooked into some black market, I don't know what.

"She's annoying in that way. I wanted her to get people's backs up from the start. My character's got all the bells and whistles and will not apologize for it, thank you very much."

Because of the character she's playing, Lawless got to work with many "Galactica" regulars.

"I was interviewing them all, so I got a real bloody good look at the cast and crew. I just adore Edward James Olmos. He's such a darling. Mary McDonnell ... legends. Some of the young crew are so impressive. They're all just bloody nice.

"I particularly liked Trisha [Helfer, who plays humanoid Cylon Number Six] and Kandyse McClure [who plays Petty Office Dualla]. I got to hang out with them more than others. They're sweet as could be and highly intelligent young women.

"You know who's the biggest surprise in all of it? Michael Hogan [who plays Col. Saul Tigh]. Oh my God, that guy is hysterical. You have no idea when you see him on screen, but he is such a goofball. I really fell in love with him."

Lawless was also thrilled to be working with Young. "He's a legend in documentaries. I so admire him. He's about 80 years old. It was such an honor for me to work with him. So all around, a great experience."

Adding a bit of cinema verite, D'Anna's news footage will be incorporated in the episode.

"I really was covering things," Lawless says. "They really were going to use the footage that I and my sidekick were taking. Sometimes he was on the camera, sometimes I had the camera, but we were really rolling video. We were making a film within a film."

Lawless has also become a "Galactica" fan. "It's really interesting, and with so many possibilities. Like with the Cylons, where are they? Do they have a soul? Are they, in fact, going to turn out to be the good guys in the end?

"The other thing that's really new about the show is the prize at the end of every episode isn't some great philosophical feel-good message -- it's pure survival. Just getting through another 12 hours is bloody victory for these people. You're rooting for them all the time, because you feel they are us."

[Sara]

And I'll say it again: WARNING: SPOILERS FOR 2ND HALF OF SEASON 2

From EOnline:

Again, as promised, the interview with Battlestar’s Jamie Bamber, who could not have been more delightful and accommodating. Sadly, though, I didn’t score the towel as it was over the phone. Next time!

Samuel: What can we look forward to for Apollo in the second half of Season 2?
Jamie: Lots of loving. Looots of looooving. Yeah, my bathrobe has been on my peg in my trailer almost every day it seems. Lots of relationship stuff. Lots of darkness. He gets into a very dark place and almost does away with himself. He gets lost in space for a bit and thinks nobody’s going to rescue him and goes to a very dark moment which then affects everything else that he does. He questions everything that goes on and holds everyone else at a distance. Basically falls apart a bit and in that, he falls into many different arms, so it’s gonna to be interesting. It’s a really good story for him in the second half of the season, and I think he ends up then commanding the Pegasus as well for a bit. He’s got a lot to do.

Tara: You have such great chemistry with the female members of the cast, especially Starbuck, Dee, and the Prez, that it's hard for a fan to choose which potential couple to root for. So, who do you think Apollo will end up with?
Jamie: It’s not hard to have chemistry with all of them! (laughs) Well in the short term he’s going to end up with Dee, Dualla. Although he falls into a couple of other arms along the way. In the long term, I really don’t know. Actually, there’ll always be something between him and Starbuck. There’s always a kinetic energy, something going on between them, but they kind of get together in the second half of season two and fireworks go off and it doesn’t quite work out, so it’s a relationship that will always be there, but whether they can actually settle into it and admit it to anyone else, I highly doubt. I think they’re too charged and too mixed up about what the other means to them and there’s too much back story and too many problems, so I’m not sure if they’ll ever get together. Other than that, I don’t know. From what I’ve learned about the character, he’s got commitment issues, so I think whoever it is is going to have a hard ride.

Paige McKinney: Your wife recently made a cameo on Battlestar. Any plans to have her come back?
Jamie: Uh, there may be. She’s actually released an album in Europe now, so she’s concentrating on that. She’s flying back and forth. So she hasn’t really got time to do any more on the show right now, but who knows in the future. It was nice to have her at work for a couple of days. It was a lot of fun, so I hope so.

Monti Shalosky: Your wife recently recorded a CD...do you know if or when it will be released? (I heard her sing...she's good)
Jamie: It’s out in Europe. In Holland and Belgium, it’s been released. I wish I knew how to get a hold of it. I think there’s a website called Alcastar.com where you can get hold of it or something.

Maureen: I'd love to know how you've managed your family life (is it right that you have a 2-year old AND 1-year old twins???) and a starring role in a new, fantastic show. Really, how many nannies does it take?
Jamie: I have three tiny, little girls. The twins are one and my eldest is two. I manage it with the help of sometimes two nannies, and a wife who’s amazingly energetic and enthusiastic. So, yeah, I’ve got a lot of help and when I’m not working, I’m playing. It’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of crazy, but in a good way.

Martin Haro: Will you sign and auction off your towel?
Jamie: Oh, well, maybe I shouldn’t admit that it probably just got washed and thrown back in the wardrobe department along with everything else! [laughs] I mean, I’ve got it! I’ve kept it. It’s at home, unwashed and ready to go until it’s price is right. We’ll see what happens to that.

Helen: How are the fans when you meet them on the street?
Jamie: They’re amazingly enthusiastic. I’ve never come across people who are so pleased to have a science fiction show that is also a great drama, that isn’t kind of goofy, and treats the viewers as adults. The other night I was at a bar and this guy comes running up to us and he was just so pleased that he’d bumped into us. It happens all the time. It’s mainly guys, I have to say. I can’t say I’ve been accosted by too many women on the street.

Jennifer: Do you and Richard Hatch get along seeing as you played the same character?
Jamie: Definitely. He sees in me, I think, all the excitement that he went through. You know, I remind him, although he went through it times ten, because it was going to 17 million people or whatever. But he loves my little version of the character. He was saying it’s great to have these sort of issues he has, relationship issues with those around him and his dad and you know, he’s not the sort of cardboard cutout sort of hero that Richard sort of played. Apollo, in the original never put a foot wrong, whereas my guy puts foot all over the place that he shouldn’t do and makes mistakes with the best of intentions. Richard’s very supportive and very excited for this show, and for his role in it as well. He’s a regular on the show now, so he enjoys it very much. And I think he’s got misgivings because he put a lot of time and effort and energy into getting his original revived and that hasn’t come to anything yet, so I think he’s got mixed feelings about it, but he’s very positive about the direction we’re going and says that he wished he could’ve gone in many of the directions that we’ve gone with his character originally.

Elizabeth Mendoza: Which Battlestar actor makes you laugh the most on set?
Jamie: We have practical jokers, but who makes me laugh the most? I would say James Callis, but I don’t get to do stuff with him very much. Otherwise Katee and I have a lot of fun, and Tahmoh too. Tahmoh Penikett is a great laugh to work with on set.

