The biggest threat to mankind may not end up being an enormous weapon; in fact, it might be too small to visualize without a microscope. Between global interconnectedness and instant travel, the age of genomic manipulation, and ever-emerging infectious disease possibilities, our biggest fears should be rooted in global health and bioterrorism. We got a recent taste of this with Stephen Soderberg’s academic, sterile 2011 film Contagion. Helix, a brilliant new sci-fi thriller from Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, isn’t overly concerned with whether the audience knows the difference between antivirals and a retrovirus or heavy-handed attempts at replicating laboratory experiments and epidemiology lectures. What it does do is explore infectious disease outbreak and bioterrorism in the greater context of global health and medicine in a visceral, visually chilling way. In the world of Helix, it’s not a matter of if, just when… and what we do about it after the fact. ScriptPhD.com reviews the first three episodes under the “continue reading” cut.

The benign opening scenes of Helix take place virtually every day at the Centers for Disease Control, along with global health centers all over the world. Dr. Alan Farragut, leader of a CDC outbreak team, is assembling and training a group of researchers to investigate a possible viral outbreak at a remote research called Arctic Biosystems. Tucked away in Antarctica under extreme working conditions, and completely removed from international oversight, the self-contained building employs 106 scientists from 35 countries. One of these scientists, Dr. Peter Farragut, is not only Alan’s brother but also appears to be Patient Zero.

It doesn’t take the newly assembled team long to discover that all is not as it seems at Arctic Biosystems. Deceipt and evasiveness from the staff lead to the discovery of a frightening web of animal research, uncovering the tip of an iceberg of ‘pseudoscience’ experimentation that may have led to the viral outbreak, among other dangers. The mysterious Dr. Hiroshi Hatake, the head of Ilaria Corporation, which runs the facility, may have nefarious motivations, yet is desperately reliant on the CDC researchers to contain the situation. The involvement of the US Army engineers and scientists, culminating in a shocking, devastating ending to the third episode, hints that the CDC doesn’t think the outbreak was accidental. Most frightening of all is the discovery of two separate strains of the virus, Narvic A and Narvic B, the former of which turns victims into a bag of Ebola-like hemorrhagic black sludge, while the latter rewires the brain to create superhuman strength – a perfect contagion machine.

With some pretty brilliant sci-fi minds orchestrating the series, including Moore, Lost alum Steven Maeda and Contact producer Lynda Obst, it’s not surprising that Helix extrapolates extremely accurate and salient themes facing today’s scientific environment. Spot on is the friction between communication and collaboration between the agencies depicted on the show – the CDC, bioengineers from the US Army and the fictional Arctic Biosystems research facility. In reality, identifying and curtailing emerging infectious disease outbreaks requires a network of collaboration among, chiefly, the World Health Organization, the CDC, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, famously portrayed in the film Outbreak) and local medical, research and epidemiological outposts at the outbreak site(s). In addition to managing egos, agencies must quickly share proprietary data and balance global oversight (WHO) with local and federal juristictions, which can be a challenge even under ordinary conditions. To that extent, including a revised set of international health regulations in 2005 and the establishment of an official highly transimissible form of the virus created a hailstorm of controversy. In addition to a publishing moratorium of 60 days and censorship of key data, debate raged on the necessity of publishing the findings at all from a national security standpoint and the benefit to risk value of such “dual-use” research. Similar fears of “playing God” were stoked after the creation of a fully synthetic cell by J. Craig Venter and the team behind the Genome Project.

As with Moore’s other SyFy series, Battlestar Galactica, Helix is not perfect, and will need time and patience (from both the network and viewing audience) to strike the right chemistry and develop evenness in its storytelling. The dialogue feels forced at times, particularly among the lead characters and with rapid fire high-level scientific jargon, of which there is a surprising amount. Certain scenes involving the gruesomeness of the viruses feel too long and repetitive in the first episodes, but this will quickly dissipate as the plot develops. But for all of its minor blemishes, Helix is one of the smartest scientific premises to hit television in recent times, and looks to deftly explore familiar sci-fi themes of bioengineering ethics and the risks of ‘playing God’ just because we have the technology to do so.

We’ve become accustomed to sci-fi terrifying us visually, such as the ‘walker’ zombies of The Walking Dead or even psychologically, as in the recent hit movie Gravity. But Helix’s terror is drawn from the utter plausibility of the scenario it presents.

View an extended 15 minute sample of the Helix pilot here:

Helix will air on Friday nights at 10:00 PM ET/PT on SyFy channel.

~*ScriptPhD*~

*****************
ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire us for creative content development.

Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.

Day 2 of Comic-Con is over and now, the Convention is really underway! Today’s ScriptPhD.com coverage has a heavy focus on television, and sci-fi television to be specific. Really, is there any other kind? We spent time in the press room with the stars and producers of SyFy Channel hits Caprica and Stargate Universe, our favorite geeky physics show Big Bang Theory and the exciting (first-time ever!) Comic-Con Discovery Channel unveiling of their new scripted series Reign of the Dinosaurs. As always we try to pay hommage to the roots of Comic-Con with coverage of the design tricks behind comics and graphic novels. Additionally, we provide pictorial documentation of the costumes and happenings of the Con, and our Day 2 Costume of the Day. Complete coverage under the “continue reading” cut.

From the Press Room: Stargate Universe

We were delighted to start our day with the cast of one of our favorite sci-fi shows on the air, Stargate Universe, to get a little peek into the cast’s geeky sides and what they think of their characters and show.

For star David Blue, playing the ship’s resident math geek Eli Wallace, this year is a completely different experience. Last year, there was so much uncertainty about the show’s acceptance and success, while this year, the cast walks into Comic-Con confident of where they are headed. He spoke of liking the idea of Eli as a hero, the show’s surrogate for the audience. Though he admits to being a geek, he was very hesitant to play the role when he heard about it, because of his previous computer nerd role on Moonlight for fear of typecasting. But Eli is not a stereotypical nerd, and experiences a lot more emotional and character growth over the course of Season 2. “I am proud to be a geek/nerd,” Blue says. “Everything from computer programming to comic books to video games.”

We were so thrilled to hear that David was a certified Grade A USDA organic geek, that we got him to proclaim so on camera for you guys:

Ming-Na, whose character Camile Wray is far more controversial and decisive on the show, was asked right off the bat what she’d do differently in real life as opposed to her character. “Well, I wouldn’t be a lesbian,” the married actress quipped. Turning more serious, she said that she wouldn’t be as level-headed and calm as her character, who is often asked to make difficult, morally ambiguous decisions based on emotional issues. The fan’s response to Camile is largely a love-hate relationship. She’s gotten great response from the gay community, something that Na appreciates, but Camile’s escape from cliches or stereotypes is something that has resonated. The morally wrenching decisions are a staple of the show (and sci-fi television in general), and will only continue into Season 2. “You may not like her decisions,” says Na, “But I like her.”

From the Press Room: Caprica

One of the most pivotal roles in the history of sci-fi television (the first Cylon) went to a girl that didn’t even really know the significance of the part. “I didn’t know what Battlestar was before I got the role,” admits Torresani, who was not a real sci-fi geek growing up. “I actually turned it down because I didn’t want to do [Caprica]. I wanted to do [Gossip Girl-type fluff]. It’s exciting now to [realize how important the role is], but it wasn’t nerve-wracking at the beginning. When I read the pilot, she was a spoiled brat, and then she gets in a robot. We didn’t know that I was going to be a Cylon. We just thought they’d use my voice and the robot’s body.” Filming the scenes as the Cylon, Torresani revealed, involves acting next to a giant green 7′ tall stick that everyone communicates with as the Cylon. She finds that the hardest part for her as an actress are scenes as the Cylon where she can’t communicate vocally, such as being lit on fire and not being able to utter a single word. “It’s really challenging. That’s something I never thought I’d have to do.”

We started our time with executive producer David Eick with a humdinger—the question we know fans would want to ask. What has been the producers’ reaction to mixed reviews and fan division of the show, most notably from the Battlestar Galactica fanbase? “We knew to expect a much greater mix [of opinions] because we knew going in that we were not going to craft it or market it as a spin-off of Battlestar,” replied Eick. Rather than containing cheeky references to BSG or inside jokes only the audience knows, Caprica is very much its own beast. He hopes fervently that as the show finds itself and its own focus, that the audience, too, would find its own way in the show. He reminded us that the early days of Battlestar were equally contentious in terms of critical and fan opinions. “The very first Comic-Con we came to for Battlestar was like George W. Bush showing up at an ACLU rally.”

In many ways, he feels more challenged by Caprica, which lacks the ticking time-clock feel of BSG. It’s a more sophisticated style of storytelling, which is based in defining the characters and the world around then, Rome before the fall. The mythology of that world is deepened as the show progresses, and how it’s harnessed by Zoey to express herself. Eick spoke of how much more graceful and elegant Caprica is visually and content-wise, with Blade Runner being a huge influence on the producers and writers. By contrast, BSG had much more of a Black Hawk Down, action feel to it.

By the way, Ron and David have a longstanding tradition of taking a drink of tequila together before either a major show launch or major seminar/Convention. In fact, David brought the bottle and we all had a little fun. Kidding. But seriously, folks, next time you think the storylines on Caprica are getting a liiiiiiiittle wacky, just remember this picture:

Ronald D. Moore, who made a rare media appearance at Comic-Con this year, largely echoed Eick’s comments. Caprica, he maintained is a serial, and (purposefully) as different from Battlestar Galactica as possible. In an even rarer move, Moore openly self-criticized himself for some of the early hiccups of the show. He admitted that it was hard to follow, that the story was indeed confusing, but that the show gained confidence as it went on. He predicted as strong of a build-up for Caprica as the eventual success of Battlestar Galactica. Another fun tidbit that Moore revealed was that the group marriage concept was tossed around for Battlestar Galactica, but just never found the story or the characters to make it happen.

We asked Ron about his thoughts on the current state of sci-fi and what he enjoys. “I’m probably not up to speed on a lot of other science fiction,” Moore said. “I almost avoid it now because I spend so much of my time in a science fiction world that I tend not to go there. It becomes almost like more work to watch other science fiction shows. In my brain, I’m inevitably thinking ‘How does that compare to us? And that’s their structure. How many characters do they have? I wonder what their CGI budget was.’ I haven’t watched a lot of other science fiction television for that reason.” Nevertheless, he maintains that it’s a thriving genre that will always be with us, despite the rise and fall of popularity. The one holy grail Moore hopes for is a broadcast network (read mainstream) sci-fi hit. He isn’t sure what the reason is that this popularity has remained so elusive, LOST notwithstanding. “Maybe it’s just us,” he mused. “Maybe it’s just us [the collective sci-fi geekdom], and there’s not this gigantic mass market for it in television in the way that there is a gigantic mass market for movies. Maybe that will never happen.”

We here at ScriptPhD.com hope otherwise.

From the Press Room: Big Bang Theory

If Ronald D. Moore is concerned about the viability of a basic network science fiction hit, at least he can take solace in Big Bang Theory, arguably the smartest, most successful, streamlined show about science and scientists in the history of television. We had such a fun time hanging out with the actors last year, that this year, with access to the full production team, we decided to get as much scoop from the show as possible.

One thing fans would be surprised to learn, and the first question we asked right off the bat, is just how geeky the team behind Big Bang Theory is. Producer/writer Lee Aaronson, a self-certified comics and graphic novel geek, used to own his own comic book store. This is where a lot of the inspiration for Sheldon (and the rest of the team’s) love of geek culture comes from. They also have a close relationship to UCLA physics professor and the show’s science advisor David Salzberg. Often, they will write a line like “Hey guys, I was just working on [insert science here]” and let him fill in the blanks. We were wondering about that, too!

Geeky enough? Not even close. Showrunner and co-creator Bill Prady is a former computer programmer. He’s far more excited about Apple founder Steve Wozniak guest starring on the show than any fame or fortune that has incurred because of it. He and

co-creator Chuck Lorre maintained that the geek culture was their most important singular focus in writing the show. As one might glean from walking the halls of Comic-Con, they maintained that all geeks/nerds/scientists are not the same. There is a lot of heterogeneity amongst them, and differing, personal passions—be they Star Trek or the mathematical concepts behind string theory. And where do they get all their geeky throwaway lines? “Oh, those are all available on the internet!” And THAT is why we love Big Bang Theory.

The actors themselves get right in the thick of the fun. Kaley Cuoco, playing perhaps the non-geekiest of the bunch in Penny, has nevertheless embraced geekdom. Her latest love? Her iPad! She and Johnny Galecki would both like to see a romance blossom between Penny and Sheldon (“Peldon,” joked Cuoco), but acknowledge that the road from platonic friendship to romantic involvement is filled with bumps and individual growth. Jim Parsons, who I shamelessly adore, started his time with us by telling me to shove it. He was, of course, talking about my tape recorder, but when I joked that I couldn’t believe Sheldon told me to shove it, his reply was: “And he’d tell you to shove it again and again!” Before telling Simon Helberg to bite him. Nice to know he stays in character so well!

We couldn’t leave a Big Bang Theory press room without getting our favorite superior elitist nerd to do something only for ScriptPhD.com fans. So here you have it, kids. From Jim Parsons, to you… a personal “Bazinga!”

Comics Design

One of THE most fascinating panels that we attended at Comic-Con so far was on the design secrets behind some of your favorite comics and book covers. A panel of some of the world’s leading designers revealed their methodologies (and sometimes failures) in the design process behind their hit pieces. An unparalleled purview into the mind of the designer, and the visual appeal that so often subliminally contributes to the success of a graphic novel, comic, or even regular book. We do, as it turns out, judge books by their covers.

We will be revealing each designer’s comments on their thought and art process, but are waiting for images from the panel to be emailed to us. So consider this a placeholder until we can finish this writeup and include it in Saturday or Sunday’s coverage. Stay tuned . . .

Graphic Novels: The Personal Touch

(From our correspondent Bryy Miller)

Some panels have mysterious names, some not so much. This one belongs in the latter category. There was no hidden meaning behind the phrase “personal touch.” This was all about the writers (Gabrielle Bell of Cecil & Jordan in New York, Howard Cruse of Stuck Rubber Baby, Vanessa Davis of Make Me A Woman, Larry Marder of Beanworld, Jilliam Tamaki of Skim, C. Tyler of You’ll Never Know, and moderator Shaenon Garrity of Skin Horse). More importantly and interestingly, it was about who they were. Some didn’t know who they were, others did, but they all knew one thing: that something inside of them needed to write.

Tamaki started off the discussion by stating perhaps the simplest answer of why she writes what she does, “I think that’s the only kind of book I wanna make.” Davis continued by adding that “anytime… it’s going to have a personal touch. Comics can soak up the people’s idiosyncrasies and sensibilities.” Marder, perhaps the odd man in the group, stated that even though his autobiography is a FANTASY, it still is an autobiography in the sense that it tells stories about his own feelings. Before anyone else could chime in, C. Tyler (arguably the oldest member of the panel) shot to life with an amazing amount of energy and playfulness. “I’ve taken autobiographies for granted.” she started “I know we’re at Comic-Con, but I hate superhero comics. When I read the first autobiographical comic, I was floored… it was disturbing and in a comic.” She went on to describe how she is fascinated with the idea of putting yourself out there, grabbing pieces of scraps from the table and showing us as if they were her life story – or even her creative process – in visual form. She would get extremely animated, and it really helped to humanize the element of the mysterious writer’s block and constant internal struggle to find how to portray your story. She ended her opening remarks with this, “the personal touch for me is I do it all by hand.”

Bell was the most reluctant to speak, but also, besides Tyler, the most visual. Not in the sense that she was very gesticulative or alive, but that she obviously was thinking very hard but having trouble in how to phrase her thoughts. “I try to cut my personal touch out,” she started, displaying the classic writer’s twitch of not looking directly at her audience “[I try to] make it universal. Professional.”

This instigated a very visceral response from Tyler, who on the spot tried to get into an earnest conversation with her fellow comic artist about what it means to be professional. Sadly, it didn’t last that long as Bell migrated back into thought. Cruse then brought up the point that, if your content is good, then mistakes in your craft are easily overlooked by a reader. The discussion (because calling it a panel at the end would just feel weird) had reached its time limit. Cruse gave some parting advice to young writers, “It will literally paralyze you to think of how many people have an idea similar to yours.” Marder stated that you have to fail in public. Garrity reminded everyone to heed that advice, as “Carol, Larry, and Howard have been in the comics since the seventies.”

Tyler let out a self-taunting gag.

Reign of the Dinosaurs

In November of 2008, the hoi polloi at Discovery Channel approached producer Erik Nelson (Grizzly Man) with a simple request: “the ultimate kick-ass dinosaur show.” They poured enormous resources, creative and fiduciary, to create a television series that will truly break ground, both for Discovery Channel and its own medium. Scripted, yet unnarrated, scientifically stunning, yet bereft of the omniscient “talking head” paleontologist, Reign of the Dinosaurs is the ultimate exercise in “show don’t tell.” Premiering in the Spring of 2011, Reign will consist of 36 self-contained episodes erected from the art up. The stories will be chronological, detailing the rise, reign, and ultimate extinction (with a twist!) of the dinosaur species. But unlike the plethora of educational shows that cover the same topic, these will be rooted in storytelling, in treating the dinosaurs not as dinosaurs, but characters with whom we share an emotional connection. Trust me, having seen the first few world-premiere clips, you will care for these creatures, and the show will both exhilarate you and break your heart.

The true key to the success of Reign of the Dinosaurs was a dedication to amassing cream of the crop talent, formerly of Disney and Pixar, which allowed them to channel superlative animation and design talents towards an ambitious format. Along with Nelson, the team (and Comic-Con panel) consisted of renowned artists Ricardo Delgado (Dark Horse’s Age of Reptiles), Tom DeRosier (Lilo and Stitch, Mulan), self-proclaimed dinosaur nerd David Krentz (Disney’s Dinosaur, John Carter of Mars), Iain McCaig (Star Wars 1, 2, and 3), Mishi McCaig (Iron Man), Pete Von Sholly (The Mask, Darkman). Along with showing the audience their two (so-far) completed “cold open” teasers that will open episodes of the show, several of the animators simulated storyboard pitches (see picture below), just like the ones they would exchange in a writers’ room for several forthcoming episodes.

Several things impressed me upon the early viewing of Reign of the Dinosaurs, aside from the stunning art direction and well thought-out design. First of all, this show is really cheeky and funny. When the writers say that they’ll give the creatures personalities, they mean it, and it’s all done through expository action rather than showy narration. An early cold open has a dinosaur, trying to soothe her babies to sleep in the wee hours of the dawn, annoyed at the incessant chirping of a smaller dinosaur deep in the forest. Finally, she marches over and does what a dinosaur would do: bites the head off of her more annoying, diminutive co-habiting pest. Literally. Secondly, the stories pack an emotional wallop. A cinema-quality sequence shown at the end, taking place post-impact of the asteroid that ultimately killed off the dinosaurs, has the post-apocalyptic feel of Cormack McCarthy’s The Road (which the illustrator said influenced him) and visual appeal of Blade Runner. The ending, a hopeful coda on the extinction of the dinosaurs as an evolutionary stepping stone for our modern birds, had me sobbing. And then giving the panel a standing ovation.

Spring of 2011 is far away in television terms, but close enough for me to say this. Be excited, folks. Be very, very excited.

From the Press Room: Reign of the Dinosaurs

Not only did we get treated to a front-row preview of Reign of the Dinosaurs, ScriptPhD.com was extraordinarily fortunate to join the Discovery creative team for an intimate roundtable discussion panel after their panel. We were able to get enormous insight into the team’s collaborative process, storytelling aims, and dedication to balancing scientific accuracy with emotional connection, all while reinventing an entire medium. Ambitious? Just slightly.

One of the first things that impressed me upon talking to the Reign of the Dinosaurs team after their panel was their sheer dedication to, almost obsession with, “getting the science right.” Mishi McCaig and Iain McCaig spoke at length about the team’s dedication to nearing the line between science and entertainment. Hugely important to the project was the involvement of renowned University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holz, Jr., who cross-checks and gets pitched all the storyboard ideas. The behavior depicted in the show is speculative, but based on facts. This includes the animal’s muscle movements, how they would hunt prey, how they would interact—all aided by the paleontology knowledge of illustrator Dave Krentz. Ultimately, the team wants interest in the show to launch a more widespread educational initiative, which will include a Discovery multi-media website, and other supplementary materials to the show itself. Even when stories delve into the outrageous or fun, they’re rooted in research. A clip depicting high dinosaurs hallucinating was rooted in the marula tree, whose hallucinogenic fruit animals will eat and get high off of.

