Battlestar Galactica

One of the things people like about “Battlestar Galactica” is the way it seems to touch upon the issues of our time without stooping to obvious connect-the-dots political commentary. In last week’s episode, the lawyer prosecuting the big human rights trial in the season finale told an aide to President Laura Roslin to back off, and then added, “Of course, I do serve at the pleasure of the president.” I thought you either had to be working much faster than is humanly possible, or “Battlestar Galactica” has become prophetic.

Wasn’t that wild? We wrote and filmed that line months ago, before it became part of the current conversation. That was shot in November or October. It’s a phrase I’ve been familiar with and I put it in the show because that’s the expression used about people who serve for the president.

Do you often find the show echoing current events even when you didn’t intend it to, or is that pretty rare?

It happens. It’s an odd confluence of events sometimes. When we’re working on a show and developing the story lines and scripts we’re certainly keenly aware of what’s going on in the world. You can project some things out to where the world might be when the show airs. But with some things, like that line, there’s a bit of serendipity that happens.

What’s especially weird about it is that the situation is so similar to the ones that led to the Alberto Gonzales scandal.

Yeah, it is. It’s Laura trying to tell the prosecutor what to charge, what crime to prosecute. It’s been interesting to watch that.

How hard do you try to link what’s going on in “Battlestar Galactica” to real-world politics? Or do you find yourselves trying to resist that impulse?

It’s part of the brief. The premise of the show lends itself to those topics so naturally. It’s about an apocalyptic attack, a group of survivors on the run and they’re dealing with issues that are inherently about freedom and security. There’s the civilian and the military, and lots of issues it seems very natural for them to grapple with that mirror events in the real world. We talk about it at length in the writers’ room and with the cast and directors, trying to figure out where the lines are for us. We never want to go into direct allegory for today’s events because there’s nothing really interesting about that.

What is interesting to you?

It’s interesting for me as a writer when we can move the chess pieces around a little bit, when you’re dealing with suicide bombing on the show but suddenly it’s not those other people who are doing it, but your characters. You’re able to examine the moral questions of it in a different context because you’re not burdened by the direct analogy of saying, “If Laura is George Bush and the cylons are the enemy, how do you deal with it?” That to me isn’t great drama because everything is so loaded and so apparent. Science fiction gives you the opportunity to mix and match the elements and the circumstances. You can deal with the deeper themes and issues because you’ve scrambled the chess pieces. You’re coming at it from a different point of view.

I get the impression you want to avoid parroting a boiler-plate political position, whatever your own politics might be.

I do try not to do that. I’m not naive enough to think my politics don’t influence the show. I’m certain that they do, but the show’s mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: “And here’s the way to solve Iraq!” I don’t think that’s helpful, and I don’t think that’s good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.

I like the show best when you get to a place where you’re not sure who you’re rooting for anymore, you’re not sure whose side you’re on. And you’re confused and you might even be angry about what we’re doing but at least it’s forced you to a place of trying to define your own point of view on something.

Moral ambiguity is unusual not only in television, but in pop culture in general. You worked on several of the “Star Trek” series, which I associate with moral stances that are a lot more pat. What’s difficult about making a TV series that aims for something different?

The challenge is that TV wants to bend you and your characters to neat moral decisions and arguments. Ultimately, the forces of television want your heroes to be heroic. It wants the leading characters to make the “right” choice each week and it wants there to be a clearly defined “bad” person in the show. Or at the most, the character does the right thing and maybe at the end he looks wistfully off-camera and ponders how it might have been different. There’s a certain phony-baloney quality to a lot of the moralism on TV. It does serve up pat answers to difficult questions. And when you try to make it more morally ambiguous, you immediately run into the buzz saw of “It makes the characters unlikable. There’s no one to root for. The audience won’t like the character if they can’t say he’s making the right choice and that’s what separates him from his enemies.”

We set out to make a very different kind of show. The difficulty is that when you go into these morally ambiguous areas, you have to have morally questionable decisions and motives for all your characters.