Kristin: I would imagine that since the subject matter can be dark…
Jamie: Yeah, but we have to break it, and snap out of it and have some fun. And you know, a lot of time the subject or situation is very dark, but the characters still connect in a very human and very sort of, at times, lighthearted way. I mean, they all know each other very well and there’s that sort of comraderie that happens in the military or in tight-knit situations. When your back’s to the wall, people do have dark sense of humor and that comes across, I think, on the screen and off of it too.

Darrel: Any other projects coming up for you?
Um no. I’m hoping to do something in the hiatus that we’ve got. We’ve got three months, but uh, nothing definite as of yet. And [my family’s] all going back to London, so we’re all going to pile on the plane, and keep everyone awake for twelve hours on the plane while we all fly home. I’ve got to rent a house in London for three months and catch up with old friends and family and stuff like that.

Kristin: See if you can score another towel scene.
Well I don’t know about a towel, but it seems like every other episode these days they’ve got me running around half dressed. Yeah, I spent episode thirteen in bed with some prostitute! And then Starbuck and I bang off the feeling briefly in another episode, so you don’t need towels.


Kristin: Right, so I imagine you’re not encouraging your wife to watch the second half of the season too much?
No, no. [Laughs] She stopped watching the show. She has stopped. She can’t take it.

[Sara]

Yup, once again: SPOILERS FOR 2ND HALF OF SEASON 2

Also from EOnline:

Battlestar geeks, unite! As promised in the column, here is the full transcript of my talk with Creator and Executive Producer Ron Moore, with the questions YOU sent in.

Chris Perez: What do you think of all of the critical acclaim Battlestar Galactica has been receiving?
Ron: It’s really nice! Thank you. It’s really gratifying. I’m really glad that people are finding it and enjoying it because we love making it.

Seth Zilger: Any chance of a Starbuck/Apollo romantic relationship? How do you feel writing their scenes, since some fans may want them to be together, but it may lose it’s edge if they were to get together.
Ron: Yeah, it’s the famous Sam and Diane problem. I’m trying not to be too coy about it. It’s a really delicate, fine line that you’re trying to walk here, where yeah, you don’t want to just suddenly get them together and now they’re a couple and all the sort of angst and tension is gone, which is what’s drawing people into the relationship. But at the same time, you don’t want to be coy about it and keep teasing and ‘oh, they almost’ and ‘oh, it’s just so cute,’ because that gets annoying too. So what I’m trying to do is just sort of be true to who these two characters are. I mean, they are kind of oil and water. They’re very different people who have a strong personal connection and a strong sort of emotional attraction to one another, and a physical attraction, but it’s complicated by a lot of baggage and a lot of stuff, so I think the truth of that relationship is that it will always kind of dance in and dance out. There are times when they feel like it’s the right thing to do, and then it will get screwed up, and then there are times when they’ll just be at each other and wanting to kill one another and then they’ll realize that there’s something deeper between them. So I don’t think it will ever be a simple relationship.

Kathryn Tennaro: have you considered making a movie out of BSG (like Joss' Serenity)?
Ron: I don’t know. I’m not sure that the show lends itself to a feature film. One of the strengths I think of the show is all the serialized elements of it. All the continuing storyline. All the character work and the fabric of the show and the myth, and all the textures of it. With a feature you’re doing a big one off, here’s one big flashy film, and I’m not sure that’s really what this show is about. So I haven’t really seriously considered that.

Chris Perez: What can we expect for the second half of season two, and when does it start?
Ron: Second half of the season starts in January. We shot the first ten then took a four week break in the summer, but we’re back. Right now we’re shooting episode 15 and we will continue shooting until first week in December.

The second half of the season obviously is going to deal with the cliffhanger where we left off, with Pegasus and Galactica about to do battle. First episode will deal with that. Then we’re going to do some episodes with, well, one of the characters who’s going to have a major role to play is Lee Adama. He’s going to go on his own emotional journey and eventually find himself.

There’s a big Laura episode. You get to see her life on Caprice before the attack, and you’ll get to meet president Adar, who was the president she worked for when she was the Secretary of Education. And you’ll get to see a glimpse of what her life was like before she found out she got cancer and before the attack.

There’s a storyline where Baltar’s sort of growing affinity for the Cylons becomes more prominent and he starts becoming somewhat darker and scarier character as time goes on.

We’re going to be doing big episodes with the other battlestar, Pegasus. We’ve got a big fighter plane combat episode that’s all about Kara and one of our other pilots named Kat and their competition with each other and sort of with themselves as regards to one Cylon raider out there that keeps coming back and killing pilots again and again.

We’re gonna try to do a couple of really controversial episodes. We’re gonna deal with some sort of hot-button issues of today that will be translated into Galactica’s world. Like abortion is definitely going to become an issue on the show.

We’re going to do a Cylon-oriented episode later in the season that’s sort of a story that’s told primarily from the cylon’s point of view for the first time. Sort of get inside their heads, see what they’re about when they’re not out chasing Galactica. And then we’ve got, of course, a big two-part finale where a lot of things are gonna change, and the show’s gonna sort of make a fairly significant, radical change of direction.

Tara Isard: Give us a hint...Are there any cylons among the recurring crew members that haven't already been identified?
Ron: Oh, no, I can’t give that away! [Laughs] If I want to pull that rabbit out of the hat, the last thing I want to do is have people start thinking in that direction. I get that from the cast, Am I a Cylon? And I say, well, you’ll have to wait and see!

Lance Q: Were you surprised that some fans were really taken aback by the rape scene?
Ron: I mean, I knew that people would react to it. It’s a very provocative moment. Any rape scene, you’re going to have an emotional response. I knew that that was gonna be a trigger on some level. But, you know, stepping back from it, you can see it’s not really, it’s much more of a thing on the internet than it is in reality. I mean, we did not push the boundaries of television. It’s certainly nothing that you haven’t seen on Law & Order or NYPD Blue or 50 other shows that have gone into this territory. It’s nowhere near as graphic and disturbing, in my opinion, as the moment when you know, remember the character on The Sopranos that beat the stripper to death? That was disturbing television. That was really hard to watch! Like, omigod! And this [scene on Battlestar] doesn’t even approach that. It’s a controversial moment. It’s a provocative moment, but it was important to the story. It was built into the fabric of what show was about, the whole show dealing with what was happening to the cylon, prisoners we had seen, evidence of what had happened already on Pegasus and this was a natural outgrowth of that. So, a lot of the reaction on the internet is just sort of what people do on the internet. They become very dramatic. It becomes a whole thing for people to get on a soapbox and start yelling at the stars. But that’s OK. That’s what people like to do!

