Source: Chicago TribuneOne of the central themes of “Battlestar Galactica,” which has its mid-season finale at 8 p.m. Friday on Sci Fi, is sacrifice. What are people willing to give up in order to survive, the series asks, and is it always worth it? Are people willing to die, or even kill their own kind, for the greater good?
This season, we’ve seen the Galactica’s second in command, Saul Tigh, sacrifice his own wife on discovery of her treason with the Cylons, who are bent on subduing and destroying humanity. Other lives have been lost along the way, but in Friday’s episode, Admiral Adama entertains the idea of a pretty stunning sacrifice.
(Don’t read further if you don’t want to see spoilers for Friday’s episode and beyond).
The Galactica and her rag-tag fleet find a planet that has a sacred relic, the Eye of Jupiter, that could tell the remnants of humanity how to find Earth. The catch is, there’s a good chance the Cylons might locate the artifact first. The thought of the Cylons finding Earth is more than Adama can stand, and he considers nuking the planet - despite what, or who, is at stake.
“Several of [Galactica’s] people are down on the ground in `Eye of Jupiter’ - [Adama’s son] Apollo, Starbuck, Dualla and Anders - who all happen to have very conflicted relationships these days,” executive producer Ron Moore said in a recent interview. “A lot of the drama down on the surface has to do with [the fact that], as they are forced to work and fight side by side, the Cylons try to make a play for the artifact.”
Adama is determined that the Cylons should not “get the key to Earth,” Moore said. “When faced with the idea that not only might he lose this battle but the Cylons might actually get to Earth… he’s willing to sacrifice people as well,” Moore says.
Friday’s episode is the first half of a two-parter that concludes Jan. 21, when “Battlestar Galactica” returns and moves to Sundays. And speaking of sacrifice, Moore warns that when the show comes back in January, “there are more losses still to come.”
“There’s a pretty big loss coming midway through the second half of the season,” Moore said. “You’ll be pretty shocked about what happens to somebody.”
That somebody, he hinted, would be a lead character. But wouldn’t the death of a major character alter the nature of the show?
“It would,” Moore replied. “And I’m not really saying that we’re doing that. I’m just saying that there’s a fairly significant loss that will happen” before the third season ends.
The next batch of episodes also “has a couple more stand-alone episodes that delve more into the civilian aspects of the fleet more than we’ve done in awhile,” Moore adds. We’ll find out about the five human-looking Cylon models that we haven’t seen yet, the half-human, half-Cylon child Hera will come into play, and the wily Gaius Baltar will find a way to survive yet again. We’ll even get a glimpse of Adama’s ex-wife.
That all sounds quite intriguing, but once Moore mentioned the big “loss” that’s coming, it was difficult to contemplate anything else. Then again, nothing is certain in the world of “Battlestar Galactica.” And sacrifice is part of the deal.
“There are things that you could do to the show that would fundamentally alter it,” Moore said. “The question for us is, we want to play the loss and the mortality of all the characters without completely disrupting the fabric of the show, and that’s sort of the challenge of it.”
The following is a transcript of my Tuesday interview with Ron Moore. We began by talking about "Eye of Jupiter," the episode that airs Friday, Dec. 14.
The situation at the algae planet, with the [artifact named the] Eye of Jupiter in play, is it a do or die moment with the Cylons? Is someone going to lose that confrontation, and lose badly?
“Have you seen ‘Eye of Jupiter’?”
I have not. I’m going by the episode summary the network sent out.
“I don’t know that I would say it’s do or die. Both sides have arrived at the same planet, as it turns out, [and it emerges that] it’s for different reasons. Galactica ends up there because they were looking for foodstuffs in Episode 9, and unbeknownst to them, the Cylons are heading to the same planet.
“And the Cylons actually know that there’s an artifact on the planet that helps point the way to Earth. They get there and assume that Galactica has already taken it, and that sparks the standoff. Galactica and company realize, ‘Gee, there’s something on this planet. We better find it in case the Cylons want it.’ And then there’s a standoff.