The objection that this makes the characters unlikable doesn’t even turn out to be true. I’m sure you’re well aware of that after seeing the response to what you’ve decided to do with Starbuck, a person who consistently made bad decisions for bad reasons but who was very popular with viewers all the same. To say she’s “unlikable” sounds like an executive’s objection.

It’s a very fear-driven culture, the entertainment business. It’s all about fear. You’re afraid the audience isn’t going to like it. You’re afraid that they’ll be turned off and that they’re not as smart as you are. They won’t get what you’re going for. Can’t it be safer? Can’t it be happier?

It’s also got to be difficult to go that route in a show that’s substantially about the military. The armed services is an aspect of society people tend to be absolutist about. Was the military setting one of the things that got you interested in the project to begin with?

Well, that was in the concept itself. The original show was a war show. From my point of view, updating it meant that I wanted to treat the military aspects differently. I wanted to make it clear that the people who are serving are human beings, not exalted icons. They do have flaws and make bad judgments and are afflicted by the same curses as everyone else. There are drunks and womanizers and all kinds of different people who go into the military because they’re just people.

It was important to me to portray it like that partly because of working on “Star Trek” for so long. One of the central ideas of “Star Trek” is that the people on the Enterprise and in Star Fleet were the best of the best. They were better than you and I, a better breed of human beings who were not torn with petty differences, jealousies and all the things that make people human. That stuff was almost bred out of them at Star Fleet, and that made the drama hard to convey. You were more distant from them as characters.

So I wanted the people on Galactica to be a very different crop. It wasn’t going to be the best ship in the fleet crewed by an elite crew. It was going to be an old ship getting ready to go into retirement, and there were going to be a lot of misfits on that ship. What happens when the fate of humanity rests on their shoulders? That’s a far more interesting question to me.

Again, science fiction gives me a lot of license. This is not an aircraft carrier. I don’t have to be so careful not to offend people who serve in the Navy or have relatives in the Navy, or people who just want to posture about what people are really like in the Navy and you’re besmirching the names of our fair soldiers and sailors and all that crap. This is a made-up universe. It’s certainly modeled on the U.S. military and we do a lot of the interior character work centering around military culture and how they treat each other, but it’s not meant to be a direct representation of the people who are serving.

But before this you weren’t sitting around thinking about how much you wanted to do a show about fighter pilots?

No, but it is one of my lifelong interests. My father was a veteran. He was a Marine officer in the Vietnam War. He had a library full of military books. I had an interest in history and read a lot about the military. I was briefly in Navy ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corp] in college. When I was at “Star Trek” I jumped at opportunities to do things like go on an aircraft carrier for a weekend, and when I was in ROTC I spent a week on a nuclear submarine. I’ve always been fascinated by the military culture. It was one of the things that appealed to me about the project, but no, I wasn’t setting out to find a military project.

“Battlestar Galactica” is a bit like “Lost” in that it’s what’s called a highly serialized drama, with a long continuing plotline. If someone misses a few episodes, they may stop watching entirely, thinking they’ll never be able to catch up. At the same time, once you get past the first season, new viewers can be put off by how much they don’t know about what’s going on. So you can lose the viewers you already have much more easily than you can acquire new ones, and both shows have suffered dips in their ratings. Yet this also seems to be one of the most fertile and exciting formats in the medium. How do you deal with those challenges?

I don’t. It’s a genuine problem I have no solution for. We have long conversations with the network about the extent of the serialized nature of the show. It’s certainly not something they’re in love with. We the writers are always pushing to make it more serialized because it makes for better storytelling. We’ve done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they’re almost never very successful for our particular series. They’re not what the audience tunes in for. But the network’s legitimate concern is just what you were saying: The audience tends to attenuate over time. It’s hard to bring new people on board. There’s the hurdle of them having to catch up on all the old episodes, and any hurdle you put in front of the audience is just a bad thing. I don’t know what to say. This is the kind of show I like to do, and we’re just going to keep doing it. Hopefully, we can persuade people to buy the DVDs and catch up at home and keep watching the show, but the show is what it is.

The availability of DVD sets seems to have made it more possible to do this kind of series.