Kimberly Owens: Do you ever get pressure from the network to tone down the sexual or violent content out of fear of the FCC or other such nonsense?
Ron: Sure. You know, we have ongoing discussions with the network on every episode, from script to final editing, and we had long discussions on that particular scene. How it was shot, what the final edit was going to be and you know, you make your case and they have their feelings and ultimately you end up at a place where, you know, everybody is sort of satisfied. I was satisfied where we ended up and so were they.

Joseph Lee: Any romantic storylines coming up in the second half of the season?
Ron: Uh, yes actually. Lee (**I think he’s also called Apollo?) and Dualla are starting to become a bit of an item in the second half of the season, which is of course very complicated by the fact that Dualla is involved with Billy. We have our first triangle! Well, actually our second if you consider the Sharon and Helo! Or Baltar and Six! And Baltar, actually, his connection to a woman that I sort of named Gina in Pegasus, the captive that was held there, his relationship with her will continue throughout the season as well.

Kristin: I have to ask, with Commander In Chief coming to ABC, everyone’s saying this is the first female president we’ve seen on TV!
Ron: Yeah, I was kind of annoyed by that.
Kristin: How do you think your president would fare up against Geena Davis?
Ron: I love our president! There was actually some [news]paper or Wired or somebody a while back actually sort of outlined it and put a chart up comparing the two! It was actually before Commander In Chief aired. I can’t really remember what that publication was, but somebody had sent me a tear sheet that was like ‘look at this!’ Um, I haven’t watched Commander In Chief, but I like Laura’s portrayal a lot because I feel like we’ve really been there with that character, where we really saw, you know, the woman who wasn’t really even thinking about becoming president. I mean, Commander In Chief, as I understand it, she was the vice president and then steps up, but she’s like in the national arena, she at least had to think about what would happen the day the president died and what she would do. You know, there’s a certain amount vetting that had to go on, and with our character, Laura was 42nd in the line of succession. It just never really was a realistic possibility in her mind that she was ever going to become president. She wasn’t driven to that kind of office, so ours is the story of almost an every woman who’s suddenly thrust into this position. The other interesting thing that I have to say, I’d say the biggest distinction between Commander In Chief and our show is that Commander In Chief hangs it’s hat on the whole notion that this is a show about the first woman president and it’s a big deal and her gender is kind of front and center and that’s why you’re tuning in. In our show, in our world of Galactica, there is no comment on the fact that she’s a woman. You know, her gender role doesn’t even really raise an eyebrow by anybody. It’s a very integrated world in terms of sexual roles. You know, we see [female] fighter pilots constantly, Admiral Cain was a woman, and there’s no even residual feeling in the Galactica world that there’s anything at all unusual about that and you get the feeling that their society has just been sort of gender blind for quite a while. So the fact that Laura’s president is just sort of ‘oh, she’s president’ and one assumes that there were probably female presidents well before she ever even came on the scene.

Mary Kay Desola: How much have you/do you take from the original BSG story-lines?
Ron: It’s virtually a completely different entity. I mean, the Pegasus episode was one that I did reach back, because it was sort of the best one that they did in the original series, the idea of them meeting up with another Battlestar that survived the attack and that that commander was a different type of commander than Adama (**I think this is also Apollo), more of a hard charger, yet who still wanted to take the battle with the cylons. That’s just a great idea and it seemed a natural fit that at some point I would want to do that story, and I wanted to kind of wait for the show to mature to a certain point where we could really mine that for all its richness. Beyond that, I’ve looked at the other episodes of the old show. I don’t really see much in there for us cause so much of the old show is predicated on the idea of encountering other planets or other aliens in their universe and that’s just not something that we do. The overarching kind of myth of the show, I’ve worked in to this version of Galactica. The fundamentals of the old show are still here. It’s still an aircraft carrier in space. It’s still a ragtag fleet looking for earth. There’s still sort of a large myth about where humanity was born and the twelfth tribe that went to the Galactica world and the thirteenth tribe going to earth. There’s sort of a Greco-Roman nomenclature to the original show, which I then sort of took and made that part of the religious aspect of the colonials of this world. I mean there’s definitely a lot of elements of the original that are present in this show. But I don’t know that we’re going to go back and redo any more episodes.

Mindy Boustead: When will there be a confirmation that Battlestar Galactica was picked up for a season three?
Ron: We’re having general conversations about it. The network hasn’t made it a formal pickup. I’d say the indications look good. But they don’t have to pull the trigger on it for a few more months. It’s just the way networks work, they will probably not do it until they have to. February or March.
I’m optimistic. I’ve been optimistic since we did the miniseries that we’d get picked up and I feel that we’re going to get picked up.

Kathryn: How many years/seasons do you anticipate the series will run?
Ron: I’ve been asked that question and it’s a difficult question. I just kind of take each season as it comes. At the end of a season, like we’re approaching now, I always feel like, oh god, can I get even one more season out of it? And at the beginning of the season we always come up with more stories than we have time to do. So I’m certain that we could get a couple more years out of it. And you don’t want to overstay your welcome either.

[Sara]

From zap2it.com:

'Galactica' Gets a Little More Lawless
Monday, February 06, 2006

Lucy Lawless, already a cult heroine from her days as Xena, is about to pick up even more geek cred.

Lawless will join the cast of the Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" for its third season, reprising her role as D'Anna Biers. She's scheduled to appear in 10 episodes of season three, which begins filming in the spring.

Fans of the critically hailed show won't have to wait to see her again, though -- she's set to make another guest appearance in an episode scheduled for Friday, Feb. 24.

Lawless' character, a journalist, arrived on Galactica to do an expose on supposed misconduct by crew members that resulted in the death of civilians. Her piece ended up having the opposite effect, however, bridging a gap between the military and civilian survivors of humanity.
Viewers also found out that D'Anna had an ulterior motive -- she's a human-looking Cylon sent to gather information on the humans.

Lawless, a native of New Zealand, shot stardom in this country during her time as "Xena: Warrior Princess," which ran in syndication from 1995-2000. She's also appeared on "The X-Files" and "Veronica Mars" and starred in the short-lived WB series "Tarzan" two seasons ago.

[leftylady]

It's from a while back, but I don't think this great article (set visit) and interview with EJO was mentioned here:

www.hollywoodnorthreport.com/article.php?Article=2363

The article promises a Part II with interview with Mary McDonnell, but I don't think it's online yet.