“Galactica is in a position to destroy [the Eye] if they’ve got it, the Cylons don’t want it destroyed. The terms of the standoff sort of bridge the two episodes. ['Eye of Jupiter' is Part 1 of a two-parter.]
“Several of our people are down on the ground in ‘Eye of Jupiter,’ Apollo, Starbuck, Dualla and Anders, who all happen to have very conflicted relationships these days. A lot of the drama down on the surface has to do with [the fact that], as they are forced to work and fight side by side, the Cylons try to make a play for the artifact.
“The second part of that episode [which airs Jan. 21] essentially resolves those plotlines, and also with the added benefit of ending the Cylon base ship story that we’ve been following for quite a while, and moving closer to a revelation of the final five Cylons models [that viewers have not seen] are. And Baltar ends up back on Galactica by the end of ‘Rapture,’ which is the second part [of the two-parter, which airs Jan. 21].”
That guy. You just can’t kill him.
“You can’t kill him. [laughs] What are you gonna do?”
This is just a shot in the dark, but if the Cylons have Sharon’s baby, Hera, and if the Galactica fleet had the Eye of Jupiter, could there some kind of trade?
“No. It doesn’t actually work like that. There’s not an explicit trade like that. [But] the baby also ends up back on Galactica by the end [of the two-parter].”
Presumably Sharon is mad that they hid Hera from her.
“Yeah, Sharon is not happy. This week is when she finds out for the first time that the baby’s even alive.”
And wasn’t it Adama and Roslin that made that call, to hide Hera?
“It was really just Roslin. Adama doesn’t even know.”
That’s right, sorry.
“Yeah, it was just Roslin and Cottle that knew.”
Does Sharon think that Adama was complicit in hiding Hera, or does she find out he was not?
“He goes and he tells her. In [‘Eye of Jupiter’], as soon as Adama finds out the truth, he immediately goes and tells Sharon.”
Is he mad as well that the baby was hidden, or does he think, “Well, that is what had to be done”?
“We play a lot of his reaction off camera. He actually reacts [as if to say], ‘I can’t believe this. Now I gotta deal with this crap.’ Roslin tries to explain and he basically gets up and walks out on her.”
That’s one character who has really surprised me. I’m not even sure it’s accurate to say she’s done a 180 on a lot of her former beliefs. I mean, in one episode, she’s advocating genocide of the Cylons, and she’s pretty calm about it.
“Yeah, it seems to me that she’s been on a fairly straight trajectory, in a lot of ways, since she ascended to the presidency. I had always intended that the character, with the weight, literally, of the human race on her shoulders, would be forced into making harsher and harsher decisions because of that.
“And it would get to a point where, yeah, the enemies of mankind are chasing them eternally and seem to be implacable and are bent on their destruction. And if she suddenly had a weapon in her hands that would wipe them out as a race, she would do it.”
It’s just such a change from who this character was in the miniseries and in much of the first season. She has changed a lot.
“She has. I think that’s one of the interesting things about it, to see how that character would evolved, and what it would do to a person in that situation. What happens to someone who sits in that chair and deal with things on that kind of cosmic level?”
And the line that you drew in the sand maybe isn’t there any more, or because your perspective is so skewed by the survival factor, you just don’t see it any more.
“Yeah, that’s very true. We talk about that internally a lot. I think the Laura Roslin of the miniseries would be shocked by the idea of where she ended up. In a lot of ways it’s easy to make these kind of judgments, ‘Oh, that’s clearly wrong and that’s immoral and you should never do that,’ until you’re the one in the hot seat, and faced with that scenario. And you’re thinking about what it means if you’re wrong.”
Right. Because, from her perspective, there’s no plan B. Plan B is that humanity is finished.
“Right.”
So based on the episode summary I have, is it the case that Adama is essentially willing to nuke some of his own people down on the planet to make sure the Cylons don’t get the Eye of Jupiter?
“It gets to a place where [he’s not going to let] the Cylons get the key to Earth. That puts him in an analogous position to Laura Roslin – that when faced with idea that not only might he lose this battle but the Cylons might actually get to Earth, and do whatever they’re going to do when they get there – he’s willing to sacrifice people as well.”
