http://www.patriotresource.com/bg/artic ... 07rdm.html
Then from MTV:Question #1: How difficult is it to make something as original as BSG in an industry that, as you described it accurately, is dominated by 'fear'.
We've seen the fan backlash - do you deal with the same thing on the other side with Sci-Fi and NBC?
It seems they have been very supportive, but when it's something as highly regarded as BSG, they aren't going to say otherwise.
RDM: It's a challenge at times, but in all honesty, I've had a pretty good run of it with BSG on this network and with this studio. We have our arguments -- and a few were doozies -- but by, and large, the political side of this hasn't been that difficult. We butt heads, we get passionate on occasion, but I can't say that I haven't been allowed to do the show that I wanted to do on this network and that's really all that I can ask.
Question #2: Regarding the return of Pegasus this fall; which characters from the Pegasus can we expect to see? I'm pretty sure Cain is coming back, but how about Fisk, Garner, Thorne, Gina, Laird, Hoshi, Stinger, Showboat, Narcho, Gage, and Vireem? Do you have any candidates in mind to play the role of Cain's XO?
RDM: Virtually all of the above have been discussed and we've worked in most -- if not all -- into at least the first draft, but it's way too early to say who might make it into the final show.
Question #3: Next time Helo pulls some traitorous crap could Adama please shoot him in the head? It would really mean a lot to me.
RDM: I was already going to give him the Colonial Cross for Gallantry, but just for that he'll get the Presidential Medal of Freedom too.
Question #4: I would love to ask about your inspiration and motivations, but I just have to know.
Did Michael Hogan (Saul) know he was a cylon since the miniseries? How did you tell him and did his reaction change your interpretation of the character?
RDM: He did not know, and frankly, neither did I.
David Eick and I called each of the actors to tell them they were, in fact, Cylons and their reactions were all very similar in that everyone wanted to know what it meant in terms of changing their characters and what our plans were for the future. I told them about the hows and whys of their new-found heritage and a rough outline of where it was going in the future and in the end, they were all pretty enthusiast -- if scared -- about going in this direction. The same could be said for all of us when we first committed to this story, but by the time it was ready for air, we were all pretty gung-ho about what we'd done and felt eager to show the episode to the audience.
Question #5: Do you already know who the fifth cylon of the final five is? If so, have you already left us some clues?
RDM: Yes and yes.
Question #6: Quote:
"Battlestar Galactica broke the mold of standard science fiction story telling via a TV medium.
From the beginning the show has been surrounded by controversy and negativity. The diehard fans from the original series were furious over Ron D. Moore's choice to cast Starbuck and Boomer as women. They were furious that the Cylons looked human and were hot. There was controversy surrounding the parallells to our own story and in particular 9/11 and the aftermath of such a tragedy as well as the correlation between Cylons and terrorism.
Since day one people have complained, protested and utterly despised this retelling of an old tale.
"But then the mini-series aired. The story instantly garnered a loyal fanbase and after the story went to a series many people were hooked. They were mesmerized by this show that was gritty, dark, emotional and real. People could identify with the characters as well as the stories. The personal relationships were wrought with drama and pain (much like real life). Survivors of a holocaust fled from their homeworlds in search of a mythical planet called Earth.
It was the beginning of what seemed to be an amazing journey and one helluva ride.
"As the shows story began to unfold new fans came and went, but the core fanbase grew and people start to take notice of this science fiction show on the sci-fi channel (known primarily for it's cheesy made-for-tv movies and typical sci-fi schlock) that was taking the world by storm. People fell in love with the characters. They felt a deep connection - a connection some probably didn't think was possible for 'just a tv show'. And so the story progressed. And soon people realized once again that this show was taking them on a ride. An unknown destination of drama, action and suspense wrapped tightly around a core of science fiction.
"Battlestar Galactica did the unthinkable week after week. Main characters went from good guy to bad guy overnight - relationships ended just as abruptly as new ones started. By the end of the first season everything you had loved in the miniseries and first few episodes had been turned on it's head and to top it off the main character - Commander Adama - the backbone of the entire story in both versions - was shot! And so this new show telling an old story nearly killed off it's main character in the first season.
"People were shocked. Outraged. Mesmerized.