Producer Erik Nelson and illustrators Tom DeRosier and Ricardo Delgado spoke at length about the collaborative process of making the show, which they described like a TV writing room, only with animators. “Everyone’s sensibilities came together in a ‘hive mind’,” said Nelson. This visionary approach was important to the team, which is essentially trying to reinvent a TV genre. The last non-narrated, no-dialogue animated show was Walt Disney’s “Silly Symphonies” back in 1938. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way since then. The team was amazed at how constructing the dinosaurs’ stories moved them, comparing their effort to “March of the Penguins,” another simple vehicle showcasing animals that was rooted in an emotional audience response. This empathy for the dinosaurs peaks with the show’s conclusion, in which the dinosaurs die out (spoiler alert!), but which is still painted in an upbeat, survivalist way, as most geologists and paleontologists agree that modern birds are the direct evolutionary ancestors of dinosaurs.

“We’re not trying to hook you as a dinosaur person,” concluded Delgado. “We’re trying to hook you as a human being.”

Two last fun tidbits from today. Last year, on Day 3 of Comic-Con, we got geeky in the press room with our friend Barry of The Ugly Couch Show. When we saw each other again this year, we thought we’d start an annual tradition. So here it is, ladies and gentlemen. Two very tired, cranky, overworked press corps members getting silly in the press room:

And last, but definitely not least, is a very worthy Day 2 Costume of the Day. These ladies hit it out of the park. Bonus points if you can tell us which comics they’re representing:

Come back tomorrow for more geeky sci-fi fun! And don’t forget to become a fan of our Facebook fan page for extra Comic-Con photos and a chance to win amazing surprise swag when we get back from San Diego.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

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ScriptPhD.com is extraordinarily proud to present our first ever Science Week! Collaborating with the talented writers over at CC2K: The Nexus of Pop Culture and Fandom, we have worked hard to bring you a week’s worth of interviews, reviews, discussion, sci-fi and even science policy. We kick things of in style with a conversation with Professor Malcolm MacIver, a robotics engineer and science consultant on the SyFy Channel hit Caprica. While we have had a number of posts covering Caprica, including a recent interview with executive producer Jane Espenson, to date, no site has interviewed the man that gives her writing team the information they need to bring artificial Cylon intelligence to life. For our exclusive interview, and Dr. MacIver’s thoughts on Cylons, smart

robotics, and the challenges of future engineering, please click “continue reading.”

Questions for Professor Malcolm MacIver

ScriptPhD.com: Your first Hollywood science experience involved consulting for a sequel of the 1980s cult classic Tron. What was it like to dive in from the Northwestern School of Engineering onto a

set and work with screenwriters? What were some of your first impressions?

Malcolm MacIver: It was fascinating to learn a bit about how these huge expensive projects are structured. One specific thing I wanted to know more about was the role of writers in movies versus in TV. I had been told by friends in the industry that writers are typically less prominent players in movies than in top TV shows, were they can have considerable power. Consistent with this, we (the scientists who met with the Tron folks) were not introduced to the writers, who I believe were in the room taking notes, while we were introduced to all the other major players (director, producer, etc). I was also very curious to see how the group of scientists that I was a part of would interact with the movie makers. The culture gap is obviously huge, big enough for massive misunderstandings to blossom during superficially neutral discussions. During our meeting, our approach to the folks involved with the movie varied

from inspired to less admirable attitudes. The less admirable attitudes seemed to arise from the mismatch between the importance scientists can place on their own endeavors, relative to their endeavor’s importance to story telling.

An anecdote I like along those lines is about how the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson complained to James Cameron that when Kate Winslet looked up from the deck of the Titanic, the stars in the sky were in the wrong position. I liked Cameron’s response, which was “Last I checked the film’s made a billion dollars.” People love the story, not the positions of the stars above the Titanic. We all tend to overemphasize the importance of the thing we are closest to, and it’s a problem that scientists need to be especially attuned to in these contexts.

SPhD: You are now a technical script consultant for Caprica, the television prequel to Battlestar Galactica, providing insight into things like artificial intelligence, robotics and neuroscience. To date, what has been one of your biggest contributions to a final written episode that otherwise wouldn’t have made it in to the storyline?

MM: One of the themes of my research is understanding the ways in which intelligence is not just all about what’s above your shoulders. Nervous systems evolved with the bodies they control—the interaction is extremely sophisticated, and stubbornly resists our attempts to understand it through basic science research or emulation in robotics. Representative of this fact is that we now have a computer that can beat the world chess champion—a paragon of an “above the shoulder” activity—while we are far from being able to robotically emulate the agility of a cockroach.

One of the things we’ve learned about the cleverness that resides outside the cranium is that things like the spinal cord are incredibly sophisticated “brains” operating sometimes without much input from upstairs. Through some old experiments that are better not gone into, scientists showed that animals can walk with little brain beyond the parts that regulate circulation and breathing and their spinal cord. This is because the spinal cord can do most of what we need for basic locomotion without any input. The point is that control of the body is distributed—it doesn’t just live in the brain. The lesson hasn’t been lost on robotics folks; for example, Rodney Brooks popularized an approach called “subsumption architecture” based on this idea. So – back to Caprica: For episode 2, “Rebirth,” the show needed some explanation for why the metacognitive processor was only working in one robot. The real reason, as we know, is that only one had Zoe in it; but the roboticists were being pressed by Daniel Graystone as to why it wasn’t working in others. The idea that I gave them, which they used, was that it was because this particular metacognitive processor had distributed its control to peripheral subunits. Because of this, it had become tied to one particular robot. It’s an idea straight out of contemporary neuroscience and efforts to emulate this in robotics.

SPhD: To me, one of the most fascinating directions of the show is the idea that the first Cylon prototype was born of blood, in this case Zoe Graystone, and because of that, carries sentient emotions and thoughts. What is the fine line between a very smart, capable robot and an actual being?

MM: To vastly oversimplify things, you can imagine a gradation in “being” from a rock to a fully sentient self-aware entity. Some of the differentiators between the rock and you include things like the impact of others on how you think about yourself. For example, categorizing a rock as a particular kind of rock has no effect on the constitution of the rock. This isn’t so for self-aware creatures: once a person is labeled a child abuser, it actually affects the constitution of the person so labeled. People treat child abusers differently from non-child abusers. People who are categorized in this way suddenly see themselves differently; and those who were victims do so as well. The philosopher Ian Hacking, who I studied with during my Masters in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, called this the difference between “Human Kinds” and “Natural Kinds.” Another differentiator is that, for what you refer to as an “actual being,” there is a sense of self-interest in continued survival. Because of this, such a being is susceptible to being harmed, and may also therefore have what an ethicist would call “moral worthiness.” Moral worthiness in turn imposes certain obligations in regard to ethical treatment. For example, returning to the rock, we wouldn’t say we harm a rock when we explode it with dynamite, and we wouldn’t accuse the person who did the blowing up of unethical behavior (certain stripes of environmentalism would differ on this point). Unlike a rock, all animals exhibit an interest in self-preservation.

A very smart and capable robot can be imagined which is not affected by how it is categorized by others, and does not have an interest in self-preservation. So, it would fall short of at least those criteria for full-on “being.” But, there’s a lot more that can be said here, of course.

SPhD: What aspect of the Cylon machine and their story, which is now at the heart of Caprica, do you find the most captivating, either as a viewer or a robotics engineer?

MM: The scenario of our inventions eventually becoming so complex that they begin to have an interest in self preservation, and thus can be harmed (and so may start to be candidates for ethical treatment), is one I’ve thought a lot about in the past. It’s a key theme of the show, too. That’s one aspect that fascinates me about the show. The other is the play between the different kinds of being that Zoe has—from avatar-in-a-robot, to avatar-in-virtual reality, to “really real.” It’s a fun fugue on the varieties of being that raises good questions about the nature of existence and mortality, among others.

SPhD: In your latest post for the Science in Society blog, you explore the theoretical question of whether the United States (or any country, for that matter) could develop a Cylon type of war machine. Do you feel there is a distinct possibility the military might ever pursue this option and how might it impact warfare strategy?

MM: I’m going to explore that in my next few posts—and I’m still formulating my thoughts. In their initial development, a more realistic metaphor for how such robot warriors will work with us is something like a dumbed-down well-trained animal, willing to follow commands but without much of a sense of what to do if something gets in the way, and little recourse to things like flexibly generating new behaviors like a real animal does. But I can’t foresee any significant barriers to the development of autonomous robots with more of the attributes of a fuller kind of being I mentioned to above. I feel the more relevant question is whether this is on the order of 10 years away, or a hundred. Once it happens, the question will then be whether the global community recognizes military applications of this technology as a potential threat in need of careful control, like nuclear arms, or not. That’s all for now – for more you’ll have to visit my blog!

SPhD: During last year’s World Science Festival, we covered a really interesting panel called Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs on the Horizon, which included a cross-section of engineers, ethicists and Battlestar actors discussing artificial intelligence, robotics, and the capabilities of modern engineering, which in some cases are very impressive indeed. In your opinion, what is one of the most significant or promising advance in robotics of the last few years?

MM: The maturing of what is sometimes called “probabilistic robotics.” This approach is what allowed the autonomous car Stanley to win the DARPA Grand Challenge, the challenge to have a vehicle drive itself with no human involvement over a challenging course in the desert. The basic idea is that while traditional robotics was concerned with making precise motions based on very well characterized inputs, what we need for robots to work in the real world is ways to handle the massive array of noisy and uncertain signals that are typically available to guide behavior. There are approaches from probability and statistics for doing this well. These approaches are integral to making robots have greater sensory intelligence. My own laboratory has developed a new kind of sensory robot using this approach, and it works very well.

SPhD: I have previously argued that television and film do more for promoting science by incorporating small, accurate pieces into an overarching story rather than basing an entire story on an unsustainable or far-reaching scientific concept. Thoughts?

MM: TV and film, when it is successful, is about telling a captivating story. The elements of good story telling (emotional connection to the characters, humor, insight into what it is to be human) have little in common with the elements of a good scientific concept (testability, explanatory power, coherence with the rest of what we know). So, yes I’d agree. Trying to do more than incorporate small bits is going to lead to your audience feeling like they are getting a lecture rather having a story shared with them, and no story teller should do that. Documentaries are an interesting hybrid, though—you need a good story, and if it’s about science, a good bit will be on the concepts. How to make that exciting and not spin out into yawn-provoking pedantry is quite the trick.

Malcolm MacIver, PhD, is a professor at Norwestern University with joint appointments in the Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering departments, and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology. He received a B.Sc. and MA at the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2001.

~*ScriptPhD*~
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No one has been more excited about the premiere of Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica than ScriptPhd.com. We eagerly joined the cast and crew of both shows last May during their joint panel at the Los Angeles Paley television festival. We were also one of the first sites to review the Caprica 2 hour pilot. And now, at long last, one of the most anticipated sci-fi prequels ever will premiere on the SyFy Channel this Friday. ScriptPhD.com’s Bryy Miller reviews the first three episodes and talks about the show’s early conceptualization and long-term promise. We are also extraordinarily fortunate and proud to bring you an Editor’s interview with series executive producer and show runner Jane Espenson, in which she talks about what we can expect from Caprica. Please click “continue reading” for full content.

REVIEW: Caprica
ScriptPhD.com Grade: B

The spin-off of SyFy ratings spectacular Battlestar Galactica has a lot in common with Shakespeare’s King Lear. Like King Lear, it is far more ambitious than any of Shakespeare’s previous works, both in scope and in depth (yes, even more so than Hamlet—but that’s for another article). In addition, it fleshes out the ensemble on a level far more fluid and psychological than what came before. But, as it turns out, being like King Lear is Caprica’s great flaw. The glitch, so to speak.

Caprica, for the benefit of new fans, is a follow-up to writer/producer Ronald D. Moore’s ambitiously verbose and successful science fiction series, Battlestar Galactica. Caprica’s main mission is to tell the creation story of the being that would one day become mankind’s greatest enemy, an artificial intelligence called the Cylon. Unlike other AI, these robots actually experience emotion and lead “full” lives. This, of course, will make for some rather interesting debates on the nature of intelligence, the soul, and war in general. Caprica takes place approximately 58 years before the events of Galactica, and while my brain is not scientific enough to compute if that is a short enough time span to encompass the full sequence of events, from the looks of it, they seem to be going at a realistic pace. In those 58 years, the Cylons don’t just sit around on the assembly line: they have to gain sentience, be mass produced, become a staple of everyday life, and start the FIRST Cylon war with humanity. Because there is quite a lot of story to tell, the central question is not whether the series is sustainable, but whether the story is worth telling.

Back to the Lear analogy. The thing about BSG was that, even though it possessed quite a large ensemble cast, it was plot-driven. Each character was essential to one overarching story, one goal. Caprica is not plot-driven. It is character-driven, and this is where it becomes a liability to be just like lil’ old King Lear. The writers of Caprica seem content to throw a lot of disparate characters all over the map doing completely different things and interweaving story arcs that feel as if a silk spider had gone to work on them. “It’s more about their personal lives,” admitted series creator/writer Jane Espenson at last year’s Paley event. “They don’t have the threat of death breaking down their neck every moment so that you can feel more lived in, you can explore this culture more.” Added Ronald D. Moore, “It’s a different show. I mean, losing the action-adventure is a risk…. [But] since there’s no Cylons coming in to sort of destroy the Galactica every once in a while, fate and humanity doesn’t hang in the balance yet.” Caprica writers even go as far as to make the main antagonist a polygamist, and give her family life a (sometimes bloated) spotlight. It’s as if they thought simply giving a character something to do would be high drama. Don’t even get me started on the subplot involving what seems to be an entire precinct of corrupt cops, three of which are introduced as part of the ensemble. My fears were not assuaged one bit when I saw that Ron Moore himself was on the writing staff. It may seem contradictory, me saying Ron Moore, the creator of a brilliant generation-defining show, writing for Caprica might be a bad thing. While he does a mean tap dance, Mr. Moore has a tendency to introduce plots into his shows without knowing what they have to do with said show. This is most apparent when he copped to not knowing where a pregnancy storyarc in BSG was going (among a human and Cylon, no less), and when he flat out stated that you don’t know where a season is going to end when you start writing it. This began many debates within the writing community if having a planned story versus on-the-fly writing mattered (the answer is, and always will be, yes). While initial publicity seemed to indicate that his involvement would be minimal, for Caprica’s sake, hopefully it is the Ron Moore of the earlier stages of Battlestar Galactica. It helps that the show is being helmed and written by equally brilliant BSG and Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer Jane Espenson.

Our story begins with Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), genius inventor, man about town, owner of seemingly everything. He is Bill Gates 2.0, and unbeknownst to him, his daughter Zoe (Allessandra Torresani), is busy creating artificial life in the form of a digital clone. The very first scene in the series is also the most confusing and frustrating, because it takes place in an Internet 8.0 lab of hers. Picture a fully interactive Second Life, overpopulated with the bored, the rich, and the dumb—which is not fully explained to the viewers in any coherent manner for at least thirty minutes into the two-hour pilot. There is a lot to like about Caprica. Every single concept in Caprica’s world was superb. Amazing. Despite visual and thematic superiority as one would expect from the BSG team, there were problems with early conceptualization. Everything seemed to be told to the viewer three times: once in vague technobabble that is supposed to sound too smart for us, once in a truncated layman’s speak, and yet another in a sort of mystic and supernatural definition. The problem is not with the idea but with its execution. Zoe’s invention—the Amoeba of the Cylons—is basically a search engine that can find genetic data and turn that into… well… memory. RAM. Gigahertz. It’s a fantastic way to explain true AI, the only problem is that the writers do so through the steps outlined before.

Tragedy occurs. Telling would be spoiling, but needless to say, Zoe dies in an accident that not only takes the life of the daughter of Joe Adams (Esai Morales), father of Galactica’s future commander Bill Adama, but also stirs the show’s significant dialogue on monotheism and the Cylons’ embrace of a One True God. Joe will come

into Daniel’s life later, but not before Zoe’s digital avatar says she felt Zoe die. It’s a Christmas Miracle. Daniel discovers this and is torn between being with his daughter once more and exploiting his dead spawn’s technological breakthrough to save his own dying company. Coinciding with Zoe’s death is a ticking clock on a government order for a perfect war machine robot, a hitherto failing experiment. It seems that Zoe 1.0’s death has caused a chain reaction resulting in a steady drop in shares, and the ire of Baxter Sarno (Patton Oswalt), a talk show host that has got to be the love child of Don Draper and Conan O’Brien.

Joe Adama’s story is one of woe from even before the mysterious accident. Adams is a Tauron, an ethnicity most despised out of all the horoscope-based groups of the Caprica/BSG universe. Joe resides as a lawyer in what is a Caprica take on Little Italy in the 1920s. I really loved these scenes, of which there are plenty, and could honestly watch the rest of the series—flaws and all—to its end simply for them. Joe’s brother is in the mob (another mobster looks strikingly similar to one of the 12 human Cylon models, FYI), teaching young Will Adams “street skills” that obviously and ultimately help make him so tough later on; Joe himself is in constant war over being a straight lawyer or being on the payroll. Indeed, at the end of the third episode, he does something so over-the-top that it risks making him seem unbelievable. Coming back to his ties to Graystone, he has a brilliant line about wanting to jump off a bridge that he says to the man during their initial meeting. In fact, both men do tremendous jobs of suffering incomprehensible pain for more than one episode, which I liked. Too many shows blithely brush off important deaths, or death in general. The two men become intertwined, first by loss, then by ideology. Even in conflict, they keep circling each other. But viewers lulled into thinking this is a simple “buddy” arrangement are dead wrong. Sometimes Greystone and Adams like each other, sometimes they don’t, but they always feel like they exist without the other. Graystone lets Adams in on his little “secret”, and their worlds crash into one another like a preordained destiny.

Zoe 2.0, it goes without saying, is the cornerstone of Caprica. No matter what else fails about the show, the ideas and concepts behind Zoe 2.0 shine through. Because Zoe 2.0 was “born” through blood, we get an interesting twist on the idea of violence being inherited; this time, however, it is digital inheritance instead of pure genetics. Because Zoe’s mother, Amanda (Paula Malcolmson), never knew her daughter in life, she has the possibility of getting to know her in death (this never happens in the first three episodes, but it is hinted that they will go down this road in some form). Male tech geeks unwittingly poke and prod at Cylon Zoe 2.0 when daddy downloads her in a prototype robot body, most likely commenting on how we objectify women in our society. Zoe’s “brain”, after being linked to her robot body for a limited time, refuses to work in other bodies, much like an organ being rejected. There’s also a hilarious scene involving Zoe 2.0 in the proto-Cylon shell which will forever be hailed as the ultimate walking-in-on-your-parents moment. Time will tell if these will remain brilliant and worthy science fiction concepts, or if they will be supplanted by other stories as the series evolves.

Overall, one would expect Caprica to have been a bit more polished, especially coming from the purebred creative stock that it is derived from, but it’s a pretty decent start to a prologue. Regardless of the flaws in the writing and story structure, Caprica has enough going for it to be at least a casual watch with a cult following from the previous series. It won’t be as good as people say, but it won’t be as bad as they say, either. Which is enough like King Lear as you can get, acclaim-wise.

Caprica airs on the SyFy Channel, Fridays at 9pm, premiering January 22, 2010

The cast and crew of Caprica preview what to expect in the show, and their world:

Interview with Battlestar Galactica writer and Caprica showrunner Jane Espenson:

ScriptPhD.com was extraordinarily grateful to the SyFy Channel and Jane Espenson for granting us the opportunity to ask a few preview questions. We wanted to ensure ScriptPhD fans’ questions got answered and that we could bring you exclusive scoop that you can’t find on any other site. Here is what Jane had to say about the show, her career, and a look back at BSG:

ScriptPhD.com: A lot of fans know you from your brilliant work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Gilmore Girls, and most recently Battlestar Galactica. But what a lot of fans don’t know is that you had a most atypical entry point into the Hollywood scene. You studied linguistics at UC Berkeley, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, with some very impressive academic achievements before getting noticed for your Star Trek: The Next Generation spec script. How do you feel that the rigors of academic study prepared you for Hollywood, writing for TV, and now, being a showrunner?

