'Battlestar Galactica: The Plan' DVD review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review "Battlestar Galactica: The Plan," which comes out on DVD today (and will allegedly air on Syfy sometime next year). Short version is that, like "Razor" (which I also didn't love), it feels more like a DVD bonus feature than an actual thing itself, despite the predictably kick-ass lead performance by Dean Stockwell. Your mileage may vary. Since it's on sale today and won't be airing on TV for months, it's cool for people to openly discuss the content of it in the comments, so read at your own risk. Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part 2": There must be some kind of way out of here

Spoilers for the series finale of "Battlestar Galactica" coming up just as soon as I make my weapons hot...

"Just so there'll be no misunderstandings later, Galactica's seen a lot of history, gone through a lot of battles. This will be her last. She will not fail us if we do not fail her. If we succeed in our mission, Galactica will bring us home. If we don't, it doesn’t matter anyway." -Bill Adama

"I see angels, angels in this very room. Now I may be mad, but that doesn't mean that I'm not right, because there's another force at work here. There always has been." -Gaius Baltar

"Earth is a dream. One we've been chasing for a long time. We've earned it. This is Earth." -Bill Adama

"What do you hear, Starbuck?" -Bill Adama
"Nothing but the rain." -Kara Thrace
"Grab your gun and bring in the cat." -Bill Adama

"Cultivation?" -Caprica Six
"Yes. You know, I know about farming." -Gaius Baltar
"I know you do." -Caprica Six

"I just know that I am done here. I've completed my journey, and it feels good." -Kara Thrace

And so the amazing four-year journey of "Battlestar Galactica" comes to an end, and I feel very, very good about it -- even as I suspect others may not.

"Daybreak," the two-hour conclusion (technically three hours, if you count last week's part one; Ron Moore has said he wanted to air all three together), was essentially two finales in one, and I hope you'll forgive me for doing more plot recap than usual, both because so much happened and because it's one of the final times I'll get to write about this show and want the experience to last as long as possible.

The first hour was rock-'em-sock-'em action on a level of technical brilliance that surpassed anything else the series had ever come close to. As Adama and the Galactica crew launched their final, desperate assault on the Cylon stronghold, The Colony, Gary Hutzel's F/X team outdid themselves yet again in depicting ships trying (and sometimes failing) to navigate through a swirling asteroid field, massive guns from both sides firing upon each other, and in a moment to make every fanboy and fangirl's heart swoon, robotic Cylon centurions getting into an epic fist-fighting brawl in The Colony's halls. (Anyone who couldn't resist the urge to yell, "Toaster fight! Toaster fight!" is more than forgiven.)

We got to witness the rescue of little Hera; the vengeance-fueled executions of wayward Cylons Boomer and Tory by, respectively, Athena and Tyrol; Saul Tigh, straddling the worlds of Cylon and human, briefly brokering a peace treaty between the two; Brother Cavil, hardcore as always, eating his own gun once it became clear peace was not in the offing; the accidental (or divinely inspired?) destruction of The Colony and all the evil Cylons within it; and Starbuck using the notes from her father's version of "All Along the Watchtower" to program the dying ship's computer for one last, blind jump to a planet called...

Earth. Yes, Earth. But not that Earth, the charred nuclear wasteland that the fleet discovered halfway through this final season. Our Earth, new and green and lush.

And as the survivors of the assault on The Colony, along with the remaining members of the rag-tag fleet, explored the very familiar, but very ancient grassy plains of Africa, circa 147,991 B.C. (or thereabouts), we entered the second phase of the finale, the long, slow, sweet goodbye to all the characters we had grown to care about over the previous 80-odd hours of television.

Lee convinced the rest of the fleet that it was better to abandon most of their modern technology and try to blend in with the primitive Earth natives. President Roslin finally succumbed to her cancer, but not before her lover and partner Bill Adama took her on one last aerial sightseeing tour of the home she had helped lead their people to. (Last seen, Adama the elder was living alone high on a mountain, planning to build the cabin he had hoped to share with Roslin.) After 2,000 years of bickering and dysfunction, Tigh and wife Ellen finally got a chance to simply be in each other's company, no distractions, no hostility. Athena and Helo bantered about teaching Hera to be a hunter-gatherer. Gaius Baltar, having finally committed a selfless act in helping save Hera, won the heart of Caprica Six and, after spending a lifetime trying on new identities in the name of self-preservation, made peace with the one he was born with, pointing Six towards a field ripe for cultivation and crying as he reminded her of his childhood on the farm.

And Kara Thrace, who seemingly returned from the dead at the start of this season? It appears, though Moore's script and Michael Rymer's direction deliberately left it ambiguous, that the Kara who came back was an "angel," sent by the same divine power that had been manipulating events by the start, along the same lines as head Six and head Baltar . Having fulfilled the prophecy to "bring humanity to its end" — albeit in a much nicer way than that phrasing suggested at the time — Kara said her goodbye to old friend and sometime-lover Lee and, while his back was turned... vanished into thin air, in the middle of a wide open field with nowhere to hide.

And after that long, lyrical farewell sequence — along the lines of the last 40 minutes of "The Return of the King," only less repetitive (and better-earned, given the length of the series as a whole) — we briefly jumped ahead to the present day, to find the angelic versions of Baltar and Six strolling through Times Square (at one point reading over the shoulder of Ron Moore himself) and pondering whether this version of humanity, on the verge of creating its own artificial intelligences, would repeat the endless cycle of human-machine violence that doomed Kobol, the 12 Colonies, and the other Earth. As the angelic Six expressed an optimistic take, the familiar Jimi Hendrix version of "All Along the Watchtower" came on the soundtrack over a montage of news footage of recent, real innovations in robotics that make the Cylons seem more science than science-fiction.

For a series that had always used familiar trappings of sci-fi like robots and spaceships to comment on our present-day circumstances — 9/11, the Iraq insurgency, constitutional law being bent in the name of security and/or religion — it was the perfect final sequence. No, that cute Japanese robot that does backflips isn't likely to instigate the genocide of humanity anytime soon, but in many ways the world of "Galactica" is closer than we want to admit.

From this seat, the finale expertly blended all the things that made the series so wonderful: action, great performances in service of well-rounded characters, contemporary politics placed in futuristic settings, and a healthy dose of spirituality.

It's that last, though, that I suspect may lead to some grumbling.

God, or the gods, or whatever you want to call the divine forces of the "Galactica" universe, has always played a role in the series, but that role was particularly dominant in the finale. Unanswered questions about the nature of characters like Kara or the spectral Baltar and Six? God's responsible. What was all that stuff about visions of an opera house that Six, Athena and President Roslin shared? God showed it to them. How did Kara know how to get the fleet to the new Earth? God told her. How is it possible for human beings to naturally evolve on a planet a million light years away from where all the colonial humans originated? Baltar suggests a divine hand. Etc.

Moore has always been less interested in technical details and logistical explanations than character beats and emotional moments. It's often a strength of the series; where one of the "Star Trek" spin-offs might have needed five minutes to explain how Tigh and company were going to give Cavil's people the secret of rebuilding resurrection, Moore's script glossed over it in a couple of sentences and raced ahead to the more satisfying moment where Tyrol found out that Tory had murdered Cally, and strangled her in revenge.

But here, at the end, after four years of waiting for answers on some of these questions (particularly the nature of Head Six, who's been causing trouble since the "Galactica" miniseries in 2003), I imagine some fans aren't going to simply accept "God did it" about Head Six, or about the existence of another planet that could be called Earth.

Me, I went with it. The answers are interesting on some level, but what I'll take out of "Galactica" is the emotional experience more than any plot mechanics. I'll remember Roslin and Tigh having a pointed debate about the use of suicide bombers when they were living under a Cylon occupation on the planet of New Caprica. I'll remember the horror on Cally's face as she realized she was married to a Cylon. I'll remember old men Adama and Tigh standing shoulder to shoulder as they prepared to hold off a coup on Galactica, Kara letting go of her status as top-dog pilot when she realized she didn't need it anymore, Lee giving a speech explaining how humanity had devolved from a government into a gang, or Roslin holding Baltar's life in her hands and choosing forgiveness over revenge.

And from this finale, I'll care more about Baltar coming to grips with his past (sins and all), or the glimpses of the lives our characters left behind when the Cylons nuked the colonies, or Adama tearfully placing his wedding ring on Roslin's finger moments after her death than I would have about getting a more concrete explanation of what happened to Starbuck after her ship exploded.

When Moore, Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell and producer David Eick appeared on a panel discussion at the United Nations earlier this week, Moore said he hoped he entertained people and made them think. From first episode to last, Moore accomplished those missions with me — even if I have to do some extra thinking on the blanks he declined to fill in.

Still, before we go, I want to examine the extent to which he did fill in some of those blanks, and also take a deeper look at some of the aforementioned moments and other great ones from the finale.

Earth-2: In talking with Mo Ryan (who should have her own finale review and Ron Moore interview posted sometime later this evening) after we screened "Daybreak" on Monday night, she seemed most apprehensive about the idea of a second Earth, and that the one we saw in "Revelations" wasn't the one that we live on.