And then season 2 began. Suddenly everything changed once again. What we thought was the truth turned out to be lies. Things we were led to believe were one way had been ripped out from under us and replaced with new concepts and ideas. A tumultuous brand of storytelling to say the least. And the core fan base kept growing while many came and went. And the anger continued and it grew. A rumble that began in season 1 turned into a roar by the end of season 2 with a one year leap into the future.
"Once again everything was turned on it's ear as what seemed like an end to a great story was shocked back to life with a cliffhanger that left everybody talking. And of course the naysayers and the haters came out in droves to protest. How dare this show pull the rug out from under them yet again. How dare these people tell a story the way they want to tell it with blatant disregard for generic story telling. Growing pains ensued as both the show and the fanbase emerged renewed and refreshed at the start of season 3.
"More people complained about a sci-fi show taking place on the ground. Blindly scolding everyone from the actors to the writers to Ronald D. Moore and David Eick themselves for destroying their perfect concepts and preconceived notions of what THEY wanted Battlestar Galactica to be. More and more people began to complain throughout season 3 as they felt lost. Abandoned. Disoriented. Much like the survivors of New Caprica. Where was this show going? What was it's destination and how would it ever get there?
"And because Battlestar Galactica challenged a lot of those people, they stopped watching. Disgusted that 'their' precious story could take such an ugly turn. Upset that the characters they had fallen in love with could suddenly change and become people they didn't like. All the while ignoring the simple fact that the more and more they complained and revolted against this constantly changing story, the more they advocated a stale, stagnant and generic television show.
"Battlestar Galactica broke molds almost every episode. And sometimes it even broke it's own mold and took you in a new and different direction. And then it happened - David Eick and Ronald D. Moore killed one of the main characters. Mind you it had been done before, but not like this. Not such a prominent individual that had been there from day one. Not one of the icons of the old series. My god, not Starbuck! And thus near the middle of season 3 this show once again spun you around and sucker punched you before you knew what had happened. Starbuck was gone. People went nuts.
"The show's fanbase lessened with season 3 because people just couldn't handle it. They didn't want to watch a show that they couldn't rely on. A show that flipped their world upside down every week. No stability. No security blanket. No guide rails. They didn't want to feel how the characters in the show felt. They didn't want to feel lost and disoriented. They wanted nice and neat little packages wrapped in pretty bows every week. They wanted Star Trek. They wanted constant closure and reassurance.
"But they didn't get it. And so they left or they rebelled. And suddenly the fanbase for Battlestar Galactica was divided by two factions. Those who loved the show and those who hated it and despised it. Thus two warring groups that reflected almost exactly what the show itself had created. But the show carried on. And still loyal fans followed every turn, every dip, every jarring bump as the creators continued to tell their story the way they wanted to tell it. And those who opposed the show continued to cry in protest. And just when things had come to a head the season 3 finale ended and the line in the sand had been drawn.
"Starbuck had returned. Earth was looming in the horizon. Characters we loved and hated were now Cylons. The confusion was larger than ever and as the credits rolled we picked our sides. Thus with season 4 far off in the distance Battlestar Galactica prepares to take it's viewers on another ride. And some will buy the ticket while others will not. And then there are those that will take the ride only to complain about it. And once again the best show on television will tell its story on its own terms, in its own way and you will either love it or you will hate it. But in the end you'll look back and realize how much fun you really had. How emotionally involved you were. And you will miss it after its gone.
"Some day you will understand."
Darling, would you please comment on this most excellent (IMO), post?
RDM: At the risk of sounding self-serving, I'd say this is a very well-written post that reflects a lot of my own personal feelings about the show. I part company in terms of his theory as to the reason that the show's ratings were soft in the third season, in that I'm not sure there's a single, rational, coherent explanation for the drop-off. We talk about this internally quite a bit and there are myriad factors involved determining audience share on any given night. To me, the bottom-line is we're still on the air and I've got a fourth season -- that's really all I care about, that and the fact that I'm being allowed to do the show I want to do. If people show up to watch it, I'm grateful and if they don't, I wish they had, but beyond that I don't spend too much time in analyzing the reasons behind the ratings, in all honesty.