And the surviving humans, in the course of this season, have had to sacrifice people already. As you said there would be, there have been deaths.
“Yep.”
Michael Hogan has been blowing me away with his work [as Saul Tigh, who killed his wife for passing secrets to the Cylons].
“Oh yeah. You know, Michael Hogan is one of the unsung heroes of the cast. And Michael, bless his soul, doesn’t really like to do publicity. As a consequence, Michael doesn’t get a lot of play out there.”
He got a mention on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List recently.
“Oh really? Oh good. Well he absolutely deserves it, he deserves the recognition. He’s a mainstay of the show. And that character, he’s just fearless in what he’s willing to do with that character.”
Yeah. He’s willing to show the man at his absolute worst. It’s wrenching stuff.
“It’s wrenching. He’s really emotionally naked, that character. The death of his wife really shattered him. Michael really played that to the hilt.”
What I’m really seeing with him, in microcosm sort of, is one of the themes of the show -- what are people willing to give up to survive? And is it worth it to sacrifice that -- something incredibly precious to you -- or do you lose part of your soul?
“Yeah. I think you’re right.”
We talked a couple months ago about losing characters this season, and we lost Kat, we lost Ellen Tigh. Is there going to be more death in the second half of the season?
“Yeah. There are more losses still to come. There’s a pretty big loss coming midway through the second half of the season.”
Is it a major, lead character?
“It’s somebody -- you’ll be pretty shocked about what happens to somebody.”
Uh oh. I’m nervous now.
“You should be.”
Don’t kill Adama. Any of the Adamas.
“You’re begging now?”
Yes. [laughs] Well, you’ve thrown me now. I honestly can’t picture the cast without one of the lead characters. All of the characters are in this closely woven web, and to take one out would really alter the dynamic.
“It’s true. There are things that you could do to the show that would fundamentally alter it. The question for us a lot is, we want to play the loss and the mortality of all the characters in the show without completely disrupting the fabric of the show, and that’s sort of the challenge of it.”
But getting rid of a major, lead character will change the show, don’t you think?
“It would. And I’m not really saying that we’re doing that. I’m just saying that there’s a fairly significant loss that will happen midway [through the second half of Season 3].”
Well, all the “Battlestar” sites are going to light up over that statement.
“Something’s going to happen. I don’t want to oversell it because I don’t want people to see it and then go, ‘Oh, well, that’s not what we were expecting. We were expecting something even bigger.’ But there’s definitely a pivotal episode coming up.”
A lot of the first half of the third season has been kind of character studies, like ‘Unfinished Business.’
“I love that episode, it’s one of my favorites of the series. It’s in the top tier of everything we’ve done.”
Absolutely. And there weren’t any Cylons in it. But we’ve had the history of these people and how they got to this place, and that’s what made it so rich.
“Yes, there’s a lot of texture and emotion and feeling, and a lot of had to be informed by back story of how you knew these characters, and how we’ve seen these characters for a couple of years now and what all these little tiny moments meant.”
I don’t know that I need it spelled out for me, but I’ll just go ahead and ask -- are Adama and Roslin in a relationship? A romantic relationship, in an undefinable relationship?
“I think it’s sort of an undefinable relationship. There’s something there, hovering around the edges. But I think they’re both, in a way, they’re both sort of trapped by the positions they have. And unwilling to sort of complicate their professional roles by a layer of something personal.
"But, that said, in the missing year [on New Caprica], when we flashed back, we saw, briefly, they at least looked at each other and thought about it. Once she wasn’t president, once he was just the captain of the ship, punching holes in the air, day after day, with nothing really to do, they let their guard down. They can hang out and smoke pot together. They can be sort of intimate and relaxed.
“But it seems that even in that circumstance, they did not choose to pursue a romantic relationship. But it was at least around in the ether. And I think probably it was in the ether for both of them all the time. Each looks at the other as the only logical person that they sort of have, on an emotional, personal level, as a potential candidate for one another. Given the parameters of humanity, who else do they really have?
“So I think there’s a sense of, you can’t imagine either one starting to date someone new, and yet there is no formal or informal understanding between the two of them that there is a relationship. It’s definitely something that hovers more in the margins than in the text.