I thought it worked, though, and not just as a fake-out to mess with our heads at the end of the mid-season finale. We never saw any definitive geographic and architectural proof that "Revelations" Earth was our Earth, no matter how much some of us (and I put myself at the head of that line) wanted to believe that we were staring at the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge. The idea that the 13th Tribe destroyed themselves as part of the cycle of Cylon/human violence (or, in this case, Cylon/Cylon violence) very much fits the show's mantra of "All this has happened before, and it will all happen again. The idea that our Earth would get its name -- as well as certain concepts of language and other bits of race memory that would take 150,000 years to resurface -- from these familiar-looking visitors from another star system feels right. It makes the similarity in dress and idiom between Colonial society and 21st century Earth society feel less like a cheat (so the show could more easily comment on current events) than a passing of the torch down through the generations.

Given how far in the past the colonials are, and that they abandoned most of their gear and technology when Anders piloted the rag-tag fleet into the sun, I can very easily see them falling to the technological and social level of the natives within a few generations. Basic survival is going to be such a priority for these people that I think they're going to quickly lose hold of the social niceties, until the idea of three-piece suits or fighter jets or a criminal justice system disappears into the collective unconsciousness, waiting to resurface when the technology catches back up.

As for why Kara, if she really was an angel, was sent back to first lead humanity to the wrong Earth, well, that ties into...

They have a plan: No, not the Cylon "they" (which I imagine we're going to hear more about in "Battlestar Galactica: The Plan," the Cavil-centric TV movie coming out later this year), but the divine "they."

I don't know that we're ever going to be able to connect all the heavenly dots, given how much of the series was admittedly made up as Moore and company went along. Moore argued to me in the interview we did after the screening that Head Six pushes Baltar into leading the cult so he can finally come to grips with the idea of a higher power, which in turn makes him able to convince Cavil to agree to a truce, but it still feels on some level like the writers needing something to do with James Callis between the trial and the finale. (Baltar had, after all, had previous periods where he briefly bought into Head Six's talk of the one true God, and even times early in the cult arc where he seemed to be believing his own hype, only for those scenes to be undercut by jokes later on.)

But parts of it very much make sense to me in retrospect, if you believe that God (or whatever the divine force prefers to be called, per Head Baltar), has been trying to get humanity and the Cylons to break the cycle of destruction.

Why have Kara lead the fleet to the charred Earth first? I think it's because humanity had to be brought so low -- to have all of its hope taken away so abruptly that a Dualla would blow her brains out or a Gaeta would lead a mutiny -- so that when the opportunity to attack The Colony came about, enough people would be resigned enough to go on that suicide mission, to confront Cavil and rid the universe of the more stubborn and vindictive Cylon faction once and for all.

If they don't find the charred Earth first, then Dualla doesn't kill herself, which means Gaeta probably doesn't launch the coup, which means Anders doesn't get shot in the head and turned into a Hybrid, which means Galactica can't find or reasonably fight Cavil's forces, which means Kara's not placed in a position where she has to jump the ship based on nothing but the notes to "All Along the Watchtower," which means they don't get to the good Earth.

(The shot of the Raptors flying down over those beautiful African fields beautifully paralleled the descent to the surface of the nuked Earth near the end of "Revelations," and was one of many moments in the finale where the screening room got quite dusty.)

Now, obviously Kara could have just taken them to the good Earth first, but Cavil would still be out there, and Lee might not have been able to persuade the other 38,000 surviving humans to give away their toys, and the rebel skinjobs might not have set the remaining toasters free, etc. Most of this has happened before, and here things happened so the old things might not happen again.

Back to Caprica: The "Lost"-style flashbacks to the pre-genocide lives of Baltar, Kara, Lee, Laura and Bill were fairly polarizing last week, though I feel like they're probably the element of the finale that suffered most from cleaving it into two pieces. "Daybreak Pt. 1" isn't a standalone episode in the way that even "Exodus, Pt. 1" is; it's a collection of incidents and character moments that just comes to a stop when the hour's up. Under those circumstances, I can see how the amount of time spent on these seemingly unrelated glimpses of the central characters on Caprica may have seemed frustrating. ("Why are we watching Lee chase a pigeon? When are we going to find out the deal with Kara's pristine Viper?")

But in the context of "Daybreak" as a whole dramatic entity, I thought they worked smashingly. Not only did they serve as a reminder of all that the characters (and the thousands of others they represented) had lost, but they tied in so well to the final fate of each one.

Laura overcomes the loss of her entire family and (after briefly trying to blunt the pain by dating an eager former student) finds the strength to help the world at large by joining Adar's presidential campaign, which in turn allows her to find the strength to help out after most of her larger human family was wiped out by the Cylons. And, having stuck around long enough to see her people to a safe outcome, and to get a few precious weeks being openly in love with Bill Adama, she can let go, content.

Kara confesses to Lee, right before the first of their many attempts to hurt the ones around them by sleeping with each other, that she fears death much less than being forgotten, and instead will be remembered (for a few generations, anyway) as the hero who singlehandedly delivered the last survivors of her civilization to their new home. In that strip club (and a big giant "Hah!" to that entire sequence), Ellen just wants to spend time with Saul; now they have all the years that their new circumstances will grant them.

Six witnesses Baltar fight with the father whose existence he'd like to deny, and when he tries to express his love for Six -- the first time in a long time Gaius Baltar has tried to place another person on equal footing with himself -- she gives a little laugh and he retreats back to his selfish, survivalist persona. It's only after he's gone through the events of the last four years -- much of it with a spectral version of the woman he loves operating as his life coach -- that Baltar is able to be selfless, to be someone the real Six would be proud to love, and to be able to look back on his farming roots as anything other than an embarrassing biographical detail. When he weeps in Africa, he's thinking about all the pain he's caused by looking out for Gaius Baltar first and foremost, and about the good things that finally happened when he saw the value of others for real, and not just as another long con. And I don't think that moment is half as powerful if we haven't been spending time the last two weeks being reminded of what he used to be.

Boomer and Tory, RIP (maybe): The deaths of Boomer and Tory were satisfying to different degrees. Both had done terrible things to others, and while you could excuse that to some extent due to their identity crises -- both found out as adults that they weren't remotely the people (or species) they believed themselves to be -- Boomer still sided with Cavil over the more peaceful Cylons, kidnapped Hera and screwed Helo right in front of Athena, and Tory still murdered Cally. There had to be some accounting for that, and if Tory's death was the more cathartic of the two, it's because she was cowardly to the end, trying to use "Hey, we're all Cylons" as some kind of blanket amnesty rather than face up to the ramifications of what she had done. Boomer, as she told Athena, made a choice to defy Cavil, even though she knew it would lead to her death, from either of the two sides she had repeatedly betrayed.

And the show obviously felt more for her than it did for Tory, as Boomer's death was accompanied by another flashback to her days as a nugget struggling to win the respect of old men Adama and Tigh. Tory just died, and her death was quickly upstaged by the CIC shootout, Cavil's suicide, and then the hand of the divine reaching out to make the dead hand of Racetrack launch her nukes.

Some other thoughts on the "Galactica" finale:

• I don't want to devote too much space to rehashing things Moore said in the press conference after the finale screening, or the interview we did after that, so click here to find out about that. But just a few highlights: Daniel was never intended to be Kara's father, and Moore and the other writers were shocked to see how many people were getting into that theory; he wishes he had been clearer in the editing that The Colony and all the evil Cylons were sucked into the singularity and destroyed; Edward James Olmos wanted a much bleaker ending than Moore did; and that the "cold island up in the highlands" Tyrol's talking about is Scotland. Go read it; I'll wait.

• Bear McCreary was on top of his game (just like everyone else on the finale), and the screening room again got dusty when Anders piloted the fleet into Earth's sun (looking very much like an eye) and the soundtrack briefly shifted into a version of the theme song to the original '70s "Galactica."

• For that matter, the idea of the characters winding up on our Earth centuries ago pays homage to the original series, which posited that its characters' ancestors had started out on Earth in the distant past and had done things like build the great pyramids of Egypt.

• I'm assuming all those Caprica City skyline shots were created for the "Caprica" spin-off, and if nothing else, they suggest the new series will look gorgeous.

• It may not get as much attention as flashier character farewells like Kara disappearing or Baltar crying -- especially since the character in question popped up again once we got to Earth -- but one of my favorites was Doc Cottle getting choked up while saying goodbye to Laura, and Laura telling him to "go light a cigarette and grumble" rather than ruin her image of him.

• It didn't last long, since most of the Galactica crew survived the assault on The Colony, but the idea of Hoshi and Romo Lampkin succeeding, respectively, Bill and Lee Adama as heads of the military and civilian arms of the fleet, was both hysterically funny and poignant. At this stage of the series, with so many top people dead (especially after the coup), who else was left?

• Can I talk again about the awesomeness of the toaster-on-toaster violence? I just loved the image of the rebel centurions with the red paint streaked across their chests to identify them as separate from Cavil's forces, as it's such a low-tech, punk contrast to their usual sleek appearances.

