Ron Moore Questions and Answers

12/7/2005 -- Question: Are we going to continuing development of civilian government infrastructure, such as civilian police and schools?

We're starting to talk about these things more, but haven't shown them yet, which is ironic since I thought that these very structures would be a key component of the show and indeed, they were featured prominently in my initial pitch. But, as I said earlier, I prefer to let things evolve naturally, and this show seems to live most comfortably in the military world and not so much in the police or school worlds. (source: SciFi.com Behind the Scenes)

7/21/2006 -- There is a model that will be discontinued -- or boxed as they say -- and it is somebody that you know. It won't happen at the beginning of the season, we won't get to that until fairly late in the run of the third season. (source: San Diego Comic Con)

12/7/2006 -- Question: Will we ever find out why baby Hera is the shape of things to come?

Yes, we will, but probably not until close to the end of the series. (source: EOnline)

12/7/2006 -- We are going to play around with that a little bit. In some upcoming episodes [Adama and Laura] are a going to start dancing around the idea that maybe/maybe not there is something here. We're not going for full-blown romance, but there could be something in the offing. (source: EOnline)

12/7/2006 -- Question: Are we going to see a return of the mysticism in the future? Does the show deal with President Roslin's seeming abandonment of her role as the leader of the prophecies?

You will definitely see both of those things. (source: EOnline)

12/7/2006 -- [Anders] starts his own storyline [without Kara] in the latter half of the season. (source: EOnline)

12/7/2006 -- Question: Is the ragtag fleet going to encounter any other signposts or interesting artifacts left by the 13th Colony that point the way to Earth?

Yes, they will, and that happens this season. (source: EOnline)

1/14/2005 -- The overall arc has to do with the relationship between Adama and Laura Roslin, the transition of both of them from what you think is going to be their roles of the military hawk and the civilian dove. And starting to realize that actually... she's a harder-line character than he is, and that he is the son, not of a long line of military men, but the son of a civil liberties attorney. And that he's actually very reticent to be her policeman, as he says in one of the episodes. And that by the end of the season, their conflict would come to a head. (source: SciFi Wire)

5/28/2005 -- There are a couple of familiar faces that will go down for the count. I would say the events of the end of last season [mark] the beginning of this season. Adama's shot. There's people stranded on Kobol. Kara's back on Caprica. Those storylines continue; all those continue. I would say we don't wrap up season one until episode seven. Adama is not back on his feet any time soon. Commander Tigh is in charge of Galactica. Laura is in jail. There's a meteor crisis that follows the cliffhanger, and Tigh kind of steers them through that crisis successfully. But, you know, Tigh, he's probably the guy you don't want in charge. Things begin to unravel when [Tigh's] in charge of the fleet. He declares martial law at a certain point. There is an incident where he sends the troops to get supplies, because the ships are withholding supplies from Galactica. He says enough is enough and sends out the troops, and an incident happens, and people get killed. They shoot a bunch of civilians. It's a whole nightmare, and Laura starts an insurrection and the fleet divides. There's a lot of fallout from the events of the last season. (source: EnigmaCon, reported in the SciFi Wire on 6/1/2005)

10/6/2005 -- The second half of the season obviously is going to deal with the cliffhanger where we left off, with Pegasus and Galactica about to do battle. First episode will deal with that. Then we're going to do some episodes with, well, one of the characters who's going to have a major role to play is Lee Adama. He's going to go on his own emotional journey and eventually find himself. There's a big Laura episode. You get to see her life on Caprica before the attack, and you'll get to meet president Adar, who was the President she worked for when she was the Secretary of Education. And you'll get to see a glimpse of what her life was like before she found out she got cancer and before the attack. There's a storyline where Baltar's growing affinity for the Cylons becomes more prominent and he starts becoming somewhat darker and scarier character as time goes on.

We're going to be doing big episodes with the other battlestar, Pegasus. We've got a big fighter plane combat episode that's all about Kara and one of our other pilots named Kat and their competition with each other and with themselves as regards to one Cylon raider out there that keeps coming back and killing pilots again and again. We're gonna try to do a couple of really controversial episodes. We're gonna deal with some sort of hot-button issues of today that will be translated into Galactica's world. Like abortion is definitely going to become an issue on the show. We're going to do a Cylon-oriented episode later in the season that's a story that's told primarily from the Cylon's point of view for the first time. Sort of get inside their heads, see what they're about when they're not out chasing Galactica. And then we've got, of course, a big two-part finale where a lot of things are gonna change, and the show's gonna make a fairly significant, radical change of direction.

Lee and Dualla are starting to become a bit of an item in the second half of the season, which is of course very complicated by the fact that Dualla is involved with Billy. We have our first triangle! Well, actually our second if you consider the Sharon and Helo! Or Baltar and Six! And Baltar, actually, his connection to a woman that I sort of named Gina in Pegasus, the captive that was held there, his relationship with her will continue throughout the season as well. (source: EOnline)

3/11/2006 -- The end of the season is quite a shake-up. The Cylons show up and all hell breaks loose. Essentially, season three is going to deal with the Cylon occupation of the Colonials on New Caprica. The archetype that we're talking about is like Vichy France: There's a Colonial government run by President Baltar that is collaborating with the Cylons, while the humans put together an insurgent resistance against the occupation. It's a pretty big twist... Adama and the Galactica and Pegasus are gone, and they're trying to get their act together to figure out a way to come back and rescue [the Colonials]. And season three will start off in that world of the Cylon occupation... We do eventually plan on getting them back out into space, and also another major thing that's going to happen in the third season is we're going to do an ongoing Cylon story where we're going to be cutting over to the Cylon world for the first time and running a complete arc within the Cylon. (source: Now Playing)

8/2006 -- It starts four months into the occupation. Time has moved on, and certain things have had time to develop. There's an insurgency on New Caprica. Galactica and Pegasus are off someplace desperately trying to figure out a way to get back and rescue everyone. Baltar is still the president, but he is under the occupation authority. There are humans who are working with the Cylons, but are they collaborators or are they trying to make things better? We deal with suicide bombings and a lot of contemporary, heavy-duty issues again in the third season. But then there is fallout. Whose side were you on when the chips were down? Who is a collaborator, and what should happen to them? What of Gaius Baltar? We'll also be telling stories on the Cylon side. We're going to do a running Cylon storyline throughout the first 11 episodes, and it cuts over to a Basestar spaceship for the first time. (source: Sci-Fi Magazine)

10/2/2006 -- There is fallout from [New Caprica] that reverberates for a while. Both [Kara] and Col. Tigh have trouble integrating back into the crew, once they're on board [again]. And there's another beat with Kacey after that, and Tigh can't return to being XO for quite a while. Essentially he starts drinking and stays in his room all day. Kara's marriage gets on the rocks and the situation with Lee becomes more perilous and then at some point midseason, the destiny that Leoben and a couple of people have hinted around that Kara has starts to manifest itself. And she starts realizing and is afraid of the idea that maybe she is pulled toward some specific end goal. (source: Chicago Tribune)

12/7/2006 -- We are going to see some interesting things: We meet Adama's wife for the first time, in an unusual way, and see who his ex-wife is and the roots of why they were divorced and the problems Lee had growing up. There are some big stand-alone episodes, including one for Helo, and one for Tyrol, and there's a really pivotal episode with Starbuck, sort of a fighter-plane episode about her. Beyond that, it starts to wrap up into our finale, and there is a three-part episode that gets us to the end of the season. By then, we will have major revelations and some major plot turns. (source: EOnline)

12/13/2006 -- There's a pretty big loss coming midway through the second half of the season. You'll be pretty shocked about what happens to somebody... Episodes 14, 15 and 16 [are] a little more standalone and concentrate on particular characters a little more. We'll do some stuff with the civilians, their culture and society. We get to meet Adama's dead wife and understand who she was, in not quite a flashback kind of episode but one that deals with who Lee and Zak's mother was, and why did she and Adama divorce and why does he still have baggage about that in his life today. We have an episode about Tyrol and the aftermath of the union experience on New Caprica and what that means today in terms of labor and class. There's an episode that deals with Helo and racial and cultural tensions within the fleet. And then the episodes kind of crescendo into the end. There's kind of a three-part ending to the season, but it's formally a two-parter. But it crescendos into the culmination of a lot of the plot threads we've set up since the beginning of the season -- the Baltar line, the final five Cylons line, stuff with Lee and his father and the family Adama and who they're all about, things with Hera. The finale this season is more interconnected with the entire season than last year's was, or even before. This finale brings together a lot of plot threads and it has startling revelations [and] multiple cliffhangers. (source: Chicago Tribune)

8/14/2003 -- Human-like Cylons are better from a creative standpoint because the backstory now is that the Colonials created the Cylons. The Cylons went off and developed on their own... and then they came back in this new form. There's a stronger tie between Cylon and human; it literally is parent and child now. That creates a different resonance in the piece, because it's really your children that you have responsibility for, that you've created in a very literal sense, and that have now come back to haunt you... It creates many other possibilities. They can infiltrate human society. Will they lose themselves in human society? Will they begin asking existential questions such as who am I, and is there a god? Those are fascinating things when they are ostensibly a synthetic life-form... The original Cylons are still in the story, but in very small roles... they're not really the newest, coolest model of Cylon any more. (source: Robert Falconer)

11/5/2003 -- There will be more mechanical Cylons but they will be seen only sparingly. CGI is very expensive for a TV budget... I'm still working on the Cylon backstory, but yes, their belief in God and in their own souls developed during their 40-year exile. I've considered the Iblis connection, but I'm not sure if I'm going to use it that way or not. (source: Cylon Alliance)

12/4/2003 -- "Who are the Cylons? Why are they chasing the humans? Why do they hate them so much?" Ultimately, "What is this series about?" And in the original, it's not really about anything. The Cylons are evil because they're evil, and they're bent on galactic conquest because they're bent on galactic conquest, and they hate the humans because they hate the humans. And the humans are just like the noble, heroic, innocent, "Oh, we love freedom." And it was just nothing there. There's some vague story in the old show about the Cylons trying to take over a third alien race and the humans tried to defend them, and that sparked a war, but that's about as far as it goes. There's some intimations that the Cylons used to be reptilian and then their technology took over, but none of these are really at the heart of the drama. When David and I were talking story, we were like, "Okay, the Cylons destroy their entire civilization -- billions upon billions of people are dead -- and maybe like 50,000 people make it out of here and run away into the stars, and the Cylons just keep chasing them." And it's like, "Why?" You really kind of wonder, "What's the big deal?" ... They were villains because they were villains, and it didn't go any further than that. So from a creative aspect, we were looking for deeper, more interesting themes and stuff to play. (source: IGN FilmForce)

12/5/2003 -- [The idea of human Cylons] came out of discussions early on between myself and David Eick. We were talking over both production problems associated with doing full-on Cylon body suits or CGI as well as the existing problems with the Cylon backstory, or lack thereof. At some point we began to gravitate toward human-looking Cylons because the themes and stories would be more interesting and the production problems would be much more containable.