I think it has. It’s really changed the landscape. People are much more comfortable getting on to shows like this because they can pick up a boxed set and catch up.

Another thing: I don’t know how reliable the ratings are anymore. I’m among those who cast a skeptical eye at the Nielsen Co. and the demographics and ratings they deliver. The fragmentation of the audience is so profound I don’t know how the samples can even tell me how many people are watching my show anymore. It seems like such a crap shoot. It’s like where the music industry used to be a few years ago, before they got — what’s that thing called? — SoundScan. Before they got that it was like Nielsen; they called up store owners and asked them what was selling and what wasn’t. When they shifted to a legitimate way of tracking each and every sale, it upended the charts. Suddenly, country music was huge, much bigger than anyone had thought. I think TV is in the same ballpark. We’re relying on a really old system based on this sample of people, and it’s not really accurate anymore. God knows how many Nielsen families are sci-fi fans.

Creatively, serialized dramas are tricky because you can plan some of it out in advance, but not all of it. Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?

A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes. I can think in groups of 10.

Then we break all the interior shows. But as those shows get translated into teleplays and we get into production, things will change. We’ll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I’m writing and think, “Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here.” Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly. But we still try to maintain that goal. We still aim to get to that same place by the end of the 10th episode, but the path to get there I consider much more flexible.

As you get deeper into the series and start planning the next 10 and what’s the season finale, it’s the same process. You think you’ve laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there’s this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you’ve already set in motion. But I find that it’s just a more organic way to do it. It’s more interesting, it’s more fun, it allows the writers’ creativity to come to the fore. It certainly has its downside, because sometimes you make big mistakes. Something that sounded really good at that moment, and you grabbed onto it, doesn’t really pan out. Then you have a bad episode.

What’s an example where that process really worked well for you?

In this season’s finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It’s been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn’t want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we’d changed her character in a way I wasn’t happy with. But it wasn’t until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let’s do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh’s lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.

And when did this method not work so well?

We’d developed a whole story line this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of [former president] Gaius Baltar. During the missing year on New Caprica, when Baltar was president, a massacre had taken place among the people from this one colony that had isolated themselves from the rest of the people. It was this long intricate back story built into a lot of the previous episodes of the show and it just didn’t work. And I basically decided to throw it out while I was writing the finale, on the spur of the moment. We then had to go back into previous episodes and take that out, reshooting and re-editing. Some of those episodes suffered from that decision. It was important because it saved the finale and made it much stronger, but certain episodes in the second half of the third season are weaker as a result of that.

One of the delicate issues with serialized dramas is that they can run out of gas.

Well, you can argue that daytime soap operas never seem to run out of gas — they go on for 20 years! But we’re not really set up to do that. Ours has a beginning, middle and end. Our main title every week says “A Search for Earth,” and at some point you gotta find earth, or it becomes “Gilligan’s Island.” The audience loses faith that you’re ever going to get anywhere and the cylons are never going to destroy the Galactica and what’s the point. We’ve always felt that there’s an end to this show, and we’ve moved into the third act of a three-act structure. Especially after this season’s finale, we’ve moved the story to a place where we’re talking about conclusions and climaxes and what’s it all about — getting into the endgame. How long it takes to finish out the saga is another matter.

So you couldn’t say now whether you think of Season 4 as the last of the series?

I’m considering that right now, to be honest. It’s in the air. I don’t know. It hasn’t been formally decided and I haven’t made my own decision. It’s a possibility.

The worst thing that could happen to us is if we overstayed our welcome and got to a place where we had not finished the story and then we got canceled. I’d rather go out on my own terms creatively and go out strong.

We won’t be seeing Season 4 until January 2008, but I understand there’s going to be some kind of miniseries or movie coming before then?

There is something that they’re calling “extra episodes” or “extended episodes” — they keep shifting the nomenclature. Essentially, we are shooting two hours of “Galactica” that will be broadcast on SciFi Channel sometime in the fall. Let’s say they broadcast it on a Friday; then, on the following Monday, it will be available on DVD.