Here at the end of a very long series and a very long post, you don't need me to again repeat all the reasons "Battlestar Galactica" was such a landmark television achievement. You don't need me to tell you how it returned to the hallmarks of traditional science fiction by using the futuristic trappings to tell compelling stories about the way we live now. You don't need me to tell you about this rich cast of characters, played by a cast of actors who will criminally never get their proper due from the rest of the showbiz community because their peers are too snobbish to realize that an Edward James Olmos or a Mary McDonnell or a Michael Hogan might be capable of giving devastating performances in the middle of a show with this title. You don't need me to tell you about the epic action, the tear-jerking moments, the occasional snippets of comedy or all things that made this show so special. But I wanted to at least mention them before the end, before I cede the floor to you and ask...

So say we all?

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica: Ronald D. Moore finale Q&A

After Sci Fi Channel screened the "Battlestar Galactica" series finale for the press on Monday evening, there was a brief press conference featuring producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, and stars Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos. Later in the evening, I asked Moore some additional questions about the finale. After the jump, some highlights from the press conference (really only from Moore and Eick), and then a transcript of the solo interview with Moore. To read my review of the finale, click here.

Post-finale press conference

(All questions will be paraphrased, since I only asked the first one)

(On what the second Kara actually was, and whether we all went down a rabbit hole when we assumed that Kara was the daughter of Daniel the missing eighth Cylon)

Moore: Daniel was definitely a rabbit hole, and it was an unintentional rabbit hole, to be honest... (Daniel) was always intended to be an interesting bit of backstory about Cavil, as a Cain and Abel allegory. And people started seizing on it as some major part of the mythology... and it was never intended to take that kind of load-bearing weight.

Eick: It's kind of like Boxey in that way.

Moore: It's exactly like Boxy. Kara, I think, is whatever you want her to be. It's easy to put that label on her: Angel, or Messenger of God, or whatever. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny on the show... We debated back and forth in the writers' room for a while on giving it more definition, and saying, definitively, "This is what she is," and we decided that the more you try to outline it and give voice to it and put a name on it, the less interesting it became. We just decided this was the most interesting way to go out, with her disappearing without trying to name what she was.

(On whether any of the Cavils, Simons or Dorals survived the attack on the Colony)

Moore: The final (edit) came out a little less clear on that level than I sort of intended... The idea was that when Racetrack hits the nukes, they smack into the Colony and it takes it out of the stream swirling around the singularity, and it fell in (to the singularity) and was torn apart. But as we were cutting the show for time, and taking out frames, one of the things that became less apparent was that the Colony was doomed. The intention was that everyone aboard the Colony perished.

(On when and why he decided to have the fleet wind up discovering our Earth in the distant past)

Moore: We decided that a couple of years ago... I don't think we ever had a version of the show where they wound up in the future, or the present. Those didn't seem as interesting. In the early going, we started talking about the fact that we would see a lot of contemporary things in the show, from language to wardrobe to all kinds of production design. That only made sense to us if a lot of the things we see in the show you feel are taken from our contemporary world were actually from their world and spread through the eons and came to us through the collective unconscious, or from (what Lee said about) "We will give them the best part of ourselves."

Eick: There was a time we were talking about, "They land and there are pterodactyls and tyrannosaurus rex." But it was the idea that they were part of the genis of humankind, and this seemed the more affordable way to do it than going "Jurassic Park."

Moore: The image of Six walking through Times Square, we came up with a long time ago.

(On what happened to destroy the original Earth)

Moore: The backstory of the original Earth was supposed to be that the 13th tribe of Cylons came to that world, started over, and essentially destroyed themselves. There was some internecine warfare among the Cylons themselves that was supposed to be another repetition in the cycle of "All this has happened before and all will happen again." Even they, who were the rebels and split off, left to their own devices, there was enough of humanity left in them that they destroyed themselves.

(On why Cavil killed himself)

Moore: Cavil killing himself came from Dean Stockwell, to be honest. As scripted, in that climactic battle in CIC, Tigh was going to grab Cavil and fling him over the edge of the upper level, and he was going to fall to his death. Dean called me himself and said, "I just really think that in that moment, Cavil would realize the jig is up and it's all hopeless and just put a gun in his mouth and shoot himself." And I just said, "Okay."

(On the history of "All Along the Watchtower" in the "Galactica" universe)

Moore: The notion is that the music, the lyrics, the composition is something divine, it's eternal. It's something that lives in the collective unconscious of the show, it's a musical theme that repeats itself. It crops up in unexpected places, and people hear it, or pluck it out of the ether. It's sort of a connection of the divine and the mortal -- music is something that people literally catch out of the air... Here is a song that transcends many different aeons and cultures across the star, and was reinvented by one Mr. Bob Dylan.

Eick: It was a simple way to communicate the idea clearly that this is not the future. This is the story of a culture that gave birth to ours. There was an episode in season one in which Helo and Sharon are running for their lives and they hole up in a diner, and there's a Cylon centurion cornering them, and for the longest time we planned to have an old jukebox in the diner that would play, "Yesterday," or whatever we could afford.

Moore: Probably not "Yesterday."

Eick: Okay, something from The Guess Who. I think we felt it was too soon, and would confuse things. It would be so non-specific that people would just be thrown by it. But we were thinking about it that far back, that music would be a great way to tell the audience about the cyclical theme... All the colloquialisms and slang that you hear, and how people interrelate... we get that from them, not the other way around.

(On whether Head Six and Head Baltar are angels or demons)

Moore: I think they're both. We never tried to name exactly what the head characters were, we never looked at them as angels or demons. They seemed to periodically say good things or evil things, to save people or to damn people. There was a sense that they worked in the service of something else... that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, sometimes tempting. The idea at the end was that whatever they're in service of is eternal and continues, and whatever they are, they too are still around, with all of us who are the children of Hera. They continue to walk among us and watch.

Ron Moore interview

When I talked to you at summer TCA, I ran through that checklist of unanswered questions.

Oh, yeah! What do you think?

You nailed pretty much every one. I think people are going to debate about Kara.

I accept that. I knew, when I decided this was as much as we were going to say about Kara, I said, "People are going to be pissed."

I don't want to spend too much time on Daniel, but did you realize that you were giving Kara's father this name that was so similar to Daniel?

That I had no idea. I only found that out online. I went, "Is that true? I guess it is." It's one of those things where you're inside the show and doing it, you don't realize that people are going to seize on this detail and it gets a life of its own. When I saw that stuff spreading online, I was really astonished. "Really? Daniel? They're obsessed with Daniel." So I started telling every interviewer, "Please tell people not to focus on Daniel, because they're really going to be disappointed."

This was a very dark, very bleak show, that had, for the most part, a happy ending. Were you ever tempted to go the dark way? Why did you decide to end it the way you did tonally?

I guess I always assumed it was going to end on some sort of note of salvation -- that they would find a home and be okay, at least some of them. I didn't want to end the series like "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," with the destruction of everybody. Although that's what Eddie wanted to do. Eddie kept pitching me that they come to Earth in contemporary times, and everyone's cheering and happy, and cut to the White House and the President goes, "Nuke 'em!" And they destroy Galactica -- cut to credits. And people say I'm dark!

I was literally never tempted to go that way. I always felt that however brutal the show was, and how bleak it felt in moments, it was never nihilistic. It was never about saying that people are irredeemable. It was about trying to be honest about people, saying, "Look at us. We are capable of all these things. Really good people do horrible things and horrible people do good things."

Given how often you used the show to comment on current events or, at least, draw current events in the show, do you feel that the finale in any way speaks to what's happening now?

Only in the sense of where it finally ends up in the very end: the robotics and where we are about to be technologically. I just saw something the other day with a scientist saying we're going to have a true (artificial intelligence) within five years or something crazy. Or these Japanese robots that look like the woman in the finale, they're getting more currency. It's been an old saw in science fiction for a long time, since Frankenstein, that we're going to create life that's going to turn on us. Well, we're right there, and we should probably really think about these things and understand the door we're about to go through.

I'm curious about a few characters' final fates. You very easily could have gotten away with Helo sacrificing his life so Athena could go after Hera, but they got the happy ending in the end.

There were two things. One, originally when we were breaking the story, Athena and Helo were both going to die to save Hera. And then I felt sort of unsatisfied about that. I really wanted that family unit to survive to the end. So in the script, when Helo gets shot in the corridor and he's left, I didn't intend it to be a cliffhanger of "is he going to die?" I just kept writing it, and there wasn't a moment to establish he was okay. And when Tahmoh read the script, he got that point and said, "Oh, (bleep), I'm dead." And when he got to the end, he was surprised.

And then it becomes this tearjerking moment when you see the three of them off in the distance (on Africa) and you realize he survived and they're intact.

And when Tahmoh had that reaction, I decided, "Well, now I definitely don't want to establish that he's okay," because I wanted people to have that same reaction.

Well, did anyone else almost die and then you gave them a reprieve in the end?

We did talk, for a long time, that Adama and Laura were going to get in a Raptor together and fly off into the stars, and Adama was going to show her the universe, and that would be the last we see of them. And before I ever even wrote it, Mary got wind of that and called me and said, "You know what? In our very first conversation about the show, we agreed Laura would die. I feel it's important to actually show it," and I said she was absolutely right, so she died on camera and Adama lived on camera.

Because when he said goodbye to Lee like that, I assumed he was going to wait for Laura to die and then crash the Raptor or something.

I knew people would have that reaction.

So he's going to be like Tyrol, just live off by himself?

He's going to build that little cabin, and who knows what.