Question #7: What was the significance of Chief Tyrol going to that room with the fan? Is there something hidden behind the fan that will be used later on?
RDM: The fan was actually something of a widow, i.e. a remnant in the script of something cut from a previous draft. Early drafts had Tyrol walking the corridors late at night to find some way of getting his son to go to sleep. In his nocturnal wanderings, he found that there was a specific resonant hum in the ship on a particular neck that seemed to lull Nicky to sleep in the way that driving around a child will sometimes help them to fall asleep (a truly southern California way of parenting, I'm sure). Tyrol himself later found that this was the place where he heard the odd strains of music that would later turn out to be the song heard by all four Cylons. Through the rewrite process, the walking of Nicky was dropped, but Tyrol was still drawn to a specific place that had been originally designed with a fan in order to visualize what was creating the "hum" that was putting Nicky to sleep.
Question #8: There is a long discussion in what has become known as the "women's thread" about the "touch ups" done to the promo and other photos of the actors before they are released or put on the web. In particular, the significant airbrushing of Mary McDonnell's photos. We know this doesn't come from BSG's producers -- but who makes these decisions? And why? It's an interesting dilemma, I suppose, for a network looking for a "young" demographic. How do you market "older" actors -- especially female actors. Has this type of thing been an issue at all, since you've created a character in Roslin that simply doesn't exist on other programs and is, therefore, charting new territory?
RDM: There are two issues here to me. The first is my utter contempt and loathing for the industry-wide practice of airbrushing (or whatever we're calling the digital equivalent these days) the images of all actors and actresses for publicity campaigns. It's absurd and ridiculous to alter the images of these people to the point where they look as if a trowel had been taken to their faces, all in the name of making them "more attractive." Mary McDonnell is a beautiful woman and anyone who would look at a photo of her and decide that she needs digital "help" is a philistine and a moron in my book. It's also a complete and cynical lie that the marketing people foist on the audience, who will then see the film or television program being sold with these plastic images and see for themselves that yes, Richard Gere's face has actually aged since 1984 and yet somehow I haven't run screaming from my seat.
Second, I think that while the marketing of "older" actors is still something that gives industry professionals the hives, it has gotten better in my opnion in recent years. With the much-heralded aging of the baby boomers has come a sudden willingness to view stories featuring someone old enough to remember when MTV actually showed music television. I think that the audience acceptance -- and outright embrace of -- both Mary and Eddie in a genre that's been living on young actors in leading roles for quite some time is a welcome change and one I hope continues.
Question #9: will the burgeoning Cult of Baltar in the show fulfill an important, positive role in events to come or should i distance myself from said cult before i have to eat my own hat?
RDM: Important? Definitely.
Positive? Like everything else in this show, it depends on how you look at it.
Question #10: Ginger or Mary Ann?
RDM: Is the universe so unfair and unfeeling that it would really present such choices as a zero sum game?
Question #11: do you feel guilty about the environmental damage caused by
fossil fuels that must be burned in order to produce the show?
RDM: I feel guilty about the damage my species does to the planet on a regular basis.
But I manage.
Question #12: I have been a huge champion of this show and have frequently and patiently counseled friends that sometimes didn't embrace the way the show challenges us and keeps us on our toes. Those are the reasons I believe this is one the best science fiction shows I have ever seen and a breakthrough television drama.
Therefore, I was surprised when "Maelstrom" aired. It felt like sheer exploitation for no reason. I felt that you took your pen and stabbed us in the eye, because you could (and maybe part of you wanted to). I really felt like it was passive aggressive.
How do you like me now?
RDM: I don't look at "Maelstrom" like that and I'm sorry you do.
"... if you print that in your paper, our relationship will be terminated."
"Sir, we don't have a relationship..."
-- All the President's Men
Question #13: If the 7 Cylons aren't aware of the Final Five, just who is it that Caprica Six saw on Caprica before the attack? Will this ever get brought up again or is it basically a dropped plot line?
RDM: While reserving the right to change my mind later, this is most likely a plot element we're not going to be revisiting.
Question #14: All right, Here's my question: I enjoy the show very much and have been trying to get my friends to watch it also. However they are daunted by the complexity of the story and many do not really have the time to sit and watch all of the episodes since they have families and other responsibilities. Usually the next thing I get asked after telling them the series is available on DVD "Are there novels which tell the story?"