Jane Espenson: Wow, interesting question — I have no idea if it’s going to lead to an interesting answer, but let’s give it a try! My graduate work was in a very specific part of Linguistics/Cognitive Science — I studied metaphor, not as a literary device, but as an important part of how we conceptualize the world around us. In a way I suppose it’s a very science fictiony area of study because it’s all about the ways our brains translate our abstract interactions with the world into OTHER kinds of interactions with the world. There’s something very “V-world” going on even inside our own brains, to use some of the parlance of Caprica. The climate of inquiry and open-mindedness that I encountered in school is very much like what you find in the writers’ room of a science fiction television show. And, of course, science fiction is inherently about metaphor — understanding our world by filtering it through a different set of rules. There are days in which what I did in school feels very separate from what I do now, and days in which it feels like I never left — like it’s all part of the same inquiry. But now I get to write for robots!

SPhD: This is a Battlestar Galactica: The Plan question from our fan Grey. He brought up the interesting point that the Cylon John Cavil has one of the most fascinating, perplexing roles in this movie (and arguably the Galactica story). His character seems to contradict himself philosophically and morally a lot. Just as the Cavil on Caprica learns to trust from Anders and the Resistance, the Cavil on Galactica seems to learn not to trust from Ellen and the other Cylons. Indeed, the Caprica Cavil has a point blank shot at Starbuck and he doesn’t kill her, but viciously knifes the little boy that befriended him on the Galactica ship. Do you have any thoughts on this?

JE: Yes, exactly — the two Cavils go on different journeys that lead them to diverge. The Cavil on Caprica learns a lesson that the Cavil in the fleet doesn’t learn. Caprica-Cavil learns that the love for humanity is going to survive even if humans themselves don’t. He doesn’t take the shot at Kara and he comes to view the entire attempted genocide as a massive error. Fleet-Cavil has other experiences in which the Cylons who surround him are repeatedly rendered useless by the affect humans have on them. When even he starts to feel the appeal of humanity, he lashes out at the orphan boy. He steels himself against humanity and his views become more and more unforgiving. By the end of The Plan, the two Cavils have very different opinions on the actions they’ve already taken, and what they should do next. Events of the end of the BSG series tell use which position was adopted by the other Cavils. (It wasn’t the more loving one.)

A Caprica question from another fan, Iqbal. He wonders if the show Caprica will explore moral ambiguity not just in surface concepts, but really try hard to pull topics from our own contemporary struggles (two wars, religious conflict, health care, the failure to engender proper economic reform, etc) in ways that defy the superficiality of the mainstream media as well as explore historic issues — as some of your best collective work on BSG did?

JE: We made a real attempt to make sure we were writing episodes, not essays. But, yes, absolutely, matters of religious conflict, abuse of government power and cultural bias are so thoroughly cooked into our show that the episodes inevitably explore these issues. And moral ambiguity is really the key to the show. The characters on our show tend to believe that their personal values are the key to keeping their world from sliding to its destruction, so they’re all driven by highly moral principals from their point of view, which may not be at all the view of the other characters or of the viewers. This was really exciting stuff to write. So yes, we do address contemporary issues, but we don’t bend the show around to focus its lens on the issues — we let it occur naturally as the stories take us there.

SPhD: A really fun Caprica question from our fan Josh! In the Caprica pilot, we saw the END of a professional pyramid C-Bucs game where they left the court….is it possible the writers might incorporate an actual Pyramid game for us to see on Caprica?

JE: Yes! We will see parts of games. It turns out that large arenas, and more importantly, large crowds are very expensive to film, but you will definitely see and hear some game play. Both the team and Atlas Arena itself will be very important to our story as it unfolds.

Film director and screenwriter Bryy Miller is the president of Lefty Films.

~*Yorick Archer*~

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It seems like we just can’t seem to stop saying goodbye to Battlestar Galactica. Perhaps the defining science fiction show of my generation, BSG’s post-finale swan song has included a bevy of cast appearances, an issue of the complete series on DVD and Blu-Ray, a recent Bryan Singer-helmed feature film announcement, and now, an upcoming two-hour television movie event. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan takes viewers on a journey of the events that transpired two weeks before the Cylon colony attacks, and their subsequent war with the humans, all from the Cylons’ viewpoint. Compiled with a combination of new footage and key plot highlight clips over the course of the show’s run, The Plan is designed to be the ultimate retrospective with a different perspective. ScriptPhD.com review + trailer under the “continue reading” jump.

Review: Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
ScriptPhD.com Grade: B

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan begins twelve days before the cylon attacks, with the nuclear codes Cylon Model Six (Tricia Helfer) cajoled Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis) into giving her getting handed off to Cylon Model One. From the first plot point, it is clear that this is the retelling of Battlestar Galactica as the Cylons’ story, and the humans are bystanders. It is one of many that fill in abruptly left off or missing scenes (Cavil desperately ordering Boomer (Grace Park) to shoot Adama, Caprica Six rejoining the other Cylons after her conversations with Baltar aboard the Galactica, exactly what was Ellen Tigh doing before her reunion with Saul). The fun of this movie is not in any new material or storytelling. It’s that every look, every gathering of those slowly revealed to be Cylons during the show’s run carries more weight. “When Battlestar fans see The Plan, they’re all going to have to go back and watch the series again,” said Edward James Olmos. The visual effects and imagery are stunning—worthy of a feature film. The first full ten minutes of the movie (not for the faint of heart) are dedicated to the nuclear holocaust, destruction and aftermath of the attacks on the colonies. While the miniseries prelude to Battlestar didn’t dwell on the attacks, The Plan does, to an uncomfortably and necessarily detailed degree. Another favorite visual was two Cavil cylons floating hand in hand in outer space post-airlock, with gorgeous cosmos CGI imagery so rare in the mostly interior series. The movie is also chock-full of humor and irony, often of the

bawdy kind. Who knew skinjobs were so funny? The price of admission, however, is for Dean Stockwell’s performance as Brother Cavill. I’ve always felt he was the most conflicted, complex of all the “original” models and this film serves as his star turn. He is everywhere—at once a priest on the Galactica, a resistance warrior on New Caprica, scheming on the baseship—and everything. It’s equally fun watching him boiling with frustration that The Plan isn’t coming to fruition, snapping at his fellow Cylons, and every sardonic aside in-between.

“This [movie] is for the fans,” remarked Eddie Olmos after a recent intimate Hollywood Plan screening. “This is for all the fans that were around since the beginning.” It is both a strength and weakness for the film. While in-the-know die-hards will laugh at the cheeky inside jokes and reveals, The Plan serves as neither an introductory primer nor promises to answer in-depth questions raised thematically by the show. For example, what is “The Plan”? The Cylons declare nuclear war on the thirteen colonies, eviscerate humanity, and take their rightful place as a sole existence under the watchful eye of their one true God. But this much we already knew. “The colonies of men lie trembled at our feet,” Brother Cavil declares to the other Cylon models, but never answers why, or where and how the nuclear holocaust was conceived. Indeed, this devotion to the Cylon God, contrasted with humanity’s heathen polytheism, served as the central ideological schism between the two races, and raised complex, thought-provoking questions throughout Battlestar’s run. The conflicting, multi-layered view Cylons have of humans (and vice versa) was not as in-depth as one would hope of a vehicle designed to give us a purview into their psyche. John Cavil, who had infiltrated the New Caprica resistance, couldn’t kill Starbuck when he had a clear shot at her, but mercilessly knifes an orphan human boy who befriends him on the Galactica. Why the discrepancy? Did Caprica Six really love Baltar? Conversely, the struggle the Cylon Doctor Simon (Rick Worthy) undergoes—and the tenderness towards his human wife that he retains—is powerful, and sheds new light on this previously mysterious model and his hospital torture scene with Starbuck. Although the Missing Five each get a very brief flashback to their previous Cylon life, any intrinsic cognizance of their true nature comes down to looks and conincidental glances during pivotal moments we’ve already seen. Granted, it is fun to rewatch them knowing what we know now.

On top of the strong visual imagery used in the storytelling, the production values are outstanding. A big kudos to writer Jane Espensen, now showrunner of the forthcoming Caprica (ScriptPhD review), for the intricate script. It’s not easy to weave in the major Cylon moments of the series (the attack, the human resistance, Boomer shooting Adama, etc.) without coming off as disjointed, gimmicky or bloated, and she does it masterfully. Likewise, Edward James Olmos directs this movie as only someone so intimately familiar with the material can. Reshot scenes on New Caprica and supplements to Galactica footage felt seamlessly in place, as though rewatching the series again in real time. He called the making of The Plan “an extraordinary journey and the actual final piece” to the series. We at ScriptPhD.com join Mr. Olmos in appreciation of this coda.

But now, it really is time to say goodbye.

The Battlestar Galactica: The Plan trailer:

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan releases on DVD and Blu-Ray on October 27, 2009. The movie will premiere on the SyFy Channel sometime around 2010

~*ScriptPhD*~
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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and pop culture. Follow us on Twitter and our Facebook fan page. Subscribe to email alerts for new posts on our home page.

Greetings from hot, humid, Atlanta! I’m thrilled to be able to provide Dragon*Con four-day coverage on behalf of ScriptPhD.com. Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the United States. I will be bringing you my take on the panels and events, with tons of coverage of Battlestar Galactica‘s final year of significant presence and panels, but with also incorporating some of Dragon*Con’s science and skeptic panels and other exciting happenings as much as possible. As during ScriptPhD.com’s coverage from Comic-Con there will also be a daily Dragon*Con costume of the day. Full coverage under the “continue reading” jump.

The first thing to know about Dragon*Con is that there is a lot of waiting in line—for panels, for autographs, and even for coffee in the mornings. And also, that lines are a lot more bearable in the mornings after the coffee.

DAY 1

The morning started early today with the first Battlestar Galactica panel, which consisted of Mary McDonell (Laura Roslin), and Michael Hogan (Saul Tigh)—a last minute replacement for Edward James Olmos, who was unable to make it due to a conflict with his filming obligations after being cast in The Green Hornet.

Mary McDonnell opened by saying how exciting it was to see so many people turn out at 10 AM on the first day, because she wasn’t sure, especially considering that this panel was up against the panel with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, that there would be many attendees.

While she and Michael Hogan debated whether or not to immediately open with questions, she told a story about Michael Hogan having done stand up at the Polaris convention:

The first question went to Mary McDonnell, regarding how it felt to get married twice, and both times when she was dead. She asked, “Did I get married twice?” and so the audience reminded her that she’d been married in the dream sequence of The Hub. She then described how difficult it was it was to shoot the final scene because Edward James Olmos would start crying and the tears would hit her hand and so her eyes would start fluttering, and she would break character, and they’d have to stop filming.

The next question addressed Mary McDonnell’s biggest regret. She said, that early in the filming she had to find an agreement within herself that Laura was going to take her mistakes to her grave. She then went on to say that she regretted that she hadn’t been able to understand openness was a choice and that she hadn’t been able to find that, and the capacity to love and be loved until the end. And that as far as that went, she was glad that Ronald D. Moore had been able to give her peace.

The next question was whether or not Laura and Bill had ever finished Searider Falcon. Mary McDonnell said the answer depended on what the audience thought they had done off camera. Then, she decided that Edward James Olmos might better be able to answer that question. So, she pulled her bag from under the table, and called him from her cell phone. Unfortunately, it was only after 7 AM in California, so she got his voice mail – and led the entire audience in a chorus of “So Say We All,” as a message.

I asked the next question, which was whether or not the ‘asterisks’ in Laura’s presidency—that is, leader, but dying leader; president, but never elected to the position—were something by which we should judge her position “because of,” or “in spite of.” Mary McDonnell said that she tried not to judge Laura’s presidency at all because it made it too difficult to stay in the role. She went on to go onto what I was really asking, with regard to women in power and said that, in the end, she was grateful for the asterisks because they freed her, and allowed her to grow into a role, and that in her current role [Sharon Raydor in The Closer] she’s a woman without the asterisks, and a real B-I-T-C-H, so that, in a way, the asterisks are a gift.

Both Mary McDonnell and Michael Hogan were then asked about whether they were inspired by real life political leaders. Mary McDonnell said, she was like Hillary Clinton, but that Hillary had better clothes. Michael Hogan, mentioned of course, John McCain. [Speaking of which, remember those sly Tigh/Roslin campaign comparisons during the McCain/Palin run?] Mary McDonnell also mentioned that she was inspired by Judy Dench’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth.

Another audience member than asked Mary McDonnell what Laura Roslin would do about health care. Ms. McDonnell said that in her opinion she hopes that “Obama states with clarity and initiative what needs to be done,” and that she’s “sure he has a reason for the argument to occur,” but that he “should have anticipated the oppressive element that would then move into control the argument,” and that not having done so was “naive.”

The next question was, again, for Mary McDonnell, and was whether she preferred doing the hard drama like Battlestar or the more comedic things like her time in E/R and High Society. She said that there was really something freeing about the less taxing comedic roles, and that she would enjoy doing that again.

The next question was about the political aspects of the show and the impact they have, but as the questioner was asking, there was a lot of noise from outside. Mary McDonnell took it upon herself to get up, march over, and close the door, to which Michael Hogan said, “We have people who can do that, Mary!”

After that, they returned to the question, and Mary McDonnell said that “I already did health care, you can tackle war and terrorism.”

Michael Hogan said that it was really a privilege to work on a show that has an impact like that of Battlestar and that seeing that Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos had signed on had let him know he was getting into something truly special. Mary built on that and said that it’s almost like your talent doesn’t fire up unless you feel like you’re in some kind of conversation and that she’s done some stuff she shouldn’t have [I might agree though I’ll never name them **cough**Replacing Dad**Cough**] and that she really appreciates the “Yeah, that’s why we do this” moments.

When asked about the most meaningful part of the series, Mary McDonnell mentioned that while she hates to watch herself on camera, the one scene she can watch over and over is the one where Laura gives Bill the admiral’s pins and that for her, that’s also the moment where Laura realizes that she loves Bill, and that there was something completely natural in it for both her and Edward James Olmos.

An audience member then asked about Laura and the bald cap, and Mary McDonnell said that she’s very attached to her hair and she’s always been someone who entered the room after the hair announced her so she was initially nervous, but that in the end she found it liberating and she was glad to die a non-glamorous death. And that she was even more gratified to know that people who had lost their hair to cancer were also watching and appreciating what had happened. She found that being bald changes the way a woman behaves and that she immediately felt more fragile, honest, and vulnerable.

The next question was whether Michael Hogan found himself bumping into things with the eye patch. Mary McDonnell answered for him and said that he was very funny and used to order the cast to “talk to my other eye.” He then said, that yes, by the end of the day he was walking into walls.

There was a question about the emotional range of the show, and how they got to that point. Mary McDonnell talked about the scene where she learned her family had been killed in Daybreak and said that she really tried not to think about it ahead of time, because just going into the scene without any preconceived notions gave her the “facility to be fluid.” Michael Hogan said he would pretty much say the same thing, but that a lot of credit also lay with the post-production team and Bear McCreary’s powerful score. Which elicited a round of applause from everyone.

Another audience member asked about parallels between Laura Roslin and other characters that Mary McDonnell has played, and Ms. McDonnell admitted that she doesn’t really remember her characters that well, except for Laura because “we keep talking about her.”

There was then a question about the characters’ most heroic moments. Mary McDonnell said she was proud of Laura for trying to steal the election, and that she had to go beyond her own ethical standards. Michael Hogan mentioned the time he spent on New Caprica.

Another audience member asked Mary McDonnell about the flashbacks in Daybreak. Mary McDonnell said she really appreciated them because she got the opportunity to see who this woman was–that she’d lead a solitary life, but that she ultimately liked the way Laura was written. She then mentioned the scene where she’d chosen to go work for Richard Adar, and that the pivotal point came at the moment when she’d been about to sleep with a man 20 years younger [her former student] and realized, “Something’s wrong; okay I’m going to take the job.”

Another question was about Saul’s perspective on Adama and Roslin’s relationship. Michael Hogan said that he was happy for the old man.

The next-to-last question was what Mary thinks the ideal retribution for Baltar would’ve been. She said that “he was tricky,” and that Laura wouldn’t have airlocked him, but something more like a slow poison would have been better. [So say we all!]

The last question was what the “ballsiest thing” either their characters had ever done was, and whether anything carried over into real life. After a reminder from the audience, Mary McDonnell mentioned that for her it was the moment in Blood on the Scales when Laura said, “I’m coming for all of you,” and that it was wonderful to be allowed to “drop everyone one would think one was,” and that should anyone ever threaten her loved ones, she would absolutely respond in the same way.

The panel then concluded and they both thanked us and said they enjoyed being here.

Speaking of health care . . . while waiting in line for the afternoon Battlestar Galactica panel there were representatives from LifeSouth promoting the blood drive, as they’re trying to beat the record set at Comic-Con. It had been a while since I’d given blood, and as I’ve been taking multivitamins lately, I figured I was in good shape. Since there was over an hour wait, the LifeSouth people said it would only take 35 minutes, and I had good friends who offered to save my place in line, I decided to sign up and do some good. While the process was a little longer than 35 minutes, it was truly worth it. I had no ill effects from the experience, got a t-shirt, a snack, and a quiet place to lie down for a bit. I hope that my donation will help them break the record and that more of you will consider blood donation if you qualify. Help save a life!

What could feel better after giving a liter of blood than an afternoon question and answer panel with science adviser Kevin Grazier [ScriptPhD.com interview here], Luciana Carro (Kat), Kate Vernon (Ellen Tigh), Michael Trucco (Sam Anders), Kandyse McClure (Dualla), and Alessandro Juliani (Gaeta)? Twilight you say? That’s tomorrow!

The first question went to Kate Vernon, who was asked about learning that she was the final Cylon. She said that being killed off . . . by her husband [said with a big, dramatic pause] was not a happy day. At that opportune moment, Michael Hogan walked on stage and crashed the panel. She then finished the story by talking about how she had been lobbying Ronald D. Moore for different ways in which to get Ellen’s character back on, and that a few weeks prior he’d called her to say that he’d pitched an idea to the network and should hear back within a week or so. When he called her back he managed to sound really dismal and she thought that it was bad news until he informed her she would be the fifth Cylon.

The next question was for Alessandro Juliani and was whether Gaeta had a call-sign, and if so what it was. Michael Hogan answered, “Stubby;” Alessandro answered, “The back door is open.”

Another audience member asked how it was Kate Vernon had been so upbeat a few years ago at Dragon*Con knowing her character was to be killed. Kate’s answer was simple, “I’m a really good actress,” she then went on to say that she appreciated the fact that on behalf of the audience, “that’s not a secret you want to blow.”

After that an audience member asked “Michael” what it was like to be a love interest for Starbuck. Given that both Michael Trucco and Michael Hogan were on the panel that created a great deal of laughs as the two of them engaged in a mock battle. Michael Trucco ultimately answered that it was great to evolve from what he thought would be just a one-shot on the show.

Kandyse McClure got the next question which centered on Dee going from someone who was “cheerful and capable” to someone who ultimately committed suicide. She said that the dark material permeated her and that the writing ultimately paralleled the journey she as an actress went through on the show, but that she found that Dee’s end was both graceful and necessary.

The next question was for all panelists and centered on what they felt was the biggest reveal of the show. Luciana Carro said that for her, in the episode The Passage learning that Kat had been a drug runner and that her later conversation with Starbuck in which she was told, “You could have been transporting Cylons,” that everything Kat had been through suddenly made sense to her. Alessandro Juliani answered for Kate Vernon, Michael Hogan, Michael Trucco, and himself by saying: “Cylon. Cylon. Cylon. Gay.” Kandyse McClure said that for her it was in the episode Sometimes a Great Notion when Dee was in Helo and Sharon’s family quarters and said it was the first time she got to see the family dynamic and Dee’s personal relationship with others on the ship.

The next question, much to Kate Vernon’s evident delight, was for Michael Hogan and was whether he felt there was a “bromance” between Tigh and the Admiral. Kate Vernon gave the question an immediate thumbs up. Michael Hogan said the question was “too deep” for him, and that “no way I’m answering.” Kate Vernon then took over and said that there was absolutely a bromance and that it’s a big part of the tension in the marriage between Saul and Ellen, because there was no room in the marriage for a third wheel.

She felt that she was the third, so that ultimately Saul’s bromance with Adama led her to cheat. To elaborate her point, she performed “Battlestar Fingerpuppets” as her fingers danced across the table to demonstrate how Ellen kept being thrown out due to the closeness between Saul and Adama.

Every panelist was then asked whether they liked how the series ended. Michael Trucco said he was very satisfied. Alessandro Juliani said that “because of his early demise” he saw it without having been a part of the process, but that he found the ending both emotional and satisfying.