Aaron Douglas keeps saying, "Well, you know what? They're going to get a message. Someone's going to trudge up the hill to Adama and hand him a note, saying, 'Tyrol needs you in Scotland!' And Adama will put on his pack and go off to Scotland!"

Given how much of the show was made up on the fly by you and the other writers, looking back, how well do you think everything hangs together with the finale factored into it?

I think it hangs together better than it has any right to. I do feel good that the process I always believed in and really defended -- about feeling the story instinctively as you go through it, and not being tied to, "Oh, we know exactly how it's going to end up" -- that that was true. We were able to get there and could say, "We've been making this mosaic, and now we just need to put the final touches on it and we'll have a complete picture." There's loose threads and things that don't quite work, but I think that's in the nature of almost any show. By and large, I think we did a pretty good job of it.

The thing I wonder about is the head characters and how (important they were). There's that moment at the end where Caprica Six says something like, "That's it? You just needed us to carry Hera into that room and protect her?"

Well, if you look over the life of the show, they certainly did more than that. But ultimately, that was the key moment that makes everything else possible.

Some of what Head Six is doing is keeping Baltar alive and free, but when she's encouraging him to start the cult, and get the cult armed and all that, is that just her screwing around for her own amusement?

No, I think that she's moving him towards an acceptance of the divine. Baltar could not make that speech in CIC unless he had gone through a religious conversion. If he didn't have a belief in something greater than himself, he couldn't have made that argument to Cavil in that moment.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica: My favorite episodes

In my review of the penultimate episode of "Battlestar Galactica," I mentioned that I was having trouble with my list of the 10 best episodes of the series, and opened the floor to suggestions. So many of you offered up your own favorite episodes, and defended your choices so passionately, that I was half-tempted to not even bother with my own list. But a promise is a promise, and since I already have my finale review written and ready to post mere moments after the episode ends -- and, word of warning, Sci Fi says it's going to run about two hours and 11 minutes, so set your recordings accordingly -- I need an excuse to write a little more about "BSG" before it's gone.

In the end, I couldn't restrict myself to 10 hours of the show, and since it's my list, I can play by any rules I want. In some cases, I combined two-parters (or, in the case of the New Caprica arc, what was essentially a five-parter), but we're still well above the 10-hour mark. So be it. After the jump, my choices, and if your own favorite isn't on there, it's only because I couldn't do a 40-plus episode list or I wouldn't get anything else done this week....

"33": The miniseries was cool, but "33" -- the regular series' first episode, in which the fleet battled fatigue while having to jump from the Cylons every 33 minutes -- was the episode that made it clear Ron Moore and company were really going to dazzle. The claustrophobia and sense of exhaustion and paranoia were palpable, and the fact that Lee and Kara went through with destroying the Olympic Carrier showed that the series was playing for keeps.

"Flesh and Bone": The first and one of the strongest episodes of the series to make you question which side you're supposed to be pulling for. Kara tortures Leoben trying to find what turns out to be a non-existent bomb, and Laura has him thrown out an airlock, as we start to realize that "the schoolteacher" is even more hardcore about defense over civil liberties than Adama.

"Flight of the Phoenix": The show struggled a lot with its self-contained episodes in the middle seasons, but this was a winner. Chief Tyrol, determined to make something good happen after months on end of depressing news, tries to build a new Viper from scratch, and in the process gives the rest of the Galactica crew a cause, half-frivolous and half-practical, to rally around.

"Pegasus": There but for the grace of the gods could have gone Bill Adama, as the rag-tag fleet reunites with the only other surviving battlestar, and we discover how things might have gone if Adama didn't have Roslin yelling at him all the time about the rights of the civilian ships. Just a gut-wrencher from start to finish, and the scene where the two XO's get drunk and Jack Fisk tells Tigh what Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes, perfect) has been up to all these months is so vivid that it made much of "Battlestar Galactica: Razor" feel unnecessary to me.

"Scar": Another great self-contained show, and one of the best showcases Katee Sackhoff ever got, as we spend an entire hour just living with the Viper pilots and getting a better sense of the emotional toll of war without end for the toughest warrior of them all.

"Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2": People mostly remember the last half-hour, with the mind-blowing time jump to one year after the New Caprica settlement, but the rest of the show has plenty to recommend it, notably Laura begging Adama to let her steal the election, and the creepy/tragic Baltar/Gina sex scene.

"Occupation," "Precipice," "Exodus, Pt. 1 & 2" and "Collaborators": In many ways, the New Caprica arc (and I count "Collaborators" as part of that) was the highpoint of the series, from an emotional and technical standpoint. Never has the show touched a present day nerve as strongly as when Tigh and Roslin debated suicide bombing. Never (with the possible exception of the finale, about which I'll stay mum till tonight) has there been a moment as jaw-droppingly cool as Galactica jumping into the atmosphere and falling like a rock so it could launch its Vipers away from the gauntlet of the Cylon baseships, and the last-minute arrival of Pegasus may rank a close second on the wicked awesome scale. The stakes have rarely seemed higher, the line between the good guys and bad guys rarely blurrier, and the performances rarely better. If I had to explain the brilliance of the show to a doubting novice, I'd sit them down in front of these five episodes.

"Dirty Hands": Where "Black Market," the previous attempt to illustrate what life was like in the rag-tag fleet if you weren't the president or a hot-shot fighter jock, was one of the series' low points (though I still like Bill Duke's performance as the lead marketeer), "Dirty Hands" managed to show what a terrible journey this has been for so many while still feeling like part of the larger whole. I still have some issues with the idea that Baltar, so soon after the New Caprica fiasco, would be accepted by the fleet's underclass as a political champion, but James Callis and Aaron Douglas are so good throughout that I can let it go after all this time.

"Crossroads, Part 2": So many great moments: Lee's monologue about humanity becoming a gang. Saul Tigh declaring that he considers himself a man and not a machine, no matter what the song may be telling him. Laura giving Baltar the death stare in a scene where Mary McDonnell isn't even being shot in focus. And, of course, the hypnotic brilliance of Bear McCreary's reinvented "All Along the Watchtower." After this episode, there was no turning back from the end of the series.

"The Ties That Bind": I know I've been a bigger fan of this final season than many. I was the same way with the final half-season of "The Sopranos." In both cases, the pace slowed down, but the sense of impending doom, and our understanding of the characters, only got amplified as we headed toward the finish line. I could easily fill half this list with episodes from the two halves of season four, but I'll limit it to just a handful, starting with this dread-soaked spotlight on Cally. She's a character I could never stand, and whose death I openly rooted for a few times, but "The Ties That Bind" did such a good job of putting me inside her head that I felt very bad for her when Tory blew her out the airlock.

"Hub": Aka "Mary McDonnell rules you all, and shame on the damn Emmy voters for not noticing." The Cylon resurrection hub gets destroyed, but it's treated as a funeral and not a stirring victory. Laura finally gets Baltar to confess to his role in the genocide, but eventually chooses forgiveness over revenge. And, in the end, Laura Roslin finally gets her man. "About time." Damn right.

"Revelations": Even if it had ended right before the fleet arrived at the irradiated Earth, this one was so overflowing with other brilliant moments -- Adama's reaction to Tigh being a Cylon, Lee finally becoming a man, Tigh offering to sacrifice himself to foil D'Anna's plans -- that it would probably make this list, anyway. But that last five minutes -- the majestic, celebratory arrival in Earth orbit, followed by the nasty gut punch of landing on the planet below -- are astonishing.

"The Oath" & "Blood on the Scales": If I was being stricter about the 10-episode count, I'd probably restrict this one simply to "Blood on the Scales," which I felt was the stronger half of the coup mini-arc. But together they're packed with pure action, mixed with some great character beats (particularly for Gaeta) and some thoughtful debate between Gaeta and Zarek about the nature of a coup.

Anyway, that's what I chose. Feel free to harangue me in the comments, or else wait until the finale ends tonight and come back to comment then. Do not use this or any other post as a venue for discussing the finale as it airs. Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica: Admiral Adama goes to the United Nations

Last night, I had one of the coolest/geekiest experiences of my career, as I got to attend a panel discussion on "Battlestar Galactica" at the United Nations' Economic and Social Council Chamber, featuring Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell and producers Ron Moore and David Eick and several UN reps, moderated by Whoopi Goldberg.

After the jump, a breakdown of how the evening went...

Sci Fi Channel went to the trouble of dressing up every seat in the room with placards designating the 12 Colonies. Caprica, naturally, was the primo seating area. I wound up getting a very good view but a very uninspiring colony by sitting in the Leonis section. At first, we wondered if they were maybe pre-existing props from the series (maybe from season one's "Colonial Day"), but the corners weren't cropped, and a friend who used to work on the show pointed out that for that to be true, someone would have needed to know this event would be happening before production wrapped almost a year ago so they could be saved, and that's unlikely. By the end of the evening, a lot of the placards had disappeared into people's bags.