I have noticed the mountain of Fan Fiction being written by us fans(including myself) and that seems to indicate, in my mind anyway, an interest in seeing this marvelous story in a printed format. I also feel it would make the story more accessible to newcomers to the show. Why has this not been done yet? I think it would've brought even more viewers to the show(so the ratings would not be so low)...........
RDM: To be honest, I don't know why they haven't commissioned more novels of the show. I can only assume that the people in licensing and marketing know their business and if they felt they could sell them that they would and if they're not, it's because they don't think there's enough of a market there. Hope they're wrong and hope they decide to do it someday.
Question #15: Ron, are you aware of the major discontinuity created by the episode "Hero"? The timeline estabilshed for Adama's military service on Valkyrie doesn't mesh at all with previous statements in the show about how long he's served on Galactica. According to many other episodes, such as Act of Contrition, Adama was on Galactica for at least two years before the attacks. But in Hero, he was commanding Valkyrie one year before.
Did you guys just mess up on this one? Any explanation for how Adama was serving on two different ships? Was he transferred to Valkyrie just for that one mission?
RDM: I've actually been curious as to the discontinuity people keep talking about in regards to this episode and the timeline, but I've never gotten a clear explanation of how our chronology is off. I do recall having extended conversations with the writers and our script supervisors about the chronology of events, the timeline as actually established in the show and how the "Hero" backstory fit into it all. I'd be curious to read a detailed explanation of the discontinuity and see where our internal calculations vary from those being bandied about on-line. All I can tell you is that it made sense to us in-house and if there's an error present in the show it's not for lack of trying.
Question #16: Have you worked out how Tigh's status as a cylon will be reconciled with the fact that he served during the first cylon war?
RDM: Yes, we have. A lot of time and effort has gone into the rationale behind this revelation as well as the other four. Trust me, it works out in the end.
Question #17: t seems that one of the major drives of the show in recent times has been to have the audience see the cylons as more than machines... to see them as real people. if cylons are people, why aren't they included in the survivor count at the beginning of the episodes?
RDM: The audience has always seen them as people by virtue of the fact that we made them look human in the mini-series. However, the drive of the show is not to validate this assumption, but to challenge it each week and force the audience to ask themselves over and over again the question as to whether the Cylons are truly people and what is the definition of that term.
Question #18: Seriously does BSG really ever have to end?? I mean I am getting hives thinking about it. Jamie and Katee have such incredible chemistry together the K/L shippers were hoping for a Kara Lee spin off once they find earth....ala.....LA Law meets The X files or something....I mean come on....we're dying here....any chances of this? If it is set on Earth even slightly in the future you wouldn't need a huge budget for SFX....how about it?
RDM: I think our show has a definite beginning, middle and end. There's a story to be told here that moves toward a definite conclusion and I think our biggest mistake would be to just try and continue to churn out episodes for as long as we could get them on the air. Certain stories need an ending, and this is one of them. I'll miss it more than you can know, but you gotta be true to the tale you're telling.
Question #19: do you ever indugle yourself by thinking up of side stories and histories for the BSG universe, such as thinking up stories about rivalries between certain colonies in the distant past, fake political crisis, the rise and fall of regimes in the 12 colonies, or stories revolving on characters from periods of time that will never even make a blip in cannon? not necessarily related to the founding of the colonies, kobol, earth or anything crucial, just the bits and pieces that fill in the world, making it more vibrant in your mind.you know, just for the fun of it.
RDM: I do think about a lot of these things as I work on the show, but most are never developed in my head beyond references that imply certain major events or sociological movements. For instance, when I had Laura mention sending the Marines in to quell the rioting on Aerilon, it suggested to me a significant political moment in the recent history of the Colonies wherein the President essentially sent in "federal" troops for the first time on the soil of a sovereign Colony since the ratification of the Articles of Colonization. In my mind, this had set a tone for a strengthened federal role for the president of the Colonies, but at the same time had produced increased tension among the Colonies themselves, exacerbating the feeling that poorer worlds like Aerilon were treated one way which richer planets like Caprica were dealt with another way. This later fed into Baltar's manifesto and his observation of the class system emerging in the rag-tag fleet and how it mirrored the social structure of the pre-attack Colonies.