When asked whether they kept anything from the set, none of the cast would answer because Propworx (who ran the BSG auctions) was there. However Kandyse McClure mentioned having to ask to have some things removed from auctions when she realized that they had put up some of the family photos that had become Dee’s photos on the set.

At that point, Kate Vernon’s cell phone rang and we all got to say hi to her daughter who was getting ready to get on a plane. Michael Hogan then used the opportunity to also call Edward James Olmos who apologized for not being able to be there, but said that he was chasing the Green Hornet, and that the Admiral would not let us down again.

The moderator than asked Kevin Grazier about his work as a science advisor and what the most interesting advice he gave was. He mentioned having to quickly come up with how an FTL drive works for The Captain’s Hand and also mentioned an idea he’d come up with for a way to destroy a Basestar without firing anything, that later influenced the scene where the Raptor jumped before leaving the bay. It’s worth noting that his book on the science of Battlestar Galactica will be coming out shortly and go into substantially more detail. [He went into these topics in MUCH more depth during his interview with ScriptPhD.com.]

Michael Trucco was asked what it was like to be in the resurrection tub. He said the goo was like warm skim milk . . . warm skim milk with dust, hair, and random crap from the set, and that he’ll never do it again.

Luciana Carro’s answer to the question of the gender reversal in Scar that stemmed from two women competing to be Top Gun while the men stood to the side was a succinct: “Whatever, man; it’s like that in real life.”

The cast then discussed the speculation surrounding the fifth Cylon, and Alessandro said that when he “sang to his stump” he’d really thought it might be him.

A discussion of the “love quadrangle” between Dee, Anders, Lee, and Starbuck then followed. As Kandyse talked about knowing what it’s like to be in love with someone who doesn’t love you, Michael Trucco interrupted with “We were doormats!” Kandyse McClure then joked that she was just waiting for the chance to “make out with Trucco,” and would watch him thinking, “Yeah, Michael’s hot.” They then pretended to make out on stage.

Someone then remarked to Michael Hogan that “Colonel Tigh is one of the most damaged characters on TV. Where did you find him?” Michael Hogan responded that he knew from the beginning that Tigh would have a bit of a drinking problem but that much of the rest of the character was developed in concert with the producers after the miniseries.

A discussion about the use of the guns on the series followed. Alessandro said he’d only been able to run with the gun, never actually shoot it. Michael Trucco said he had squibs and that they burned. Luciana Carro got to fire live rounds, and said that they had real military come on set to show them how to use the weapons accurately. Kandyse revealed that when Dee shot herself that the gun was not loaded but that there was someone just off screen to fire a squib to provide realistic sound.

Alessandro Juliani then had to answer the difficult question, “Felix Gaeta: traitor or hero.” He said that Gaeta was a tragic hero, a terrible judge of character, who does not pick his allies well, but still holds on to his threads of morality.

There was a bit of a discussion about practical jokes on set. Other than Kandyse showing up in a tiara and feather boa, they said there wasn’t much of it – more often they’d get to giggling, and reaffirming something I’d previously heard, that Mary McDonnell was pegged as the worst offender.

When asked what was next for them, the answers were: Alessandro Juliani is Superman’s doctor on Smallville. Kandyse McClure is in several movies [Persons Unknown, a remake of Children of the Corn, and Mother’s Day]. Michael Trucco will be in The Plan, a movie called Meteor Storm on the “SciFi” channel, which he then pronounced SeeFee to go along with the SyFy rebranding, entirely unconvincingly (and perhaps deliberately so) he said, “No, it’s a really great movie; it’s good.” Kate Vernon will be in the new Miley Cyrus movie as well as the new National Lampoon movie. Luciana Caro will also be in a SyFy channel movie, which she said was “not very good, but what do you do—you need the money.” She’ll also be in Caprica as a character unrelated to Kat in any way; Kevin Grazier once again reminded us of the Science of Battlestar Galactica book he has coming out.

A night of people watching followed and the crowds in the bar were truly overwhelming. Michael Hogan and Richard Hatch both took pictures as they descended the escalators, and Gareth David Lloyd of Torchwood was actually talking to people in Who-verse costumes.

Which brings us at first to our thematically appropriate Costume of the Day: New Caprica Laura.

DAY 2

Day 2 of Dragon*Con began with another Battlestar Galactica panel. The participants in today’s panel were Kevin Grazier [BSG’s science advisor], Luciana Carro [Luanne “Kat” Katraine], Kate Vernon [Ellen Tigh], Michael Trucco [Sam Anders], Alessandro Juliani [Felix Gaeta], Michael Hogan [Saul Tigh], and Mary McDonnell [President Laura Roslin].

The moderator began the question and answer session by asking Mary McDonnell how difficult it was to prepare for Daybreak [the series finale]. In response, she recounted the often-told story about Edward James Olmos crying and making it difficult to stay in character.

The first audience question was whether there was a ‘pecking order’ among the cast. Mary McDonnell drolly replied: “That question should’ve been addressed to Mr. Olmos; end of answer.”

Alessandro Juliani was asked whether there was a scene with Gaeta that he wished hadn’t been cut. Juliani answered the question in reverse, by instead saying that he pushed hard to have the final scene between Gaeta and Gaius Baltar added and give an ending to their relationship, so that rather than being disappointed by a missing scene, he was happy to have a scene added.

The moderator asked Michael Hogan to address Tigh’s relationship with Six. Hogan said that he was initially nonplussed about that, but he came to realize that it was the only way for Tigh to learn what it was to be a Cylon because she was the only Cylon there. Mary McDonnell and Kate Vernon shook their heads vehemently and with pretty unmistakable facial expressions made it clear that they didn’t believe him and that it was all about sex.

The next question was addressed to all members of the panel who had been present in the miniseries primer to the television show: How did you find your characters so quickly? Mary McDonnell described the bible that Ronald D. Moore had prepared for the cast. She also gave credit to [series director] Michael Rymer for setting the atmosphere. Michael Hogan agreed with her on this, and said that in many ways it was like working on a major motion picture.

An audience member asked Mary McDonnell whether she would vote for Laura Roslin if she ran for president in 2012, but then qualified the question with—politically. Mary McDonnell said that while she thinks Laura had a lot to offer, and some qualities we all could use, that there are some other women who are better qualified.

The moderator then had a question for Alessandro: If Dee hadn’t committed suicide, would Gaeta have gone through with the mutiny? Juliani pondered this question for a while, and noted that Gaeta had gone through many other forms of hell prior to that, including being shot in the leg by another member of the panel [Michael Trucco’s character, Sam, shot him in the episode Faith]. In response Trucco joked, “I missed!”

Mary McDonnell was asked about her new role on The Closer. Mary said she’s greatly enjoying it, and the mini movie provides some exciting news in that regard. She then went on to describe how very awesome and supportive the set is, much like that of Battlestar Galactica.

The next audience question–directed to both Kate Vernon and Mary McDonnell–was whether, given the “bromance” between Saul and Bill, there have been room for a friendship between Ellen and Laura Roslin. Kate said that given how “lonely” Ellen was, she thinks that Ellen would’ve very much enjoyed a friendship with Laura, but that she’s not so sure Laura would’ve reciprocated, and as given that Ellen doesn’t handle rejection well, that she probably wouldn’t have even reached out. Mary McDonnell added that she thinks there should have been a night of drunken revelry. On a more serious note, she went on to say that she thinks that’s a major issue with Battlestar Galatica, in general, that most of the women (save, she noted, for Six) were quite isolated, and that not only did Laura not really interact with Ellen, but that she doesn’t think that she even had a scene with Kat.

The moderator’s next question centered on Sam’s relationship with Kara. Specifically, if— in the tub of goo—Sam were to happen to have a revelation, what would he say to Kara. Trucco said that he liked what he did say to Kara—”See you on the other side”—but that alternatively “Hand me a towel” would have been a good choice.

At that point, the panel was interrupted with a question from the wings. Specifically, the person wanted to know whether they remembered an attractive, intelligent cast member, named Aaron Douglas. The punch line, was, of course that the person asking the question was Aaron Douglas. The cast laughed and Aaron was ushered on-stage with the rest of the cast by Mary McDonnell.

The next audience question was whether any of the issues that Battlestar Galactica had dealt with challenged or changed the actors’ personal beliefs. McDonnell’s response echoed her discussion from Day 1’s BSG panel, “Okay, do you want to talk about health care?” On a more serious note she said that the role woke her up a bit more and taught her the importance of listening harder. Kate Vernon built on that by noting that it’s really hard to mentally put yourself into a situation at all where there’s such a small amount of people left, but still such rampant violence and destruction of life. Kevin Grazier mentioned that Ronald D. Moore and David Eick had said that they weren’t doing their jobs if you don’t ask at least once per episode “Am I rooting for the wrong team here?” Mary McDonnell agreed and said that the suicide bombings portrayed at the beginning of the third season were the centerpiece of that idea.

Alessandro Juliani was asked whether or not he would have liked to have been a Cylon. His succinct answer was, “I SO wanna be a Cylon.”

Luciana Carro [whose character died midway through season 3] was asked what part of the last season she would’ve liked to have been a part of. Her answer was “the finale.”

The cast was then asked to recite their favorite lines. In order they were:

Luciana Carro: Starbuck, my cup runneth dry.
Kate Vernon: I have my ways.
Mary McDonnell: I’m coming for all of you!!
Michael Hogan: It’s in the frakkin’ ship!
Aaron Douglas: Any time his character had ad libbed.
Alessandro Juliani: If you drink enough ambrosia [pulling his shirt down to show the tattoo that he’d revealed during the time he said the line on screen], it doesn’t hurt.
Michael Trucco: Lighten up; it’s only the end of the world.

The following question addressed the “game changing moments” and whether anyone on the cast had any particular favorites. Kate Vernon said that it was such an evolutionary process and that through the scripts and the re-writes it was really hard to identify anything. Aaron Douglas said that he really liked killing Tory in the finale. The enthusiasm he had in describing the joy he took in snapping her neck with his bare hands seemed to surprise Mary McDonnell, who whispered something to Kate Vernon. [One can only speculate what she said, but in speaking with other women in the audience later, the consensus seemed to be that they might have found Douglas’ perspective rather misogynistic.]

A question about Laura’s temporary cure from Cylon stem cells in Season 2 led Mary McDonnell to reveal that the original plans were to delve much more deeply into the implications of her cure, but that for lack of time it was not brought up again until the time of her relapse at the end of season 3. The questioner then followed up by asking whether Mary felt that Laura’s cure was contrary to Ronald D. Moore’s original manifesto of avoiding the clichéd “quick fixes” of science fiction. McDonnell said that quite the contrary, it was not a “fix” at all, but rather a way to think more deeply about the fusion of two races and that the blood that “cured” her was a foreshadowing of the idea that in order to survive the two races needed to come together.

Alessandro Juliani was asked how much notice he had of the role Felix would play in the mutiny. He said that story-line had been mapped out for a while, and that Ronald D. Moore had called him. He also added that he really enjoyed, overall, the freedom to flesh his character out, including adding such elements of his own making, like Gaeta’s “crush” on Baltar.

Kate Vernon was asked about the growth of her character, or more precisely, whether the viewers were right in seeing Ellen as kinder, gentler, and a bit less devious after her return. Vernon said that in fact after Saul poisoned Ellen, when she came back she “downloaded into who she really is.” With that knowledge, the character was centered and no longer there to start trouble, but that rather to heal and get back to her husband. Vernon introduced a bit of a lighter note into the discussion, adding that returning to find Saul sleeping with a “Six” (who was, for all intents and purposes, their daughter) really threw Ellen into a “WHAT??!” reaction.

The next, initially straightforward question, provided a great deal of unintended levity. The questioner wanted to know whether the panelists had any pets. Luciana Carro has two cats, two dogs, and a “Chinese” [she might have meant Siamese] fighting fish. Alessandro Juliani very dryly noted that while he has no pets he’s considering a turtle for lawn maintenance. Mary McDonnell’s dog is a German Shepherd/Lab/Pit Bull mix named Jocco that was adopted from a shelter. Kate Vernon then began talking about her two long-haired dachshunds, and the discussion went something along the lines of, “and the girl’s name is Lucky Legs . . . now wait, the boy’s name is . . . oh, shoot! The girl’s name is Legs Diamond and the boy’s name is Lucky Knuckles, the gangster.” Mary McDonnell interjected with, “yes, and it’s Kate who’s named ‘Lucky Legs.’”

A question for the characters who represented the Cylons asked what the knowledge of their real identity brought out in them. Aaron Douglas said that he initially hated it, but later regarded it as a great big cosmic joke, which you can often see as he’s quietly smiling to himself during the more dramatic moments. Michael Trucco said that for his part it brought out a heightened sense of confusion and paranoia, which, as Alessandro Juliani pointed out, led to his shooting a fellow crewman. Michael Hogan said it was his worst nightmare, and likened it to waking up one day to discover that you’re not Pakistani, but Israeli, and went on to talk about the dream sequence where he shot Adama because he not only feared, but truly realized he was capable of doing so. Kevin Grazier built on that by mentioning a scene that was cut from Season 2 where it was revealed that Tigh had actually brought down Cylon Centurions with his bare hands during the original Cylon war. He is truly the most dangerous man in the fleet.

For the final question, the cast was asked what they do to get focused. Luciana Carro replied that a friend of hers was a musician and made her a collection of mantras that she used to listen to in the trailer. She added that for the finale, she listened to Gnarls Barkley, and then asked, “you know the song . . . Maybe I’m craaaaazy . . ..” Appropriate enough, Luciana.

The panel I attended after that was for Twilight. The two participants were Peter Facinelli (who plays Carlisle Cullen) and Justin Chon (who plays Eric Yorkie). Michael Welch (who plays Mike Newton) was also supposed to be there, but had to cancel. The panel opened with Peter Facinelli saying that he “liked sitting with us in the dark.”

The moderator then asked both stars to describe the process of getting the role. Chon said he had to audition just like everyone else. Facinelli said that he’d been invited to do the role but wasn’t interested, and then later read the book and couldn’t put it down. He initially didn’t get the role, because they had someone a bit older in mind, but he liked [director] Catherine Hardwicke as a director, and as such sent her a book on Vampire Movies through the Years. The person originally cast in the role didn’t work out, and Hardwicke then went back to Peter Facinelli. He jokes that it was the book that got him the role.

Facinelli then described how weather issues impacted their filming—that for most movies they sit around waiting for sun, but that for this movie, they had to sit around and wait for cloudy weather. In telling these stories, he began to talk about issues on set resulting from the weather and described the work his stand-in had to do, and issues resulting from the time spent at the craft services table as the weather got bad, and he wasn’t able to go to the bathroom when he wanted.

The two participants were asked why there wasn’t a blooper real on the DVD, and if there were any bloopers they could share. Chon then told a story about a wig that they’d put Robert Pattinson in for early days of the shooting which made him look like a “long haired woolly mammoth.” Facinelli said that given the budget and the schedule they were shooting with, they couldn’t really afford to have bloopers.

The participants were asked what their next projects were. Peter Facinelli is playing a doctor in Nurse Jackie [which ScriptPhD.com reviewed], and then mentioned that he was very excited to have finished, and seen a rough cut of the next series installment, New Moon. He said it was marvelous and affirmed that, “I’m a fan, too!” Facinelli said he’s playing a very different type of doctor in Nurse Jackie, and that he very much enjoyed exploring the differences between humans and vampires. He then went on to discuss some research he’d done for his doctor role in New Moon where he had to give stitches to Bella. They’d brought some physicians in to teach him how to give stitches and, tired of practicing on Styrofoam, he eventually moved on to putting stitches in chicken breasts as he thought it might be more realistic. He brought some samples to his co-star, Kristen Stewart, who much to his chagrin found them unconvincing and said she’d never let him stitch her up. He also said that he’s pretty sure his maid was terrified to come into his house and find all the remnants of his handiwork.

The next question was about the type of scenes they like to do, and Facinelli said he tends to love to do scenes that show the whole Cullen family together. Moving into a tangent, Facinelli then described his work on Hollow Man II in which he had co-billing status with Christian Slater, but that given the plot of the movie [Slater was invisible through the course of it], he never actually interacted with him.

A member of the audience asked Chon what he thought of [his co-star] Taylor Lautner [who portrays Jacob Black]. Chon said, “I think he’s gotten really, really big,” before adding that he’s a very nice guy and is genuinely unaffected by all that’s happened.

The last question involved their favorite vampire, and Facinelli said he really liked Buffy until several members of the audience informed him that Buffy wasn’t actually a vampire.

We also learned that Facinelli has an extremely popular Twitter account. He tries to keep his fans updated while still respecting both set secrets and the privacy of his coworkers and family members. He was also a very good sport related to a very young audience member who asked to give him a kiss. He lifted her on the stage and let her do so.

The final panel of Day 2 was one called Battlestar Galactica: the Last Half Hour, or Frakking the Daggit. Unlike the other BSG panels, this one was part of the science track and so the participants were not cast members, but rather scientific experts who were there to cast their views on the finale. The moderator of the panel opened by announcing that he was thinking about putting a red line down the middle of the room to divide the audience based on their opinion of the finale. He then went on to add that he had no problem with the acting, special effects, or music. His primary question was: was [series creator and writer] Ronald D. Moore possessed by Ed Wood.

After that very provocative opening, he went on to explain that in classic BSG terminology, “Frakkin’ the Daggit” translated to “screw the pooch,” and that his understanding was that Kevin Grazier had long lobbied to get that phrase incorporated into the series, but it never happened.

From there, the panelists introduced themselves: Barbara Drescher, a cognitive psychologist who teaches research methods, memory learning, and statistics; Christopher Barrett, a forensic anthropologist; and A.C. Trenya, an aerospace engineer who does advanced concepts work for NASA

Drescher opened the conversation and said that for her, there was a point for her at which finale really flipped and she wished she hadn’t seen the series at all, and that was Kara’s disappearance. She went on to explain that her problems aren’t so much with the science of the show. Rather, her problem is with the message in the end, and the message is: knowledge is bad and human beings can’t handle it.

As might be expected given his background, Barrett’s problem is with the portrayal of early homo sapiens, and that in his opinion to portray them as pre-verbal, was not accurate. He feels that the writers took too many liberties with Mitochondrial Eve. He went on to say that when you look at the Wikipedia entry for Mitochondrial Eve, every single factoid about her is in the last episode.

Trenya, by comparison, liked the finale. He felt the show was ultimately about existentialism, in the sense that the world is something we don’t have control of. There is death, but through all of that, we still survive as human beings on a grander level. He said a pertinent example would be film noir, which deals with these motifs; these are very good and dramatic movies and TV shows, and that in his point of view Battlestar Galactica is a scientific film noir.

Drescher corrected Trenya and pointed out that existentialism is not a property of the outside world, but the inside world. We don’t survive in spite of ourselves; we survive because of ourselves. She was fine with the message of the show, in general, not being about knowledge; it’s a drama. But she amended that point of view to add that there was a big plot hole related to Kara Thrace being harbinger of death and it was a large literary problem.

Trenya said that he felt that the ending was definitely right for each character and that in BSG they were literally kicked out of their world. He said that the tipping point was the trial of Gaius Baltar and the revelation that we are not a civilization, we are a gang. That moment made the point that our civilization is over, and we go on a divergent path – but we stay ourselves.

Drescher countered that her beef is not with how close the characters are to us, but with the message that this medium puts out there that there’s this huge power with a plan and that apparently wants us to go through hell only to destroy everything we built and start over again.

Barrett said that he had a very big problem with the lack of consistency in final episode which he saw as mixing in scientific explanation with deus ex machina. Your correspondent was unable to keep her mouth shut at that, and from her seat in the audience quipped that she couldn’t really see their problem – after all it’s what the Bush administration’s been doing for 8 years with ‘intelligent’ design. Their response was to note that politics and television are two different things. The moderator then noted that the deus ex machina aspect was particularly troubling to him, and that Aristotle criticized that particular approach to storytelling as bad writing.

A member of the audience stated that while Ronald D. Moore may be a very effective storyteller, what he knows is how to write episodes not series. A second audience member then noted that it was really stupid to throw [all the buildup of the first three seasons] away. Drescher agreed, and said that while she usually believes it’s kind of silly to think of what a fictional character would do, but in this case it’s easy to say nobody’s ever done it, because it’s stupid.

There was a long discussion following that comment, about whether there would even be any colonists left after a few months given the need for such basics as medicine and their exposure to unknown hazards.

Another audience member noted that the religious theme of the show was something that was there from the beginning. The moderator noted that he understands those in charge were kicking around various endings until the last minute and called out the [missing Cylon] “Daniel” subplot as something that was dropped that shouldn’t have been.