[Spaced Out Looney]

Q&A with Ron Moore about the season 2 finale:

blog.scifi.com/battlestar/archives/2006/03/#a000409

3/26/06

Q & A

"The plot twist [of the finale] seems to share allot in common with the DeSanto Galactica continuation story, where the humans think they are safe from the cylons and revolt against the military by deciding to give up on Earth and to colonize another place called New Caprica. Were you at least partially inspired by this earlier concept? "

No. I can honestly say that the idea for our finale was entirely home-grown. I had lunch with Tom DeSanto a few weeks back and we talked about the struggles we both went through trying to get our respective versions of the show off the ground. As he talked about his pilot concept, I shared many of the plot details from our finale and we both remarked on how some notions and ideas are simply either "in the ether" or have a certain inevitability to them. It's reminiscent of the "Babylon 5" vs. "Deep Space 9" questions I used to get. I was there when DS9 was being created and I knew for a fact that neither Michael Piller nor Rick Berman had any knowledge of the B-5 material, but when you're doing a series set on a space station, there were bound to be certain paths that writers found attractive (like having a female second officer, for instance). In terms of Galactica, the idea that the people of the rag-tag fleet might one day come across a planet and decide to settle down permanently, is an idea that would probably occur to anyone approaching the material, and it's really a question of how you execute that idea which is key.


"What happened to Adama in the season finale to change him so much? Why would a man who spent decades of his adult life standing watch for the Cylon return suddenly give in and allow the military to stand down? How could he convince himself that the Cylons weren't coming back after 1 year when the last time they waited 40 years? He knew settlement was wrong so why didn't he offer any resistance? "

I think people have a remarkable ability to convince themselves of just about anything. Adama, like everyone else in the fleet, had been constantly on the run, constantly under stress, and constantly in danger of losing his life for months on end, with virtually no break from the metal walls surrounding him day in and day out. When, finally, the people decided to end the long sojourn and settle on New Caprica, he had little choice but to comply with the results of a democratic election which hinged on that very question. And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, people began to relax, to believe that maybe they had really turned a corner, had really found a place to lay down their burdens and start a new life. Adama was just as vulnerable to that attractive idea as anyone else, and as the men and women under him began to clamor for a new life, as the political leadership of New Caprica began to demand more and more military resources to support the civilian population, there came the point where Adama began to believe in the mirage too. He's not perfect. He never was. He couldn't bring himself to leave his ship, but as age and fatigue began to set in, he started to let down his guard just a little -- not all at once and never completely, but just enough.

There were also practical considerations. He was entirely alone out here. No Admiralty to call for reinforcements or intelligence, no Justice Ministry to prosecute soldiers who simply never came back from the surface of New Caprica, and no friendly ear in the office of the president to get needed resources for the military ships maintaining their lonely vigil up in orbit. He was alone and he was tired. It's almost as simple as that.

I remember one of my most vivid memories from the immediate post 9/11 period was opening up the newspaper and reading about a physical confrontation in the streets between members of the New York police department and the New York fire department. It was heartbreaking, it was infuriating and it was illuminating. People are people. Enormous events happen, history pivots around us and we tell ourselves that everything has changed, that we're irrevocably different from this day forward -- until the next time everything changes. Adama made a mistake. They all did. And as he is wont to say, they will all have to live with it.


"What is up with the pudgified Apollo? Too much chunky munky B&J? "

We're going to hint at some of the reasons for Lee's physical, er... changes in the first few episodes, then deal with it in more detail later. Overall, we're going to be hinting at a lot of things that happened in the intervening year over the first few episodes, then do more stuff with it later, as the season progresses.


"You have giant, steel balls. My head is still spinning from being smacked in the head with them in the form of Lay Down Your Burdens Part 2. It seems like you are operating under the philosophy that if the audience could possibly come up with a plot idea then it isn't good enough for BSG. Am I reading that right? I know I never would have guessed that we would suddenly jump 380 days ahead, but I love it. Will we get to see Tigh and Starbuck put all past hostility behind them and become a super bad ass resistance fighting duo with Anders, the chief, and Cally as their sidekicks? I'd like this not only because of the Tigh/Stabuck dynamic, but also because it would be nice to see Tigh do some good again. I loved the arc at the beginning of season two where all he could do was [censored] up while in command. However, since that point it seems that Tigh's only purpose for existing is to expose to the audience the wrong opinion or bad idea. Everything that comes out of his mouth is obviously the stupid or shortsighted answer which is invariable and immediately undercut by one of the wiser characters. He didn't like the documentary, the blackbird project... Have you noticed this theme? Personally I love Tigh and want him to be good for something again. Oh, and that first shot of him on New Caprica in that old man hat was priceless. Thanks. "

They're teflon, actually.

Anyway, I think you'll be happy to know that we've got some real meaty stuff planned for the Colonel in the first few episodes. I also felt that we didn't use Tigh as effectively in the later part of Season Two, and I was eager to get him back into the thick of things. He's got a sizable role in the initial episodes, and there are some enormous changes and shocks coming for his character next season.


"What happened to Zarek? Given his help getting Baltar elected, I would have expected him to have recieved a pretty nice 'reward', perhaps as VP? Did Baltar even have a VP? We never see Zarek post-election or a year later on New Caprica. Given Zarak's penchant for political mayhem, I would think that his fate would be one of significant interest. Perhaps we will see this early in Season 3? "

You will be seeing Zarek again and early in the season. He was the Vice President, but his relationship with Baltar went south relatively quickly, and he simply refused to cooperate once the Cylon occupation began.


"Speaking of Directors - I think everyone has paid attention to the remarkable work the directors do on this show, albeit subconsciously. I was wondering about some specifics on how you developed the show's directorial conventions. I believe I read in AC that most scenes are shot with two cameras running. Given what was in your mission statment regarding the script, how much of that was instigated by Rymer and the other directors in terms of realizing that style and making BSG grounded in a semi documentary aesthetic? What conventions did they establish on the show that have surprised you?"

The documentary/verite approach was in the initial pitch I made to the studio and network, and it was something that David Eick and I had numerous conversations about in the lead-up to the miniseries. It was a stylistic choice we made early on, and it colored all the conversations about the show with the production team, including the directors. Michael Rymer then took this aesthetic approach and made it real, developed the visual language of the show and made concrete the ideas that David and I were tossing around. The series bible does discuss the documentary film approach, but as always in this business, it's up to the man or woman behind the camera to make these things happen and Michael deserves a great deal of credit for the visuals we now take for granted.


"I understand according to the podcast that you guys were way over budget on ep 2.20, but the tent city really threw me off. I try not to be one of those fans that nitpicks everything to death, but this bothered me so much that I had to register and post. If they've been on planet for over a year now and they intend to make it their home, why are they still living in tents? If I had my choice between a tent and something more permanent and weatherproof, I'd be moving heaven and earth to construct the latter."

There are some permanent buildings in the settlement, but it seemed plausible that to start an entire city from scratch would be a massive undertaking to say the least. It also seemed that without a strong leader like Laura Roslin to helm this kind of effort, that the organizational problems would add up and that the project could easily get stalled or delayed. Now, add to that various unknowns like disease and unfamiliar weather patterns as well as the difficulties in exploiting the natural resources in a completely new environment, it didn't seem implausible that there'd still be a lot of people living in tents.