12/6/2003 -- Mankind has turned against them in this version, a traditional idea, but these believe in God, have a soul, feel they are children of humanity but must kill their parents. I'm more internally terrified of an enemy that's killing me in the name of God... When you look at it, you won't say we've treated the Cylons as Muslims. We're not dealing with al Qaeda. You can say they are stand-ins, but I don't think you can say the Cylons are Islamists. (source: Washington Post)

12/7/2003 -- These machines actually believe they have souls. They have a God and believe that the child cannot become an adult until the parent is dead. They come and kill us in the name of love. Personally, I'm more frightened by that than the idea of a bunch of space Nazis. (source: The St. Petersburg Times)

2/20/2004 -- The creative aspect was: one of the problems of the original series was that you never really understood why the Cylons wanted to kill the humans. They spent a tremendous amount of time and resources chasing down the Galactica and its rag-tag fleet, hellbent on destroying them, and you're never really clear why, except that they were the bad guys, space Nazis. They were evil and humans were the good guys... So they needed something that was more intriguing and more interesting to have as their motivation for going against our people. One of the roads that that brings you to is, what if the humans created the Cylons? What if human beings, in this other society, had advanced to the point where they created truly sentient beings and then they rebelled against them? That's a familiar science-fiction idea, that has been explored in many other arenas, but in our version, what made it different was the way the Cylons were specifically realised. They have a belief in God, they have a religion, a society, a culture. They view themselves not just terminators out to destroy mankind, because they hate us, [but instead] as mankind's children who can never quite realise their own potential until their parents have died. Which is a bizarre, but more intriguing idea.

Then, from the practical aspect, if you went with mechanoid Cylons, close to the original or even just a modern day version of them, it's going to cost a lot of money. Modern day audiences are not going to accept the slow-walking, bad-shooting Cylons of 1978. So, it would require very complicated suits, which are very expensive and would be hard to mass-produce, if not impossible. That leads you to CGI, which we did use in the pilot, but again, the expense of all the CGI means that you couldn't do a lot of them on a television series' weekly budget. If you make them human, all those problems go away, and we could still bring in a few mechanoid Cylons here and there. It was a good way to go for creative and practical reasons. (source: BBC Cult TV)

2/20/2004 -- I think that the enemy that says I'm killing you in the name of God, and God is love, is a more frightening enemy to me than the one that's the space Nazi and just wants to kill you because they're evil. You get the feeling that one, you can take care of them. The other, you're not quite sure how to even approach them. Also, it's a contemporary thing. We're dealing with religious fanaticism in many contexts, some on the left, some on the right, and I think it's an interesting area to explore. The humans in the show believe in god, or in gods, rather, and have a religious faith, and a belief in something larger than themselves, and so do their enemies. That's intriguing, because it gets you out of the easy dialectic, "We're the good guys and God is on our side, and you're the soulless, godless evil ones who are trying to hurt us." (source: BBC Cult TV)

2/25/2004 -- We'll reveal pieces of Cylon society slowly. It's best to keep them interesting for the time being.

3/6/2004 -- We will open up the Cylon world a little bit more. You want to do it slowly and carefully because they are really interesting the more mysterious they are... We will see more mechanoid Cylons as the series goes on. But right now I don't have any plans for Imperious Leader. The humanoid Cylons are the pinnacle of Cylon evolution at the moment. (source: James Iaccino)

4/2/2004 -- Bit by bit we will peel back the onion of Cylon society, who the Cylons are, what there values are, and what they care about. We will treat them as people. And just because they're people doesn't mean they aren't capable of doing horrific things. Complicated and interesting villains are the most effective... The Cylons' belief system and the Colonials' belief system is intrinsic to who the two parties are in this show... The Colonials believe in a polytheistic view of the universe with multiple gods: the Lords of Kobol, with their own mythology and backstory. The Cylons look at that differently. They looked at that belief system and then evolved on their own, ultimately reducing the multiple god system down to one. The Cylons believe in a single god, a larger, single creator of the universe who guides all things... closer to a monotheistic system. (source: Robert Falconer)

6/17/2004 -- There are Cylons within the fleet that are a threat. There are Cylons like Sharon [Boomer] from the miniseries, who you know is a Cylon. But in terms of dog fighting, with Cylons literally attacking the Galactica, that's not going to be every week. We'll do that every three or four shows; but that doesn't mean the Cylons can't attack and threaten us in other ways in the interim. "33" had dogfights and space battles, as you'd expect from Battlestar Galactica, but in episode two there isn't a dogfight. (source: SFX Magazine)

1/9/2005 -- It's about the role of faith in society, how it can be used for good or for evil, and different faiths, and what happens when they collide. The religious aspect of the show is one of the more interesting textures of it. Complicated philosophical debates go on. There are certain theological issues that are posited and argued about -- Cylons and humans, why the Cylons believe in one God and the humans believe in many. What does it mean when one God tries to drive out the many? (source: Zap2It)

1/9/2005 -- We will continue to fight the Cylons throughout, but we don't do it every week. The show is not really a shoot-'em-up, it's a drama. There are plenty of problems for this fleet that don't involve the Cylons. There are Cylon sleeper-agents within them, they're running out of food, they're running out of supplies, they have accidents, things happen to them out in the reaches of space. And that's great, because that means you don't have to defeat the Cylons every week. Because if you do, you start going, "Well, how tough can they be? I mean, these guys beat them up every week." So, it's a good format, and it gives us a nice balance on the show. (source: HypaSpace)

1/14/2005 -- Most of the things that we're doing in season two were at least begun in season one. A lot of the religious things that happened in the show in terms of the Colonies and in terms of the Cylons. I think probably the big opportunity in season two that we didn't get in season one is to open up the Cylon world a little more. To see more of other Cylons. See how the society functions a little bit more. And give a sense of what that community is all about (source: Sci-Fi Wire)

1/15/2005 -- We're talking about eventually opening up the Cylon world and going aboard the ships and starting to see that culture, but I want to do it very slowly and I think right now the Cylon society is very interesting because you don't know anything about it and it's mysterious and kind of cool and kind of out there. And the more you reveal, the more you start getting familiar with that and it might not have quite the same intrigue. (source: Now Playing)

1/20/2005 -- The religious angle was something that evolved after the first draft of the miniseries. In that draft, I had mentioned, almost in passing, that Number Six believed in God and that really intrigued Michael Jackson (the executive, not the singer) who was working at the studio at the time. He suggested making it a bigger part of the show and also to more strongly play the Al-Qaeda/Cylon parallels. Both comments surprised and delighted me and I was more than happy to go in both those directions. The Colonials in the original were always mentioning the "Lords of Kobol" and I decided to make that literal rather than figurative and give them a polytheistic religion and the Cylons a monotheistic belief system. I found the clash of those two belief systems to be fascinating in our own history and thought it would be an interesting conflict in the show.

5/25/2005 -- At the beginning, I assumed that the Colonial would have a belief system, probably polytheistic. In the original, the "Lords of Kobol" were referred to several times. But it wasn't until relatively late in the game that I randomly gave the Cylons a belief system. I was creating the characters and working on some lines for Number Six and I thought it was interesting if she professed a belief in a single God. I had really given her a belief in a singular God almost by accident. [As] I compared that with the polytheistic religion of the Colonials, I started to realize that an interesting pattern was developing -- the Cylons believing in the one true God and the Colonials having an older, multifaceted system of deities that was obviously patterned on the Romans.

I started reading about the rise of monotheism in the Western world and how it came to displace pagan religion. Those themes were interesting to play with in the show, the dynamic whereby the pagan religious practices tended to be tolerant and allow monotheistic beliefs within their own culture. And then there came this came this notion of this outside monotheistic belief, of the one true God that could not tolerate others, that started to drive out pagan worship. You had this apocalyptic moment of genocide which kicked off the entire series, of this Cylon culture that has this belief system in one god that is literally wiping out this pagan belief system and then is pursuing them across the galaxy.

The Cylons come back with a vengeance and have this belief system in place. The interest in the Cylons is this notion of "why are our enemies doing this? It’s not just that they're space Nazis, it's that they have an intricate belief system that leads them to this horrific answer... The Cylons in the show focus on the soul; they firmly believe that they have a soul. Human beings have souls given by the gods, and Cylons have a soul given by their one true god and that has to be just as valid. That means there is a plan for their soul and something for them after they die too. It's a fundamental element of their faith. (source: beliefnet)

9/30/2005 -- I always felt one of the problems of the original Battlestar was the Cylons were just bad. They were just evil. They were just out to conquer the galaxy -- they just wanted to shoot you. And I thought that this series was going to be much more complicated than that and that our opponents would have much more interesting sides to them. That they would have humanity, for lack of a better word. They have feelings and emotions. They have a theology. They have a belief system. They worship a loving God of salvation. They're complicated opponents, which I think makes them more formidable opponents. It's like, "These guys scare me." You may not know what to do with these guys exactly, or how to outmaneuver them, or what their weak point is, or how you defeat them, or how do you just survive against the Cylons... Overall the Cylons are just not about destruction. They have their own civilization and their own ethos. What are they doing with the Colonies? They left a lot of the buildings intact; they're cleaning up the bodies. I think they're intent on using the Colonies for themselves. The question is for what. (source: Now Playing)

12/7/2005 -- It was a conscious choice I made during the development of the miniseries [to make the Cylons monotheistic and the Colonials polytheistic.] I had included a line from Number Six where she said, "God is love," and that became the jumping off point for this entire aspect of the series. The fact that the Colonials already had Greco/Roman names and nomenclature made it a natural for saying that they were polytheistic. I think I realized that the clash of two civilizations with these beliefs would echo our own history as well as be an interesting inversion of the usual Pagan=Bad, Christian=Good dynamic and I thought that would be interesting to play around with. (source: SciFi.com Behind the Scenes)

1/4/2006 -- On a philosophical basis, they seem themselves as the children of humanity, and their worldview says they'll never really achieve their full potential until their "parents" are still alive, as it were, it's the idea of children coming into their own when their parents are dead. And it's also practical. Knowing humans as intimately as they do, they know if they allow this ragtag fleet to escape and establish colonies, they'll eventually come back and seek vengeance. So the Cylons are driven by a strong need to foreclose that possibility. (source: Chicago Tribune)

1/20/2006 -- The centurions are not sentient and their memories/experiences are not downloaded into new bodies when they die.

7/26/2006 -- Number Six was specifically a homage to "The Prisoner," but the rest were assigned their numbers randomly.

9/19/2006 -- While we did briefly discuss using a new technique of using actors in motion capture suits to portray the centurions, we ultimately decided against it for budgetary and production reasons, and the centurions will be completely CGI once again [in season 3].

9/19/2006 -- We made a fundamental choice at the outset that the centurions would be an extension of the original Galactica centurions, and therefore would be bipedal and vaguely humanoid in appearance. It's an aesthetic choice, one intended to maintain a sense of humanity even in the mechanical opponents. We've talked about other, more complicated devices and robots, but it seems to veer off into predictable territory rather rapidly, so we've decided to keep it pretty simple for now.

10/2/2006 -- Question: Regarding the various Cylon models we see on New Caprica, does each model speak for all the copies of that model?