Three things to keep in mind before I get to summarizing the event:

1. The evening was as much about the UN as about "Battlestar Galactica," if not moreso. There were four segments, devoted to issues like human rights, terrorism, and children and armed conflict. After a clip reel illustrating how the series at one point or another tackled that issue, the UN rep gave a long speech discussing the current state of that problem in our world, often making a token attempt at best to connect their subject to the show. Then Whoopi tried her best to balance discussing the issue currently and discussing it in the context of "BSG." Some of the panelists admittedly had never watched the show before they were invited to do the event, and some of the subjects had only a tangential connection at best ("BSG" really only dealt with kids and human trafficking in "Black Market"), and it felt like a lot of the night was an attempt to introduce "BSG" fans to issues that the UN deals with as opposed to introducing the geo-politically-inclined to "BSG."

2. Eddie Olmos likes to talk. The guy's opinionated, and he's passionate, and he'll go on a while. (Whoopi had to cut him off a few times.) But he also has a sense of self-deprecation about it. "You should've never invited me here," he admitted, right before he went on a rant about his hatred of the concept of referring to different ethnic groups as "races." (Said rant climaxed with him leading the crowd in a call-and-response of "So say we all!")

3. Considering 1 & 2, Whoopi did a very good job. Obviously, part of her job on "The View" is to try to maintain control of a chaotic discussion among strong personalities, and she's an unabashed sci-fi fangirl, so she was well-suited to keeping the conversation moving and trying to find a balance between "BSG" talk and UN talk.

Now, onto the four segments:

Human Rights

We started off with clips of Kara torturing Leoben in "Flesh and Bone," then The Circle conducting their executions in "Collaborators," and then Lee's speech in "Crossroads, Part 2" about how they've become a gang. Craig Mokhiber, Deputy Director of the New York office of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, seemed the most plugged-in to the show of all the UN reps, making several references to the show -- "We are all Cylons," he said at one point, while discussing the idea that we dehumanize our enemies to allow ourselves to do horrible things to them, "Every one of us is a Cylon, and every one of us is a Colonial."

Moore and Eick talked a lot about Leoben getting waterboarded, and Eick noted that they went out of their way to make it ambiguous whether he actually had the nuke Kara was looking for, which made it even harder to get on her side as she tortured him.

This segment is when Eddie's rant about race happened, because Mokhiber quoted the founding documents of the human rights office in his speech, and it contained references to different races. When the mic got turned back to Mokhiber a few minutes later, he seemed mortified and went out of his way to explain that the document he was quoting was 60 years old, and featured other outmoded terminology like referring to the two "sexes." And he said he would support any effort to get that language changed.

"When a bug doesn't like you," Eddie said in response to the offer, "that's racism."

"That is so deep, I'm going to take a question (from the audience) now," Whoopie interjected.

There were a few hundred NYC high school students in the crowd, and they were occasionally allowed to ask questions, starting with one about whether our current obsession with technology could lead to the creation of actual Cylons. Moore cleverly brought this back on topic by noting that we're a few years away from actual artificial intelligence, and that there's going to come a point where we have to decide whether to extend human rights to artifical but self-aware creations.

Children and Armed Conflict

Again, this one had very little connection to the show, and the UN rep, Radhika Coomerswamy, admitted she had only watched a couple of episodes to prep for the panel, and was pleasantly surprised to find it was "a deeply moral show" and not just a showcase for special effects.

Whoopi adroitly picked up on some of Coomerswamy's stories about horrific things done to young girls in war-torn countries and used that to spin the discussion around to gender on "Galactica." Moore and Eick talked for a while about how, once they made Starbuck a woman, they decided they wanted her to not be the first female Viper jock, but one of many, in a gender-neutral society, in which all the female officers were called "sir," and in which gender-related epithets were never used. (The closest they came, they admitted, was whenever someone would dismiss Laura Roslin as "a schoolteacher.")

One of the student questions went back to the human rights discussion, asking Mary whether she thought that Roslin was committing crimes when she threw people out of airlocks. Mary said she did, and that it troubled her personally, but that in character, she was absolutely committed to the belief that it was necessary.

"Mary can say she was haunted by airlocking," said Eick, "But she was the one who made it a verb."

Eddie noted that they had deliberately made Laura "the 214th person in line to get this job," and Mary, mock indignant, interrupted to check with Moore that she was, in fact, the 43rd person in line for it.

After another monologue about whether the UN should intercede with the problems in Mexico, Eddie talked about how he as Adama never listened to Roslin on military-related decisions, "And that was a mistake." Moore said they wanted to explore how fragile the law is at times of war, and Eick noted, "You get a brief glimpse into the dynamics of the set when you hear Mary refer to the President as 'Laura,' and Eddie refers to the Admiral as 'I.'"

Terrorism

Whoopi noted that we were running way behind at this point, so the last two segments were briefer than the first two.

The clip reel, not surprisingly, focused on the New Caprica arc and Roslin and Saul Tigh's debate about suicide bombing. Moore said he wanted Tigh to have a strategic rationale for ordering the bombings, that it would be much more frightening if he was logical than if he was crazy.

Reconciliation and Dialogue Among Civilizations and Faiths

There was a lot of talk here about the decision to make the Cylons (the ostensible villains) the monotheists and the humans the polytheists. Moore said it happened almost by accident. He was writing a Caprica Six scene in the miniseries and, on a whim, had her say, "God is love," and a Sci Fi Channel executive liked the line and told him to run with it.

"The network wanted more religious tension," said Eick. "How often do you hear that?"

"Other than on my show," said Whoopi.

They started wrapping up. Moore said that he wanted the show to entertain, but also to make people think -- that even if people came out of episodes like "Flesh and Bone" or "Occupation" with the same beliefs they had when they went in, "at least you thought about it."

Eddie talked about the incredible journey, how they made 84 hours of television. There are some shows or movies that you spend time watching, or working on, where you might regret those lost hours when you're on your deathbed, and he didn't think either those who watched or worked on this show would feel that way.

Mary said she felt "honored to have participated in such profound simplicity," and she and Eddie both expressed their gratitude for being able to participate in an event like this.

And on a lighter closing note, Whoopie said, "I thank God for the word 'Frak,'" which she's used a few times on "The View," to the confusion of her co-stars.

Finally, let me remind you once again that this is not a political blog, and any comment by someone who jumps on here to complain about the UN, or US foreign policy, or anything else unrelated to "BSG" itself will be deleted. Period. I'm halfway tempted to just turn off comments for this post, as I'm afraid the political talk will be unavoidable, so just know I'm going to have a quick trigger finger today. Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part 1": Got a one-way ticket to the finish line

Spoilers for part one of the two-part, three-hour "Battlestar Galactica" series finale coming up just as soon as I feel the perfection of creation...

"Galactica has been more than our guardian. She's literally a vessel into which we've poured all of our hopes and dreams. And when she's gone -- when we can no longer derive the security from looking out her window and seeing her massive bulk floating by -- then this life will be over. And a new life will have begun. A new life that requires a new way of thinking." -Gaius Baltar

"Daybreak, Part One" felt very much like the first part of "Exodus": Adama preparing for what seems like another suicide mission against the Cylons, lots of set-up for the big confrontation, but all the real action saved for the conclusion. And if "Daybreak, Part Two" is even half as good as the corresponding chapter of "Exodus," then the series will be going out on an awfully high note.

But beyond moving pieces to their proper places on the board, the first part of "Daybreak" also takes the series back to its roots. With Ron Moore on script and Michael Rymer in the director's chair -- as they were together for the miniseries and as they haven't been since the first half of "Lay Down Your Burdens" -- it feels right that we open up with an extended look back on what most of our major characters (plus Anders) were up to in the months (and in some cases, years) leading up to the Cylon genocide.

There are still more blanks to be filled in -- What one-hour meeting was Adama so reluctant to go to? Is Lee drunk because Zak just died? Did Caprica Six really put Baltar's father Julius in the retirement community, or did she ease his pain the way she did the baby in the miniseries? -- but what tied all the stories together (except for Anders, but we'll get back to him) was the way they showed or hinted at our characters suffering devastating losses long before the nukes started flying over Caprica City. Zak Adama died in a Viper crash. Laura Roslin's family was wiped out by a drunk driver. Baltar had to care for an ailing father he openly despised (and vice versa).

And as I watched Laura step into her favorite fountain (last glimpsed, I believe, during her hallucinations in "Epiphanies") and let its water wash over her tears, and as I watched her carefully eating sushi and trying to act normal three months later, I began to wonder if maybe the grand plan for these characters isn't quite as grand as some of us want to believe. Maybe the reason that these are the people who have survived everything the Cylons have had to throw at them -- beyond luck, of course -- isn't a matter of destiny, or the work of the Cylon God, or any other metaphysical force. Maybe these are just the people who are gods-damned tough enough to take everything the last four years has thrown at them and keep on going. Maybe Laura Roslin has been able to keep it together after all this time because she already had her world taken away before the Cylons came back. Maybe she calls on the memory of that day the two cops came to her door when she needs to find the strength to get up off her death bed and hobble down to the flight deck, even though she can barely stand or speak, because she's not going to let her second family leave without her.

Because so much of this hour was devoted to setting up the true finale, there wasn't as much time for the big emotional wallops we've been getting throughout season four, but you'd have to be made of stone to not be incredibly touched by the sight of Bill Adama welcoming the woman he loves as she joins him on this suicide mission, and on Kara Thrace helping the president she admires stand up even as Laura's legs want to give out from under her.