Question #20: Sure, I'll take a shot. When, exactly, in the creative process did you decide that the story need not be bound by any of the elements that it had previously established?
RDM: I take the continuity of the show and the consistancy of the universe we've created quite seriously, but I don't feel that one must be a puritan in this regard. We have a covenant with the audience to keep as regards honoring the history we've established and we all strive mightily to keep it week after week. However, I will not be hamstrung by an off-hand reference to an event being on a Tuesday if later I need that event to take place on a Wednesday -- if the initial reference has no real bearing on the show. If Captain Kirk says that he's from the United Earth Space Probe Agency one week and calls it the United Federation of Planets another week, I'm willing to grant him that license in pursuit of constructing a better and stronger series universe. I won't consider changes that I think change the fundamentals of what's important to me in the series, but I am willing to make compromises around the margins. The difficulty comes when you, the audience, feel that I've changed something important and that it has a destructive impact on the show and damages your viewing experience. In that instance, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I simply look at the show from a different perspective than you do and I guess your mileage does indeed, vary.
http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles ... tory.jhtml
Last but not least AV Club:MTV: Why pack so many cliffhangers into the finale?
Ronald D. Moore: It all started with the trial of Baltar [James Callis]. As we got further into the development process of the second half of the season, I felt there wasn't enough going on in that scenario. And I had this notion that I've been kicking around in my head for a while about what if four of our characters were drawn into a room for reasons they didn't know, and they walk in, close the doors and look at each other and say, "We're Cylons." At about the same time, we were working on the episode "Maelstrom," where Kara [Katee Sackhoff] was killed, and we decided that it was a hell of a story if she actually died, embraced her fate and came back later in the series with knowledge of where Earth was.
MTV: There have been rumors out there on the fan sites that Lee's [Jamie Bamber] vision of Kara was just a hallucination, like Baltar and Caprica Six [Tricia Helfer].
Moore: It's not a hallucination.
MTV: How did you decide which four of your characters should be Cylons?
Moore: Some of it was a process of elimination in deciding who we wanted to make Cylons and who would make sense and who would damage the show. We quickly came to [the decision] that we didn't want it to be Adama [Edward James Olmos] or Laura [Mary McDonnell] ... there were just too many reasons not to do that. It had to make sense why it would be these people as opposed to anyone else on the series.
There were certain logical reasons for each one. Chief Tyrol [Aaron Douglas] was literally drawn to the Cylons, first personally and then for reasons he couldn't quite name, like when they got to the Algae Planet and he found the temple. Tory [Rekha Sharma] was the one we knew the least about, and yet she had been around enough that she wasn't a completely new face, so she was a bit of a wild card. Anders [Michael Trucco] had mysteriously survived the holocaust on Caprica originally and then the struggle through two resistances, and ... he was so drawn to Kara and she was so drawn to him. And since Kara had a specific destiny and a specific sort of lone play on our mythos, it felt right that Anders did too.
Tigh [Michael Hogan] was the biggest gamble. He was the one where we really had to do a lot of soul searching to make sure we were doing the right thing. You're going to lose something with the revelation that he was a Cylon, but you're also going to gain a lot too. Tigh was a very human character with deeply human flaws and weaknesses — his alcoholism, the killing of Ellen [Kate Vernon] and his friendship with Adama — and I didn't want to lose all of that amazing character stuff that we've built up. I mean, here's a guy who killed his wife because she was collaborating with the Cylons, and now he is a Cylon. What does that do to him?
MTV: And those four characters are 100 percent Cylons, or is there a chance that something will happen to change that?
Moore: I'm pretty sure they're Cylons.
MTV: In one episode, audiences saw what seemed to be an American military Humvee on Caprica. Now the characters apparently know Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." Is this all meant to demonstrate that our two realities are closely interwoven?
Moore: There is an idea in the show that all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. There's a cycle of time and there's a sort of larger story that is told many times in many ways and that there is a direct connection between their reality and our reality. We will get to the reasons why all of these things are connected.