Trenyo said that he watched for ideas of connections, and that Ronald D. Moore picked Mitochondrial Eve as a way to connect the show to ‘us’. Drescher agreed but added that there’s a big difference in the way that religion was presented throughout the show and that up to that point it was a lot of mysteries that may have had a scientific explanation – but at the end it was, ‘here’s this miracle’. The moderator said that in his opinion there was an implied contract with the audience and the writer that “I’m going to devote some of my finite lifetime to paying attention to what you’re doing, so make it worth it.” He went on to hold up Babylon Five as an example of a show that dealt with similar religious aspects but provided a satisfying ending.

An audience member said that he was not sure he agreed that the theme of technology in and of itself was bad, but rather that the issue was ‘bounds of technology’ – are we going to repeat the same mistakes? Drescher said that the show did in fact have that message that technology was bad, and pointed out that Lee called technology “baggage,” and said we’re immature. The moderator then quoted directly from the episode, “our minds outraced our hearts,” and added it wasn’t just technology the colonists left behind, but also art and culture. This opened the point to complain a lot more generally about the finale, and in particular what the point was of the pigeons. Most people really didn’t get that allusion and felt it was an example of badly over-dramatic story-telling.

Barbara Drescher then said that one thing she did agree with was Laura’s ending, and that even if on an emotional level, she wanted a miracle cure in the end, she felt that it would have been cheap. By comparison, she asked, “What are we supposed to think Lee does? Only screw people from Galactica, remain celibate, or hook up with a cave woman.” Trenya remarked that the whole show was about conflict and tension, but once they got to earth, it seemed like an exhale, as though the writers had just given up, and everything seemed too easy.

Most panelists agreed and then returned to the issue of the reveals at the end relative to the people’s roles and religion, and the moderator said that if these were things that had been talked about at different parts throughout the series it would have been easier to swallow.

The moderator then showed a clip of the last half hour that he’d modified with pithy subtitles. One particular aspect was pointing out the location of the sun over the Earth with the subtitle “Noon in Africa,” then the BSG-produced subtitle over a closer shot of the continent read “12 Hours Later,” and the moderator’s subtitle, “It’s STILL noon in Africa,” as clearly the shadows remained in the same place.

At the end, the moderator pointed out that Kevin Grazier was BSG’s science “advisor,” and a really good guy. He noted that just because Grazier’s a science advisor, doesn’t mean they have to follow his advice. He said he’s seen nasty things about him [especially after some remarks given in this interview], and thinks it’s unfairly directed criticism. We here at ScriptPhD.com, knowing Kevin personally to be a terrific person and a great fan of the show, cannot agree more.

And finally, the Day 2 costume of the day is a rather inventive approach to last-minute planning:

DAY 3

There was only one panel that I was able to attend on the third day of the Dragon*Con, and it was another Battlestar Galactica panel. The participants in this particular panel were Luciana Carro, Richard Hatch, Kate Vernon, Michael Trucco, Alessandro Juliani, Michael Hogan, and Mary McDonnell.

The moderator opened the floor for questions very quickly, and the first question was what their characters didn’t do, that the actors would’ve liked them to do. Most participants answered they would have slept around a lot more. Mary McDonnell said she would’ve had Laura get drunk and then, in reference to the previous days’ round of questions about spending time with other women on screen, added, “. . . with Ellen.” Alessandro Juliani said Felix would have let Laura steal the election. Kate Vernon, with a slight smirk, said she would have slept with Adama. When asked “which Adama,” she smiled a little more deeply, looked between Mary McDonnell, and Michael Hogan, and said, “both of ‘em.”

The next question centered around a comment that (executive producer) Ronald D. Moore had made during the podcast that he saw the end of A Disquiet that Follows My Soul as the first time that Adama and Roslin consummated their relationship, but that the actors saw it differently. The audience member asked if McDonnell would elaborate on those differences and provide her own perspective.

McDonnell said that Edward James Olmos very vehemently believed that Adama and Roslin had been sleeping together since the second season (she did not elaborate when, however). She said that in thinking about it, she probably agreed with Ronald D. Moore. [Previous interview with Ms. McDonnell hav indicated that the missing year on New Caprica (specifically in and around the Unfinished Business flashbacks) are when she considers the start of the sexual relationship; this may well be a moving target.]

A young boy in the audience then asked the panelists what the “coolest” thing their character had ever done was.

Alessandro Juliani said, “I took over a whole Battlestar. It may not have been a very good thing to do, but I gotta admit that standing there in Adama’s spot in CIC, I had a moment of . . . yeah, this is cool.” Then Kandyse McClure responded, “ Saving Starbuck. That was cool. Flipping Apollo.” More quietly, she added, “Frakking Apollo.” Kate Vernon said that she thought being resurrected as “The Mother of all Cylons” was pretty cool. Michael Hogan mentioned that he got to beat up some young people in Season 2. Remembering the age of the person asking the question, he added that they were Cylons; they had it coming. Michael Trucco simply stated, “I flew the ship into the sun.” Mary McDonnell who passed initially, then said, “I talked about this yesterday, and that was . . . trying to steal the election.”

Richard Hatch’s answer was the most extensive. He said that while he wasn’t sure it was necessarily a cool thing to do, that what he found to be the most important and significant thing his character ever did, was, during the course of the Season 4.5 mutiny arc, leaving a Quorum meeting only to turn around and give the order to have the entire Quorum assassinated. Seeming to gauge the general audience reaction surrounding that really shocking and uncomfortable moment, he went on to explain that as originally written the Quorum had agreed with Zarek, and that he’d lobbied to have that changed as it was inconceivable that Tom would kill allies.

From my position at the microphone, I asked the next question. Specifically, I addressed my question to Kate Vernon and Michael Hogan. I noted that the relationship between Ellen and Saul was easily the most dysfunctional on the show, and yet, also the most eternal and deeply loving—surviving not only 2000 years but also death. And then I asked what it was that kept these two together in spite of themselves.

Hogan cheered the question and then deferred to Vernon to answer. Vernon seemed caught off guard by the toss, but ultimately said she would try to answer seriously. She affirmed that these two people had been together for thousands of years, and that as she saw it, they needed each other. There was a level of “intractability” to their relationship, and that—no matter what—they would always find their way back to each other. She then said she hoped that her answer was more coherent than the answer of the previous morning [when it was too early for her to remember her dogs’ names].

The next question was directed toward Mary McDonnell, and was what she thought about the use of books as a symbol for the relationship between Laura Roslin and Bill Adama.

She initially seemed to get a little choked up, and then said, that she “really liked it,” then, seeming to get in touch with a more mischievous side, said, with a deliberately deeper meaning, “he read very slowly, and [pausing to suppress a giggle] she really liked it.” Returning to the broader implications of the question she said that “the idea of enjoying literature as a romantic activity” is not something that we see anymore—that it’s lost, and it’s very easy for her to become emotional about it. She concluded with, “so yeah, I really like it.”

Mary McDonnell received the next question as well, and it was very specific. The questioner referred to a brief scene in No Exit when, after being questioned by Bill Adama, Laura Roslin, and Saul Tigh, Ellen Tigh asks for a drink, and it’s Bill who unstraps the flask and passes it to Ellen. The questioner noted that though Laura remained silent during that exchange, the expression on her face is very unhappy, and wondered if, at some point, Laura ever confronted Bill about what happened.

McDonnell asked the questioner to identify herself again, and she did so. She then nodded, and said, quite enthusiastically to the questioner, “You’re very smart.” She went on to say that she felt that way because the questioner had clearly picked up on some real subtleties in the acting given that there had been no dialogue or other outward sign in that episode [to suggest otherwise], but that yes, in her view Laura was very threatened by the idea of Bill’s drinking, and she had no real way to express that feeling. She then said that no, Laura never did confront Bill about that moment or his drinking in general.

Another audience member wanted to know whether the reason that Laura began to dress more femininely and act more flirtatiously in the third season was because she was closer to death.

McDonnell disagreed. Instead, she said that it was because the writers began to trust in Laura’s power, and because of that she could have a little bit of fun. She said that she was playing a woman who didn’t want to be president, and who didn’t like politics and that until Laura (and by extension the writers) were comfortable in that role, it wasn’t possible for her to also be a woman.

The moderator then asked Kate Vernon, Michael Hogan, and Michael Trucco to—without giving away spoilers—describe the upcoming movie, The Plan [which will cover events during the New Caprica arc from the Cylons’ point of view and is directed by Edward James Olmos].

Michael Hogan said that between what was revealed about the Cylons in season 4.5, what is revealed during “The Plan,” it’s really hard to keep what the audience does, and does not, know straight in his head. He went on to tell the audience that Jane Espenson had actually written a very detailed 5,000 year history of the Cylons, and even that’s hard to keep straight because it predates the events in Caprica. He said that it was really fascinating to have Edward James Olmos go back and re-edit footage that had been shot previously, and it provided him with a lot of “Aha!” moments. Without spoiling any details, Kate Vernon said that there is an “innocent yet creepy” scene between Cavil and Ellen, and we’d know it when we saw it.

The next question was for any of those portraying the “Final Five” Cylons, and whether, after their Cylon identity was revealed, they were “erased” from Laura’s white board [the board in her office that keeps the tally of remaining alive humans]. After a lot of laughing from both the audience and the panelists Mary McDonnell answered in one word, “Absolutely!”

An audience member then wanted to know what Laura had told Bill Adama about what happened to her on New Caprica. Mary McDonnell said that as she saw it, Laura was sheltered a bit—even in prison—given the “weird and complicated” relationship that she has with Gaius. She said that even so, given how private Laura is, she probably didn’t tell Bill anything about that, but only told him about what had happened to “the people.”

Alessandro Juliani was asked about the “mancrush” Gaeta had on Gaius Baltar and how that had developed. Using an allusion to another pop culture phenomenon [The Simpsons], Juliani called Gaeta, the “Smithers to his Burns.” He said that Baltar was an “omnivore of sexuality” and that it was really conceivable that pretty much anything had happened on New Caprica. To which Mary McDonnell indignantly cried, “In my airplane??!” [Gaius Baltar’s offices were in the grounded Colonial One]

The next question caused a great deal of consternation among the panelists. Specifically, the audience member wanted to know what each member of the cast would do if they had the opportunity to spend time with their character for a day.

Mary McDonnell [who’s dislike of Laura’s wardrobe has been something she’s joked about before] initially quipped that she’d take Laura shopping. Many of the other panelists tried to pass on the question saying it was too hard, too detailed, and too complicated. Mary began to say, she then wanted to talk about why it was that no one wanted to answer the question, and then as others began to murmur joked, “oh, no, here she goes again . . .” Kate Vernon then picked up the conversation and said it really was hard, because she’s not at all like Ellen. She said that she admires parts of her, but that “if I were to meet her I’d be a little nervous and I’d want to know that she’d be a ‘friend to women’,” and that she’s not entirely sure that Ellen is. She said that perhaps she’d take her

to a yoga class and then see what happens without the external influences of booze and men. [Very interesting idea, Kate!]

The cast was asked about how the Writers’ Guild of America strike impacted their work. Mary McDonnell talked about how it coincided with shooting the “first” Earth landing, and that it was the last day they were legally allowed to work. She said they had a lot of cranes and the whole set was full of decimation and they were trying to portray the human beings in shock, but that every time the director yelled, “cut!” the whole cast whipped out cell phones to immediately began talking to their agent, and that in her memory it’s the only time there were really cell phones on set at all. Once they were back in LA, she said that the focus immediately turned to the writers and how they could support them, and that she didn’t worry too much about the show because Ron [Ronald D. Moore] had promised they’d be back, and she believed him.

Michael Hogan said that Edward James Olmos had said [the show was] canceled, and, doing his best Edward James Olmos impersonation she said, “yeah man, I just heard from my agent. That’s it.” Mary then turned to Michael and said, [referring to Edward James Olmos] “and he answered your call; he didn’t answer mine.”

To conclude the panel, the moderator asked Luciana Carro about her upcoming role on Caprica. She said that she’s very happy to be on the show, and that the character she plays is not Kat nor Kat’s grandmother, but someone else entirely and that as far as she knows, she’s also not a Cylon. Mary McDonnell said, “and she has amazing shoes,” at which point Carro explained that she gets to wear 4-inch heels.

After that Michael Hogan, very emotionally thanked all of us for coming, as it’s only at this sort of event that he gets to get together with so many of his fellow cast members, and that he really likes being here. Mary McDonnell agreed with him and thanked us all for being the “best fans in the world.”

So say we all.

In that spirit of generosity and thanksgiving, it only seems appropriate that the third, and final, Costume of the Day is Storm Trooper Elves:

DAY 4

The final, and most poignant panel I covered was on gender disparities in science and engineering—something that this female-run science website has a direct and personal interest in. The conversation was a very interesting mix of both pedagogical approach and participation of women who choose to make science a career. The panel consisted of: Pamela Gay (who can be found at the blog StarStryder.com), Ginger Campbell (whose podcast directory can be found at Virginia Campbell, MD), and Kylie Sturgess (PodBlack Cat). Sturgess holds a master’s degree in gifted and talented education and is currently pursuing another master’s degree on paranormal beliefs. She has an R.A. position in university where she’s doing research for a study on mathematics and anxiety. Ginger Campbell hosts two podcasts on science topics. She’s noted that when she was in medical school, the number of women seemed low, but in retrospect, it’s a lot when compared to fields like engineering.

Sturgess began by citing the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) which showed that boys outperformed girls in each level in math in Australia—in contrast to internationally, where the performance was about even.

Campbell then provided a bit of information on Title IX, asking the audience how many thought it was so girls could play sports. Very few members of the well-educated audience raised their hands. She validated them and pointed out that in fact, Title IX stated that any university that gets federal funding cannot discriminate on the basis of gender, and that while it’s mostly associated with sports, those that originally fought for Title IX weren’t trying to get sports; they were trying to get women into law school, and medical school and traditionally all-male universities like Harvard and Yale. She mentioned a recent interview she’d done with Eve Marder who was among a seminal group of women that got to go to graduate school through a combination of Title IX and the lack of men going to graduate school after the deferrals for Vietnam stopped being offered.

Returning to the subject of statistics, Sturgess noted that parents’ values regarding math shape ability of a student. That is, parents who place a high value on the importance of math lead to students being able to do well in it. There was a note then that boys have a tendency to over-participate and that some of the traditionally “male” extracurricular activities, such as Dungeons & Dragons lead to enhanced statistical ability. Campbell wondered if that is similar to how young men spent so much time computing sports averages. Sturgess noted that these tendencies do increase how we see math—as do inaccurate perception of careers that need math and individualized and cooperative learning environments.

Pamela Gay arrived late to the panel by this point, and interjected by stating that there are two great lies we tell people: 1 – “Anyone can be anything.” In reality there are a lot of people who, for a variety of intellectual reasons, can’t be PhD microbiologists. 2 – “Because of social influence X you can never be such and such.” She went on to say that somewhere between those two lies, is the truth. As an example, she noted that at the current university where she teaches, there are lot of people from small towns. The only thing holding them back and differentiating them from the kids who go to the major universities is the lack of a good math teacher.

Sturgess compared the U.S. educational system with the systems in Europe and Great Britain—the international students begin specializing a lot earlier, and as a consequence, their undergraduate-level students are doing work on a level equivalent to master’s level work in the U.S. However, an advantage to the U.S. system is that there’s a great deal more freedom, and the community and state college system allows you to change your mind. She then provided the example of a student in Canada who decided, “I don’t want to be a pipefitter anymore!” and after enrolling in college went on to become a Hubble fellow.

There was then a discussion about the potential language bias on exams and how for example the change from a “box of books” falling to a “knitting ball” falling changes the way we view the question. This bias showed in 1994 when women of similar intellectual ability to men scored 50 pts lower on Physics SATII and 150 points lower on physics GRE.” Things like this do affect gender bias, as well as things like trying to have a family and gain tenure. Another small example of this type of bias in the employment field can be seen in the departments themselves, where there is a lot of heavy equipment and no carts anywhere.

The Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005 report summarizes a lot of the trends related to women in physics and astronomy at different levels. Among the highlights that were identified: In 2003, women made up 18% of physics and 20% of astronomy departments over-all. But if you look at plots of degrees over time, this is changing. In particular, the number of Bachelor’s degrees has risen to 40% from 18%. Conversely, When you look at projections for women in all degree fields, the number of women who reach full professorship in physics asymptotically approaches 0. The result of this is that if every person at Caltech University who left their position was replaced with a woman, it would still take 20 years to reach a 50/50 gender proportion. In summary, gender equity isn’t going to happen, and has nothing to do with interest.

The panelists then addressed potential solutions to this issue. Among the suggestions: “What we should be looking at is not trying to get women aspiring to be PhDs in science, but how can we keep all kids interested in science?” Campbell commented about how the wonder of the universe is often lost at some point. [In many ways this comment reminded the correspondent of her college chemistry professor saying that children are natural born scientists who are always excited to learn and try to understand how the universe works.]

Gay said that it was truly shocking to her how few students have someone who believes in them and that take interest in their growth and development. She said she tries to approach teaching as getting students “doing science” instead of just “doing homework.” She then talked about kids coming home complaining of people who had been mean to them, and that there was a lack of someone to say, “I believe in you; be nice twice then swing back.” The audience laughed quite hard at that quip. Campbell said that thinking of teachers who believed in her it was not always math and science, that sometimes the message is more important than the discipline. She also said that she got into the sciences because they were harder to her than English, and she wanted the challenge. She asked, “When your kid says x is hard, why is that a bad thing?”

Audience questions:

There was a gentleman who wondered about the influence of “The Evil Empire of the past eight years” and whether the change in administration would change things. All panelists agreed it would and talked more directly about the influence of the “No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),” and what a terrible thing it was that “learning” had been replaced with memorization. Gay noted that she could name all the kings and queens of England but could not tell you any more about them. She also stated that she could identify all the components of her computer but not necessarily what they did—that she felt the process of understanding had gotten lost somewhere in the fallout from NCLB and that is truly regrettable. She went on to say that children’s lives are being overly legislated as “soccer moms” haul children from one event to one lesson to one practice to the next, and that conversely inner-city children who are often left alone for long hours of the day [which she quickly noted is just as bad] have a much higher demonstrated ability to use their imaginations and participate in creative play—she said children should be free to get dirty, run around, and use sticks as swords.

This was followed up by an audience member who identified herself as an employee of the National Academies of Science (NAS). She noted that she chose a liberal arts path after her pre-calculus teacher told her there was no room for creativity in math, before building on the previous comment about federal messages regarding math and science. She’d said that one of the greatest points in her career at the Academies was President Obama’s address to the full assembly of members, and that it was really heartening to her and to many other people who watched the address with her to hear his message that the government’s “war on science is over” and moreover to hear him specifically encourage scientists to work with, inspire, and mentor young people. Based on that, she concluded, “I think we’re on the edge of a renaissance.” [in some coincidental timing, the NAS has just released are report today on Engineering Education in K-12.

The panelists were a bit more skeptical, saying that it’s good to get people excited but it doesn’t get them employed.

The next audience member was a mother who talked about her work volunteering at her children’s school. She wondered if whether in doing so much work to encourage girls to participate in science, boys were being left out.

Sturgess said that from what she’s seen, getting girls excited often does get boys excited. Gay noted that part of what you’re seeing is the difference between fields. While biology is now dominated by women, when you look at the physical sciences, engineering and physics are at 15% and 16%, respectively. She went on to say that while until 8th grade interest is equal in both fields that around middle school, a strange sociological “something” happens and girls dumb themselves down. She added that they also try to “go blonde” and qualified that while blonde isn’t necessarily dumb, the association is there.

During a discussion about the work environment, Gay said that she actually quit the science field for a while because she got tired of being asked, “Oh, whose secretary [are you]? Whose grad student [are you]?” She said even now in work that when she is “unprepared” student evaluations say she doesn’t know the material while when her male colleagues are unprepared, the student evaluations will say “unprepared.” Sturgess said that was very interesting, because in Australia studies have revealed that the gender of teachers is not as important as qualifications.

The final audience question referred back to the “leakage effect and pipeline effect” in science and technology and asked: How do you improve the approaches?

Campbell said that they really need to make more of an effort to have an old-girls’ network—that men have been helping each other all the time, and women need to accept help from other women without a chip on their shoulders. Gay advocated for more anonymity in the job application and peer review process. She noted that you don’t see reviewers’ names, so why should they see ours. She also noted that during the first cut of an application process (when one is only reviewing for achievements and qualifications), it should also be gender anonymous [as auditions at most symphony orchestras, historically underrepresented by women, have become].