"Why is the fleet so concerned [about] elections? They are running for their lives, so I would think holding elections would be the least of their problems."

I felt right from the beginning that question of who was in charge and how a democratic society would deal with this situation was one of the fundamental questions of the show. If democracy means anything, it means that people get to decide who their leaders are and what kind of life they choose to lead. And the operative word is "choose." Democracies are about choices, some made intelligently and thoughtfully, and some not so much. Adama and the Galactica were faced with an immediate question as to the role of the military in this surviving population: were they still the servants of the people, or were they the overseers? Adama's choice was to preserve the idea of their society, indeed of their entire civilization while still striving to protect them from their enemies both within and without. It was, and continues to be a difficult balancing act, but as he said in "Resurrection Ship": it's not enough to survive, you have to worthy of suriving.

If the military simply took choice away from the people of the fleet, if it simply decided that the senior commanders knew best and that was that, then the people out there in those ships become irrelevant. They're cargo. It's a military world and a military society and everything else is secondary. Down that road lies the cautionary tale of Admiral Cain and the battlestar Pegasus. One Adama and Galactica decided not to go down that road, then the entire panoply of democracy was in play -- representation by consent and elections to determine those representatives.

[Sara]

From eonline:

New Beginning for "Battlestar"
By Josh Grossberg Thu Apr 27, 10:52 PM ET

Do you ever wonder what happened before a certain ragtag fugitive fleet set off on its lonely quest?

Well, Battlestar Galactica fans, does the Sci Fi Channel have a treat for you.

The Viacom-owned cable network has unveiled plans for Caprica, a prequel to the cable network's update of the '70s sci-fi show. The spinoff series will apparently be set about 50 years before Battlestar Galactica and center on the cataclysmic events that formed the current series.

Sci Fi Channel execs announced the Caprica news Wednesday in New York during the net's upfront presentation, when broadcasters traditionally pitch their most buzz-worthy new shows to advertisers and journalists.

Caprica is being developed and executive produced by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. The duo is responsible for reengineering the 1978 Battlestar (masterminded by TV veteran Glen L. Larson) into a smash 2003 miniseries and then into a full-fledged series that's garnered a massive cult following and just won a Peabody Award.

Just as the 1970s Battlestar Galactica took its inspiration from (or, as some would say, "ripped off") George Lucas' first Star Wars, the new series will take a page from the latter-day Jedi tales and focus on the bad guys' rise to power.

Details are still sketchy, but Caprica will presumably detail how robotic Cylon Alliance rose to power and decimated the 12 Colonies of Kobol (Caprica is the name of the largest planet in the system). The wanton destruction forced a group of refugees to launch the interstellar colonial spaceship the Galactica into deep space in search of a mythical planet known as Earth.

Producers have tapped 24 scribe Remi Aubuchon to write the script.

No premiere date has been announced, but given the popularity of the updated Battlestar, starring Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell and Katee Sackhoff as a female Starbuck, you can bet the suits at Sci Fi will try and get it on air next season.

[Sara]

From Heather Havrilesky on salon.com:

Human being there
I mean, can you imagine if my priorities were so mixed up that I would let the birth of my first child distract me from the upcoming premiere of the third season of "Battlestar Galactica"? The colonists are stuck on New Caprica, surrounded by Cylons, the future of humankind hanging in the balance, and all I can focus on is childbirth? Sweet Jesus, I shudder to think!

Rest assured, I haven't let foolish concerns like unassembled cribs or nonexistent infant car seats stand in the way of my watching the entire head-spinning two-hour premiere of "Battlestar," which I received in the mail yesterday and immediately slipped into my DVD player. I may not know where I'll change my little mewling raw chicken breast, but I do know that Starbuck and Adama and Roslin are so far up shit creek, they're going to need more than a paddle and a tube of diaper rash cream to get them home safely.

If, like me, you cherish the darkness and the high stakes and the ominous twists of "Battlestar" more than anything else about the show, then you're going to la-la-love the show's premiere this Friday. As you know, we left the colonists on a cold, forbidding, ugly planet with Baltar as their arrogant yet fearful, self-serving leader. And just as things were looking crappier than ever for the last remaining humans in the universe, the Cylons invaded and made Baltar their pathetic little bitch-boy. Last we saw, former President Roslin was looming in the margins like Bill Clinton before he caught a second wind and started busting heads on Fox, Admiral Adama was bumbling around on his spaceship, feeling like a relic of the past, and our one and only heroine, Starbuck, was in love and had let her hair grow long, which was clearly meant to signal that humankind was in big, big trouble indeed.

Things can't get much worse for our New Caprican friends, right? Wrong! Deliciously perilous times await all involved, with lots of invigorating references to the Biggest Mistakes of Human History to savor and enjoy, from the mind-control and finger-pointing ugliness of fascism to the senseless death and zealotry of bloody revolution. After just two hours with the old crew, you'll be shaking your head, a little smile on your face, appreciating how beautifully the writers of "Battlestar" have illustrated the terrible human condition, punctuated as it is by one instance of our screwing the pooch after another. My, we humans are a pathetic and undignified lot!

There's nothing quite like wallowing in the hopelessness of the human plight when you're about to welcome another human into the world. My child's first lesson will surely focus on the spectacular failure of most sociopolitical paradigms...

[Spaced Out Looney]

Ron Moore gave a seminar at Cornell on Tuesday (10/30) about the process of adapting the orginal BSG series into the new show. Buffyannotater attended and posted his notes from the seminar. It's not a transcript, but it's pretty close. Very fascinating and a must read if you're a fan of the show.

There is a teeny tiny something that some people might consider a spoiler, so I cut it here. If you click the link above, you can read the whole thing intact (I only cut one paragraph).





Yesterday, I saw Ron Moore give a fascinating 90-minute-talk at Cornell University, about his process of adapting the original Battlestar Galactica series into its current incarnation. He is a very engaging, intelligent speaker and gave a great deal of insight into his motivations behind each and every alteration, breaking the series down character by character. Most impressive was the amount of respect he paid to the 70s version. He showed clips of the original series, alongside clips of his own. Although the original series' clips caused the audience to burst into laughs of derision on quite a few occasions, he never tore it down. He certainly explained why he thought such and such wouldn't work today and what he might have found less than compelling in the original, but he never dismissed it as something that should be disregarded or forgotten but praised it as a good but flawed series centered around a genuinely fascinating mythology, a mythology which he does his best to honor and pay tribute to in his version. I wish I had the foresight to bring some sort of recording device, or even jot down notes. Unfortunately, I didn't, but I'm going to attempt to get down what I found to be some of the most interesting things before I forget them. Obviously, these are all from my own memory, which may be faulty, but I thought any fans of the series might enjoy to read them.