Yeah, they're speaking for their model. The Cylons reach consensus among the twelve, and each represents their distinct model. And how they communicate among themselves and whether there are some shared knowledge pools are things we leave deliberately vague. There's a certain dramatic context to it, I want to imply that there are more mysterious things and that they communicate in ways that maybe we don't understand. I never want to want to quite define them, because then they become mundane and not that interesting. (source: Chicago Tribune)

10/20/2006 -- I felt that as the religious aspects of the show were becoming more common and started to dominate plot lines and certain character attributes, you had to make a choice at some level about whether that was all bullshit or not. Does it mean something? Is all this worship just about talk and about made up religions that don't mean anything? Or is there the possibility of something greater? These are the existential questions. Is this all that I am? Is there something more? Why am I here? If all the characters on the show are asking themselves those questions, I felt that on some level I wanted to give a hint that maybe they're not all fools. That maybe there's some greater truth that they're all struggling toward, that none of them can see perfectly. So I started to feather in ideas that could not be explained by rational means. While never really coming out and saying that God is behind the curtain, I wanted to have elements of it.

One of the things that I had noticed working on Star Trek, and in science fiction in general, was that mainstream science fiction tended to shy away from this as a subject. Gene Roddenberry felt very strongly that in the future of Star Trek, religions were all gone; that in 300 to 400 years mankind had evolved beyond it; that religions were all superstitions and were things of the past. It was a very secular humanist idea, which I don't have a problem with philosophically, but I didn't believe as a storyteller that in just a few centuries we would discard this fundamental thing that had informed our societies for so long. So, I felt that in this world in Galactica, which had nomenclature like Apollo and Athena and all these names of the Greek gods, it beggared the imagination to say that they didn't really believe in it. And if they did believe it in, I wanted to give it some validity and show that there is something out there. (source: Screenwriting Expo 5 in Los Angeles)

12/7/2006 -- Question: Do Cylons get older, or do they always stay the same age?

That's a good question! We've talked about it internally, as well, but we don't really have an answer for that. On camera they don't look like they are aging, so we haven't had to deal with it. (source: EOnline)

11/5/2003 -- Yes I would consider [script] submissions, and yes, I would put the [writer's] bible out there for use. (source: Cylon Alliance)

11/5/2003 -- I didn't have an advisor for the mini. Most of that was from my own research and knowledge of military protocols. My father was in the Marine Corps and I was an NROTC midshipman... We'll probably have a military and science advisor for a series but for the miniseries I was able to muddle through. (source: Cylon Alliance)

12/5/2003 -- Question: If you get the go ahead for a series, do you see BSG being an episodic series, such as Star Trek, or a series with more of a untied plot, such as Babylon 5.

It will probably be a combination of the two approaches -- episodic stories layered with continuing stories and character arcs.

2/18/2004 -- It's a corral of writers, somewhat as with Star Trek. I've gotten down the general story arc for the season, worked through several of the character arcs, and gotten a lot of stuff going... One of the joys of having a staff is that you have someone mention something you never thought of. I really enjoy that process. The writers all need a sense of ownership, and the series can only benefit from that. (source: scifi.about.com)

2/20/2004 -- I have story arcs that take us through to the end of the first season in terms of plot, and then there's various character arcs that I want to do as well. It's going to be an ongoing story. Each week you should be able to tune in and watch that week's episode, and follow the general plot that will have a beginning, a middle and an end that week, but also there'll be many plot threads that are continuing throughout. There'll probably be a little bit more humour. I don't know if it'll ever have comedy as a strong element in it, because that's just not the nature of the situation, but there'll be grace under pressure, and comic moments. The pilot is pretty bleak, because it's a bleak story, but it won't be that bleak week in and week out. (source: BBC Cult TV)

2/25/2004 -- Our writers are Toni Graphia, who worked with me on Roswell and Carnivale. A writing team of David Weddle and Bradley Thompson who are story editors and worked with me on Deep Space 9. We also have a staff writer named Carla Robinson, who is a relative newcomer.

2/26/2004 -- We're not going to take script submissions for the first season. There's no practical way to do that. The fans need to at least see one season of the show before they can possibly start writing and matching stories. So year one is going to be a staff-written show and we might give out a couple freelance assignments to other writers but they'll be other writers to bring in work in our business that we're familiar with. You know hopefully if we do get a pickup for the second season at that point I could open it up for submissions. (source: galactica.tv)

9/30/2004 -- I have a general sense of where some of the characters might be, or where I'd like to see them as the series progresses, but I haven't mapped out an entire series arc. I think it's better for us to remain flexible with this series, so that we can move in different directions as ideas unfold. If I remember correctly, I think Michael had his final episode of Babylon 5 all sorted out and locked away in a safe somewhere, waiting to be revealed for the finale. Certainly we're not doing anything like that. (source: Robert Falconer)

1/30/2005 -- We don't have a full time military advisor on staff. However, we did have an advisor on set during the miniseries, who also put the principal actors through a "boot camp" before shooting. I can't honestly remember his name or service branch (sorry if you're reading this!) As far as the scripts go, Bradley Thompson, David Weddle, and I provide a lot of the military technical details based on our own knowledge base.

3/12/2005 -- A lot of the background information on the characters is starting to come out in both Seasons One and Two, so there might come a point where I'd let the [series] bible be put out there for public consumption.

8/11/2005 -- As much fun as that would be, [a producer's cut is] probably not going to happen. There are a few problems, starting with the fact that once we cut scenes and character beats from the show, we then treat those scenes for the most part as if they didn't exist as we develop subsequent episodes, so in some cases we might well be reinstating scenes that are then contradicted by later events. Also, to re-edit the shows with additional footage would entail significant post-production costs that no one's likely to cough up -- not just the expense of completing visual effects, but also editing time, sound mixing, color correction, etc.

And finally, there's really not a definitive Producer's Cut to go back to in any case. Each episode is edited and re-edited by myself and David Eick several times even before they're presented to the network and oft times David and I find ourselves prefering our own cut of the same episode to the one done by the other. I find editing to be a lot like writing (Joe Menosky, one of the best and smartest writers I ever worked with once told me that a TV writer does his second draft in the editing room) and I like to reshape and reconceive different elements of the story along with the editor. David likes to work on individual scenes and fine-tuning takes and performances. Our two cuts are then blended together and presented to the network, and we usually submit an episode that is within a few seconds of our alloted running time so that we are the ones who make the painful choices on which scenes to be lopped out. More changes ensue, and by the time the show gets on the air, I generally have an overall impression of the show that encompasses all the different cuts I've worked on. But picking out the "best" cut from all the versions that have gone before would be a herculean task at best.

10/6/2005 -- I just kind of take each season as it comes. At the end of a season, like we're approaching now, I always feel like, oh God, can I get even one more season out of it? And at the beginning of the season we always come up with more stories than we have time to do. So I'm certain that we could get a couple more years out of it. And you don't want to overstay your welcome either. (source: EOnline)

12/2005 -- The broad story arc is only vaguely sketched in at the moment. I've thought over a variety of endings for the series, and each time I've gone down those roads, I've been dissatisfied with the answers, so I've opted to put it off for now. I know there's a school of thought advocating working out everything in advance, but I prefer to let the show and the characters evolve more naturally and discover their stories along the way. (source: Sci-Fi Magazine)

12/7/2005 -- I can say that working on a show that I created is the most gratifying experience I've had, hands down. There is a freedom to my work that wasn't there in any of the other shows I worked on, for the simple reason that my primary task before now was always to emulate someone else's voice and execute someone else's vision. My experience at Roswell taught me a lot about editing, which I learned from Jason Katims, and that experience has proven invaluable ever since. Carnivale was a bit of a trial by fire and the most valuable thing I learned was the discovery of my own ability to withstand pressure and be able to operate in a difficult environment, with the experience of having virtually no limits in terms of content and the tremendous freedom that entailed being a close second. (source: Sci-Fi.com Behind the Scenes)

2/27/2006 -- We did take a month long break in between eps 10 & 11 in order to catch up on scripts. Doing 20 instead of 13 makes a big difference in terms of stamina and quality control. When you're concentrating on 13, you can essentially make each of them special and each of them gets a lot of attention. With 20, you're spreading yourself out more and trying to keep more balls in the air at once. I won't say that's the only reason why we had a couple of shows that I wasn't happy with this season, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a contributing factor.

3/8/2006 -- Hill Street Blues was definitely something of an archetype we looked to for developing the structure of the series. I made explicit reference to the show in our series bible and talked about how we would strive to emulate their structure as much as possible. That structure was, basically, to have a self-contained A-Story that would begin and end each week, with smaller character-centered B-Stories that would take place over a few episodes, and finally long-running C-Stories that would arc throughout the season. It was a starting place for a lot of story discussions and script meetings, but we didn't strictly adhere to the form, as you can see from the experimentation we did throughout the first season. The first seven episodes of season two roughly follow this format, but then we varied again from that structure for the rest of the season. Why didn't we hew more closely to the Hill Street format? Partly it's a result of not wanting the show to get so serialized as to be inaccessible to new viewers, and partly it's a result of continually wanting to try new things on the show and mix up the story-telling.

9/19/2006 -- Creatively in terms of the series, each season I think there's maybe two seasons left. I start each season thinking, "Oh jeez, can I really fill up a season's worth of episodes? I'm not going to make it this year." And then at each year's end we end up with more stories that we never got around to telling. Part of it is just an objective perceptual thing. Right now from where I'm sitting I can see another couple of years of this, but you know, ask me again next year and I might give you the exact same answer! I do know how I want the series to end, so we're lining up pieces and evolving storylines and arcing them in a specific direction. I don't like to block everything out and I don't like to lock into a firm game plan to get there. I like to have it more improvisational on the way and try new things and mix up the stories. But I basically know where the show is headed. (source: CHUD)

12/7/2006 -- I have an idea where we should end the series, and the question is how long the story, I think, can go from here to there... It's so hard. By the end of the season I'm like, "How many more of these can we get out?" And then sure enough, we think of a whole lot more in the writers' room -- but at least a couple more years. (source: EOnline)

7/8/2003 -- One of the first things that occured to me was to make Starbuck a woman... The character of Starbuck in the original is the rogue, the hot-shot pilot, the cigar-smoking, skirt-chasing, best friend of straight arrow Apollo. Approaching that character again years later and starting over, I felt that the essence of it bordered on cliché... The whole thing wasn't that interesting for me. But when I was starting from the place where Starbuck's a woman, it's a different relationship with Apollo. I hadn't seen that relationship played on camera. I hadn't seen the whole notion of women in the military. That is a relatively new idea. It's become more part and parcel of the way things are done in today's world, but hasn't been explored very often on camera. This was an opportunity to reinvent that aspect of the relationship as well, and I just knew it would change things. I knew that it was going to give me a chance to write a fresher character and to create a more complicated relationship between her and the character of Apollo and Apollo's father, Adama. So, it seemed like a richer place to go. (source: Television Critics Assocation press tour, reprinted in the Official Mini-Series Magazine)

8/14/2003 -- Kirk Douglas' character of Paul Eddington and Galactica's Colonel Tigh share many commonalities. I love the relationship, personified in "In Harm's Way," between Rock Torrey (John Wayne) and Paul Eddington: two friends, one the stalwart Commander, getting on in years, the other the deeply flawed man who is there for his commander and who can be relied on in time of crisis, but ultimately is a victim of his own weaknesses. (source: Robert Falconer)

11/5/2003 -- Making Starbuck female was primarily done to mix things up and add a different element into the relationship. Certain sexual tension will be there but taking it into different directions was the central idea, not just sex... I think the new viewers will like Starbuck and Katee's portrayal. She's rough around the edges and sometimes you just want to throw her out of the airlock, but in the end, she's the one you want next to you in the foxhole... I think Katee will grown on you. In fact, I think she'll be the breakout character if this goes to a series. I find Katee to be an interesting actress, all balls and tough on the outside, but I'm always aware of a cracked and broken quality to her on camera that makes you root for her. (source: Cylon Alliance)