That story will not pick up our cliffhanger at the end of Season 3. That didn’t seem right. The story will be set on the Battleship Pegasus and will take place in the past, relative to where we are in Season 3. But the events set up in that story will then pay off in Season 4.

What was the reasoning behind doing that?

They came to us. It gives Home Video something to sell in the stores. Since we won’t be back until January, which is a long time to be off the air, it gives the fans something to see and keeps the show alive. So it serves multiple masters. There was no way we could pick up the cliffhanger in that format, and then ask people to wait to really start the season later. One of the story lines everyone had really liked was the Pegasus story and the character of Admiral Cain, so we decided to go with that.

There’s been talk of you doing another series called “Caprica,” set before the cylon attack on the colony of that name. Is that still happening?

It’s possible. It’s been in development at SciFi for a while and they haven’t picked it up. And I don’t know if they’re going to pick it up at this point. There’s talk of doing it as a TV movie and seeing how that works, as a back-door pilot, much as we did with the “Galactica” miniseries. Right now there’s nothing telling me that they’re going to move on it anytime soon, so I’m starting to feel that it’s going to remain on the development shelf.

It was a different kind of show. Instead of an action-adventure sci-fi piece, it was more of a prime-time soap, a sci-fi “Dallas.” It was about a family, the Adamas, and a company, and it was about the creation of the cylons 50 years ago. It was not going to be space-based, but set entirely on the planet of Caprica. But it would have sci-fi touches, and it would deal with issues like artificial intelligence and the various schemings and backbitings that you get in the traditional soap opera.

Are you already at work on Season 4 of “Battlestar Galactica”?

Yep, we’ve broken the first eight episodes. We’re pretty happy. There are a lot of things coming; a lot of things change in the season finale of this season and propel us into the story lines of next season.

Can we expect something in this Sunday’s season finale that will be as surprising as the finale to Season 2?

Well, the Season 2 finale is a pretty high bar. It certainly had some shocks. I don’t know if we can really top Season 2, but it’s up there.

This year’s half-season began in an existential funk, with humanity’s remnants and their cylon allies poleaxed by the discovery that Earth, the planet they’d spent the whole series chasing, had been rendered a smoldering, toxic wasteland by its previous residents — who, to add insult to injury as far as the humans were concerned, turned out to be cylon skin jobs. You had to sympathize with the show’s writers: No narrative twist could equal the end of Season 2, in which Baltar was elected president, the refugees foolishly settled on New Caprica, and suddenly it was a year later and cylon centurions were striding through the bedraggled little settlement in a scene that was a frank citation of the Nazis marching into Paris. After you’ve dared to flip the premise of your show entirely, what can you do next to upend your audience’s expectations? Allowing the characters to find their ultimate goal and then making it really, really suck was pretty much the only card left to play.

And then where do you go? There was way too much wallowing, weeping and ‘splaining in this season, but things did briefly return to form in the two-episode mutiny arc. That was “Battlestar” at its best: the “good guys” (Roslin and Adama) were compromised by their semi-dictatorial high-handedness while their antagonist, Tom Zarek, was conversely doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. As for his co-conspirator, Felix Gaeta, would he have been driven so relentlessly to the brink if not for a maddeningly shoddy prosthesis and the humiliation of staggering around the Galactica like Captain Ahab without a whale? That peg leg was like the proverbial nail for want of which the war was lost. Exquisitely played by Alessandro Juliani, Gaeta has long been one of the series’ most intriguing minor figures, a man who disastrously combined the best of intentions with the worst possible judgment of character.

Then again, the true colors of Tom Zarek were difficult for anyone but Roslin and Adama to discern — until, that is, he finally went Stalin and massacred the Quorum. “Battlestar Galactica” made itself distinctive with moments just like that one, drawing its events and dilemmas from 20th-century history rather than the moral simplicities of space opera. When Roslin’s swearing-in echoed LBJ’s, when she and Adama hovered on the brink of fixing the election, when Starbuck tortured Leoben and the human insurgency resorted to suicide bombings to resist cylon rule, the show became electrifying, frank about the predicaments of the present in a way that a TV drama about the present could never be.