9/11 and the Attack on Caprica. His first consideration in updating the story was September 11th. In re-watching the pilot to the original series, he realized that, whether one likes it or not, it would be impossible to produce a series about the survivors of such a widespread attack from an outside enemy without viewers finding that resonance, and so rather than ignore it, he decided to embrace the notion and thus make a story which not only has deeper gravitas but personal significance to the viewers. We relate to what happened to these characters, albeit on a smaller scale, in a way that the viewers of the late 70s could not relate to the characters' plights.

In reviewing the original pilot, he also noticed that there was a great deal of footage of Cylon ships zooming down to the planet and shooting down humans, blowing up buildings, etc., whereas he made a concentrated effort to keep the action centered, for the most part, on the crew of the Galactica, hearing the reports of the attacks from afar. His reasons were twofold: firstly, he meant it as an homage to one of his favorite films, In Harm's Way, starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, in which the attack on Pearl Harbor is shown from the point of view of a submarine crew, far away from the actual action; secondly, and more importantly, his intention was to capture the feel that most of us had on 9/11. Most of us weren't near the actual attacks, but heard about it on the news, on TV, on the radio, on the web. We felt helpless and isolated and removed from what happened, although most of us knew people who were immediately affected--who were killed or hurt. And these are the feelings that Moore captured in the BSG pilot.

Cylons. The look of the Cylons is also immensely important, and of course probably the most signifiant shift from the original series. Most interestingly, the decision to have the Cylons look like humans began due to a budgetary concern. In order to update the original Cylon design (represented in the form of the CGI "centurions" or "toasters" on the current series), costumes for human actors would have had to be designed, or a great deal of CGI would have to be implemented, on a constant basis. As far as the idea of dressing humans in Cylon costumes went, designing and creating the sort of realistic-looking, revamped robot suits that would have been necessary would have been so expensive that they only would have been able to afford to make two or three of them at the most. As far as CGI went, while it would have been affordable, Moore and his creative team decided that it would be simply not work to have a constant enemy on the series who could only be represented through CGI. This means dealing with much more blue screen and acting against things that aren't there than they wanted for their weekly series.

The related concern, plotwise, was that in the original series, the Cylons didn't have a very clear motivation for chasing the humans through space. They destroyed all the colonies and left the human race all but extinct. So why wasn't that enough? Just because they're evil? The new series required a solid reason why this race would take so much time and effort in tracking the humans down. The decision to make Cylons look like humans and the idea of them having a monotheistic religion, a God who tells them it is their duty to obliterate their masters or whatever else their plan is (and I'll get to that in a moment), came around the same time. And all the problems were solved: suddenly, not only would the Cylons be affordable but the series now has the ability to have compelling, three-dimensional enemies who are full, "human" characters themselves.

<snipped for a teeny-tiny spoiler>

The Family Adama, The Starbuck Problem, and The Lack of Strong Women. Ron Moore loved the concept of "The Family Adama" being the central focus of the original series. What he didn't like was that, for some unexplained reason, Adama's entire family lived with him on his military vessel. Since he strove for realism in his version, he decided that this simply would not be believable. His other major concern was the lack of conflict in the original Adama/Apollo relationship. In the original series, Adama was basically always right, and Apollo pretty much always agreed with him and followed his orders--the perfect dutiful son. Heartwarming, yes; interesting on a week-to-week basis? In Moore's opinion, no. Also, he was very clear in his mission statement of not wanting this future to be a sanitized, perfect Trekian future where humanity has evolved past pettiness and strife. He, therefore, made a few decisions, all connected with one another, that served this end: firstly, he eliminated the younger son, Zac, from the pilot altogether. In the original, Zac was killed in the pilot during the attack on Caprica. In Moore's version, Zac was killed years before. Secondly, how to set up conflict between Adama and Apollo? Have Zac's death be the contentious issue that separates the father and his surviving son! Thirdly, he decided that the two had not spoken in years, and that Apollo, or Lee, was only on the ship at that time, due to a matter of circumstance, not because he was regularly positioned there. And so with just a few neat shifts, Moore took the raw elements from the original series and was able to place them into positions that he found more compelling, from a writing standpoint.

His next concern, whose solution, like the Cylon problem, didn't initially seem to be related but ended up unlocking one another, was the character of Starbuck. Moore says that he loves the original's Starbuck as well as Dirk Benedict's performance. But the roguish, swaggering, cocky, heavy-drinking, promiscuous fighter pilot with the million dollar smile is a science-fiction cliche, and further an almost campy type of wink-and-nod humor that he felt would stick out like a sore thumb in the new version of Galactica where realism was key. There was also the issue of strong female characters, of which the original series had none. Apollo's sister, Athena, was basically there to stand there and look beautiful and...stand there and look beautiful. So, the two problems were Starbuck being a cliche character and there being no strong women. How to solve this? Make Starbuck a woman! Because while a roguish, swaggering, cocky, heavy drinking, promiscuous male fighter pilot with a million dollar smile is a cliche, a roguish, swaggering, cocky, heavy drinking, promiscuous female fighter pilot with a million dollar smile? Now, that is interesting and that is different. Further, by making Starbuck, or Kara, the former fiancee to Zac, she fulfills the "daughter" role in the Family Adama vacated by Athena's absence. And by making Apollo's best friend instead a female who was going to marry his brother but whom he is also in love with, it adds a whole new level of interesting dynamics to play with.

And so the Family Adama now has a father, a brother, and a sister, but what about a mother? In the original series, as here, Adama's wife (ex-wife in the new series) was killed in the attacks, and yet Moore wanted to make sure that the heavily military (masculine) angle of the series was symbolically balanced out by a more feminine presence. This is where Roslin comes in. She represents a constant reminder of the civilian population, the protection of which should be the military's top priority (not having a president after Adar's death, as in the original series, was therefore not an option for Moore, because without representation for the people, it is only a military show, and he of course played with this conflict in the first season finale), as well as a reminder of how many people were wiped out in the attacks, since she was near the bottom of the line of succession for president. He also wanted to play with the idea of showing, over the course of the first season, the pressures that even a liberal president undergoes in such a dire situation. He didn't want it to be a simple case of Adama always preaching masculine values and Roslin always feminine values. She hardens over the course of the series, taking actions she never would have considered before, and at times, he does the same, in the opposite direction--he softens. There's a give and take. Likewise, her cancer is a constant reminder of the species' mortality.

Other Characters. The transformation of Baltar from the proverbial mustache-twirling villain to a flawed but not evil narcissist who unwittingly assisted in the decimation of his species was another example of the new, realistic series requiring further character motivation than "Because he's bad" or "Because the Cylons promised him land and a title." Moore studied a great deal of history at Cornell, and one of his dream projects, which he wrote a script for years ago that he was never able to sell because of a lack of Hollywood interest in Revolutionary War-era films, is a film on Benedict Arnold. Since he wasn't (as of yet) able to make this film, he molded Baltar after him--a man who becomes known as the greatest traitor to his people in their history, due to events which spiralled out of his control and which he did not necessarily intend. Six is the new Galactica's version of Peggy Shippen, Arnold's British wife, who is now believed to have been the primary influence in Arnold's treason.