MTV: It's been reported that the fourth season will possibly be the last. If that's the case, are you now writing your story lines with that in mind?
Moore: It hasn't been definitively said that the fourth season is the final one. What I had said is that the show, since the end of this season, has really moved into the third act in the three-act structure where we're all moving towards the finale and the climax of all these different plot lines. In my head there's two chapters to go in the story and those can be of varying lengths.
MTV: Are we going to see Earth as it exists in the show?
Moore: I think the show eventually gets to Earth. We promise that to the audience in the main title every week, and it's what the show's about on some fundamental level. And I just think that this series, unlike some series, is a show that has a beginning, a middle and an end. There will be an end, and it does involve getting to Earth eventually and what they find and how that wraps up the tale.
MTV: The story of Battlestar Pegasus is getting its own television movie later this year. Tell us about that.
Moore: We're doing two extra episodes, and it's my understanding that the network will broadcast them one night, and then they'll be released to DVD either the very next day or two days later, or something like that. It's a story line that picks up a lot of the Pegasus [plot] but also involves Galactica, and eventually it becomes a story that pays off into the fourth season. The script is still being written right now, and we've talked about all of the established Pegasus characters [appearing], but it's still too early in the process to say who will end up in the final draft.
MTV: Since this is going to have a DVD release, have you talked to the studio about providing a larger budget for things like visual effects and larger sets?
Moore: Yeah, it's a separate budget that's not related to our episodic budget. They've set aside a specific pot of money for this release, and it is more than our usual parent show.
MTV: Could you ever see a "Battlestar" theatrical film? Is that something that's ever talked about?
Moore: We've talked about it internally. There's never really been any sort of discussion with Universal Features, and I'm not sure creatively what I would want that to be. Even with these two hours that we're doing for the DVD release, I think of them as tied very specifically into the show. It's hard to come up with what's the completely stand-alone version of "Galactica" that isn't really tied into our mythos. I don't know that there's a great theatrical story out there waiting to be told.
http://www.avclub.com/content/node/60737/1
The A.V. Club: How did you choose "All Along the Watchtower" as the song that triggered the new Cylons?
Ronald D. Moore: That's actually a song I've been interested in doing something about for a long time. It's one of Bob Dylan's really interesting pieces, and I've always been fascinated by the lyric and the imagery. When I was working at Roswell, there was a point where I was going to do an entire episode about it. And then as we got into Galactica in the first year, I was starting to think ahead about ways of saying that, you know, things that happened on Galactica were tied into our reality here on Earth in some way, in the past or the future, or some other connection. And one of the ways that I thought of making that connection explicit was at some point, to have a song we recognize playing in the background on one of their jukeboxes. It's another way of saying, "Well, why do they wear suits and ties? Why do they use many of the expressions we use in contemporary culture?"
AVC: The show has always taken place far off in an alien culture. Did you think this would be jarring for the audience?
RM: Sure, I knew it was definitely going to be a hard left turn. And that's one of the things that appealed to me about it the most—the fact that it would upset the idea of what Galactica was, and the things you thought you were comfortable knowing. Which is really what I like about the show, that it continues to push the envelope and that it never lets the audience settle into a comfortable routine.
AVC: The show has often been called "topical," and obviously from the beginning, it started in the wake of 9/11. At the same time, you've said you've avoided turning it into a specific allegory or a polemic.
RM: Right.
AVC: At the same time, a lot of really specific references creep in—like when a character is saved by the equivalent of stem cells, or Dean Stockwell's character almost quotes Dick Cheney.
RM: Oh sure. It's a very subjective line. And we play around with that line a lot. There's definitely times when we're tempted to make a very specific connection to today's events, and sometimes we shy away from it, and sometimes we seize on it. There's no real hard-and-fast rule for when we do it and when we don't. It's a gut thing, and I just kind of feel my way through it and decide almost arbitrarily what I think works and when we've gone too far.
AVC: You've said that President Roslin is partly inspired by George W. Bush, which makes perfect sense in terms of her situation, but it's hard to see in her character.