It wasn’t just that “Battlestar Galactica” dealt with “issues” — “Star Trek” did that, in its own pat, right-thinking liberal way. It wasn’t even that the series was “dark,” in the callow sub-noir fashion of a Zack Snyder movie. What “Battlestar Galactica” showed us over and over again was just how hard it is for real, complicated and contradictory people to find their way in a universe that offers them one impossible choice after another. It refused to provide any easy or obvious solutions. Should Roslin and Adama have fixed that election? If they hadn’t, then the Baltar presidency, the settling of New Caprica and the cylon occupation would never have happened. Hundreds of lives would have been saved. You can understand how the two of them must have lost their faith in democracy and ethical rectitude as the result of the New Caprica debacle. But from that loss of faith, the slow creep toward despotism began. By the end of the series last night, the political legitimacy of the Adama and Roslin regime had almost withered away.

Adama was always the series’ most conventional figure, the old-fashioned, admirable leader-hero that American popular culture typically insists upon. This also made him the least interesting character psychologically, but he was essential all the same; the rest of the survivors needed him as a fixed point, a star to steer by. Understandably enough, in moving their convention-busting story through its endgame, the show’s creators decided to attack that final redoubt of certainty by dismantling Adama himself along with his ship. His best friend was a cylon, Earth was a bust, the woman he loved was dying and even the Galactica itself was crumbling — talk about piling it on! Adama hit the sauce, prowled the corridors peering at cracks with a hunted expression (to the extent that Edward James Olmos exhibits any expression), and spent a lot of time sprawled on the floor, crying. This tactic backfired, making much of the final season feeling labored and maudlin. Take away Adama’s strength, and there didn’t seem to be much left to the guy. There’s something to be said for never getting a glimpse behind a revered leader’s facade.

Friday night’s finale, at least, provided an Adama who’d snapped out of it. The first half of the two-hour conclusion offered a hearty serving of something else the creators of “Battlestar Galactica” supposedly didn’t care about: action. The last-ditch assault on the cylon’s colony by ramming it with the rattletrap Galactica was thrilling and gorgeous, providing a final showcase for the centurions, surely the scariest monsters on television. Then came 40 minutes of speeches about lessons learned and the need to “break the cycle,” the naiveté of which did indeed feel like a break — from the knowing, worldly stoicism that made “Battlestar Galactica” so refreshing to begin with. The last flash of that sensibility came when the corpse of poor Racetrack got knocked against the wrong button and wound up nuking Cavil’s cylons to Kingdom Come just as everyone had decided to get along for a change.

Then we got to Earth, and saw one scene after another of people standing in green fields saying, “But what will you do now?” (And how preposterous was the idea of the survivors splitting up and forsaking all technology to go native? The first case of strep throat would have made short work of that vow.) Laura Roslin died with the heart-rending dignity that Mary McDonnell never failed to bring to the finest role of her career, and most of the other actors (James Callis, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, Aaron Douglas, Tahmoh Penikett) got a final chance to remind us of just how good they are. The initially puzzling flashbacks to the pre-attack days on Caprica turned out to depict the key decisions that led all of the series’ characters to the Galactica, and ultimately to the founding of a new human race.

It was the opposite of David Chase’s famous non-ending for “The Sopranos,” and it demonstrated that tying up every loose end also has its pitfalls. Granted, it can’t be easy to cap off a serialized drama this avidly followed. On one hand, the audience craves resolution, answers to all the mysteries and prophecies and visions; on the other, “Battlestar Galactica” isn’t “Lost,” a comic-book epic in which the puzzles and their solutions are the main point.

What made “Battlestar Galactica” great was the uncertainty of its characters’ condition; were they part of a divine plan, or pinging randomly around an empty universe? Was there a reason to be good, to be selfless, or was it every man for himself? How much of our better nature should we be willing to sacrifice in order to survive? How can we tell where our loyalties lie? They didn’t know. We don’t know. They were racing around in a spaceship fleeing killer robots, yes, but the ambiguity of their circumstances made them so much more like us than 99 percent of the people on television. It made them seem so real. When they got their answers, they became finally and irrevocably fictional.