Closing message of Dragon*Con 2009? Never believe what you read on T-Shirts bought at conventions, kids. It’s never lupus!

~*PoliSciPoli*~
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Greetings from sunny San Diego, California! The geekiest of the geeky have gathered at this oceanside oasis for a non-stop four day celebration of comics, television, film and gaming. As Comic-Con gets underway, we here at ScriptPhD.com hope that our comprehensive coverage gives you a slice of the action (especially pertaining to our forte, science and technology in entertainment) and that through our words and pictures, you feel as though you achieved Nerdvana right here with us. Today’s coverage kicks off with Warner’s highly anticipated motion comics panel, where they debuted world premieres of several motion comics and rounded up top talent in graphic novels to atlk about the direction of modern comics. From there, we will segue to some Battlestar Galactica nostalgia, courtesy of Richard Hatch’s popular yearly panel. This year was devoted solely to fan questions! Our press room coverage of popular shows Psych and Burn Notice will quell your burning curiosities about what’s in store for those shows, and we end the day with Discovery Magazine’s panel Mad Science: The Science of Science Fiction (co-sponsored with the Science and Entertainment Exchange), including writers from Fringe, Eureka and much, much more. We also have our first ScriptPhD.com Comic-Con Costume of the Day, a complete pictorial roundup on our Facebook page and insider interviews gallore from your favorite writers and actors! To read Day 1 coverage, please click “continue reading”.

Motion Comics: Graphic Novel Storytelling in the Digital Age
Moderator: Gregory Noveck (DC Comics)

Panelists: Paul Levits (DC Comics), Dave Gibbons (Watchmen, Batman: Black and White), Paul Dini (Batman: Black and White, Mad Love), Lydia Antonini (Warner Premiere), Dylan Coburn (Karactaz, Superman: Red Son), Stephen Fedasz (Perpetual Notions), and Jake Hughes (director, Watchmen Motion Comic)

ScriptPhD.com starts the day by not forgetting the comic in Comic-Con. This is, after all, the event’s 40th Anniversary, which includes a plethora of tributes to and celebrations of the Golden Age of Comics. Our first panel includes several modern-day kings of the graphic novel, who gathered to talk about the art of graphic novel storytelling in the digital age and how the tradition is adapting with the changing times. Motion comics, incidentally, are short-form videos that amalgamate subtle movements, voice-overs, sweeping music scores and stunning comic book artwork to bring an engaging visual experience to life.

Gregory Noveck: How does the new media translate to modern comic fans and new ways of accessing characters?

Paul Levitz: Well I consider it a step on a long journey. I recently went on a trip to MIT, to talk about transmedia, and the conference was full of scientific-type people and cultural analysts. And what they kept wanting to know was how does the media converge, please tell us? Ultimately it all rests in the art of storytelling with all-new strange tools opening up, and it’s a completely experimental process. The challenge is that those [comic artists] brought up traditionally in the craft are wedded to it. They love telling stories on paper, but find it tough to adapt to doing it in a new way with a new medium. Newer guys aren’t bound by what happened before. But we don’t get to the next step without experimenting. So a big thanks to the fans for being here and helping us shape the process to move it forward even a year from now. Motion comics and these new tools don’t replace comics but it’s a new thing!

Gregory Noveck: What entails the technical production process?

Lydia Antonini: You’re asking if DC was using the best writers/artists to make these books? Well we searched the world for the best young animation studios to enhance the original material, we wanted to approach it as new medium, artistically and technically. Most of it was fun conversations between Warner and DC about what art can pop off the screens, what stories are the most exciting and worth telling.

Clip of Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (12 original episodes available on iTunes)

Gregory Noveck: How did the Watchmen motion comic come about and what were the challenges?

Jake Hughes: Making Dave happy, that was the challenge! I had been doing cut scenes for video games, experimenting with cheaper ways to do cut scenes, and in the process did a comic version of video game. I thought let’s see if we can do this with existing comic, so experimentally, I did the first page of Watchmen (my favorite comic). I had to ask, how do you make that art look nice? I had to convert the sidewalk cracks in the opening panels, animated it, added music, and people loved the end result. So I contacted Lloyd Levin, producer of the live action movie, and they set up a screening of the DVD, they loved it!

Dave Gibbons: I was sent to London to see mysterious footage of the first episode, and I didn’t really know what to think about it. I was certainly flattered to see my pictures move. But does this really need to be done at all? So I showed it to my friends in animation, and they were forensic about analyzing it, but they loved it! As a storyteller, you want people to react that way (“tell me more!”). So the bottom line is that this motion comic is not aimed at dyed-in-the wool old comic book people, but the new generation, and in a new format. They were all totally committed, were going to give it their best shot, and I’m really, really happy with what they’ve come out with. This is for people who wanted Watchmen to be adapted exactly as the graphic novel came out, with 5:40 of total footage.

Jake Hughes: Sometimes, of course, we’d get it wrong and Dave would set us right.

Dave Gibbons: I’d like to point out that the motion comic also works really well on an iPhone because its screen has got the same size as the original panels so that works really well.

Fan question: What was the budget on the first project and do you expect it to be reduced?

Paul Levits: Depends on how many of you fans show up!

Lydia Antonini: Well it’s an evolving art form, so it’s a moving target for budgets, meaning I can’t give you a specific number. 5’40” of high-end work in 13 months is a huge amount of work in a short amount of time. At some point we will make a comic and a motion comic at the same time.

Paul Levits: That will be the turning point moment for all of this, evolutionarily. We don’t know yet what all the tools are to do it right and efficiently, but you’re on a journey to shape the art form.

Clip of Batman: Black and White, Collections 1 and 2

Paul Dini: When I first heard about motion comics, some of the old Marvel Comics instantly flashed in front of my head (as candidates), but when you do it like this, there’s so many stylistic changes you can do, and interpretations of Batman that you can do, you can really give it a different voice. It’s really cool.

Jake Hughes: I have a question for you. Was making the Batman motion comic a different process from Watchmen?

Lydia Antonini: Batman was done by a small studio named Sequence Studios in Vancouver, with Microsoft Shake program, and it was fun to experiment with the black and white panels of Batman. They don’t make this program anymore, but they did some beautiful art with black and white, to really bring the art out, make it pop out on the screen. All 20 episodes are beautiful, but they all have a different look.

Fan: When it came to voice casting for these motion comics, what decisions did you make about one narrator versus different characters?

Jake Hughes: That really changes from project to project….

Lydia Antonini: For Watchmen, Zac Snyder was heavily involved in the project. The formalness that is found in Watchmen helped us get the voice there to convey that, and thinking about how to have the panels look formal on the page, and conversely we cast based on that desire.

Dave Gibbons: What’s next, Watchmen: the theme park? The Rorschach rumle and ride! [laugter] The narrator Tom Stechschulte) brought tremendous talent into it and he was also very into it.

Paul Levits: How differently would you have written the dialogue if you’d known you were writing for the spoken voice?

Paul Dini: Sometimes I was thinking about writing animation, with minimal voice-overs and things like that. With Case Study, I wanted to write like you were reading an interview. If I’d known I was writing for motion comics, I certainly would have experimented more. With animation, it’s minimal, not a lot of talk. That’s the challenge in adapting a graphic novel for animation. At first, I was a little lost, how to introduce certain elements. I think they did a really nice job with it. It brings its own nice tone to it. I have a question. Is there discussion about original motion comics for promoting Warner Brothers releases? Jonah Hex?

Jake Hughes: That’s an awesome idea!

Fan: Were these created specifically for the iPhone?

Jake Hughes: Well, not in our case. Watchmen was shot for 1920 HD, everything was done for high-definition, and that took a lot of time to render for HD, but we downscaled, and it looked great for the small screen, but looks great for the big screen as well. It’s easier to get it small once you’ve shot for the big screen.

Fan: What kind of process is there for weeding out certain characters/stories in interpreting the comics for motion comics?

Dylan Coburn: It’s about being true to the book, first and foremost. As directors that’s what we’re ultimately trying to do. Then you get the voice down. And you do that with voice casting, the voice drives the whole thing, it’s all about the narrative.

Paul Levits: I’d like to also point out that the fans ultimately weed out what works and what doesn’t. The fandom knows what the cream of the crop is in the comics stories, or can at least unanimously pick the top 7 or 8 out of 10. That’s how you winnow down the stories that you want to tell, it’s what the fans want to see. You go to the great creative moments and you try to build from there. But over the years, we got a very good idea of what you guys think and we take it from there.

Fan: Did you think about not having voices at all? Voice talent makes it more animation as opposed to a comic book with animation.

Dave Gibbons: It’s either a reading or a viewing experience. This is a viewing experience. It’s also like reading a comic book the same way you read it in your own home. I was disturbed at how long it takes to read a page of a comic book—less than 10 seconds, which is sobering to me, who spends over 10 days making it. The addition of voice to the media puts it in the control of the artist. This also might evolve into being a spectrum of media.

Paul Levits: Once you have the written word, scaleability becomes a whole different problem, so that is definitely a big challenge to us. Along the way, there’s lots of interesting questions.

Stephen Fedasz: It’s also allowing us to experiment with different styles, allows us to get these stories and styles out to the masses who don’t typically read comics, so they can try something new.

World premiere clip of Batgirl: Year One

Stephen Fedasz: So in this motion cominc, I was trying to tell the same story, edit where you need to, try not to break the lines. It was challenging and exciting.

Fan: Can you discuss the decision to put up the dialogue balloons and have narrations for Watchmen?

Jake Hughes: On the demo, there was no voice over. But recording the voice changed the timing of things (some shots were longer, some shorter). The balloon informs the viewer of who’s doing the talking, because we’re not doing any mouth movements. It also conveyed that you’re looking at a comic book! Sometimes, you don’t need balloons if you have multiple voices, but because Watchmen can be confusing and you only have one voice, that of Rorscach, it helps to

Lydia Antonini: The other Motion Comics are all multiple-voicecast, so it is easier to figure out what’s going on. But with Watchmen, we had to promote this for our international divisions as well, so we had both versions, because if you’ve never read Watchmen, it’s VERY difficult to know what’s going on, because it is a very complicated story.

Fan: Where do you draw the line between motion comics and full animation?

Stephen Fedasz: It comes down to the placements. Sometimes you can give a scream instead of using a facial expression. It definitely depends on the medium.

Lydia Antonini: The Peanut comics are fully animated! If we’re using that strip and animating, then it’s a motion comic. We look at that as the foundation, and the house just needs to honor the suggested movement and the art. It’s very much based on the source material. So that’s why Peanuts is full action, full lypsinch. For many of them, they’re so well posed, that it already sets up the animation, and it’s just a matter of building on top of that.

World premiere clip of Superman: Red Sun

Dylan Coburn: I was so excited to direct and produce this. The challenge lies in the pace and the dialogue. It’s tough when you have a single panel where nothing is happening, but lots of dialogue. When you work in animation, you don’t often get to do stuff that’s hardcore, but this was great. And definitely hardcore.

Jake Hughes: Also edited very cinematically.

Dylan Coburn: I also used split-screen a lot in this motion comic, because it tells the story very well and tells the story in a way that makes more sense. A lot of comic book artists think cinematically, actually, like directors.

Jake Hughes: And as a reminder, DC Comics All Access opens today at DC Comics.com

Fan: When do you create the original artwork to have more layers and in digital to begin with to save time when adapting to motion comics? Does that happen yet?

Lydia Antonini: Everyone has come to us and begged to layer the artwork to save time on Photoshop for later adaptation, but that moment when the two are being planned for together, that’s for the future. That’s definitely the moment that we’re leading up to.

Paul Levits: And you’re thinking a different way as an artist, a different way of telling the story

ScriptPhD.com was extremely fortunate to catch up with Mr. Gibbons to chat in brief about the Watchmen: the IMAX Experience movie and his thoughts on comics today.

ScriptPhD.com: Were you pleased with the Watchmen adaptation for the screen?

Dave Gibbons: Yes, in fact I know all those guys (director Zac Snyder, screenwriters Alex Tse and David Hayter) very well and I was out promoting the movie when it first came out.

SPhD: How do you feel about the state of graphic novels today compared to when Watchmen first came out over 20 years ago?

Dave Gibbons: Oh it’s fantastic! Watchmen was one of the first graphic novels that ever came out, so it was very much uncharted territory, whereas today you have a whole wealth of graphic novels employing advanced techniques and a whole breadth of material. I’m also very happy about the presence of graphic novels in mainstream bookstores today, which was just not the case when Watchmen first came out.

Thanks much to Dave for chatting with us (and for signing my copy of Watchmen)! Watchmen: The Director’s Cut came out on DVD July 21st.

Richard Hatch: Battlestar Retrospective
Moderator: Richard Hatch (Battlestar Galactica)

Panelists: Bear McCreary (BSG composer), Michael Taylor (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek writer/producer), Kevin Grazier (Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Virtuality science consultant), and special guests Lucianna Caro (Captain Louanne ‘Kat’ Katraine) and Tom DeSanto (producer, X-Men and Transformers)

Next, we moved on to a yearly fan favorite: Richard Hatch’s impromptu panel of Battlestar Galactica guests, ranging from actors, writers, and producers on the show. This year’s panel was treated as a retrospective on the collective four seasons of the show, from the musical (with composer Bear McCreary) to the scientific (with science advisor Kevin Grazier) to the written (with writers from the show). This year was also special because the panel graciously opened the floor to solely answering fans’ burning questions.

Fan: Was the story planned from beginning?

Michael Tayler: Yes, absolutely. It wasn’t seat of the pants writing, but rather organic, and we knew where we were going 10 episodes out. Ronald D. Moore had it planned out 4-5 seasons down the road. But we also didn’t kill ourselves to figure out every detail, because then the characters couldn’t surprise you. New Caprica, for example, was such a surprise, a home away from home that didn’t turn out to be what it was.

Tom DeSanto: 9/11 occuring also caused a delay in shooting, and also changed the nature of the plot as it was originally imagined. A lot of ideas were fluid from the old show and the new show. And of course, the big reveal at the end was that the Cylons were being controlled by the human beings.

Fan: This question is for Bear. Are you planning to release more outtakes or extra music?

Bear McCreary: Well, I’ve released an album for every season. Season 4 was released at Comic-Con today, but the best place to grab is at the House of Blues concerts this week. Fans astonish me with how much music they want, and they still demand more. A soundrack for Razor is in the plans, but if people still want more, then we could certainly put together a box set of cues that weren’t good enough to go on the original CDs. You never know. And there will definitely be lots more concerts to come. It’s bombastic and incredible. I’m actually hoping to put out a live DVD in the coming week of these concerts. My ultimate dream is to play “The Shape of Things to Come” at the opera house in Vancouver where we filmed.

Fan: Richard, you’ve been a big part of the whole BSG world. Did you have a say in how your character ended in the show?

Richard Hatch: I’m still hanging out on the tail fin, figuring out if I’m a cylon, I don’t know about you. No. Michael and Ron, they make the decisions, they decide the creative direction. I would have loved to have had creative input, but that just wasn’t how it worked.

Michael Tayler: We couldn’t wait to kill you dude! We were competing!

Lucianna Caro: And I cried and begged [for my character not to get killed off].

Fan: Hi from Vancouver! Thank you for having strong female characters. Are you guys planning to keep that up on future projects?

Michael Tayler: Well, Caprica should be a hint. One thing we’re trying to make clear is that while there’s elements of racism on Caprica, for some reason there’s a lot of gender equality. I don’t think of it as good female characters, just good characters.

Fan: I’ve heard the series borrowed a lot from Mormon theologies? Is this true?

RH: Yes, there was a lot from the Mormon philosophy. Glen Larson (creator and producer of the original series) is Mormon and he weaved that into certain elements of the show.

Tom DeSanto: The name Kobol is from the Mormon religion. But he also borrowed a lot from other theologies and philosophies, for example with people coming down from space and helping us to discover ourselves.

Fan: Are you going to elaborate on Daniel (the boxed cylon)?

Michael Tayler: I can dispell some rumors right now. He is NOT Starbuck’s father. We never anticipated that much interest in that character.

Fan: Who came up with frak?

Richard Hatch: By the way, that did come from the original show, but they changed the spelling for the new one.

Fan: I loved the integration of All Along the Watchtower into the series. That was brilliant! Where was that specific song picked, and are there implications of how that song connects to now?

Bear McCreary: It came straight from Ron.

Michael Tayler: The implication is that it came from Dylan, Ron’s god. The Word of Bob.

Kevin Grazier: Ron had wanted to use it earlier than it did, but it came back later.

Bear McCreary: We always interpreted that the song was out there in the cosmos. Never implied that Dylan wrote it, more handed down from the cosmos. It was implied that Anders used to play this down on the original earth on his guitar. So it was timeless, it didn’t have an era or a time. That’s how we interpreted it. The use of that song still ranks among the most daring and unusual decisions in the show. Ron put it on Kevin’s and my plate to figure out how to get the jump coordinates for the final jump from the song. But the song isn’t catchy. So there were these 12 notes of original music that were integrated into Watchtower. And that was introduced in Season 3, and we suggested that idea in the final episode, that Kara was exposed to it earlier.

Fan: Did you like how Zarek was portrayed in the new BSG?

Richard Hatch: I love this character, but the realities of a show like BSG, is that there are many talented characters and actors, and only 44 minutes of a show, so a lot of scenes got cut out, and a lot of dialogue got cut out. But we had 70something episodes to develop a lot of different characters. I would have loved to see more backstory for Tom, other than the 4 part mini-series where I discovered that hey, I was a good guy!

Kevin Grazier: Other than that whole killing the quarum moment.

Fan: Was race ever a consideration for casting/writing? Or was it the best actor?

Michael Tayler: I don’t think it was a concern, but we’re trying to paint a post-racial world with a lot of variety, just like our own world. Ultimately, we’re always looking for different types, we’re just looking for great acting as a bottom line.

Bear McCreary: I talked a lot with Rekha Sharma, and she loved that she got to play a role where being Indian didn’t matter. For her, that was a big deal and she appreciated it!

Kevin Grazier: I made the argument that given that we have 12 planets with 12 different environments, we could have even MORE diversity than what you saw.

Fan: Richard I loved your books, and the sequels to Battlestar. Are we ever going to see you and Dirk Benedict give a better send off to your BSG 1980 characters?

Tom DeSanto: Well, the show (DeSanto’s original Battlestar remake) we were doing was a bridge between the old world and the new. And the FOX execs (where it was orignially going to air) felt the 9/11 tone of the genocide touched too hard on a nerve, given what had happened. There was never that great war to define who we were, and then we were struck smack dab into that new war that we weren’t prepared for.

Bear McCreary: Where did the Pegasus set come from?

Tom DeSanto: My construction crew from X-Men had started building the BSG sets, so they took a chainsaw to all the vipers because they couldn’t keep all the sets around. But we had these master boat-builders and they took the pieces of foam and bent them around to make the Pegasus set.

Fan: what do you guys think Starbuck is?

Collective group: An angel. That’s just an opinion. There’s no master plan or bible that says that’s what is definitely written.

Fan: How do you guys think they adapted to being cavemen? What if they’d flashed forward only one year?

Michael Tayler: That is an interesting question. I have a feeling they brought certain skills to the table. Maybe there’s mysterious ruins waiting to be discovered and it wasn’t a TV show but a history!

Kevin Grazier: Humanity, 70,000 years after Mitochondrial Eve, was reduced to about 15,000 people, so the fact is, most of them probably died. But there was a great scene in the rolling hills where they blew up all the raptors and they disappeared. For the belly flop, or Adama maneuver, I was remiss to remind them that Galactica would break up, but owing to the coolness factor, go for it!

Fan: How gratifying was it to get to talk to the United Nations?

Michael Tayler: I wasn’t there, I just watched it on C-SPAN. But they replaced the actual countries with the 12 colonies. For me, it was a little scary, because we have real problems! And all the UN people wore their old Cylon costumes. It was scary and gratifying at the same time. And we’ve been invited to work with the UN in solving real world problems!

Fan: How did your music evolve from Season 1 (raw earthy quality) to the full orchestral sound in Season 4?

Bear McCreary: Well, the key is that the writing also changed. It became much more emotional, mystical, as Season 1 reached its end. The end of Season 1 is where we really begin to understand the show. Normally, music is there to remind you what you’re watching and it stays the same. But the producers challenged me to make it different, but to make sense, to always “sound” like Battlestar. From Italian Opera, to drummers, to bagpipes, to Anglo-Saxon signing, strings, and stuff that doesn’t naturally go together musically. Every episode was a chance to experiment and change, and eventually the orchestra became part of the sound. The end was as bombastic as anything you’d hear in a movie score. At the beginning that wouldn’t have worked, but it did at the end. It was a natural process.