RM: Well, you know, the role of a president in the aftermath of this apocalyptic attack seemed like it was set up in a way that it would be hard not to draw the parallel on some level. And on some level, I wanted to extend sympathy for the person in that position. To realize that even someone like Laura Roslin, when they are thrust into the presidency in these circumstances, and literally have the fate of the human race hanging on their shoulders, there's going to be a transition, there's going to be a change. They're going to look at the world through different eyes.
And certainly George W. Bush went through a similar transition. The 9/11 attack was the seminal moment in the man's life, it was the seminal moment in his presidency, and he changed. And I think you can argue about the reasons for that, and was it a good change, was it a bad change, but on a human level, the change happened. And I wanted to dramatize that with Laura Roslin too, and say that anybody in that position's going to have certain reactions to that event, and they're going to take the responsibility much more seriously than they did before the event.
AVC: When viewers call the show "topical," do you think they have a consistent interpretation of exactly what they're seeing? A show like 24 has such a clear message: "This patriotic superman is going to save America." But with Battlestar Galactica, it's a lot trickier.
RM: I don't think ours has a direct message like that, and I think people come away from the show with different things depending on what their viewpoint was going into it. For some people, the show confirms what they already believe. For others, it challenges their beliefs. I think it pisses some people off.
One of the things that surprises me the most, and that I'm really gratified about the most, is that The National Review continues to be one of our biggest fans, and continues to support the show, and has said it's one of the best shows on TV. And their political agenda is certainly not mine. But I'm really happy that they like the show, that they see things within it that appeal to them.
AVC: Were you surprised when some of the things you've done lately—say, when the heroes condoned suicide bombings—didn't provoke more backlash?
RM: We saw a fair amount of heat for it. If the show was on a broadcast network and had a much bigger audience, we probably would have taken a much bigger hit. The fact that we're on cable and we have a smaller audience, I think, went a long way toward shielding us from a major media backlash.
And also just the fact that it's science fiction. We get a pass on a lot of things because it's science fiction. The religious stuff on the show, the political stuff on the show—a lot of people just don't want to take it seriously, because it's people in spaceships and robots running around. So a lot of the mainstream media just isn't going to really take anything in the show seriously. Which gives us a lot of freedom to do what we want.
AVC: It would be hard for Rush Limbaugh to start ranting about a show with killer robots.
RM: It would be pretty funny to hear. I sort of would like to hear that broadcast some morning.
AVC: With this show, like some of the shows on HBO, you have the space to create a social-science lab and experiment with these ideas, and you have week after week to see how it turns out.
RM: Well, especially, I think, in science fiction, because you're creating the universe from ground zero, and the social and political aspects of it are what you say they are. A lot of the politics of the 12 colonies are obviously based on American politics, but also with things from other societies and cultures thrown into the mix. "Well, if the government works slightly differently in this way, or what if the tradition in the country was more like this"—all those things combine to give you this great flexibility to play around with the game of "what if." It provides a much richer and more interesting context for the character drama.
AVC: But at the end of the day, you're still more interested in the character drama?
RM: Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a part of me that's wonkish enough to really be fascinated with how the 12 colonies developed as a federal government, and what the articles of colonization were about, and what are the differences between the colonies, and what are the legal differences, etc. etc. But it's all just background. It's really about Adama, and Laura, and Starbuck, and these people, and what they do in their lives.
AVC: Lee Adama's speech in the season finale seemed to encapsulate one message about the show—this idea that we're watching a group of people who are screw-ups and who are fallible, but at the same time something in their nature still pushes them to do the right thing and stick to their values.
RM: I think that's very accurate. I look at them as people. And I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. I'm interested in exposing the flaws and playing with the flaws. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things. It's the spectrum of human emotion and reaction that interests me on the show.
AVC: Going into the next season, has the network given you any general requests to alter course? Like, "We need more laughs next time"?
RM: There's been an ongoing conversation with the network since the very beginning about the tone of the show—is there enough humor on the show, is the show too dark, is it too depressing, are we giving people enough reasons to tune in the next week. That's always been a difficult conversation, I think. They've always been concerned that the show is too dark and just too depressing. And we're always saying, "No, that's what the show is. It's the circumstance, it's real, but there's still heroism within it, there's still people to root for, but they're just not your standard TV heroes." By and large we win that argument, and they let us do the show that we want.