“And a lot of it quite frankly is informed by the performances, especially the way Eddie [Edward James Olmos, who plays Admiral Adama] and Mary [Mary McDonnell, who plays President Laura Roslin] play it. There was the episode we did last season, when she was still dying of cancer and she got up and he just kissed her, impulsively, he ad-libbed it. And her reaction was in character, but also ad-libbed. And we kept it in the show, and just said, that’s who they are and we continue to find that the way they deal with each other as actors on set, that’s just the way they play the characters.”
Is Lee still with Dualla? Does she know the extent of what went on between Lee and Kara? Is she going to find out?
“We actually played that a lot of different ways in various drafts. I think where it ultimately shakes out is that Dualla seems to be nobody’s fool, and kind of knows something and has decided not to know too much. [She’s] sort of building a resentment in her heart, but at the same time, [she] knew what she was getting when she married Lee. She knew how much Kara meant to him, whether he said it out loud or not, she sort of always thought she was on a bit of borrowed time in the relationship and chose to accept it anyway.”
But it seems to me, it could be a situation where she could walk away, and let him work out whatever he needs to with Kara.
“There was a big speech for her that got cut from ‘Unfinished Business.’ She and Lee were in the Raptor, on the way back to Galactica, after Starbuck had jilted him and married Anders and all that.
“He impulsively asked her to marry him, and she had this lovely speech about the fact that she just knew that eventually Kara Thrace was coming back into his life, but they’re all on borrowed time -- she was going to be echoing what Laura said in the same episode, ‘Who knows what tomorrow’s going to bring.’ But right now, today, she wanted to marry him, she’ll accept [the proposal]. She’ll take whatever she can get, because everything has been taken from these people so many times, they have to grab on to what they have in the moment.”
It sounds like a big bunch of self-justification to me.
“And it is. [laughs] It absolutely is.”
Just on a different topic, do we find out more in “Eye of Jupiter” about the Temple of the Five?
“Yeah, that starts to come up in these two episodes.”
Are we meant to understand that the Temple of Five has something to do with the five Cylon models we have not seen?
“Essentially the Temple of the Five is directly connected to the five Cylons we have not seen.”
Just looking generally at the second half of the season, if you had to sum it up, where would you say is it going?
“Well, the second half of the season, it has a couple more standalone episodes that delve more into the civilian aspects of the fleet more than we’ve done in a while, which is kind of nice. We kind of get away from the larger, overarching mythology for a couple of episodes and do a little less serialization in episodes 14, 15 and 16, make them a little more standalone and concentrate on particular characters a little more.
“And yeah, we’ll do some stuff with the civilians, sort of their culture and society. We get to meet Adama’s dead wife and sort of understand who she was, in not quite a flashback kind of episode but one that deals with who Lee and Zack’s mother was, and why did she and Adama divorce and why does he still have baggage about that in his life today.
“We have an episode about [Chief] Tyrol and the aftermath of the union experience on New Caprica and what that means today in terms of labor and class. There’s an episode that deals with Helo and racial and cultural tensions within the fleet.
“And then the episodes kind of crescendo into the end. There’s almost like a three-part [ending], it’s not formally a three-part ending to the season, but it’s kind of a three-parter. It’s formally a two-parter. But it crescendos into the culmination of a lot of the plot threads we’ve set up since the beginning of the season -- the Baltar line, the final five Cylons line, stuff with Lee and his father and the family Adama and who they’re all about, things with Hera.
“The finale this season is sort of more interconnected with the entire season than last year’s was, or even before. This finale brings together a lot of plot threads and it has startling revelations.”
And I assume you’ll leave us on a major cliffhanger.
“Multiple cliffhangers.”
Well, then you need a fourth season.
“Yes, I would really like a fourth season of the show.”
When’s that going to be decided?
“We’re moving to Sunday nights [as of Jan. 21], which is a major thing that we want everyone to know, and they’re going to see how the ratings are on Sunday night. We’re not expecting [to find out about] a pickup [for a fourth season] until late January or beginning of February, somewhere in that ballpark.”
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