Richard Hatch: As a conclusion to this panel, I want everyone to talk about what they’re doing and future projects.

Tom DeSanto: There’s many incarnations to Galactica. If you have stories to tell, and want to celebrate this universe, put them online! Universal is looking at doing a feature of Galactica, but the economics of doing a big film means that you need a wider audience beyond just the TV show, and hopefully someone will pay hommage to both versions of the show, and in the process pay hommage to Star Trek, and I’m going to try to do that, on the big screen.

Kevin Grazier: It was very fulfilling to work on BSG. At the screening of “Daybreak” (the finale), Ron said, “If this was your first job in the industry, sorry, because it doesn’t get any better than this.” I have a book coming out, “The Science of Battlestar Galactica” and it comes out in December, just in time for the holidays. To be honest with you, since I stopped working on the show, I’ve been suffering from withdrawals!

Bear McCreary: I was suffering from the same withdrawals, and that’s why the concerts and fan interactions tend to be really great. In many ways, the show isn’t over for me. I’m also working on Caprica with Michael, so that’s great!

Richard Hatch: BSG has been life-changing for me, always more than entertainment, but about something, about asking who we are, where we come from, where we’re going. I love things that challenge you to think, open your hearts and minds, and show you there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We find a way to pull together and survive. I want to be a part of projects that do that in the future. Projects that leave me with hope! No matter how dark BSG got, it left you with hope. To that end, I’ve put together a production company. Our first movie is entitled Don’t Let the Sun Get You Crying. I’m also producing a reality show depicting the Hollywood underbelly you’ve never seen, with the journey you go on as an actor to get to the E! True Hollywood Story. Lastly, I just left a relationship of 2 years, I’ve struggled in finding a relationship, and in making it work. So SoulGeek.com partnered with me, for those of you looking for your Sig-O. It’s hard to find a sci-fi partner out there!

Michael Tayler: Well, I’m working on the BSG prequel Caprica and the pilot of that aired and is available on DVD. We should be set to air sometime in 2010.

ScriptPhD.com caught up with Kevin Grazier who we interviewed and the rest of the panel for some pictures exclusive for ScriptPhD.com, including a group shot right up on the stage! (Incidentally, yes those are BSG dog tags I’m wearing. My call sign? Hot Dog!) Check it out:

ScriptPhD note: ScriptPhD.com spent an hour in the press room with the cast and production talent of Psych and Burn Notice gathering exclusive behind the scenes scoop and spoilers.

Straight From the Press Room: Psych

Corbin Bernsen (Henry Spencer)

Corbin Bernsen: [checking out The ScriptPhD’s iPhone] Ohh I just got one of those. Look at you!

ScriptPhD: Sweet, right?

ScriptPhD: All right well start with me? You obviously play James Roday’s character’s dad on the show. I’m a big fan of the show, by the way, love it. And it’s been really interesting to watch their relationship develop over the seasons. Because in Season 1, there was this very tense thing between them. They’ve grown closer. Can you talk a bit about the evolution of that relationship?

CB: You have to start out and show the tense relationship. The relationship is founded in this. I have a certain way of doing things, I wanted my son to be like me. And he has ended up being exactly like me, which is solving crime, but doing it his own way. And Henry Spencer is like, my feet are grounded in this cement, and I’m not budging. And what the evolution is, is not so much Sean having to realize that, gee, my dad isn’t such a bad guy, although there’s a bit of that, but rather Henry needing to loosen up. Henry’s got to recognize, as I’m doing with my own kids, I have a 20-year-old son, that you need to say, “All right, you don’t want to do it my way, as long as you get to the end of the game, and have values, we all have our different path.” We all have our different path. And that is what Henry is sort of doing, and it’s interesting, because he is sort of mirroring my life a lot.

Press question: Is Natalie coming back and what’s happening with that?

CB: I wish it was more of it, but I’ve always got to keep in mind that it’s not the Henry Spencer Show. It’s not about my stuff. It’s how it relates to Sean. I mean Cybil [Shepherd] and I had a great time, you know? But you have to find out where it fits into the show and how it relates to Sean. So, I couldn’t answer the question. I actually want my real wife to come back, who was in an episode that we went on a date with.

Press question: So is he going to be getting some then?

CB: Yeah, man! He’s 54, he’ll take all the girls he can get. Onscreen, whatever it is. It’s the only legal cheating you get.

Press question: James has written and directed a few episodes. Any similar aspirations to do that?

CB: No, I direct. I just finished a movie called Rust. I’ve done four movies, I write in the season, and I direct in the offseason. You know, yeah it would be fun, but I have a weird thing about TV, and directing TV and a showy you’re on. I’m not dying to do it. I don’t know where the win is. What if your show sucks and then you’re all, “Hiiiiii!” You know? I’d rather direct my little movies where I’m well-removed and I always said, when I direct, I want to do things on my terms. All the acting is kind of everybody else. Agents, networks, producers all of that. I make my movies and it’s, “Well, what do we think, Corbin?” And I wanted to reserve my directing for that.

Press question: You always have to play a younger version of yourself. How do you get into that mindset and pull that off week after week?

CB: I just try to make the younger me a little bit more amused with Sean. It’s probably very imperceptible, but I try to raise my voice a little bit. Because you put the wig on, and it’s hair but I still see lines. I try to make him talk a bit differently.

James Roday and Dule Hill (Sean Spencer and Burton “Gus” Guster)

Press question: Can you talk about your writing and directing and what motivated you to do it?

James Roday: Truthfully, it’s something that I’ve always been interested in doing, I just didn’t think the opportunities would fall into my lap the way that they have. Thanks to our super-generous and wonderful show creator and producers. It’s basically the warmest, safest environment to cut your teeth and flex new muscles and I feel like with each one I’m getting more confident, and what can you say? You work on a show where you get to write and direct and act. It’s a gift.

Press question: Do you hang out in the writers’ room

JR: I do. I got to spend more time than I’ve ever spent in the writers’ room. We finish shooting, and there’s still like a month left before they finish, and I just left and came down and spent that month with them and started breaking stories for this season with them, and so I got to have that experience as well.

Press question: Dule, are you jealous of James?

DH: Jealous of the writing? Noooooooo!

JR: I don’t think he’s jealous of not being in the writers’ room.

DH: It’s not something I’m passionate about, at all.

Press question: directing?

DH: Maybe one day, but I don’t really see myself directing an episode of this show. It would be something down the line. I always tell the crew, “If you ever see me directing, start for a new job.” Because I’d only direct when the show was cancelled.

Press question: Girlfriend for Gus? I mean Sean already has his love life.

DH: That’s the same question I keep getting today. I think something will happen this year. Something will come by at the end of the season. Hopefully, we’ll see. But when you have an energy with the tall guy over there—

Press question: Well, this guy is in the writers’ room!

JR: There’s something in the pipeline.

ScriptPhD: The energy between you translates really well onto the screen. Are you guys also good friends off-screen? Similar relationship?

DH: I think so. In real life, I would say, I wouldn’t say it’s opposite, but I’m not as straight and he’s not as crazy. But the friendship has definitely grown. A lot of what we do offscreen goes back onscreen. Just the dynamic and how we interact with each other and things like that.

ScriptPhD: And, James, how do you guys keep finding cool ways to hide the pineapple? I have to ask.

JR: Well, I have to say, we went almost a whole season without any cool ways to hide the pineapple. It was just sitting out on people’s desks. It’s like, “There’s a pineapple, right there.” We got a little lazy with it. But we did some recon in the off-season and you should be dully impressed with some of the hiding places this season. We put a lot of thought and care into it.

DH: I think He Dead was a good one. That was nice way they put that one in there.

JR: We just finished one called one called “Let’s Get Harriet” that’s got a good hiding place.

DH: I don’t even think I remember where it is.

JR: See? Is that good or what?

DH: Preeeeeeetty sneaky.

Press question: How did you develop your characters’ speaking styles? That reflects their personalities.

JR: My approach was just that here’s a guy who’s constantly flying by the seat of his pants. He’s an improviser by nature, and the influences were basically Chevy Chase’s inflection and Val Kilmer as Chris Knight in Real Genius. That’s it. Those are sort of the guys that I felt encompassed that the best. So I put them with a blender, along with a heavy dose of my own face and landed on that pretty early in terms of the weird little rat-a-tat delivery. I think with Gus, we’ve had more fun watching him evolve. The way he rolls with the punches, the way he’s learned to be spontaneous, sometimes he’s right there to add something to finish a run, sometimes he’s not.

DH: Because I don’t really—myself I never had any preconceived thought, it was more of an idea of who this person is, but as you keep doing it, you figure it out. Seeing how he reacts in a given situation.

Steve Franks (showrunner)

[preceded by major squealing and fangirling, inlcuding Steve Franks, over the fact that we were sitting next to the Futon Critic.]

Press question: The show has a very random and absurd sense of humor. How do you balance the tone and keep it from veering too far into the absurd?

Steve Franks: That’s the hardest thing. It’s like having a car, and the wheels are out of alignment, and it’s always trying to pull that—because what fuels us is the silliness. But we realize at the end of the day that if we are a detective show and we’re having a case, if you’re 30 minutes into the show and you’re like, “What’s this show? What’s this case about?” You’re probably either going to lose interest, so it’s walking a tightrope and we really wrote ourselves into a corner because we have so many things we have to do humor wise. We have to get these guys in a fun argument, we have to tie it to something that happened to him as a kid in the past, we have to relate it to what’s going on with the characters, and it’s a character piece, you know? It’s not like CSI, where every minute, they’re at a new location and they’re questioning, and it turns out to be the third person they questioned. So we always try to start with a cool case, and this show we started thinking about, instead of oh it’s the world of telenovellas, let’s think about what the guy did and then we’ll work backwards and try to put it into our fun world. So we’ve got some really cool cases this year.

Press question: Do you have to go as far as possible and as crazy as possible to get all the fun stuff that we do?

SF: Yeah, exactly, and I want our show, I drive our network insane, because I’m so adamant that our show be unique. We did an episode where a sea lion got hurt and they go to a funeral for a sea lion, and Sean—I directed that episode, so that’s my episode. I love it special. But for me that’s what we have to do. And it’s twice as hard. We could just do, OK, debutante gets shot, whatever.

ScriptPhD: Or the spelling bee episode. Loved it!

SF: The spelling bee episode, I wrote that. This is great! All my fans are here, I love this. It’s like I turn on the CSI and it’s like, “When a toddler is found dead…” and I’m like, “Oh my god! How are you sitting down going Ohhhh this is going to be great?” Can’t wait to see them catch the guy, you know? It’s got to be rewarding and fun and I really want it to be something new and different, and it’s like even when we do serious stuff, our two guys in serious stuff, when they’re in danger, is another fun, different thing. Like on Burn Notice, that’s what’s really cool about it, our guys are screaming and running and doing all that stuff. We started hearing that this is silly, and this is the serious. We did the serious in the first season, and I want to keep expanding, expanding, expanding. I think “American Duos” is the silliest we’ve gone, because it veered into satire, and we had John Landis directing and John has all these crazy ideas, and we’re like do it! But at the end of last season, we did “Mr. Yang”, which is as far serious as we go. And we don’t ever want to change the show, but at the core of the show it’s a guy who’s disappointed his father, who’s trained him to do this. And he’s always thought that his father was the one who abandoned him as a kid, but his father was the one who stuck around, so it’s kind of a heavy-ish backstory to it, but it’s the reason that this guy is who he is and why he masks everything he does with humor. And we feel we have room enough to do all those things that I think it makes it so rewarding. Last season, we had the most gut-wrenching scene for Tim Omundson, where he gets back together with his ex-wife and he thinks she wants him back, and she’s actually there with divorce papers. And Tim was so good in that episode, so serious. And then two minutes later, we have a guy chasing Sean with an axe. And it’s like, “What have we created?” And that’s what season four is about. Season four, we have some really light, funny, whimsical episodes. And then we have a couple, so far, that are kind of dark!

ScriptPhD: I was curious where Sean and Juliette are going?

SF: Well you know that Sean’s now got a girlfriend, so that’s going to create some problems for a little while. Rachel Leigh Cook is back for a handful of episodes this year and we talk about her in the episodes she’s not in. It’s hard, because on our budget we can only get so many guest stars. The thing with Sean and Juliet is that you never know, you just never know. And I think they would make a really good couple. There will be no resolution to that. But things start moving in different directions. I don’t think you’ll see a wedding episode that ends with them completing the wedding.

Press question: Can you talk about The Mentalist

SF: My theory, and I came up with this last night, and it’s really good. Am I upset aobut it? Listen. When you go to the cereal aisle in the grocery store, and you see Fruit Loops and you see something that looks just like Fruit Loops and it’s in a different bag and it’s called Fruity Loop-o’s.

ScriptPhD: But along those lines, I love that you had an episode where Sean says, “I have to get home. I don’t want to miss The Mentalist.” I was like, yesssss!

SF: The Mentalist gets mentioned in the season premiere, but that’s the best mention ever!

Timothy Omundsen and Maggie Lawson (Carlton Lassiter and Juliet O’Hara)

ScriptPhD: By the way, I just want to say that I love you from Judging Amy. You’re amazing and that’s just all there is to it.

Timothy Omundsen: Awww, you’re my favorite person here.

Maggie Lawson: How much did he pay you?

TO: Seriously thank you.

ScriptPhD: They wouldn’t tell me anything about Juliet and Sean by the way. I tried.

ML: They won’t tell me anything!

ScriptPhD: I was like, “What’s going on?!”

ML: It’s very tight-lipped. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’ll go one direction and then it changes direction and then it looks like it’s going that direction.

Press question: Is Juliet heartbroken right now?

ML: I think that she’s covering it well, but yes, I think that she’s dealing with a bit of—I kind of see her as having a bit of a lonely existence anyway, in Santa Barbara, just because she throws herself into her work.

TO: It’s why she’s friends with Lasseter, for God’s sakes!

ML: But so I think that was a big deal for her, especially to open up vulnerably and socially and to have that shot down. I think she’s gone back into her hole a little bit. And now it’s like work, work, work, work.

ScriptPhD: So you think she does have feeling for him despite her protestations to the contrary?

ML: Absolutely! I think she always has, but just they played a little game and then things got real, you know? Wait, wait, what? There’s someone else?

Press question: Will Juliet and Lassie bon over their mutual heartbreak?

ML: I feel like we are doing that in our stories as characters.

TO: As much as he would ever open up to anybody. Yes, I think they have great respect for each other and their relationship has leveled out where they’re on this same level. Now it’s not so much mentor-mentee.

ML: And we would never sit with each other and say, “Hey, what’s going on? Here’s what’s happening with me emotionally.” But I think that underneath it, we have a mutual understanding of who the other one is, and we respect that. And we pick up the slack for the other one.

TO: It’s really a thing where also, he knows she totally has his back and it’s a real cop thing. She’s now his partner. It’s not she’s the trainee. She’s his partner and that’s that.

ScriptPhD: Do you enjoy being one of the consistently serious aspects of a very silly show?

TO: At first, I thought, “Man I don’t get to have any fun!” But a Rainn Wilson quote, and I’m totally going to steal it, “There is great comedy to be found in great seriousness.” And that’s where it is. To play that stillness. And, I’m a great fan of the straight guy. The William Holdens and the William Powells and all that. So, I kind of grew up with that. I was never like a Jerry Lewis fan, it was always the other side, so. It’s great, other than trying to keep a straight face.

ScriptPhD: Because you’ve done that before, on Judging Amy. You really had to put up with Tyne Daly’s shenanigans.

TO: You know, with Amy, I found that I was able to make him funnier as the show went on. I don’t know if you know this, but like, Tyne and I, it got to the point where we would work such late hours, and we were so tired and Tyne is such an amazing woman and actress, that we just said, “How can we make each other have fun today?” And wherever there was—and it was such a heavy show—wherever there was a spot for some funny, she and I would find a way to make it work. And it was mainly just trying to make her laugh.

The Futon Critic: Could you talk about the difference working with James as an actor versus a director?

TO: You have much more experience with this, so why don’t you take it?

ML: He is—James is such an artist anyway. As far as a difference, you kind of expect it. You know James is coming prepared. You know James has a vision, start to finish of what he’s directing or what scene he’s doing. And he’s very open as an actor to changes and improvising. And he’s like that with directing as well. Where he loves new ideas, but he also really knows what he wants, which I think is one of the most important things in a director. He knows what the episode and the scene needs to be, and he gets that. And I think that’s what he does even on our show. Sometimes a scene that on the page seems rather boring and expositional, he could throw a few zingers in there and elevate this scene to be one of the best scenes in the whole episode. And I think as a director, he treats it like that as well.

TO: He has just, a laser focus when he is working. We had half a morning to get in a scene I do with him, a couple of scenes, and it was the very first thing that we’d shot, and I really felt like I bonded with James even more over that, because I really needed his help as a director. And he was absolutely there for me. He was fantastic. Whereas as an actor he totally abandons me! [laughter]

Straight From the Press Room: Burn Notice

Bruce Campbell (Sam Axe)

ScriptPhD: You look, if I can say, like you just walked straight out of Miami!

Bruce Campbell: I did! I’m going back on the set tomorrow.

ScriptPhD: With the white outfit—

BC: This is from the wardrobe department.

ScriptPhD: Are you serious?

BC: Oh yeah! I said, “I’m going to Comic-Con! Hook me up! Give me the Miami whites!”

Futon Critic: So do you inform the shirts or do the shirts inform you?

BC: Well you have to wear the shirts, how it should be worn! I don’t know, I can’t answer that. I have no idea. I don’t even ask them what shirt I’m getting. They just come out. It’s an endless supply. I think we’ve done about 150 different shirts. Tommy Bahama. Haven’t had too many hats. I don’t know why.

ScriptPhD: So you’re already shooting for the third season. What can you tell us about some fun stuff to expect?

BC: Well, in the second season, Michael Weston had to answer to this evil woman named Carla. She’s gone. She’s dead. And so, the protections that she provided him are gone. In the big spy universe. So this season, he’s back on people’s radar, back on foreign agencies, even the local police, in Miami. So, he now has to deal with people from all over—old adversaries, new adversaries, anyone can get a piece of him now. It’s a bad place to be in.

ScriptPhD: And the shippers want to know if Fiona and Michael are gonna work their stuff out.

BC: they’re always back and forth, hit or miss, it’s the tortured relationship. It builds, it crumbles, it builds, it crumbles. I think you need that. It’s a bit of the Moonlighting thing.

Press question: well I love the vicious thing between you and Fiona, when you guys are in the car and just snipping at each other.

BC: That’s what we do! Because I think she’s crazy and she thinks I’m a loser. So the feeling is mutual.

Press question: How do you guys think of each other in real life, though?

BC: Good! She’s so different. She’s so not Fiona. She’s this very dignified Englishwoman, who’s very classy and cool and she plays this psycho bitch. Which is good. It’s good to have that.

Press question: What about Sam’s love life?

BC: I think it’s around. You never see much of the ladies, though. You see a couple of them. He just talks about them. Maybe it’s all just talk. He’s full of crap. I’d like to see that explored only because it’s fun to do as an actor. Wooing a woman at a café, or whatever. Watching your love go down in flames, or I don’t know. We’ll see what the writers come up with. I don’t bug them too much!

Press question: There’s been some great moments. What’s been a highlight for you from this past season?

BC: Well they always have us playing these dumb alternate characters. Like, my guy is Chuck Finley. He always plays this guy named Chuck Finley when he’s on a mission. That’s how he always lies to everybody. Chuck Finley. So that’s always fun because they have him doing weird things. A couple of episodes ago, he was a motivational speaker. So that all is way out of the box for us, so it gets us very excited.

Press question: What about the interrogations?

BC: Sam’s specialty. It’s becoming his specialty, tormenting his people. Which is fun, too, because you get to figure out how to crack that person. And my brother was actually at Guantanamo Bay as a military police guard. So, I pick his brain, but he doesn’t really tell me anything. He’s like, “I can’t tell you anymore, I’d have to kill ya!” So, those are fun too, because you get to see a whole other side, where you can either be serious or mean or intimidating or crazy. Why don’t we just some stuff in front of a guy and it drips blood in front of the guy, and you try to freak him out. That if I’m willing to do that to myself, what am I willing to do to you?

Press question: Relationship between Sam and Alex? Can you comment?