Our trip back in time was also a reminder of just how much Caprica Six has grown and changed over the course of these four years -- and how much Gaius Baltar hasn't. She feels tremendous guilt for the role she played in the genocide; he's shrugged off the blame like water off a duck's back. She's no longer the slinky sex machine but a scared and strong woman; he's just found a new venue in which to pick up desperate would-be lovers. She crosses the red line and joins the mission to rescue Hera; he, despite staring long and hard at her on the other side, and despite having been shamed by Lee earlier over his life of selfishness, stays right where he is.

That said, I can't imagine a scenario in which Baltar doesn't have a last-second change of heart right before Galactica takes off from the rag-tag fleet. Though the writers haven't really known what to do with Baltar since the trial ended, he has to be a part of the grand finale, both because James Callis is such a great actor and because Head Six said he would play a role.

Why are so many people (including Doc Cottle, who has to be sent back for the good of the fleet) willing to join Bill on this foolish quest? Why, for that matter, is Bill willing to do it? This isn't like the New Caprica arc, where most of the galaxy's remaining humans were trapped down on that planet; this is one girl, and even though Ellen and the rebel Cylons talk about how important she is in the grand scheme of things, why would so many humans with practical survival concerns put themselves at risk for her?

I think the impending demise of the ship itself has everybody spooked, and contemplating, as Head Six suggests, that "The end times are approaching." They've been running for four years and almost nothing good has happened. Their supplies are dwindling, they're not making babies as fast as adults are dying off, Earth was frakked, and now the fleet's longtime protector is falling apart? I can see how that might put people in a less careful frame of mind, and/or how it might convince them that saving the Cylon/human hybrid is the only mission left worth completing.

Speaking of Head Six, with only two hours (really, around 90 minutes plus commercials) of the series remaining, I wanted to look back on that list of questions I asked Ron Moore in the wake of "Revelations" and see how many have been answered and how many are still hanging over the finale:

&bull: The identity of the final Cylon? Check. (Ellen)

• The origin and nature of the Final Four and how they're different from the rest of them? Check. (See "No Exit")

• The origin of the rest of the skinjobs? Check. (ibid)

• What happened to Earth and what happened to the 13th Colony? Check. (op cit)

• Who, if anyone, is orchestrating all of this? Maybe? (Moore said this one wouldn't be wrapped up in a bow, so we could read this as Cavil, or as the Final Five, or as a figure or force yet to be revealed in the final two hours.)

• Will "All this has happened before and it will happen again" be explained in some way? Maybe? (Again, we could interpret that as involving the cycle of human-on-Cylon violence, or there's something more at work.)

• The opera house? Still waiting on this one.

• What happened to Kara when she went through the Malestrom? Still waiting on this one.

• Identity and nature of the "head" characters? Still waiting on this one.

• Tigh and Six's baby, and whether that means Cylons can breed? Mostly resolved in "Deadlock."

• The fate of Boomer and whether there are other 1's, 4's and 5's floating out there? Check.

• Roslin's health? Pretty much check, as I don't see her walking away from the finale, one way or another.

Can Moore answer the remaining questions, provide satisfying endpoints to the remaining characters, and deliver a good mix of action and drama over the final episode? I've got faith.

Some other thoughts:

• Anders' locker room interview about being less interested in winning and losing than in the perfection and geometry of Pyramid is the sort of thing that would have gotten him ripped up and down the Caprica sports blogosphere, their equivalent of "SportsCenter," etc. And while it didn't thematically tie in with the other flashbacks (at least not yet), it did show that maybe Sam has been heading towards this hybrid status all along, that maybe he always wanted to be as much machine as man. That, and he likes to sit in hot tubs, regardless of his mental state.

• As the series comes to a close, we get our first real interaction between Adama and Hot Dog -- and, therefore, a nice moment between papa Olmos and his son Bodie.

• Speaking of Hot Dog, while I admire his gallantry and willingness to follow the Old Man into Hell, is Nicky going to lose three different parents before his third birthday? And if Baltar's staying behind, does Lee really want to risk having a less careful eye in charge of the reconstituted Quorum if he dies on this mission?

• Adama freeing the mutineers to go on the mission got glossed over a bit, but it felt like a nice touch to have Racetrack and Skulls go on one last scouting mission together.

• The presence of Baltar's father also provided a nice callback to the scene in "Dirty Hands" where Baltar tells Tyrol about escaping the farm where he grew up and changing his accent into something more cultured.

• Despite the ominous sound of Simon prepping his instruments during our brief visit to The Colony, I can't imagine that even this show would let the big rescue mission arrive after Hera had been dissected. On this one, I have to side with Helo over Athena.

• I also found it interesting that Helo didn't seem that mad at Tyrol for his role in Hera's kidnapping. (There were apparently some deleted scenes from "Islanded in a Sea of Stars" that showed how Tyrol wound up in the brig.) Helo's barely holding it together, and the only way he can rationalize what's happened is to compare Tyrol's relationship with an Eight to his own, even though Athena is everything he's always believed her to be, while Boomer's loyalties are ever-shifting.

A few pieces of housekeeping before I open it up to comments:

1. For the last time with this show, I implore you to remember the spoiler rule, which basically translates to No Spoilers. No talking about anything from the previews. No talking about anything you've read or heard elsewhere about what's going to happen in the finale. Period. Any comment that I find even vaguely questionable will be deleted, regardless of what else is in that comment.

2. I'll be seeing the final two hours of "Daybreak" on Monday night at a Sci Fi Channel screening, and there will be some kind of media Q&A afterwards with members of the cast and creative team. So I'll have my finale review all ready to go after the show ends on Friday night. And depending on how the Q&A goes, I'll post highlights or a full transcript of it around the same time.

3. On Tuesday night, I'll be going to yet another "BSG"-related event: Ron Moore, David Eick, Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell at the United Nations to discuss the series' approach to 21st century geopolitical issues with a trio of UN reps, moderated by Whoopi Goldberg (who, don't forget, is a big sci-fi nerd who played Guinan -- and worked with Moore -- on "Star Trek: The Next Generation"). Depending on how that goes, I hope to have a write-up of that sometime on Wednesday.

4. I was going to do my list of Top 10 (or, if I get wimpy, Top 15) "BSG" episodes ever for today, but got tied up with other things. I have a good idea of what I want on it, but as always with lists, I'm willing to at least listen to suggestions -- particularly ones that don't involve mid-season cliffhangers, season finales or season premieres, which is where many of the really obvious choices lie. It's not hard to point to, say, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2," but if somebody wants to make an argument for something like "Flight of the Phoenix," I'm all ears.

Keeping all that in mind, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica, "Islanded in a Stream of Stars": Going down with the ship

Spoilers for last night's "Battlestar Galactica" coming up just as soon as I imagine that my bran muffin is a cupcake...

"I've had it up to here with destiny, prophecy, with God or the gods. Look where it's left us: The ass end of nowhere, nearly half our people are gone, Earth a worthless cinder and I can't even walk down the halls of my ship without wondering if I'm going to catch a bullet for getting us into this mess." -Bill Adama

"There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza." -Anders

It's all falling apart. And there's no fixing it, is there?

Roslin is near death. Galactica is about to be abandoned and scavenged. Hera is in the hands of Cavil, separated even from the facsimile of her mother. Baltar is so without hope for their current state of affairs that he's now giving sermons about angels and eternal life. Athena can't even look at Helo, and Helo is losing his grip on sanity. Tigh is losing more of his children, even as Ellen is forcing him to accept that they're his. Lee is barely in control of the new congress of fleet captains.

When Ron Moore said the state of things would actually get bleaker from what we saw in "Sometimes a Great Notion," he wasn't kidding. And while a dark, apocalyptic ending feels tonally appropriate to everything that's come before, I'm not sure how well I'm going to deal with all the deaths (of people and ships) that I suspect are coming in the two-week, three-hour finale.

"Islanded in a Stream of Stars," written by Michael Taylor and directed by Edward James Olmos, never let up on the sense of impending doom. Every scene on Galactica is punctuated by flickering lights and the sounds of creaking, protesting metal. Even the bathroom stall doors won't close (and Starbuck doesn't much care if Baltar sees her on the throne.) Every establishing shot of the fleet inevitably leads to a close-up of the gaping hole that Boomer left in the ship's hull. The Hera/Boomer story is bookended by scenes of little Hera wailing for a lost maternal figure (first Athena, then Boomer herself). There's no relief, no let-up. Even a relatively happy moment, like Lee assuring Kara that he doesn't care about who or what she is, isn't much of a respite, because Kara still needs to know (and so do we), and because Lee has to play dashing ex-boyfriend in front of the memorial wall.

(A quick but necessary detour: It's said that actors who direct -- particularly actors who direct their longtime co-stars -- often bring out more from the performances, and that was certainly true here with Olmos in charge. Not that the cast is anything less-than-brilliant, but almost everyone went to some new, scarier places in this one. Jamie Bamber was more coiled than he's ever been during the contentious fleet captains meeting, and then so effortlessly charming as he walked away from Kara. The number of emotions that can quickly wash across Katee Sackhoff's face seemed to triple. I never would have thought Tahmoh Penikett was capable of showing us a Helo teetering on the brink the way he did in the scene where he confronted Adama. And Grace Park got to show us two different Sharons, each coping differently with being separated from Hera. I could write entire posts just about each member of the cast's work in an episode like this, and it's a testament to them, as much as or more than the usually outstanding writing, direction, music, etc., on the series, that I'm going to be so wrecked if we get the inevitable unhappy ending.)