As far as Boomer is concerned, Moore saw him, like Athena, as being a rather unnecessary character. As he saw it, Boomer was basically just there to be a friend to Starbuck. Unlike with the male Starbuck's transformation into the female Kara Thrace, the reason Sharon Valeri has nothing in common with Boomer is she is not the same character at all. They just simply decided, as a tribute/shout-out to the original series, to give her the "Boomer" call sign. There is no other significance to it.

Tigh's transformation from Adama's friend/yes-man to a more complicated figure--a functioning alcoholic with a mean temperment who nonetheless has a great deal of respect for "the old man" was another example of Moore eliminating a "redundancy" in the series. As it stood, many of the characters were simply there to follow Adama's orders and be in awe of him. The concept of everyone being in awe of him was definitely shown beautifully in the miniseries, but that was undercut since Lee came on board, and people going behind Adama's back and sometimes proving him wrong or at least showing that they have a different view point to his has been an important part of the series ever since. Again, this is the anti-Star Trek. Moore wanted it to be so naturalistic as to feel like a documentary that, but for the space setting, could have been filmed today in a modern military setting. Tigh's drunkenness is also a nod to Kirk Douglas' washed-up, alcoholic character in the aforementioned Pearl Harbor film, In Harm's Way, the difference being that the John Wayne character helped the Kirk Douglas character clean up in the film and by the end he proved himself and never had another drink, whereas in Battlestar, the moment of truth happens, and Tigh doesn't improve himself. He remains a "bitter old drunk," for lack of a better description.

No Alien Life. Lastly, the decision to have no contact with alien life was yet another way Moore chose to distance the series from Star Trek. The original series was very much in the Trek mold of having the Galactica arrive at a new planet each week and deal with their culture, whereas Moore thought that that was too easy an out to come up with new scripts. By eliminating that option, he forces the show to always be character-based, first and foremost. It also is another method by which he shows the overwhelming isolation of the tiny remnants of the human race.

And I think that's about it. I'll add more if anything comes to me. That was all from memory from last night, so I apologize for any errors or omissions! What I found most interesting about this talk though was how clearly Moore outlined his reasons for making each change. While many fans of the original series felt betrayed, thinking he'd made enormous haphazard changes just for the sake of change, he on the other hand, seems to have a very coherent, consistent vision for the series. He was able to explain every single shift he'd made, and why each of those shifts was important for his vision.

[leftylady]

leftylady said:

It's from a while back, but I don't think this great article (set visit) and interview with EJO was mentioned here:

www.hollywoodnorthreport.com/article.php?Article=2363

The article promises a Part II with interview with Mary McDonnell, but I don't think it's online yet.

Better late than never. Here's the Part II interview with Mary McDonnell from Mar 2, 2006

www.hollywoodnorthreport.com/article.php?Article=2674

[Sara]

From today's salon.com:


Space balls
By Laura Miller

Nov. 10, 2006 | For the past month, while the national political conversation has concerned itself with racy military thrillers and antique racial slurs, the real issues -- the big, soul-scraping ones -- have been wrestled with in the wasteland of Friday night basic cable programming, on a channel otherwise devoted to no-budget thrillers about killer centipedes.

Surely you've heard by now (because we've certainly repeated it often enough) that "Battlestar Galactica," the new remake of the cheesy '70s series, is the most thrilling and trenchant dramatic series on TV at the moment (except, of course, for "The Wire"). Maybe you still haven't given it a shot because you just can't believe a show set on a spaceship could possibly engage you when you can watch the simpering narcissists of "Grey's Anatomy" instead -- in which case, you are an idiot. But if you've simply not yet gotten around to it, hurry: Rent the DVDs of Seasons 1 and 2 (they're short), and then hasten over to iTunes to catch up on the first handful of episodes for Season 3 because this one is not just about other planets; it's about our own.

The first season of "Battlestar" seemed daring merely for having the remnants of the human race persecuted by a genocidal, sanctimonious and devious enemy, the Cylons, who were not above sending suicide bombers onto the humans' ships. The series' troubled fighter pilot heroine, Starbuck, showed her darkest side when she was put in charge of interrogating a Cylon captive and tortured him without a tinge of conscience. (The Cylons, a kind of robot created by robots that were originally created by humans, are nearly indistinguishable from human beings, even under close scrutiny. The humans' position is that they're "toasters," and homicidal ones at that, but it's not always possible to maintain this position, as the story of the Cylon Sharon has demonstrated.)

At the end of Season 2, however, the show's creators executed a daredevil twist by scooping most of the characters (along with the remaining human population) off their ships and onto a dreary colony on a planet they called New Caprica. At the very end of the season finale, an overwhelming Cylon force descended, marching through the muddy streets of the tent city, and announced that they were taking over. Instead of trying to exterminate humanity, they were going to try to reform it. And the chosen method of reform would be a little thing we call occupation.

The two opening hours of Season 3 were, it must be said, unrelentingly grim. The humans, shivering in damp bulky sweaters and fingerless gloves, had mounted an insurrection. Gaius Baltar, the self-serving scientist and secret Cylon collaborator whom they had rashly elected president, was running a Vichy-like government that had become hopelessly implicated in the Cylon's brutal crackdowns on the rebels. Colonel Tigh, the former executive officer of Galactica, a leader of the resistance, lost his eye while being detained and interrogated, like many others, without charge or due process.

Some colonists, whether out of a misguided attempt to ameliorate the situation or out of bald self-interest, had signed on with the human police force that the Cylons set up to maintain order. They had to keep their identities secret, however, because the insurrection regarded them as collaborators. The Cylons just couldn't understand why the humans wouldn't behave. The humans just wanted the Cylons to go away.

The parallels to current events are obvious, but "Battlestar Galactica" has always kept more than one historical touchstone in play. The early scenes, when Secretary of Education Laura Roslin was sworn in as president because everyone above her in the civilian line of command had been massacred, cited the swearing in of LBJ after the Kennedy assassination. The scene of the shiny, terrifying Cylon centurions (a servant class of robots that actually look like robots) marching down the main road of New Caprica while the devastated colonists looked on was the Nazis marching into Paris.

The really audacious stroke of this season was showing us a story about a suicide bomber from the point of view of the bomber and his comrades -- no, it was more than that, because the cause of this terrorist was unquestioningly our own. We sympathize with the insurgents wholeheartedly. So when Colonel Tigh, a blood 'n' guts military man if there ever was one, insists that suicide bombing is the only way to end the occupation, the show leaves the question of whether he's right up to us. Is it worth it?