11/5/2003 -- I wanted Tigh to be a different kind of XO than we normally see, which is the loyal, stoic, efficient soldier we've seen countless times. I also wanted Adama to be bending the rules a bit for his friend. In a way, Adama is protecting his friend because deep down, he still believes in him... I think that not for the protection of Adama, Tigh would have been long gone. Now its Tigh's turn to show Adama that all that effort was worth it, that Tigh really is the man Adama though he was. (source: Cylon Alliance)

12/4/2003 -- At first Boomer was a man... and the crew chief was going to be a woman, and there was something about the power relationship that I didn't want to play -- that's it's the officer man and the enlisted woman. It just felt too boss and secretary... I wanted it to be a forbidden romance. I wanted it to be something that two people were doing outside the norms, and that would give us sort of, "Why don't officers and enlisted mix? What are the problems with having men and women in the military, serving together?" I wanted that relationship to deliver that, and I thought it was more unusual to give the woman the senior role and the man the supporting role. And then I just called her Boomer because why not? There was a Boomer character, and I didn't have a role for another pilot. (source: IGN FilmForce)

12/6/2003 -- In the original there was a [Council] of twelve for Adama to rail against. He had to find a way to get around what they were doing. I invented Mary's character to be a strong presence and to be Olmos' co-equal. (source: Washington Post)

2/18/2004 -- I just thought it would be interesting: how it would change the whole thing if [Starbuck] were a woman. The two fighter pilot buddies, that's so familiar: the hot-shot rogue pilot and his straight-arrow friend. But when you make it a woman, it's just not so familiar anymore. You make her a woman, and you're dealing with things upfront, asking the audience to look at the woman's in a man's role and making any sexual issues much more overt. You know what's funny, is that although Starbuck is the wild one, she's closer to Adama than Apollo, more conservative than he is. Between her and Apollo, you wouldn't think it, but he's really the more liberal, while she turned out to be a Republican. (source: scifi.about.com)

2/20/2004 -- I think the one that brought the most that I didn't expect was James Callis in his version of Baltar. I had always loved Baltar on the page, and thought he was a really complicated, intriguing dark character, but what James brought to the role was a sense of humour. He's a much funnier character on the screen than he is on the page, and that was a perfect instinct on his part that gave us a flavour that we didn't have. He provides some of the only laughs of the whole project. You really like Baltar. Even as you despise him -- this is a weak, arrogant man who has helped bring down an entire civilisation -- you do still kind of like him, and it's an intriguing mix. (source: BBC Cult TV)

4/2/2004 -- I think [Commander Adama and Lee Adama] bridged a gap in the miniseries that certainly had held them apart for a couple of years. I don't think that issue has been completely resolved, but they've moved past it to a certain point. Now they're in a new relationship and a new dynamic... they're father and son and they're also serving on the same ship, and the stresses and pressures of that will affect the relationship. I think it's interesting that Lee Adama has a strong relationship with Laura, and that he in some respects is a bridge between her and his father... [Adama] was commander of the oldest ship in the fleet that was about to be retired, and had been on the ship for a while. He wasn't an admiral; he wasn't at the heart of the Colonial Military... [He] was not a hard charger climbing the ranks of the military structure. He went off into this backwater assignment... which he nevertheless loved. He has an affinity for the Galactica... it was his first assignment when he was a youth, and he came back to command it... He believes in the things the Galactica stood for when it was originally built, and there's a very deep connection between the man and the ship. But the destruction of the Colonies falling in his lap has certainly put him in a different place than he has been for many, many years, and I do think that brings with it a renewed sense of commitment and a renewed sense of relevance. There is a role for Adama to play now, and it's a hugely important one. (source: Robert Falconer)

4/13/2004 -- [Baltar's] motivations in the original show are simple, very cut and dried, he wants power, there's an intimation that he's betraying the Colonial's to the Cylons to maybe take over a Colony of his own, it's never quite spelled out, but that's sort of the general idea and from that point forward he's simply evil and he's going after the Colonial's forever and he's going to find them and destroy them... For a character there isn't a good motivation to sell out your entire race and simply say "Hey, I'll help you guys commit genocide to my entire race." It doesn't really make sense, so I chose to make it a more complicated situation. Here's a man who's weak. Here's a man with flaws, here's a man who's own arrogance allows himself to get into a position where he has betrayed his entire race. (source: Battlestar Fan Club)

4/13/2004 -- There's been a few examples in recent years of cinematic portrayals of women as pilots, but they've been few and far between and we've never played it like this where they are friends and they have this back story and it became a more interesting and complicated relationships. It introduces an odd sexual dynamic into the relationship, which is there whether they follow it up or not, it's always going to be present. Anyway, as I started delving into the backstory of her relationship with Zak that helped me play out things between Adama and his son, her relationship with Adama is more Father/Daughter and she happens to be closer to Adama than his own son. It just became more interesting the further I got into it, making the character of Starbuck a woman opened up many possibilities for me. (source: Battlestar Fan Club)

1/19/2005 -- In my first draft of the mini, Lee Adama had just been accepted into test pilot school on Caprica and was not currently assigned to any battlestar. Presumably, he had been posted to at least a couple of battlestar air groups in his career, as well as several ground assignments as well. This isn't canon yet, however, and I'm currently thinking of changing some elements of his specific backstory as I work on storylines for Season Two. Overall, I'd say Lee was striving (perhaps too hard) to blaze a different path for himself in the fleet from that of his father. I don't think Lee ever saw himself as a battlestar commander and was looking for a different way to make his mark.

1/20/2005 -- The beginning of the process involved thinking about the characters as pieces within the larger context of the show: The commander, his son, his son's friend, the loyal second in command, and the traitor. They were the inner circle of the original show, the core characters that made the drama work. Understanding how they interrelated and how they moved the show forward was essential to understanding the show itself. After that, it was mostly a matter of thinking about them and their interactions with one another -- what's an interesting father/son dynamic? What are the issues peculiar to this relationship that set it apart and what are the common chords we all understand?

Adama's journey was tied to that of his ship. Galactica herself was, in my mind, a glorious old bird from another time. I could appreciate the heroic lines of her shape and the triumphant step of the original theme, so when it came time to think about what the new Galactica would be, I essentially felt like we should treat her like the original ship suddenly transposed to this this setting -- an old, proud, handsome woman about to take a well-deserved retirement after a long and successful career, only to be suddenly recalled to duty. Adama would reflect his ship -- an old, proud, warrrior about to fade away into retirement...

I wanted a new dynamic between the CO and the XO. Typically, the second in command is a kinda thankless task (just ask Commander Riker) and tends to fall into the "I agree with everything you just said, sir" category except for carefully delineated objections and arguments. His "command decision ability" isn't really the core of the character, since that primary role is assigned to the commander. So the task is make the character of the XO and his interaction with both the crew and the commander interesting on its own. I was definitely influenced by the character of Cmdr. Eddington played by Kirk Douglas in "In Harm's Way," who was both a drunk and morally challenged to say the least. However, I loved the fact that his CO, (John Wayne) valued him as an officer, kept him aboard ship and even promoted him eventually. I thought that relationship between the heroic captain and his flawed friend would be an interesting one if it were translated to the Galactica universe.

1/20/2005 -- In my mind, [Baltar] was always this complicated, ambiguous, morally, ethically ambiguous guy, he had this weakness for women, he had an ego. What I didn't really write was that he was funny. James really brings that to the party, he gives the whole show a jolt. He's funny. (source: Chicago Tribune)

8/11/2005 -- I think Baltar will always be conflicted, and probably always has been. Certainly in his own mind, Baltar isn't "evil" and would recoil at the very notion of it. You decide whether you think he's evil or not.

8/11/2005 -- Question: Just how did Starbuck become so fracking awesome? I mean, she's the best pilot, the best shot, potential pro athlete, ex-flight instructor, her personal vehicle is a Humvee loaded with submachineguns (like that BEFORE the Cylons attacked), she dual-wields Skorpions like Neo, her fists pack a wallop, she's a tactical genius, second-best card player in the known universe... she's a tomboy Mary Poppins. Practically perfect in every macho way.

This is partly an outgrowth of the original Starbuck character, partly a result of the realities of television, and partly a riff on the traditional male action hero transposed to a woman.

The original character was supposed to be the best pilot in the fleet and the best card player, so I always saw those two attributes as integral to the role. Also in the original was the conceit that Starbuck and Apollo were inevitably assigned the most important positions in any mission and they carried out a variety of tasks that had little or nothing to do with flying Vipers and I decided to continue that conceit for continuity and for practicality -- you use your regulars to tell story in TV, that's why you're paying them. This is one of those areas where the realism of our fictional universe has to give way to the realism of producing the show. Could we have introduced a new sniper character for the final action scene in "Bastille Day"? Of course. But would that have been as dramatic or interesting as having Kara be the sniper while Lee is in the center of the action? Probably not. Could we have introduced a different pair of shipboard investigators to deal with the assassination plot in "Colonial Day"? Absolutely. But the show is about our group of regular characters, and handing over an entire investigative storyline to two people we've never seen before simply isn't as good as letting Kara and Lee do it -- as long as we can plausibly believe they'd handle those chores. And yes, I think that given the premise of the show, namely that there are only a handful of survivors to begin with and that Galactica herself was undermanned when the attack went down, I can accept Kara being asked to do a variety of roles.

I also frankly enjoy watching Kara take on many of the traditionally male roles in the show, as the leading hero(ine), which more often than not involves being extraordinarily adept at more than one thing. (James Bond, anyone?) Some of it is just my own perverse pleasure at watching us explode gender roles and stereotypes and seeing Kara Thrace be the go-to character in a genre which typically demands that person be a man. And truth to tell, if she were still a he, I strongly suspect that this question wouldn't come up at all.

10/6/2005 -- [Starbuck and Apollo] are kind of oil and water. They're very different people who have a strong personal connection and a strong emotional attraction to one another, and a physical attraction, but it's complicated by a lot of baggage and a lot of stuff, so I think the truth of that relationship is that it will always kind of dance in and dance out. There are times when they feel like it's the right thing to do, and then it will get screwed up, and then there are times when they'll just be at each other and wanting to kill one another and then they'll realize that there's something deeper between them. So I don't think it will ever be a simple relationship. (source: EOnline)

10/14/2005 -- I am aware of the [negative reactions toward Roslin] and I tend to shrug it off like I do a lot of comments about the show and the characters. I like Laura and I like the way we've played her as President. I think the comments about her say more about the people making them, than it does about the character itself, frankly. I've found it interesting that there's a school of thought out there which claims that Laura should've been completely sidelined from the very beginning, that Adama should've declared martial law from the outset and ignored civilian government altogether. It probably says something about me that I found that very notion to be antithetical to the underpinnings of a decent and democratic society, and I remember the very conscious choice I made in the early stages of this project that while Colonial society was going to be flawed and riddled with problems, that at its base, it was going to be a fundamentally decent and democratic one. It was not going to toss its principles over the side in a time of crisis. It was not going to turn itself into a security-above-all state. There were certain things that mattered more than survival, certain things that mattered more than safety. They were going to hang on to their government and their rights as citizens as best they could under the situation, and would give up those rights and freedoms only grudgingly. Laura Roslin is the personification of that idea. She wasn't elected, she wasn't chosen, she arguably wasn't even ready for the role, but she represented continuity to the traditions and principles undergirding their society, and she would stand for them until she died.