Though the episode finally takes us into The Colony, wakes up Anders from his coma (albeit by turning him into another babbling Hybrid), and prepares all of us for Galactica's destruction, it deliberately leaves most of the big answers for the Moore-scripted finale. We still don't know exactly what Cavil's plan is (when he talks about "playmates" for Hera, does he mean the creation of new Cylon models, or just that she's going to be spending a lot of time with the Simons?), nor what Kara's identity and role is, nor the truth of the head characters and the opera house visions, but we're getting extremely, tantalizingly close to all of it.

My favorite shot of the episode was of Kara, right after her discussion of angels with Baltar, going in to see Sam. Outside in the corridor, she's bathed in a heavenly white glow, while inside the compartment, she's suffused with a devilish red. Is she an angel? A tool of the apocalypse? Both? I need to find out, even as I suspect I won't like the answer -- not for being unsatisfying, but for signaling bad things to the many characters I care about.

Some other thoughts:

• Do you think Kara subconsciously realizes that Baltar will blab her secret, and going to him is her way of unburdening herself to her friends without having to tell them directly?

• One of the hallmarks of the four episodes that Olmos directed over the years is the way he likes to show us familiar parts of the ship in a new way, like that lovely shot of proud, tired old men Tigh and Adama splayed on the big sectional sofa in Adama's quarters. We've seen that couch a hundred times in different scenes set there, but never at that angle, in that way. For so many people in the rag-tag fleet, or even on Galactica, the last four years has felt like time in a floating metal prison, but to Bill Adama -- and to his dying lover, which Laura so movingly articulates in sickbay -- this is home.

• Gary Hutzel's F/X team were in fire with this episode, between all the shots of the hole, the dead Six floating through the fleet, and the awesome, horrifying glimpse of The Colony. (I type notes of all my reactions as I watch, and when that thing first popped up, I banged out, "WHAT THE FRAK IS THAT?") It looked very much like something H.R. Giger would have cooked up for the first "Alien" if he had access to modern CGI technology.

• I loved the funeral sequence, with the different speeches from different sources -- Colonial vs. Cylon, religious vs. secular -- laid on top of each other. Slowly but surely, all these different groups are coming together, even as it feels too late for it to matter.

• Was Baltar being sarcastic when he asked Kara who she was, or has he just slept with so many women over the last few years that he's forgotten the one who called out Apollo's name when they were in bed together?

• I loved our brief glimpse of the bad-ass Six who got into a fight with one of the Galactica repair crew, then saved him (and everyone else) while sacrificing her own life after the explosive decompression. A really memorable character in a short period of time, almost like they gave Tricia Helfer a chance to play Starbuck for a few minutes. There isn't much variation between the Eights, and none that we've seen among the other Cylon models, but it's a testament to Helfer that she's been able to play so many different versions of the same character.

• Silly question: how does Hera even know what a cupcake is? She's only three, and for most of the life that she can remember, she's been eating nothing but an algae diet.

• One nitpick: I could have done without the vaguely Southern accent on the one fleet captain who said "and I use that term loosely" when referring to the skinjobs as "people." Seemed too on-the-nose to have the bigot sound like he could be a Klansman.

• Even in the midst of the despair, Michael Hogan can bring the funny. Ellen's going on about how the Final Five wanted to bring an end to the cycle of human/machine violence, and Saul shrugs it off and says, "That was a bust."

For the next-to-last time, a reminder of two of the basic rules around here: 1. No talking about anything in the previews, or anything you've read/seen/heard about the last two episodes, or anything that even vaguely qualifies as a spoiler. Any comment along those lines will be deleted, period, regardless of what else you've written in that comment. 2. Show respect to your fellow commenters (and those of us who try to read all the comments) by at least skimming what's come before before asking a question or making an observation that's come up a few dozen times already. At the very least, do a browser word search for whatever it is you want to talk/ask about.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Battlestar Galactica: Weddle & Thompson talk "Someone to Watch Over Me"

As she's been doing for most of this final batch of "Battlestar Galactica" episodes, Mo Ryan reached out to the writers of "Someone to Watch Over Me" with some questions about the show. Last week and this week, she invited me to throw in some of my own questions, and writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson answered many of them -- while Weddle noted that he had answers for others in a letter he wrote to "BSG" composer Bear McCreary. Bear should have the full letter up on his blog by the time I post this, and I'll include some excerpts from it at the end of David and Bradley's responses to the questions Mo and I asked.

Alan: When Tyrol returns to the dream house on Picon, is it empty because he's not doing the projection with Boomer? Or is it empty because she was scamming him the whole time?

Weddle: Cylon projections are fantasy expressions of their subconscious desires or emotional life. Tyrol’s return to the empty fantasy house at the end of the show to find Boomer and his imaginary daughter gone was an expression his devastation and despair.

Thompson: It’s empty because that’s what he experienced. Like Tyrol, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions. But it was definitely not a random dramatic decision. We weren’t being all mysterioso. There’s logic to it.

While working in Japan a long time ago, a Japanese businessman I was interviewing explained that when Americans come to his country, they’re always asking what they should see, and his countrymen advise them to go see this or that famous shrine. The Americans take the trip and arrive at this shabby little shrine. And they’re disappointed. An interview subject told me it was because of a different cultural orientation. “For you Americans, it’s all about reaching the goal. For us, it is the journey.”

"Battlestar Galactica" is a wonderful journey – which, because we all took it together, will make Ron’s fantastic three-hour finish all the more compelling.

Mo: Did Boomer really love the Chief? Or was that final speech to him just another part of her con job?

Weddle: Did Boomer really love the Chief? That’s an interesting question and one I don’t have a neat answer to. Boomer is deeply conflicted. I think the process of having false memories planted in her, getting switched “on” as a Cylon, shooting Adama, getting shot by Cally, and her experiences on New Caprica have left her severely disturbed. She was determined to go through with her mission, but in the process of seducing Tyrol she reawakened feelings of love that she thought were dead. I think she experienced real misgivings just before she got on that Raptor, but felt she had gone too far to back down. Wrapped up in that is her perverse envy of Athena, who obtained everything Boomer once wanted, and this festered into a sick desire to strike out at Athena. It’s difficult to say someone who did that loves the Chief, and yet in her damaged way, I think she did and still does love him.

Thompson: Good question. She may not even know the answer. Boomer’s a complicated, damaged individual. Might both be true?

Mo: Is Tyrol in love with the real Boomer or the one he remembers?

Weddle: This is exactly the question he is struggling with. His visits to the fantasy house illustrate that he’s in love with the dreams he’s attached to Boomer about a life he would like to have. Don’t we all do this to some extent to the people we fall in love with? And when they fail to live up to our fantasies or expectations, it can be excruciating for them and for us.

Thompson: Black-and-white answers would be nice. But that’s not generally true of the human – or Cylon - heart. Brings up an interesting question: Does commitment to your mission, your country, your people, outweigh the dictates of your heart?

Mo: What did the Chief think was in that box he toted around for Boomer? Change of clothes?

Weddle: In the beginning of the episode, Starbuck instructs Raptor pilots going out on long duration planet-hunting missions to pack food and water for those long flights. And we see them pack cases just like the one Boomer puts Hera in. Tyrol thought he was giving Boomer a chance to get away and find a life somewhere. Naturally, she would need to take food and water to give her as much time to do that as possible.

Thompson: “PROVISION PACKAGE - LONG DURATION” – We establish those big boxes of gear as planet-hunting mission requirements early in the show, and since that was Athena’s task, it would draw attention if she didn’t load out one of those crates. So Chief Tyrol probably assumed she was carrying the box she was issued for the flight.

Mo: Would we be correct in assuming that everything Boomer did from the moment she left Cavil's base ship was part of his plan to get Hera?

Thompson: How do you escape from a fully armed base ship?

Alan: Ron said in the podcast for "Deadlock" that there was originally a different plan for how Boomer's story would end, but he couldn't get into it yet without spoiling what was to come on the actual show. Are we yet at a point where you can explain how the original plan diverged, or do we need to wait a while?

Thompson: You’ll have to wait.

The part of the question that is from Alan: Bear McCreary said that the piano player was partly modeled on him. Was this story about finding a way to celebrate Bear's contribution to the show, or had you decided to do a music-themed Starbuck episode and then realized you had a pretty talented musician nearby you could brainstorm with?

The part of the question that is from Mo: Was Bear on the set for the entire making of the episode, and if so, how much of "STWOM" was changed/altered/rethought based on his input? I look forward to reading Bear's account of the making of the episode on his blog, but what is your take on what he brought to it?

Thompson: The show was never conceived as “music themed” – we wanted to help fill in the gap we perceived in Starbuck’s story – and since her father was a musician, it seemed natural to explore what happened to the musical part of her.

We asked to have Bear was in Canada for the entire shoot, because he had to compose music that would actually be played live on the set during shooting by Roark Critchlow and Katee Sackhoff. It was also vital to have him interact with Michael Nankin, our director, because making a show like this is a constant process of discovery, and we needed the flexibility to change as we learned new things about the characters.