AVC: We've seen the Cylons go from an unknown and mysterious enemy to a more concrete, well-explored society. But there's still a third force on the show, the mystic side. And that's still very abstract and mysterious. Are you going to flesh that out more? Do you have a game plan around that?
RM: We do, and the plan is as we go into the next season or so, to start bringing more of that to the fore and tying it into everything else that's been going on in the show.
AVC: It seems like a big challenge.
RM: Oh sure. It's a huge challenge. But the tease only works to a certain point. Ultimately, if you take the story all the way to the end, you do need to give the audience some answers to some of these things. Maybe not everything. There's probably some elements that we will leave mysterious even after the show is over. But I think you have to at least ground the audience in some reality for some of these things that have happened. Even if the explanation is a supernatural one, you want to give them some explanation and feel a payoff for the time and effort they've put into the show up to that point.
AVC: You were one of the first television shows to start a podcast commentary alongside the show. Do you find it strange that you've got fans who spend as much time listening to you talk on the podcast as they do watching the show on TV?
RM: I find it very odd. [Laughs.] I'm always surprised when people tell me that they listen to the podcast, because I don't really listen to podcasts. It's not really part of my consumption of media. And the idea that people are listening to it weekly as part of their viewing experience, and it enhances their viewing experience—I understand it intellectually, but emotionally and personally, it always kind of surprises me that anybody listens to the podcast.
AVC: At the same time, now you almost have to lie on the podcast, like with "Maelstrom"—at the end, after we see Starbuck die, you talk about how sad the cast and crew were to lose the actress. And then three weeks later, she came back.
RM: Well, all that was very true. I was very careful on that podcast not to directly lie about any of it. The crew had no idea that we were bringing her back when we killed her. And the cast at first was very, very upset. I actually had to calm the waters up in Vancouver at some point and call the cast and say, "Okay, here's the plan," because we hadn't told any of them. We had told Katee [Sackhoff] what the plan was, and Katee, we all agreed that we were going to keep this to ourselves, and that we were going to shoot her final scene in the finale on a separate day after principal photography had wrapped up. It was all trying to be very secret, hush-hush. We had alternate endings, fake script pages, all this kind of stuff, to preserve the secret of Starbuck coming back and the revelation of the final four Cylons.
AVC: You've said that the one-off episodes and self-contained stories are the ones you're least satisfied with. Why is that?
RM: Well, part of it is just that they don't have the richness of the other episodes. It's just not the show that we all like to do as much, and it probably shows in the final product. The more serialized episodes really continue to embroider on the characters and give you a sense of continuity of what happened to them last week and the week before and the week before that, and you're watching the characters grow and change over time. There's just a richness to that kind of storytelling that I think we all find much more satisfying.
AVC: Will you try to do fewer of those next season, or is it a requirement from the network?
RM: The network too has come to the conclusion that as much as they don't want the show to be serialized, the show is what it is at this point. I'm not getting a lot more pressure to do that any more.
AVC: You've talked about Starbuck and Ellen Tigh as female characters who are strong and "tomcat around" on their men, and the men understand that. Where did that come from?
RM: Nobody in particular, actually. [Laughs.] There's no woman I know that's really like either of those women. I think I was attracted to it because I didn't see that sort of archetype in person or in fiction very often. The attributes that men get away with as characters, you don't often see given to women.
AVC: A lot of science-fiction franchises are expanding their story via other media, like The Matrix with The Animatrix, or Buffy continuing from a movie to a TV show to a comic book. What do you think of that?
RM: I think it's great. I think that's a tremendous outlet for being able to tell stories in that universe. I'm always tempted in the back of my mind to continue to write things in the Star Trek universe, in the novels or the comics, just because I don't get to play in that universe and I don't get to hang out with those characters any more. You spend hours upon hours of your life, day after day sitting in writers' rooms, talking about these people and these situations, and it becomes very real to you. They're friends of yours, in a lot of ways. I can go see Michael Dorn or I can run into Patrick Stewart or whatever every once in a while, but I don't get to hang out with Captain Picard or Worf any more. So the idea that maybe you could capture that again a little bit, and write more and create more stories in whatever form, I think is a great thing, and certainly for Joss, it must be a tremendous boon. He must really enjoy that.