2/25/2004 -- We certainly won't be finding Earth anytime soon. As to the long-term, I don't know, it's too early to say.

4/13/2004 -- The show still takes as a given that there are twelve Colonies of human beings that are out there someplace in the cosmos and that there is a thirteenth Colony which is Earth and somehow all these people descend from the same place called Kobol. Now within that, I kept the names of the Zodiac as the names of the Colonies. What I didn't do was put in the Egyptian helmets and I didn't use some of the more obvious connections to Aztec and Mayan symbolism. It's not as overt. But beneath it all, it's still this fundamental buying into the concept that OK, the people on Earth came from the same place that these guys did. The ancient astronauts idea is part and parcel of Galactica. The nature of the story I was telling in the pilot didn't really lend itself toward a deep exploration of the mythos or really getting into a lot that. Because it's really just about the attack, the apocalypse that happens and their narrow escape. If we go to series and the series goes on then we'll touch on the mythology, develop it more. (source: Battlestar Fan Club)

1/30/2005 -- Question: Will there be any development between characters on what distinguishes a Sagittaran from Caprican, Virgon, or any of the twelve Colonies? Did they develop separately their own cultures and even different religions on their worlds?

This is an area we didn't get a chance to get very far with in the first season, and I'm hoping we explore more fully in the second. I think that some of the Colonies have developed very different cultures and attitudes from one another and that it's rich ground for us. We alluded to some differences here and there, but mostly we talked about the "Federal" (for lack of a better word) governmental structures. We do know that there was a sizable opposition to the Colonial government. Leoben claimed to be an arms dealer supplying freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on your point of view, and Tom Zarek was the jailed leader of a sometimes violent opposition, so it stands to reason that there are a wide variety of views, some of which come into violent conflict with one another. It's also worth bearing in mind that one of the uses for which the Cylons were originally used by the Colonies was as soldiers in their wars against one another.

1/30/2005 -- The mythology of the new Galactica is heavily influenced by that established in the original. I've always approached this project with an eye toward taking the original material and making it work in a new context. I still try to do this whenever possible. Does it make sense that there would be a star system with twelve inhabitable planets? Not really, but that was in the original and at some point I decided to run with that as another nod to the old show. The mythology of the old show centered around Kobol and the thirteen "tribes of man," so I've kept it as the centerpiece of ours. Not every single element is the same and not every element is even intact, but the roots are there. The point was to make another version of Battlestar Galactica, not just use the name.

2/19/2005 -- There are a couple of notions rolling around in my head as to how we reconcile the very real fact of evolution with the Galactica mythos, but I haven't decided which approach to take. However, it was a fundamental element of the orginal Galactica mythos that "Life here began out there..." and I decided early on that it was crucial to maintain it.

3/12/2005 -- Question: There are a lot of references to Republican Rome in BSG, in everything from the names Gaius and Valerii to the Religion to the democrato-militaristic govennment. Has this been done on purpose, or is it just a lot of coincidences?

The original series used elements of various ancient civilizations and I wanted to continue that element, but I didn't feel that the Egyptian motif, which they used predominantly, would be particularly resonant in this series. Greco-Roman influences were also present in the orginal, and I felt that Roman influences in particular would have resonant value given today's American society both in the republicanism (lower-case) and in the portrait of a culture that had ascended to a certain plateau, had driven its enemies from the field, proclaimed itself the guardian of truth and justice and yet was still prey to the same frailties and failings of all other human endeavors.

4/11/2005 -- Question: What do you have to say to new fans, like myself, people who are unfamiliar with the mythos of BSG? You've been talking mainly to people who are intimately familiar with the original series.

I guess I say welcome aboard and you've got some homework to do. If my references to the original series drive you crazy, why not go out and get the DVD set of the original and see what all the hoopla's about? I try not to delve too deeply into the original show in my commentaries, but at the same time, this show does have a history and I think it's only fair to point out the connections between now and then, after all there would be no Galactica now were it not for Galactica then.

9/2005 -- We were all really surprised in the first season how strong the religious overtones of the series were and how interesting that was going to be in terms of what the show is about. That aspect of the show really opened up the Cylons in a different way and established a way that I could introduce mythos, ironically, from the original Galactica. The lords of Kobol. What is Kobol? Where did they all come from? What is Earth and their mythology and what are the roots of this universe? I wasn't really intending that would be such a big component of the show. (source: Dreamwatch)

4/18/2006 -- Question: Why are the home worlds other than Caprica not really mentioned? Was there one planet per tribe?

It's just a factor of Caprica having had the capital city of the Twelve Colonies . That put Laura there in the miniseries and it was natural to have Baltar there as well so as to keep the confusion factor to a minimum for the audience rather than trying to establish and identify more than one planet. Same goes for the reason Helo & Sharon put down there in the mini. So from that point forward, Caprica becomes the default planet to reference and deal with. We have talked about Saggitaron and Gemenon and sketched out the particulars of their cultures, but we just haven't done a lot more with the rest of them, which is unfortunate.

5/18/2006 -- Question: The possibility of everyone getting to Earth must be tempting but then you have to think of how that would play out with the Cylon threat. Will the conflict be over by then? Will Earth play a part in the Cylons defeat or will the twelve tribes simply never make it home? Or is it just too early on to be planning that far ahead?

I have given it a lot of thought, and yes, I do know how the series ends. And no, I won't tell you. (source: Sky One)

10/20/2006 -- In theory they think of [Earth] as paradise. They have a mythic view of what the world is and where it can be based on their scriptures. But beyond that, when they think about it realistically, they don't know what they're going to face there. Are they going to find that the Thirteenth Colony is dead, is it hostile, are they going to welcome then, will it be more advanced, less advanced? It's such a big unknown. They really don't know what to expect, and the only thing that keeps them going is that it's the only hope they've got on the horizon. It's the one place they could maybe solve all their problems and they've committed to putting all their eggs in that basket... The Cylon [search] for Earth is a little more mysterious and we're teasing that out a little bit. (source: Chicago Tribune)

9/25/2002 -- Question: Are you considering having any original cast members reprising their roles in the remake?

Not their actual roles, but perhaps in other roles... We have made some preliminary inquiries regarding their participation, but it's still too early to tell. (source: BSG.com)

9/25/2002 -- I have never once heard anyone at either the studio or the network say one bad thing about Richard Hatch. All I've heard is about how passionate he is about BG and how astonishing it was that he laid out his own cash to produce a trailer. They respect his guts even if they don't want to go with his take... Thank you, Richard. It was your commitment and passion that likely got people interested in Galactica after a long hiatus and I am more than willing to give credit where credit is due. (source: BSG.com)

11/5/2003 -- I would definitely like to bring back the Pegasus, Sheba, and do something with the Ship of Lights. (source: Cylon Alliance)

12/4/2003 -- They're looking to find Earth and they're being chased by the Cylons. We have the additional advantage of the possibility of having Cylons within the fleet itself, but the general direction is that the stories would be generated from within the fleet... That we really wouldn't do "planet of the week" type episodes. We might. We might discover that we want to discover other alien races, but for the most part I'd like to stay away from it, and I'd like the drama and tension and action to occur from the stories that come from within the fleet itself. (source: IGN FilmForce)

12/5/2003 -- We did contact several of the original actors and discussed having them appear [in the miniseres], but they declined the offer. I'm open to contacting them again and discussing that possibility if we go to series.

2/10/2004 -- I've talked about revisiting the Pegasus episode, because I think that's a cool idea at some point. There's a possibility in my head we might go back and play around with the Ship of Lights that was in the original series. And I'm going to sit down and watch all 22 of them again, kind of go through it. But the first thing that springs to mind is that the old show did a lot of planet-of-the-week type episodes, and we're specifically not doing that on this. So a lot of those aren't going to translate very well. (source: SciFi Wire)

2/25/2004 -- There is a possibilty that I might re-make some of the old episodes but for now we are concentrating on some original stories.

2/25/2004 -- Do you see the possibility of introducing the Iblis character in the new series?

Possibly, it's something I've been thinking about, but haven't made a decision yet.

2/25/2004 -- Question: Will there be other races than Cylons and humans?

Not for a while at least. I don't plan to have other alien races as a major part of the series. When we encounter an alien, it will be a big deal.

3/6/2004 -- There's a possibility of revisiting one or two of the original episodes. But if we do it, it wouldn't be until the latter half, the latter maybe third of Season One. It's more likely it would be Season Two.

9/30/2004 -- I kind of see the Cylons as a race of mechanized beings that went off and evolved on their own. Certainly, I've thought about the idea that they had help, and I've thought about using Iblis in some sort of storyline, but right now I'm not leaning in that direction. (source: Robert Falconer)

1/20/2005 -- I'm open to [casting original series actors]. The trick is to do what we did for Richard, which was to find a good, rich role for them to play. (source: Chicago Tribune)

1/30/2005 -- Question: Did the Colonies have outposts, bases, or trade partners outside of the twelve Colonies. Did they even explore other systems. The Colonies could have had observatories, listening posts, or even scientific research teams exploring other planets beyond the Colonial system(s). They could encounter any of these which could lead to supplies, raw materials, food, fuel etc.

I think that's probably true, but part of our premise is that the fleet has Jumped far out into unexplored space in an effort to elude the Cylons, so we won't be encountering any other outposts or Colonies.

2/19/2005 -- We are talking about shows that deal with other survivors right now. Don't ask about the Pegasus -- I haven't made up my mind yet.

9/30/2005 -- You never know as far as the original players. It's sort of like Richard was a unique case. He and I talked and then we came up with a great character that was a good match for him. Hopefully if we were to bring anyone else back from the original show, it would be similar: that we would have a great character that was a good fit as opposed to just a walk-on or a stunt or something like that. (source: Now Playing)

10/6/2005 -- Beyond ["Pegasus"], I've looked at the other episodes of the old show. I don't really see much in there for us because so much of the old show is predicated on the idea of encountering other planets or other aliens in their universe and that's just not something that we do. The overarching kind of myth of the show, I've worked in to this version of Galactica. The fundamentals of the old show are still here. It's still an aircraft carrier in space. It's still a ragtag fleet looking for earth. There's still a large myth about where humanity was born and the twelfth tribe that went to the Galactica world and the thirteenth tribe going to earth. There's sort of a Greco-Roman nomenclature to the original show, which I then took and made that part of the religious aspect of the Colonials of this world. I mean there's definitely a lot of elements of the original that are present in this show. But I don't know that we're going to go back and redo any more episodes. (source: EOnline)

2/27/2006 -- We don't have any plans for redoing any more episodes from the original series. "Pegasus" was the one that translated the best and the others all seem too distant from our structure and universe.