Bear also sampled our wonderfully out-of-tune set piano so he could add music voiced with the same instrument during scoring, as well as change any pieces that didn’t fly during the initial performance.

We modeled Slick on Bear because Bear undergoes the same tortures of the damned trying to top himself with each new Battlestar Score (keep setting the bar to the maximum and then trying to top it – try that for four years straight – yet he keeps succeeding). That seemed to match Slick’s drive to compose.

I can’t really speak to the idea of how much was “changed” due to his input because he was a full-on interactive collaborator in making the episode as successful as it was. It was something we all did together (with Ron and Michael, Katee and Roark) growing this thing organically from all our input.

Alan: Am I correct in interpreting the shot of Kara, Tigh and Tory at the piano -- with the piano player and his sheet music nowhere in sight -- to mean that he was never there? And if so, is Kara hallucinating -- or is she projecting? And is there any reason why we shouldn't assume that Kara's father -- musician with a name that starts with D, who taught her how to play the Final Five version of "All Along the Watchtower" -- is Daniel, the artistic and missing eighth Cylon model?

Thompson: Interpretations are always subjective and belong to the interpreter. We put something on the screen with clues to assemble into conclusions. Are yours the same as ours? Do they satisfy you?

Mo: Does the fact that Dreilide Thrace's recording was titled "Live from the Helice Opera House" have any connection to the "Opera House" visions that have long been part of the show?

Thompson: Maybe.

Mo: To me, so much of this episode (quite heartbreakingly) dwelled on what these people have lost or given up or had to suppress in order to survive. Was revisiting that an important part of starting to close the chapter on the story of these characters, in particular Tyrol and Starbuck?

Weddle: It was thrilling and fulfilling for Brad and me to write this episode because we got to revisit the pivotal characters of Boomer, Tyrol and Starbuck. We were deeply involved in plotting their character arcs throughout the four seasons of the show and it was exciting and rewarding to craft some of the final movements of their journeys. The entire staff believed it was very important to revisit the Boomer/Tyrol relationship, especially since the Chief has discovered he is a Cylon. And exploring Kara’s relationship with her father in a way completes her biography and rounds out her character. This episode puts events in motion that will propel our characters to the climax of our story. So it is not a tone poem in any sense of the word.

Thompson: We always felt that a love such as shared by Chief Tyrol and Lt. Valerii wouldn’t simply go quietly away – especially given the changes that both have gone through in the last four years. And the reasons they parted – do they make sense after all this? Is there still something left? We wanted to see where that led. And since we’re in the last headlong dive for the final logo, if not now, when?

Mo: For me, the moment when Tyrol spots the daughter he could have had is one of the most bittersweet and emotional ones of the season. Aaron Douglas' performance was spot on throughout, but I am betting director Michael Nankin had something to do with the performances we saw. Am I right in recalling that you had asked that he be hired to direct this episode? Why?

Thompson: Every one of the cast was blow-you-away spectacular. One of Nankin’s many gifts is the ability to run the throttle on these powerful engines so that the moment has maximum impact when it finally plays. I have to say that Aaron and Grace outdid themselves for this episode, fearlessly reaching into painful personal places for some of their best work. And Katee reached the same place with Slick.

Another part of Mr. Nankin’s talent is that he creates an atmosphere where actors feel safe taking chances, can risk falling on their asses, knowing that he’ll put them back on the path if they go astray. It’s a trust built over a lot of working together. And it’s especially tough on these actors because with them, we expect brilliance.

Michael Nankin is one of the most talented directors I’ve had the good fortune to work with, and he was slotted into Episode 19 long before we knew what it was – or that we’d be writing it. After “Someone…” Mark Verheiden was sorting out the writing assignments for the last shows of the series and asked us if we wanted to do one more. We, of course, grabbed for it with both hands and our prehensile feet. He then asked which slot we’d prefer and it was a no brainer: Mr. Nankin’s.

Mo: How much did you draw on the Weddle & Thompson writing process and collaboration for the scenes Kara and the piano player composing music?

Thompson: In my recollection, it was more about the agony and joy Bear experiences during that process. Of course, there are parallels in any creative endeavor, but in this case, David spent a lot of time talking with Bear and making it musician/composer-specific.

Mo: Speaking of composition, what had to be cut from "STWOM"? What happened on set that you weren't expecting or that presented difficulties?

Thompson: It’s been a while since I watched all this go down, but I think most of the cuts were in the music because it was long and that was the place where we could best afford the loss. The show was restructured in editing, because Andy and Paul found a way that the climax with Kara and the climax with Boomer could happen simultaneously, which made the end much more satisfying.

And I should note that we’d been admonished (by high level players who will remain nameless) not to have Helo make the mistake he makes. We backed off in subsequent drafts (feeling like we were somehow cheating the fans) until Michael Nankin’s first round of script notes hit Ron, saying, “I can’t believe you have this opportunity and you’re not going all the way with it.” And Ron turned to us and said: “He’s right. It’s so wrong we have to do it!” And we got to put that moment back in the show.

An addendum on Boomer-Tyrol story from Thompson: The thing I forgot to mention is, if I recall correctly, that the Boomer Tyrol aspect of this story was something we'd floated in the room in season 3 but didn't know where it fit or what it would be. Like so many Battlestar ideas, it simply hung in limbo until the time was right for maximum impact.

That's one of the genius parts of Ron -- patience. Like with the nuke six asked Baltar to get. And how it eventually played out. When the time came, we were very happy we'd had that one in our back pocket. But Ron didn't force playing that card until it made sense to do so. Likewise with Boomer-Tyrol.

Alan: A portion of the fandom has gotten upset with episodes like "A Disquiet Follows My Soul" and "Deadlock" for what they perceive as a slow pace, not enough answers about the mythology or forward plot advancement, and not enough about what they consider "the endgame." Now you guys have written an episode where large chunks are about Starbuck remembering how to play the piano, and while I liked it, I suspect you may have the barbarians at the gate like they were for Jane last week. Anything you want to say to reassure them about what's coming? Is a lot of the endgame stuff being saved for the finale proper? Or do you feel like fans who only care about the plot and the mythology are missing some key component of the show?

Weddle: I love the shows that concentrate on the emotional lives of our characters. They are fundamentally important in laying the foundation for the big action oriented episodes like [Season 3's] "Exodus." "Exodus" has so much power because "Occupation" and "Precipice" set the table, and put all the pieces in place for the climax. “A Disquiet Follows My Soul” sets the table for the two unbearably tense mutiny shows that follow it. Fans may think they want every episode to be nothing but slam-bang action, but if you didn’t have the quiet episodes that place each character emotionally and set up the stakes for our people, the action episodes would be hollow exercises.

Thompson: A great symphony or great novel can’t all be furious pace, crash, and bang. That would leave no room for dynamics and contrast. Battlestar Galactica has always been about the characters, not plot or endgame. It rests on the people: They’re either interesting and satisfying or not. As for what’s coming? It’s Ron’s vision, Ron’s story and either you trust him with the few hours that are left or you don’t. All I can say is that for us, the series comes to a satisfying, earned, and honest conclusion.

Mo: Did I spot Mr. Weddle sitting next to Starbuck in Joe's Bar at one point? Or was I projecting?

Weddle: Congratulations on spotting the Weddle skinjob at the bar. Now you know the hideous truth. Weddle is a Cylon. I am surprised you didn’t spot another skinjob in the bar during the previous episode.

Thompson: Yes. I’m in the scene, too, though I don’t think I made the cut. We flipped for who would be where, and had no idea how the scene would play at that point.

FROM DAVID'S LETTER TO BEAR MCCREARY:

...We felt this had to be a memorable episode, one that could stand beside the others. And we soon hit upon the idea of dealing with Kara’s father, the absent parent whom we knew about only through a brief snatch of his piano music played in her apartment in “Valley of Darkness.” By exploring her relationship with her father, we could complete the story of Kara, in a way.

We also were drawn to the idea that the scene in “Valley of Darkness” where Kara and Helo visit her apartment would contain two major clues to the epic story of "Battlestar": Kara’s painting on the wall, and her father’s music, which she plays and is obviously deeply affected by. If we could pull this off, a tangential scene that initially seemed to be only a poetic mood piece, would later be revealed as one of the most pivotal moments in the entire series.

So we sat down in the writers room with the rest of the staff and began to explore this. The first pedestrian approach that I flogged was to tell the story in a series of flashbacks where Kara would remember playing piano with her father as a child and remember the day he abandoned her. We soon hit on the idea that the song he taught her could be “All Along the Watchtower.” The problem was how we could make this episode feel inventive and fresh and not like “Maelstrom II.”

Two inspirations enabled us to create an exciting new story that was not derivative. First, Mark Verheiden suggested that Kara’s father appear in Joe’s bar on Galactica as a kind of ghost, or projection of her subconscious. And we would hide this until the very end of the story when she finally remembers the song he taught her to play.

The second inspiration came from Ron Moore, who had the idea of Hera actually drawing the notes of "Watchtower." Ron said this could enable Starbuck to remember the song at the very moment that Hera is being kidnapped. Once we had those to breakthroughs, the story fell into place very rapidly...

Again, you should be able to read the full letter at Bear's blog. Click here to read the full post