The humans in "Battlestar" don't have an overarching religious fanaticism to persuade them that it is. (The Cylons are the messianic monotheists.) So when Baltar confronts former President Roslin in her jail cell about the morality of the suicide bombing, and demands that she look him in the eye and tell him it's the right thing to do, she can't. Every time you start to get all starry-eyed and latch onto Roslin as the second coming of Josiah Bartlet, the show reminds you that it's a whole lot tougher -- on its characters and its viewers -- than "The West Wing" was. "Battlestar Galactica" may be set in outer space, with robots, in the far distant past, but it reminds us every week that the other TV shows are the fantasies. "This," as Roslin tells her stricken assistant in a recent episode, "this is life."

[Sara]

From slate.com:

Want to understand Battlestar Galactica? Eavesdrop on its writers.
By Adam Rogers
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2006, at 5:24 PM ET


Ronald D. Moore, the executive producer of Battlestar Galactica, has created a great show with a goofy title. The title isn't his fault, of course—he's remaking a crappy 1970s sci-fi relic—and, in any case, it lured in an audience of geeks who will watch anything with the word star in the title. A few months ago, Moore told me (and, more recently, Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen) that the geeky title means a swath of Battlestar's potential audience doesn't tune in.

Whether as fan service or a hunt for those missing viewers, Moore has done Herculean labors to promote his show. He blogs and he podcasts DVD-like audio commentary tracks for every episode; die-hards painstakingly synchronize their iPods and TiVos every week. But if you really want to understand what makes Battlestar Galactica great, scroll through the iTunes list to the podcasts called "Battlestar Galactica Writers Meeting." These are four hours of unedited recordings from the writers' room, and they're fascinating, even for the uninitiated. The podcasts are like a master class in how to make good television.

For most of those four hours, writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson are working on an episode called "Scar" (which aired Feb. 6), presenting their detailed outline of the episode to Moore, the show runner. (The process is called "breaking.") Moore made his bones working on Star Trek spinoffs, which he says had an almost totalitarian approach to breaking and story development. Trek characters weren't allowed to have flaws or conflicts, and almost every story was external—it originated as a mission from Starfleet or as a complication posed by some visitor. As a result, Trek plots don't hold up; shows from the last 20 years seem stilted and predictable. BSG is rigorous about "breaking" stories, too, but to the opposite end. Every show is internally directed and driven by character, by conflict. There are no aliens with weird foreheads or pointy ears on the Galactica—just imperfect people in extraordinary circumstances.

While breaking "Scar," the writers get stuck on a plot point. The Galactica is a sort of aircraft carrier in space, home to dozens of fighter pilots; Weddle and Thompson's story is about how those pilots deal with facing an unbeatable, Red Baron-like enemy. The writers' problem is, why does it make sense that the Galactica has to stay in one place while one of the bad guys—they're called Cylons—picks off its fighters? Why doesn't the Galactica just, you know, fly away?

One writer suggests that they're fixing the engines (a true standby of science fiction, one that served Star Trek for decades). Another writer proposes that Galactica's fighters—called Vipers—are vulnerable because they're flying attenuated, long-distance patrols. Moore eventually decides that the fleet must have manufacturing facilities, but needs raw material, some magic metal for building Vipers found only where the ship is stuck. "Then it can influence the conversations in the ready room," Moore says, "because of the psychological toll on the pilots. Now their machines are more valuable than they are."

But the podcasts are about more than geeky plot points. While the BSG writers break the story, they also bare their souls. And it's here that the podcasts move from a peek at the sausage-making process to great, almost intimate, radio drama. I don't recognize any of the writers' voices except for Moore's, but it takes all of 20 minutes for their personalities to shine through. One falls back on Hollywood shorthand, blazing through a string of references to other TV shows and movies—The Right Stuff, The Getaway, and so on. Another turns to military history for inspiration, referencing Royal Navy traditions and heavy drinking among Vietnam-era pilots. (So that's why Starbuck, one of the main characters, takes that crazy, boozy dive off a barroom table.) Family stories get told, like how a writer's salesman father superstitiously avoided ever putting his hat on a hotel-room bed. The writers have all become characters in their own story, the particulars of which dribble into the episodes.

The last hour of the podcasts consists of a planning meeting, and the writers go completely wild. Moore tosses out the idea of doing an episode told from the point of view of two of the killer androids. Then, the whole group tries to figure out the Cylons' deeper motivations via a rapid-fire series of metaphors. The Cylons are Nazis, hell-bent on solving the Human Question. The Cylons are Jews, trying to defend Israel. The Cylons are U.S. troops in Iraq, caught off guard by an uprising.

Building in all that symbolism turns out to be complicated—who's representing what changes from week to week, from scene to scene. In just eight episodes, the current season has morphed humans from Iraqi-style insurgents into post-apartheid South Africans, complete with a truth and reconciliation commission. I once heard a media-studies professor claim that the best, most adult television shows embrace cognitive dissonance as a storytelling tool. He was talking about the old cop show Hill Street Blues, but I understood him to mean that characters and situations seem more "real" if they have an ambiguous, or situational, alignment on the grid from Dungeons & Dragons (good versus evil, lawful versus chaotic). I realize I'm mixing my geek metaphors here, but the podcasts illustrate the ambiguity of the Battlestar Galactica approach: There's no single political subtext. The show has all the subtexts at once.

Eventually, Moore goes on a riff that tees up all the narrative pitch and yaw of the end of Season 2, which concluded with a seriously ballsy move: jumping the whole story forward a year in an instant—forcing viewers, as Moore puts it, "to play catch-up, which I think is really fun." Other TV shows have built extended story arcs—Chris Carter did it on The X-Files, and we might charitably assume that J.J. Abrams knows what's really happening on the Lost island. But actually hearing a producer of Moore's caliber work through the process is thrilling, because he relies on the improvisational qualities of the writers' room. Maybe he has no idea whether his human characters will ever find the (possibly mythical) Earth. It doesn't matter. He and his writers are building a world to live in, not a theory to unravel. It's a world that does more than transcend his show's silly title. It actually redeems it.

[Sara]

From zap2it.com:


'Galactica's' Fourth Season Battles Longer
Sci Fi gives series its vote of confidence

Next season, fans can expect more Cylon action. The Sci Fi Channel has increased its initial 13-episode order of the fourth season of "Battlestar Galactica" to 22 episodes.

The Peabody Award-winning series will also include a special two-hour extended event that will air during the late fall or early winter 2007 and will be released on DVD later.

The redefined space opera is currently approaching its third season finale Sunday, March 25 in which Baltar is on trial and the identity of some of the humanoid Cylons may be revealed.

The fourth season will begin production in May, shooting for an early 2008 premiere.