3/13/2006 -- The Ship of Lights I've thought about, but at this point we've developed our own mythology and theology in terms of what the religious beliefs are and what the back story is. And the Ship of Lights feels like it's a different thought than what we're doing in the show. That was all about quasi-divine beings showing up, and you had the good ones and the bad ones, and there seemed to be some larger godlike chess game that the people on Galactica and the Cylons were caught up in, and I think at this point that just introduces a whole other complicating factor into what we've got because we've got so much going with the religious aspects of the show and the backstory of the Lords of Kobol and the tribes... So I don't think we're going to go there... ["The Return of Starbuck"] is all predicated on the two fighter pilots down; it's Wings Over the Pacific. It's the two shot-down pilots who learn to trust one another in their situation, and it's a very familiar story. I'd be willing to try it if we had a really interesting twist on it. (source: Now Playing)

5/10/2003 -- David and I started from the proposition that we should retain as many design elements from the original as we could. In the give and take of getting the production on the air, we had to give ground on some of these issues and more things changed than we would've liked. You win some and you lose some, but in the end, we have a mix of old and new and hopefully we're struck a balance that will work. (source: Cylon Alliance)

5/10/2003 -- The costumes were deliberately designed to evoke our own present-day reality rather than go with the usual "space clothes" approach. It was a conceptual choice that we wanted the audience to see this story and these events through the prism of their own world rather than dress it up in "other-worldly" designs. This goes to the heart of the entire approach -- to make this feel real and true by building a reality close to our own rather than create a fantasy world. It's anti-escapism being married to a genre that typically lives and dies by it's escapist trappings and you could call that both risk-taking and adventurous. (source: Cylon Alliance)

5/10/2003 -- It's an attempt to try something different and more creative. Ever since Lucas reimagined space battles as WWII dogfights, it's been the standard approach for this kind of material. We're looking to try something new and hopefully the splits will give us a new dynamic to sell what's become a familiar sequence on screen. Losing sound in space has been done before in 2001 and more recently in Firefly (which I never saw, but heard about) so it's not like this is an insane notion. Again, it comes out of our desire to play the show straight, to make it as realistic as possible, and to challenge the audience's perception of what a space show is. I can remember after Star Wars came out that Harlan Ellison was saying that Hollywood film producers were dumbing down the audience by putting noise in space and treating the ships like fighter planes. He said that the audience is smart enough to understand what the reality is without condescending to them and I'd like to put that to the test. (source: Cylon Alliance)

8/14/2003 -- We're approaching all the visual effects with the idea that someone is documenting them. Someone is sitting in a cockpit [for example] holding a camera and pointing it out the window. We're not going to do the big, sweeping "hero shot." That's not to say we never used a dolly or a crane; we did do a few of those shots. But by and large it's pretty much hand-held, pretty much guerilla, "you are there" style cinematography. Imagine the sorts of shots you might see on CBS News. If the CBS News crew goes out to the carrier, Enterprise, they'll give you an establishing shot of the carrier, but it's shot out the side of a helicopter as it goes down the side of the ship. (source: Robert Falconer)

12/5/2003 -- What led you to put greater emphasis on the military angle of this Galactica?

It seemed right. Galactica is supposed to be an aircraft carrier in space, so I decided to treat it like one, to embrace the military aspects of the show and play them as realistically as possible.

1/27/2004 -- The way I described [the Cylon raiders] in the first draft of the script, they were going to be some kind of variation of the flying wing, because that's what the original Cylon raiders were. And David Eick, I think, is the one that came up with the idea that the Cylon raiders should have a sort of a head or a face associated with a big oscillating red light. And then it went through various changes over time, and by that point I was not really in the loop anymore. (source: galactica.tv)

2004/02/20 -- When I talked to the studio and the network about what the intention of the project was, I pretty much laid all that out in the very first meeting. I said I wanted this to have a different style and aesthetic than other space opera that's on television. One has to play it real, one has to take it seriously. I don't want it to be hyped-up melodrama, I don't want it to be sentimental and milking everything, I want to play it as if this really happened to a race and a culture that is basically ours. I wanted it to be a parallel society to our society, because I found that that was more intriguing and relevant and I wanted the audience to hook into that... What we did with Galactica was strip away a lot of the artifice... For instance, in the Galactica miniseries, when the Cylons attack the colonists, they attack them with thermonuclear weapons. They don't attack them with lasers and photon torpedoes, and strange things that don't exist. When you see a planet nuked, and you see those mushroom clouds, and hear about the destruction of entire cities by nuclear weapons, that is a much more terrifying and frightening idea than if you're saying fifteen thousand photon torpedoes were launched at Caprica. One is real and one is not. (source: BBC Cult TV)

2/25/2004 -- Regarding the flight characteristics, I would say the impetus was to try to make space flight realistic, once again. Space craft have become analogs to airplanes or naval ships in science fiction. George Lucas delivered fighters in Star Wars like fighter planes in WWII, which was brilliant at the time, but since then it has become a cliché of the genre. Likewise Nicholas Meyer, had the Enterprise act like a battleship in Star Trek II. I wanted Galactica to come at the entire genre from a more realistic perspective, which meant treating the characters, the story and the visual effect in a more realistic manner.

2/25/2004 -- Question: Is the series going to be shot in the same style as the mini was?

Yes. Probably even more documentary and hand held than in the mini.

2/25/2004 -- We will continue the muffled aesthetic. We ended up trying to split the diffrence between the true silence of 2001 and the completely unrealistic sounds of Star Wars. I think what we ended up with was a unique sound design that conveyed the emptiness of a vacuum of space, while still providing a viscereal thrill to the audience.

2/25/2004 -- Question: How is artificial gravity approached in this series? Will it ever be explained?

Never. It's one of those things that is best left unspoken.

4/2/2004 -- Galactica was designed to withstand a nuclear hit. Don't forget that nuclear weapons in space have a different impact than they do in the atmosphere. There's not really a shock wave in space, it's more the immediate blast, heat and radiation effects. Galactica is shielded against radiation. However, I'll tell you that we're going to get into that as the series goes on. That nuclear hit will come back to haunt them later; there will be consequences to what happened to the ship structurally when it took that hit. We're taking the approach conceptually on this show that we must live with things that have happened to us, and that there are consequences. As to the Galactica's size, I don't know the exact figure off the top of my head. I was asking Gary Hutzel to give me the technical specs just last week, actually. I think he described the flight pods [hangar decks] as being about four football fields in length. (source: Robert Falconer)

4/2/2004 -- Question: The bullets that the Vipers fire, are those really bullets, or are they some sort of an explosive charge?

We settled on them being bullets, for a variety of reasons... We had long technical discussions about some of this. What mattered to us was that they weren't laser blasts. We just felt that had been done to death, it wasn't as interesting, and it wasn't realistic. From our research we discovered that such weapons would take huge amounts of energy, and that fighters would probably be better served by using actual bullets. But presumably they're more advanced than what we're using today, although we haven't actually sat down and defined them as such. (source: Robert Falconer)

1/19/2005 -- Question: Why Colonial One looks so much like Airforce One? Was that deliberate?

The design of the ship itself was meant to evoke commercial airlines and of course, present-day Air Force One is a modified 747. One of the things we discussed was trying to make Colonial One immediately identifiable amid the sea of other ships, so we started to make the color scheme and markings more distinctive and recognizable. It does evoke Air Force One at this point, and I'd say that helps with both recognition and with reminding the audience that it's the President's ship.

1/19/2005 -- Question: Why is everything so low tech when clearly these humans are so advanced? It seems incongruous.

The plot explanation is that following the Cylon Uprising 40 years ago, Colonial society took a giant step backwards to protect itself from the technological nightmare it had unleashed. With their enemies able to hack into virtually any network, the Colonials had to rely on stand-alone technologies that we not connected to other components. Ships like the Galactica were designed with this in mind, as well as the old military philosophy of building equipment that will function even in the most dire of circumstances. You don't want to be using cordless phones when the ship is hit by a nuke and power is disrupted to say the least. You want something reliable and solid and preferably with a cord.

The creative explanation is that high-tech ships with touch screens and computers that talk has been done to death in my opinion. Also, having magical technology that does all the work for you tends to take the human beings out of the dramatic equation. I wanted a lower-tech Galactica so that we could put people back into scifi. This show is about our characters, not about the magical technology that they use.

1/20/2005 -- Question: Can you discuss the thought process behind the decision not to re-use the theme and how you and your staff came up with the musical direction of the series? I'm assuming you decided to go in a completely different direction with the score in keeping with the tone of the new show.

You pretty much hit it on the head when you said I just decided to go another direction. In fact, when I first pitched the series I made a specific point of saying we weren't going to go with a lush, orchestral score because it had been done to death. Michael Rymer, who directed the miniseries, and David Eick, my partner, had a tremendous amount of input into the score and worked directly with our composer, Richard Gibbs.

1/20/2005 -- Question: Are there any other military ships in the fleet? I know there are no other capital ships, but I was wondering if there were any minor military vessels remaining that would be the equivalent of destroyers, coast guard cutters, etc.?

I always thought that the Colonial Fleet would have a variety of vessels for various purposes. The battlestars formed the nucleus of fleet, with battlegroups around them, much like modern day carrier groups. Battlestars are different in that unlike carriers, they also carry heavy weapons of their own and fight other opposing capital ships -- in a sense, they are a combination carrier/battleship. But there might also have been dedicated heavy gun ships and smaller carriers as well.

1/30/2005 -- Question: Why is it that the paper in the Galactica universe has the corners cut off, even the tractor feed.

This is a closely guarded secret of the show and certainly not a wacky design element that someone came up with during the miniseries.

1/30/2005 -- "Wing Commander" is frequently mentioned to me as a possible influence on the show, but I've never actually seen it. While it's possible that other members of the production team were influenced by it, it wasn't something that figured into my thinking. My own design influences were things like "Das Boot" "Blade Runner" "Alien/Aliens" and a stack of documentaries on the modern and history US and Royal Navies.

1/30/2005 -- An FTL Jump is nearly instantaneous, essentially moving a ship from point A to point B without travelling through the normal space-time continuum, presumably by bending space around the ship in some way. The analogy I used during production was to imagine three dimensional space as a flat piece of two dimensional paper. To get from one side to the other, you can travel in a straight line across the page, or you can gently bend the sheet in half and cross from edge to edge virtually instantly. How this is accomplished and what is the basis of this technology outstrips my technical brainpower. In fact, I feel faint just coming up with that explanation.

2/19/2005 -- The rank structure is derived from the original series. I didn't want to change Commander Adama to Captain Adama or Colonel Tigh to Commander Tigh, so I elected to simply embrace the co-mingled nature of the original rank structure. For our internal purposes, we've decided that the ranks are indeed a mixture of naval and army nomenclature and are basically as follows:

Officers --
Admiral
Commander
Colonel
Major
Captain
Lieutenant
Lieutenant (junior grade)
Ensign

Enlisted --
Master Chief Petty Officer
Chief Petty Officer
Petty Officer (1st, 2nd Class)
Specialist
Deck Hand
Recruit

Just to complicate matters further, there are also Marines aboard Galactica which conform more closely to the traditional enlisted Marine ranks, with Sergeants, Sergeant-Majors, etc. Unresolved is the question of whether the Marine officers would also adhere to the mixed rank structure (which sounds odd) or if they are strictly army equivalents (which makes no sense given that the "Navy" ranks seem oblivious to there being any such distinction).

2/19/2005 -- Please do something about the consumables questions; fuel, food, ammo, clothing etc., where is this stuff coming from?

Water is addressed in... uh, "Water." Fuel is addressed in "Hand of God." Other consumables will be addressed in the second season.

2/19/2005 -- Question: Will we see the mess hall and other part of the ship such as the main Kitchen where all the meals are prepared?

I'd like to. It's a question of budget; there has to be a story point or scene so cool that we just have to build this set.

3/12/2005 -- Question: I am aware that you intend to address the logistical problems the fleet suffers, however, do you intend to explore indepth the consumable production vs consumption directly. Considering the tonnage dictated by Baltar in one of the episodes one would think that every possible space would be converted to hydroponic grow ops (of the legal variety)? There seems to be an awful lot of wasted space on some of these ships.

This has always been in the back of my mind and I'd like to bring it up in the show at some point. (And they're probably growing the illegal variety too.)

4/11/2005 -- The visual style of the show was deliberately chosen to evoke a sense of realism to a world that, by its very nature, is fundamentally unreal. Ours is a world of many conceits, in which the viewer is asked to believe a great many things that he knows do not exist and so we strive to create a mood that implies, in ways both explicit and subliminal, the idea that, "Yes, in fact, this is a real place and you are watching real events occur." By doing so, we hope to encourage the viewer to suspend his natural disbelief and invest himself into the drama. One of the tools we use to achieve that is to use a visual style which suggests that the viewer is eavesdropping on the proceedings, peering into an objective reality that was captured in some way by an imaginary documentary film crew. The same holds true for the exterior space shots, which are designed to continually suggest that a real cameraman is filming the action as a way of implying that someone had to go "out there" and shoot these objects. The audience has a built-in awareness, whether they are conscious of it or not, of exactly how real cameras move and behave when they are being aimed at real objects, and more we can suggest to the audience that a real camera was involved, the more they're willing to accept unreal objects as actually existing.

8/11/2005 -- Could you explain via plot or in your podcast why the Colonials aren't trying to copy the FTL drive from the raider? It seems like that would solve most of their problems if they could even learn to make one 1/2 as capable.

For now, we're saying that the industrial capacity available in the rag-tag fleet is extremely limited. I doubt that they are really capable of reproducing the Raider FTL drive with the equipment on hand.

10/14/2005 -- I did want to stay away from the technobabble that I felt sometimes swamped the characters in Trek, and so I have intentionally avoided discussion of the technical workings of Galactica. Bit by bit, however, small windows into the inner workings do come to light and I'm sure will continue to do so in the future. Also, in all honesty, the writing staff often felt that the technological detail of the Enterprise was as limiting on Trek as it was helpful. We'd established so much about the way the engines worked and didn't work that we sometimes found ourselves discarding perfectly good story ideas or scenes because it contradicted some bit of jargon we'd tossed out two seasons before. There was always the option to write around those kind of details, of course, but inevitably, the thought of yet more tech-talk to justify doing what we wanted to do became a real irritant and we'd usually just try a different approach.

12/7/2005 -- Question: Will more research go into how computer networks "actually" work and how computers are susceptible to viruses? There were a few "questionable" instances in a couple of episodes regarding how viruses managed to get into the Galactica's computers, taking away from the "realism" of the show.

We strive to keep things realistic without getting bogged down in too much technobabble or detail about it. We do have a very good, very knowledgeable technical advisor, who usually flags down errors of this sort, but in the end, it's my call when to stay with the dramatic beat or change things around to keep it scientifically accurate. It's a very subjective call and basically I listen to my own instincts as a writer, so if we're doing something that pulls you out of the show because you know better, it's probably a result of me taking the dramatic rather than the accurate path. (source: SciFi.com Behind the Scenes)

1/20/2006 -- Question: Why does every one call the officers Sir even if they are women? I was in the military but I thought that every one knows to call female officers or presidents Ma'am.

This was something I took from Wrath of Khan. In that film, everyone called Saavik "sir" and I liked the way it played and the implication that the honorific had become gender neutral at that point. On Next Generation, we didn't encounter a point where a female officer had to be addressed with a "sir" or ma'am" until well into the run -- an embarassing moment for the entire writing staff, by the way -- and it started a fair amout of debate about which one should be used to address Troi during a crisis (I believe the episode was "Disaster"). My personal feeling was that there was something vaguely condescending about "Yes, ma'am" versus "Yes, sir" in context and that by addressing everyone as "sir" it made a point about the egalitarian nature of Starfleet. It's certainly a debatable point, and Jeri Taylor, the executive producer running the writing staff at that point, felt very differently about it. Ultimately, we decided to go with "sir" and follow the protocol from Wrath of Khan. When I was writing the miniseries for Galactica, I decided I wanted to use sir for all the female characters and I even toyed briefly with the idea of calling Laura "Mister President" but that seemed lik e a step too far. Billy does call Laura "ma'am" on occasion, so the term itself does exist in the Galactica universe, but the military invariably calls her "sir."

2/1/2006 -- It's a pretty deliberate choice not to reveal very much about the technical specs on Galactica. Partly it's a way to clear out a great deal of technobabble that tends to swamp action scenes and leach drama from what should be intense moments, and partly it's a way of preserving flexibility in terms of storytelling. The more we define the capabilities of the ship, the more we limit ourselves in terms of exactly what the ship can and cannot do in a given situation. Now, you can't really avoid establishing parameters as the show develops and having some sense of the limitations is a good thing to maintain continuity, but a little of it goes a long way.

3/8/2006 -- Question: Why do the "marines" on the show always wear a CQB (close quarters battle) gear loadout in all the episodes? Even in the ones where they are outdoors? Is it possible we might see a different "marine" gear setup?

It's primarily a budgetary issue. We've got the CQB gear, so it's cheaper and easier to keep using it week after week than it is to rent specific items for every mission or to buy a wide variety of gear for stock. There's also a costume issue in that we don't really have specific Marine uniforms, so we use variations of our existing "naval" uniforms for the Marines and distinguish them mostly through the use of the CQB gear.

3/27/2006 -- The documentary/verité approach was in the initial pitch I made to the studio and network, and it was something that David Eick and I had numerous conversations about in the lead-up to the miniseries. It was a stylistic choice we made early on, and it colored all the conversations about the show with the production team, including the directors. Michael Rymer then took this aesthetic approach and made it real, developed the visual language of the show and made concrete the ideas that David and I were tossing around. The series bible does discuss the documentary film approach, but as always in this business, it's up to the man or woman behind the camera to make these things happen and Michael deserves a great deal of credit for the visuals we now take for granted.

4/18/2006 -- Question: Why don't Cylon raiders fire conventional missiles anymore?

That's a good question and Gary Hutzel brought this up himself. I think it's something we just kinda stopped thinking about as we were working on the dogfight seqeunces, because they were already so complex that adding yet another layer on top seemed overwhelming. However, I agree that it's something we've established and should try to reintegrate into the show again.

4/18/2006 -- It's coincidental that Racetrack & Boomer were women, and I never really thought of the Raptor as a transport, I usually thought of it as analogous to the Navy's EA-6 Prowler (a variant of the A-6 Intruder popularized in "Flight of the Intruder"). Dualla, however is the one who communicates most often with the pilots and I actually made her a woman because she was filling the role of another woman in the original BSG series who used to man the communication system on their bridge. That character was called "Rigel" but I didn't think that name worked in the remake, so I gave her the name of Dualla. (As a side note, Roddenberry made a similar decision on the original "Star Trek" series when he made the computer voice a woman -- I think there's an anecdote in Stephen Whitfield's "The Making of Star Trek" where they did some research about the US Air Force deciding that pilots listened to or responded better to a female voice.)

5/18/2006 -- They presumably do [have their own calendar system], but we've been deliberately avoiding talking about it. There's a fine line in the show between embracing familiar Earth terms for accessibility and crossing over into bizarre anachronism. It's certainly debatable as to where that line should be drawn, but to me, saying "January" will cross the line. By the same token, having them refer to a made-up month tends to pull the audience out of the show because it's a reminder that none of this is real. (source: Sky One)

7/27/2006 -- The props are all deliberate choices that imply more than just a passing connection between our world and the world of Galactica and there are deeper connections yet to come.

1/30/2005 -- Question: What is the DRADIS? Is it like sonar or radar?"

It's our version of radar. [ In the draft script, DRADIS stands for Direction, RAnge and DIStance ]

1/30/2005 -- Question: In the MS, what does "krypter, krypter, krypter" mean? Is it like an SOS?

It's our version of "mayday, mayday, mayday."

1/30/2005 -- Question: What's the acronym CAG stand for?

Commander Air Group, meaning the senior pilot in charge of all aircraft in the group embarked aboard ship. I know that the nomenclature sounds anachronistic, but my reasoning was that terms like this would most likely live well beyond their origins and still be in use even when the "planes" involved were actually spacecraft.

2/19/2005 -- [Frak is] straight out of the original series. I dropped many other terms from the old show like "centon" (a unit of measurement) and "yahren" (year) because I felt they distracted from the mood I was trying to create and they sounded a bit silly to my ear. There was something elegantly lovely about "frak," however. There's nothing like being able to say my favorite four letter word on TV over and over again and I salute Glen Larson for giving the joys of frakking up, frakking off, not giving a frak, and frakking-A to the masses.

3/26/2005 -- The card game they're playing in the original series was actually called Pyramid. And somewhere along the line, I transposed the names, I mis-remembered what they called it. The racquetball/basketball game that they play in the original, I now call Pyramid. And the name of that game in the original, which was Triad, is now what we call our poker game. So, it's one of the charming differences between the old and the new. It's either that, or a stupid error that the writer made. (source: Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I podcast)

9/25/2002 -- Essentially, I'm looking for a more grounded, more realistic presentation of science fiction than traditionally presented in the "space opera" format. Taking the opera out of space opera would be another way of putting it. I'm looking to give you more human characters and more realistic stories which take place in a fantastic setting... We're going to try to bring a more naturalistic way of storytelling to the form... The central narrative still revolves around the family Adama, which is one of the reasons I think the original was beloved in its day, and many of the original characters are present and fulfill similar roles. The central narrative and mythos of the Galactica world is much the same. Much has remained the same, but much has changed as well... I'm interested in deepening the character relationships both within the Adama family and without. I feel that a sharper focus on the characters and less focus on the sci-fi plot of the week will create a different kind of science fiction series, one where the human equation is front and center. This is the heart of my approach -- make the new Galactica more about people, less about sci-fi hardware and pseudo-scientific tech talk. (source: BSG.com)

8/2003 -- One of the things I loved about Deep Space Nine was that our characters were flawed. They were human, they made mistakes, they had rough edges, they had unlikable traits. I wanted to take that even further and make characters that were really human in every way. They would have fundamental flaws, and we would root for them because we recognize the human condition, even with all its flaws. [With Battlestar] it was a good fit to marry all those ideas onto that property... If you take all the archetypes out of it, and make them more identifiable human beings and put them in the same situation, to me, it's more of an homage to the original show. It's saying there was something worthwhile at the heart of Battlestar Galactica. There was something there that is worth revisiting and worth expanding and worth exploring if you take it seriously. (source: Sci-Fi Magazine)

11/11/2003 -- I was eager to write something that was more dramatic than the traditional space opera, a story with real characters, real human relationships, but in a science fiction setting. Instead of creating a completely different, alien culture, I took the approach of , "This is you and I and we're on an aircraft carrier in space and then the world ends. What happens to us?" One of the things that struck me when I went back at looked at the original pilot for Battlestar Galactica was how dark it was. I mean, it begins with the destruction of an entire society. And I thought, you know, there are depths that we could really plumb with that. And remember, I was looking at this in a post-9/11 world, a world that had been at peace and that was going along quite well. And then suddenly, one morning I woke up and the World Trade Center had collapsed and people I'd never heard of hated me and hated everything about my society and wanted to destroy it. Life stops for a moment. Looking at it in that light, I thought that there was a truth there that we should go for. How do people react in that moment? And how do they go on afterwards? How do they balance security and freedom and how do the debates about that unfold? (source: SciFi.com)

1/27/2004 -- I pitched the show initially with an idea towards taking it to series, so I pitched it to be producible on a weekly budget. It's designed to be an interior show, that is, about the people within the ships, not planet of the week. It's not designed to go to any alien cultures, not to do the prosthetics, the wardrobe, the sets, what have you, that's associated with that. It's not designed to be a war show where you're doing lots of combat every week. It's supposed to be a drama, first and foremost, and the drama's supposed to be within the Galactica and the ships of the rag-tag fleet. (source: galactica.tv)

2/10/2004 -- I think one of the hallmarks of the series will be that it's always going to be a tense situation. These people are always going to be one step away from disaster. Which doesn't mean that the Cylons will be attacking them every week. But I think the nature of their situation and the reality of what they're facing out there alone, with most of them left with the clothes on their back and whatever food and supplies they happen to have on those ships when the events of the pilot occur is only the beginning. And it's going to take a long time for them to get to any kind of stability or normalcy... The tone and context will be in that vein. There will be lighter moments. I'm sure there will have things that are unexpected and fun to play as time goes on. But the miniseries, that's the bar. That's what we're trying to [do].... We want to do that show every week. (source: SciFi Wire)

2/18/2004 -- Sci-fi is a much larger canvas to create on... You can explore contemporary social ideas in sci-fi, and people give you a pass. When you write them in contemporary dramas, so much is taboo. Sci-fi is allowed to explore the human condition in allegorical terms... Sci-fi should be a vehicle to comment on us today, a way to see what sort of creature man becomes when things happen to us. So, what if [destruction on a global scale] happened to us? Not to some bizarre space aliens, to us. I want something that strikes a chord. I want the audience to think, "I know what it's like to see my world come shattering down." That speaks to me. That propels the show, thinking, "What do I do now?" What do you do about your basic liberties? Is the Patriot Act a good idea? How do you respond to that sort of threat? Can you be noble when your world is ending? (source: scifi.about.com)

3/6/2004 -- These people are on ships without support, way off by themselves. They have only the clothes on their backs and whatever supplies happen to be on the ships when they escaped. And our job is to take that seriously, to play the truth of that, to really see what will happen to these people. How do they organize themselves? What is their society going to be like? Where are they going to get food and fuel? How are they going to replace the most basic things? Where are they going to get the bullets for the guns? All these sorts of questions are typically swept away in sci-fi where you just press buttons and things appear and you never question how the ship gets repaired and where the food came from and what about people who have different points of view. What about people in the fleet that don't like Laura Roslin, that don't think she's the legitimate President -- who question her authority and legitimacy to give commands? I think all those things are inherently dramatic and interesting. And they're more dramatic and interesting than simply having the Cylons show up and do a dog fight every week. (source: James Iaccino)

5/18/2004 -- They dress like us, their furniture looks like our furniture. They act like human beings, they have the same flaws, wants, and desires as recognizable 21st-century human beings. Let the audience put themselves in the drama. This isn't another wacky other alien race. This is us. This is what would happen if we went through this tragedy. (source: Multichannel)

1/9/2005 -- The miniseries was informed by a lot of 9/11 memories, 9/11 feelings, and the series continues on that route. The series is definitely about this time and place in America. We have a band of survivors on military ships. They're at war. They're worried about things like terrorists in their midst, who they can't identify, because Cylons can look like people. They have questions of security. There's questions of freedom and democracy and civil liberties, the hard choices you have to make. That's what I think sci-fi should do. Science fiction is supposed to question things that are going on in society, think about things that are relevant. It's not just escapism. The show is trying to be relevant, to provoke debate and make people think about the world they live in. (source: Zap2It)

1/9/2005 -- We're not doing bumpy-headed aliens. We're not doing planet-of-the-week stories. We're not doing mind control, body swapping, time travel, all the usual things. This is a drama. It isn't about gee-whiz scientific ideas week in and week out. It's about people and characters in a desperate situation, and it happens to be in a scientific backdrop. (source: Zap2It)

1/12/2005 -- The show will still incorporate elements of a post-9/11 world and the Iraqi war world... What I like about science fiction is the idea that things that matter to me in American culture today, that I have an opportunity to explore those things, to comment on them ... without having to write a "West Wing" or an "NYPD Blue." Here's another world, and it's a lens through which we can view our own. (source: Associated Press)

1/30/2005 -- Question: I have a friend who has a son and they both enjoy watching the new Battlestar Galactica. But it is a very frustrating thing when he cannot allow his son watch the show when there are sex scenes and constant sexual innuendo scattered throughout the episodes. Call me a little old fashioned but I nor others that I know really appreciate having to endure sex scenes that really do not further the story in any significant way.

First of all, I'm sorry your friend can't watch the show with his son, but I always intended this series to be for adults. I have two small children, and I wouldn't dream of letting them watch the show -- mostly because of the violent content. Second of all, I disagree that the sexuality is intended to be exploitative or that it's somehow not integral to the story. We're presenting adult human beings as adults, and their sexuality is a key part of their lives. Baltar's sexual weaknesses, Sharon & Tyrol's forbidden love affair, and Starbuck's promiscuity are part of who and what they are. I think the only reason this gets the kind of attention is does is that we're not used to seeing sex treated maturely in science fiction -- nine times out of ten, any sex is either something to snigger at or to make fun of. Somehow it's okay to fetishize sex by putting women in S&M leather "space" outfits or have Carrie Fisher run around in harem clothes (not that there's anything wrong with that), but to portray two mature adults simply having sex is somehow controversial in sci-fi circles.

I'd also point out, as I have many times before, the strange standards of American audiences, who can become red-faced with indignation over nudity, but find no problem with slasher films or chains-saw massacres. I mean, Galactica's premised on a massive genocide, and the pilot deals with violent, shocking deaths over and over again, but people get upset about the sex? Weird....

2/19/2005 -- Question: Why does the doctor smoke?

Because smoking is cool. Don't let anyone tell you different, kid.

Seriously, we're showing people doing what people really do and not all of their choices are smart ones. We smoke, we drink, we have sex with the wrong partners -- we make lots of bad choices and some of them we do knowingly and in full cognizance of the risks and consequences. Dr. Cottle obviously knows the risks associated with smoking and he elects to do it anyway -- that's his choice. I'm also frankly tired of all the anti-smoking p.c. crap that we're bombarded with these days and I decided that this was a world without all that. Call it my one sop to the idea of an idealized society, the notion that adults can make informed choices and not be nagged to death or run out of public spaces for making choices that others may not like or agree with.

2/19/2005 -- Security and discipline are definitely problems on Galactica and they're not going away. The ship was far from the best of the best at the time of its retirement and the people on board weren't either. The discipline was lax and many procedures had been allowed to fall by the wayside. Now, this ship and its crew are forced to operate far above what they considered to be the norm and it's not an easy transition for any of them. This was a deliberate creative choice. It's one thing for the finest ship, with the finest crew to deal with the end of the world and a long flight from a relentless enemy, it's quite another when you were just a bunch of people trying to get by. I find it a more challenging and interesting environment to tell stories in and I find these people more heroic in their actions just by the nature of the obstacles they have to overcome in their day to day existence.

4/1/2005 -- What are the politics of the show and what is its political agenda? The quick answer is that the show doesn't really have a political agenda in the sense that it's neither liberal nor conservative in the way those labels are thrown around in the sound-bite era of demagoguery that currently passes for political discourse in this country. One would be hardpressed to say that watching Laura Roslin break her word to a prisoner and then kick him out an airlock would be advancing a progressive, liberal agenda, or that Adama questioning his society's worthiness to be saved is somehow indicative of a conservative bias. I certainly have my own political views and it would be disingenuous at best to say that there's some kind of firewall between my beliefs and those portrayed on the show. I'm the head writer -- my views and thoughts are on life are on display every week, including my political predilections. However, I don't see the show as a platform to advance my political belief system or my own views on morality. I do see the show as an opportunity to raise questions in the minds of the audience and ask them to think, which is something of a rariety in these days when politics seems to be about stoking emotionalism and finding simple-minded slogans to stand-in for actual answers to complex problems. ("Culture of Life!" "Right to Die!" "Ban Smoking!" "The Ownership Society!")

Galactica is both mirror and prism through which to view our world. It attempts to mirror the complexities of our lives and our society in turbulent times, while at the same time reflecting and bending that view in order to allow us to extrapolate on notions present in contemporary society but which have not yet come to pass, i.e. a true artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and the existential questions it raises. Our goal is to examine contemporary culture and society, to challenge (and sometimes provoke) our audience, but not to provide easy answers to complex problems.

I firmly believe that what Kara Thrace did to Leoben in "Flesh and Bone" was wrong. I believe that a society which employs torture on the defenseless captives in its custody has crossed a bright shining line that civilized people should not cross. Likewise, I think that Laura Roslin promising a man freedom only to kill him in the end is abhorrent to the ways in which I want my president to behave. However, I also understand why each of them did what they did. I understand the emotional, psychological and moral quandries which can lead two moral, good people to take such ghastly actions. And, in the end, I also believe that it was true to who characters really are, and that trumps everything else. Would I personally behave the same way in similar circumstances? I hope not, but neither am I so confident of my own immunity to the pressures felt by an interrogator charged with finding a nuclear weapon or to the enormous weight sitting on a chief executive trying to protect her citizenry that I can say I would absolutely have made the more "moral" choice.

Was it wrong for Adama to dissolve a legally constituted judicial tribunal in "Litmus" simply because he sensed it becoming a witch-hunt or was he actually protecting the larger concepts of justice? Was it right for Lee to shoot down a civilian ship knowing full well that it was probably filled with innocent human beings or was he making a pragmatic choice to protect the greater number in the fleet? Is Tyrol a fool for protecting Sharon or is he honoring the most fundamental human emotion of all -- true love? These are the debates that I hope you have among yourselves, your families, your friends.

I want the show to provoke you into thinking about the times you live in and the choices that are being made all around you every day. In a time when the President of the United States actually asserts that he has the power to arrest without warrant and detain indefinitely without charge or appeal, any citizen (indeed any person on the face of the Earth) simply by designating them as an "illegal combatant," we should all be engaged in a vigorous and energetic debate about who we are as a people and as human beings and exactly how we do intend to respond to the very real threat posed to this nation and to the foundations of liberal democracy posed by people capable of, and willing to, fly airplanes into buildings.

I hope this show makes you think. I hope this show makes you question the moral choices that are being made in your name and by your representatives. I hope this show angers you at times and makes you outraged at the actions that good people like Kara and Laura sometimes take. But the show is not a polemic; our aim is not to screech and demagogue these issues in search of facile answers. Good people can make bad, even horrific decisions, just as bad people can make noble, even righteous ones. Balancing civil liberties with security is a complicated,