BC: It’s good, it’s increasing. She considers herself my friend now, and I go over there to hang out and Sam protects her all the time and lies to her a lot. Which is not good but. He’s moving out and moving to a new girlfriend, who’s living behind Madeline’s house. It’s his neighbor’s daughter.

Press question: Talk about the tone of the show a little bit, the humor, the seriousness. Where is that balance?

BC: A director once said to me, “You should be a different character in every scene. Because you want to show all the different sides. A spy when he’s crabby. A spy when he’s tired. A spy when he’s pissed. When he makes a mistake. So all of that just adds up into our mosaic of characters. But, it’s a serious show with trench humor. What soldiers would say to each other when the bombs are coming in. It’s a very dark, gallows humor. We all have to find it all the time. And it’s changing.

Alfredo Barrios, Jr. (producer) and Matt Nix (creator/showrunner)

ScriptPhD: I asked this of the actors, but I also want to ask you. Where and how do you compile the really cool gadgets and scientific material? Who do you go to for your ideas and how do you incorporate that into your scripts?

Alfredo Barrios, Jr: I think like Matt said, we have a number of different sources, we have a consultant on the show named Michael Wilson who is a former intelligene operative, who has been instrumental in helping us figure out the technical side of things, the gadgetry, the ideas. Oftentimes, we’ll come up with the goal that needs to be solved, or this is generally the principle that I think could be employed, but how do we make it work? How specifically, what will be build, where will we get it? Oftentimes, I joked during the panel that we’ll find a lot of stuff on the internet. And ultimately you have to verify it, but you have to take great pride in being accurate with our science and in not giving everything away, because we build some pretty dangerous devices along the way. But we really do our research, and we take great pride in that and we’re both kind of geeks, and we take great pride in being right about stuff.

Matt Nix: Growing up, I always thought that I was going to be a scientist when I was little. I was a computer enthusiast when I was a kid, and a programmer and I’ve always been really interested in that stuff. And so if I go to a party, I want to talk to the engineer, I want to the scientist. It’s been a good thing for the show that I live near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and that my kids go to school with kids whose parents work as rocket scientists. So literally I’ll go to parties and be like, “Let’s have a beer. Tell me how drones work.” We also bring in people who work in various technical fields, and we’ll sit them down and buy them lunch and say, “Tell me everything there is to know about optics.”

AB: I think naturally, the whole writing staff, we like to read about all sorts of things, and oftentimes ideas come from where you don’t expect it. You read a story that has some science in it, and you’ll derive some interesting fact, which might build an idea for putting together a gadget or something like that. And we get excited about that and we bring it to the room and it’s kind of fun.

Press question: And yet, I love the gadgets, and I think that’s fun, but the characters are what’s so rich, all across the board. From the villains to the heroes and in-between. Every little character. Can you talk about that?

MN: The funny thing is that a lot of people, when talking about writing in Hollywood, will say talk about character and plot as if they’re two different things. And character is this really good thing over hear, and it’s what makes a show good, like character, some ingredient that you put into shows. And plot is just this afterthough, this mechanism that people will use. And we’re a very plotty show. We do a lot of stuff in 42 minutes. But I think tha tone of the things that makes the characters rich is that they have to do a lot of stuff. And creating a bad guy who’s a worthy adversary to Michael who can have the plan that Michael has to go to the ends of the earth to unravel, that bad guy is just going to get more and more interesting as you get through the script. Because how would he know how to get him to do that? Well, maybe he was a doctor, and we need to get from here to there. That’s going to demand a really dynamic scene between these two characters because this character has to get so mad that he’s willing to blow up that hotel. So, what’s that scene look like that would get you to blow up a hotel? Then we have to stop you, and so what’s exciting for us is making the characters. In the case of the ex-girlfriend of Michael’s, her son has been kidnapped, and she’s in this really extreme situation where she needs to trick michael into helping her. And if you start with “Woman needs to trick Michael into helping her”, that makes for an interesting character. Well how would she do that? Maybe she’d make him think that her son is his son. OK, that’s an interesting character. And that’s how it grows out a plot but it turns into character. And then, at the same time, who’s the bad guy that can trick this woman into doing this thing, well that’s a really formidable bad guy. And that’s how Brennan is formed. He’s a bad ass! And then it just goes from there.

AB: Yeah, and oftentimes, just trying to come up with as part of what Michael is doing in combatting these villains, is, he ultimately exploits a character flaw. Something that is borne of character, and seizes on it, and exploits it, and turns it on them. And that is always fun for writers to figure out. It is both the source of their power and the source of their demise. And it’s fun to see, what is that trait that is unique to each villain that Michael can kind of seize on. It’s a problem at the beginning, but then it becomes something that he can use to do that. And that’s character.

Press question: Did you purposely structure each season to have its own story and purpose or how did you plan that out?

MN: You know, honestly, I can be coy about it, but I’m a huge fan of The Shield and so is Alfredo, and he was the first writer I hired for the show and we kind of talked about it. And that show had a great structure of this overarching theme of is Vic Mackey going to get busted for being a bad cop, and then it had these seasonal villains of the season, a seasonal problem to deal with. And our structure, because we’re broken down into two seasons and it’s a different show, it turned out to be very different, because we had to do a lot of things that—we do things they couldn’t have done because of our structure, they did things we can’t do because of their structure. But, it was inspired by The Shield.

Press question: can you talk about how the break of the season structure works into the storylines that you want to tell?

MN: It helps in that it forces you to digest the material. It doesn’t feel like help at the time, but it feels like, “We just did a finale! God!” But yeah, think about it. If someone came to you and said, “All right, you’re going to do a nine episode season and a seven episode season. And a nine episode season and a seven episode season. And so on.” How? Why? But that’s what we do and we don’t want it to be like “Here’s a season of Burn Notice and we just took a really long break in the middle.” It’s got to feel like something resolved between seasons. It makes the writing harder and better.

AB: Unlike a 22 episode order, where you run 22 episodes from beginning to end continuously, splitting up the season makes for a more dynamic show. You have to come up with a mid-season twist that makes sense and sets up everything you’ve come up with in the previous episodes, and yet launches you to the next season.

Mad Science: The Science Behind Science Fiction
Moderator: Phil Plait (astronomer, Discover Magazine contributing editor and blogger)

Panelists: Jaime Paglia (co-creator/executive producer, Eureka), Kevin Grazier (science consultant, Eureka, Virtuality), Jane Espenson (executive producer, Dollhouse, BSG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Rob Chiappetta and Glenn Whitman (staff writers, Fringe) and Ricardo Gil da Costa (neuroscientist and consultant on Fringe)

We ended our Day 1 coverage with a panel that embodies the epitome of what ScriptPhD.com stands for: the intersection of science and entertainment. Discovery Magazine, in concert with the Science and Entertainment Exhange, put together a panel of leading science fiction writers and the science advisors that make their shows happen. What ensued was a riveting discussion about the role of entertainment to educate, philosophy and moral extrapollations of topics covered by these shows.

Brief clip of Eureka

Jaime Paglia: Thanks fans for supporting our show, this past season we’re seeing the highest numbers we’ve ever had, thanks for coming.

Kevin Grazier: I had so much fun at the panel last year, I’ve been looking forward to it all year!

Clip of Fringe

Glenn Whitman: Farnsworth, our character, incidentally, was named after Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the television, not Futurama!

Rob Chiapetta: I love Comic-Con, because you can drink at 3 PM, and you’re not hallucinating if you see furry creatures walking all around you!

Glenn Whitman: This is the first time I’m on a panel rather than out in the audience so this is really special.

Ricardo Gil da Costa: I want to assure everyone that the neurobiology happening at the Salk Institute is actually a lot more tame than what you see on Fringe!

Clip of Caprica

Jane Espensen: I wish we had something new to show you, but only in the 2nd week of shooting post-pilot material. But we’re wrriting and shooting as much as we can. Hot robot action coming soon!

Phil Plait: Let’s talk about the good and evil of science and how it’s used on television, particularly on Caprica. This idea has been around for a long time. If you could create a duplicate of someone, how would it work? And is it right?

Jane Espensen: We actually had this discussion in writers’ room. How similar it is to downloading, what the Cylons eventually did fifty years in the future. Versus this version where two of you live simultaneously. And we had a big argument about is this afterlife or on the road to afterlife, and how do you squeeze the maximum drama out of that. What I love is that you’re having very ethical and philosophical discussions in sci-fi environment.

Jaime Paglia: In Season 2 of Eureka, Wlater Perkins loses wife, Susan, they buried her and she shows up again in the future. But he is living with a clone of his ex-wife, and had a child with her. Susan discovers this child is genetically hers but has no connection with. Does she have an obligation to this child?

Kevin Grazier: Legally this poses interesting questions too because she couldn’t prove it wasn’t her child in a court of law if she were to reject it.

Glenn Whitman: We’ll do that on Fringe! Season 5! [laughter]

Phil Plait: Transporters—if they destroy you and reinstate you, if you could do that, be dead and brought back to life? Then what happens?

Glenn Whitman: We need to have a Law & Order: Fringe, to debate the ethical issues. I came across this web site that’s actually some company like reincarnation.com, and you go there and put assets in escro for a future life for an inheritance. But what kind of proof would they accept when you came back to cash your money?

Phil Plait: In the Fringe clip, they scientists are trying to extract info from a guy who was dead, and it seems a bit like torture. Sci-fi is a reflection of our current standing in our moral decisions. We don’t torture because we don’t get correct info when we do. But imagine if you could torture AND get accurate info? Where does that leave us?

Jane Espensen: we’re thinking about a torture ep for Caprica, and we keep pulling ourselves back, but ethically, we don’t want to promote that. This is one of those places where drama and the real world, you sometimes have to work to make them work together.

Ricardo Gil da Costa: How we extract info from the brain if they’re not willing or dead is actually an interesting question. But there’s a lot of fMRI and brain imaging techniques that are already out there, and we assume that we can outsmart a polygraph. You can really get this information right now. Sometimes you use it in courts. But it’s very tricky to interpret because we don’t understand the brain fully yet. The brain doesn’t lie, but what we get is our biased interpretation. You cannot always directly transpose laboratory advances socially and legislatively.

Phil Plait: In the show, the guy was dead, but do you have the right to your thoughts after you’re dead? What if you could download their thoughts and put instructions?

Jane Espensen: Well you put them into a robot and get it to do what you want. [laughter]

Kevin Grazier: In Caprica, Zoe made the claim that you can download the personality information that you need to rebuild a person from online, so you don’t have to necessarily violate them directly. But is that still a violation?

Jane Espensen: It’s a dicey area. I think we should all worry about being downloaded and put into robots.

Kevin Grazier: Think about all the things that are “out there”, though, and freely available that reflects on your personality and who you are. It’s kind of scary!

Phil Plait: I’ve never been involved in the writing of a TV show. I advised for a children’s show called Zula Patrol, but didn’t develop the storylines. When you’re in the writers’ room, do you find what’s morally ambiguous, and then apply the science? Do you do plot and then science or vice versa?

Jaime Paglia: On Eureka, we look at everything: newspapers, magazines, news, and then come up with our own ideas that are little homages to books and movies. We basically try to find a unique way to approach it. Eureka is a ¼ turn different that makes it fun to explore. Everything depends on how we approach it. We want a story arc for our characters and want them to develop, and then ask what can we marry thematically to advance those developments? Then we pop in a science fiction idea into it.

Kevin Grazier: My interaction is, it depends. Different writers will come to you beforehand, but most people will come to you after the script is written. Remember when we toyed with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on Season 1 of Eureka?

Glenn Whitman: We’ll do it on Fringe! Season 5! Sometimes we start with the science—recently we wrote about a transgenic animal made into an eight-part beast, and that came from reading articles about real transgenic hybridized and engineered animals. Some episodes definitely come from those science headlines. Sometimes someone will have a crazy idea for an episode, and you better figure out a way to make it work and justify it. Why would someone’s head explode? Because J.J. Abrams thought it was cool, now justify it scientifically!

Kevin Grazier: And usually the response on our end is Oh Cool! or Oh my God! A great example is the Eureka season finale coming up. We worked on that for a long time to justify the science.

Jaime Paglia: I knew what we wanted to happen storywise, because it’s pretty big [story development], but it was one of those moments where Kevin was able to help us out, and it turns out that this theoretical thing was already out there that couldn’t have been more perfect for this episode.

Rob Chiappetta: That’s a double edged sword, because if it already exists, then the producers want you to “think harder on it” and make it work, because they want it to seem made up and implausible. They don’t want to believe that it’s real or that you came up with it too easily.

Glenn Whitman: Sometimes it’s disappointing to hear that it exists, because you want to push the limits of what is out there as a writer.

Ricardo Gil de Costa: I think there is still some cool stuff that is exciting, realistic and not out there. Just recently we were talking for an episode, and using an already-researched application of TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) to inhibit brain areas. So I think we can still do this feedback both ways.

Rob Chiappetta: From an audience perspective, you want to start with something that’s more grounded, “Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard of that” and then take them on the ride. Start with familiarity, easy to understand concepts, because then you get the opportunity to push people’s buttons.

Jaime Paglia: In our show, the manifesto is that we don’t want to cross over into magic, things that are not yet scientifically possible at all. But do you guys on Fringe have hard and fast rules?

Rob Chiappetta: We want to be “science next”, 10-15 minutes into the future as opposed to a year in the future. Visual [appeal] drives our show a lot. We get frustrated because we can do everything you want in terms of the really cool science, just give us more time to explain it [than a 42 minute show].

Glenn Whitman: There are plenty of us in the audience who geek out and think this stuff is really cool when we see it and want those in-depth explanations, but too many people in the audience want the story and tune out the science if it starts getting too complicated. So the trick is to feed just enough that people believe what will happen and want to go along for the ride.

Rob Chiappetta: Show your precedent, show what you want to do, and then show all the things that you want to do to get there.

Glenn Whitman: Rob used to be a lawyer, and he just have a lawyer’s outline for writing. I used to be an economist, so I should come up with a similar manifesto.

Phil Plait: I wondered when you’d have an astronomer on the show, and when you did, he bludgeoned his wife with a tire iron. Is this someone I need to know about?

Glenn Whitman: Fringe is a horror show, partly. Creepy and gross is easier with biology and virology, than astrophysics, usually.

Kevin Grazier: You haven’t hung out with many astrophysicists. [laughter]

Phil Plait: In 1998, Armageddon came out, and the only thing scientifically accurate about that movie is that it had an asteroid and yes, asteroids do exist. But Deep Impact also came out, and that movie was fairly accurate about predicting the future. What scientific breakthroughs will you put in there that you’d like to see or wouldn’t like to see happen?

Kevin Grazier: I can justify the glowing spines from BSG. I’m not going to, but….

Jane Espensen: We’re doing something on Caprica where we’re saying technology is accelerating so fast that it’s not reaching everyone quickly enough. Rich people have robotic butlers, but poor people have answering machines. Instead of reaching for big concepts, we are approaching little bitty things in the high-tech house that would be really cool to have. The little things are as cool as the big things.

Jaime Paglia: We play with that with the character of Sarah, who has had her good and bad moments. We also had people monitoring what technology gets out in the world. Those are the kinds of things that are fun to explore, not as dark as Caprica and Fringe, but good drama nonetheless!

Fan question: Do you ever consult visionaries, because sometimes science catches up to the visionaries. Do you ever look beyond the science to the spiritual to get ideas?

Jane Espensen: We certainly do ask what our wildest dreams would suggest. That is related to that, since their dreams come close to ours. But that’s as close as we go to consulting visionaries.

Glenn Whitman: We thought we were the visionaries!

Fan: We sane fans generally don’t think about trying the science at home. Do you ever worry about disclaimers for those that would?

Ricardo Gil da Costa: It goes both ways. You could have great synergy between these two fields, people like Michael Crichton who certainly do go both ways.

Jaime Paglia: With our shows, we pick normal scenarios that you’d see aywhere, but when you add the geniuses and the technology, that’s what makes it special. You could say, “Don’t create a second sun at home!” but most of those projects that we approach couldn’t create danger or couldn’t even be attempted.

Rob Chiappetta : The general rule of thumb is that if you see Walter do something on Fringe, don’t do it at home!

Fan: What is the correlation between science fiction and science fact: who drives whom?

Kevin Grazier: Yes. [laughter]

Jaime Paglia: Well it depends on the idea… you could read about something in Discover Magazine and say, that would be a great episode.

JE: Also design elements from science.

Kevin Grazier: I work at JPL, and I see two influences: you’d be surprised how many action figures abound in people’s offices. So many scientists go into science because they want to be Captain Spock. But then we get the picketers who are all the conspiracy theorists carrying the placards saying “Tell us the truth!” and it’s like, “We are!”

Fan question: Portrayal of evil robots versus good robots? Why the disproportion?

Jane Espensen: Stories sometimes trump idealism. Killer robots are just a lot more fun to watch. Serge, the butler robot is actually adorable, though on Caprica!

Fan: What does your role as a science advisor entail? How much time does it entail on top of your full-time jobs?

Ricardo Gil da Costa: Very dependant on the project and the show. Sometimes not that much time at all, other times you’re involved from the get-go. I really like my day job, but it’s a great compliment to it to be able to help the writers on Fringe.

Kevin Grazier: I’ve ranged from writing two sentences for an episode, versus spending a lot of time on Eureka developing ideas. But on a show like Virtuality, I did more on that 2 hour episode than for the entire half a season of BSG.

Fan: Are you going to talk about the solar system of BSG?

JE: That will definitely be addressed in Caprica, but Kevin came up with a beautiful system for how these 12 colonies can be so closely put together.

Fan question: Pertinent to BSG and the episode of DS9 that Jane wrote. You try to ground these stories in science and make it believable, but also weave in mystical elements. How do you reconcile those two?

JE: I was talking with my writing staff about this just the other day. I like the mystical stuff being downplayed where the magic is technology. For example, I would say Head Six and Baltar aren’t angels but so advanced that that’s the only explanation we can come up for them. We are so limited that we grasp for magic when it’s physics we don’t understand yet.

Fan: As an educator, I can definitively say we have a problem with communication. We are not taking the mystery out when we explain it. You’re in an important position to be educators working through entertainment. To say “Isn’t this stuff cool” through entertaining stories.

Kevi Grazier: I’m an educator as well. Lots of students are turned off of science because it’s too nebulous for them to understand. But other kids will listen to you because you work in the entertainment industry, because it’s a tool that allows me to talk and have them listen to what I say for an hour so that at the end, they can ask that burning question: “Do you know Tricia Helfer?”

Jaime Paglia: The closer that you look, the more magical the science is. That’s how I think of it. Heck, I want to know how my iPhone works because it’s magic to me!

Rob Chiappetta: Science and technology is such a forefront in our pop culture, that you have people now like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as people who are making a difference and people want to hear from them and what they have to say. So that’s why on our show we have scientists and engineers who are portrayed as trying to figure out how stuff works. And more importantly, they’re normal, real people. All we have to do [to promote science and scientists] is show people living lives as scientists and they’re real people too: husbands, fathers, in relationships. That they do their jobs but then go home at night and live real lives. That’s the one thing that we can really bring to scientific education. I can be an inventor and a hero and be a helpful part of society. That’s an important message for us to be bringing across every medium: video games, movies. That today’s heroes aren’t ballplayers or movie stars, but techies and engineers.

Phil Plait: And on that note, let’s end with a pertinent quote to our discussion: “It does no harm to a sunset to know a little bit about it. –Carl Sagan”

ScriptPhD.com caught up to Jane Espensen, showrunner of Caprica, writer on BSG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, to get exclusive scoop for the upcoming season of Caprica:

ScriptPhD: Are you guys going to go into the religious monotheism and where that stems from for the original three students in the pilot (including Zoe the avatar)?

JE: Yes, we absolutely will! But there is a lot of that explored with their mentor and school headmistress, who really got them involved with the one god philosophy. But we definitely touch on the idea of where that stemmed from and what are really the roots of the Cylon monotheism culture. Where did that really stem from?

We also caught up with Glenn Whitman, staff writer on Fringe and chatted about some exclusive scoop. He was nice enough to oblige!

What exclusive Fringe scoop can you give to ScriptPhD.com that isn’t out there but that won’t get you into trouble with your bosses?

GW: [laughs] Oh I have to think about that one! OK, well, next season, I can definitely tell you that we are going to be exploring the relationship between Peter and Walter, the father-son relationship and going much more into what drives those two. We love their relationship and dynamic and can’t wait to explore that!

That’s it from Day 1, folks! Same bat time, same bat channel tomorrow. But before I leave…. I believe I promised you guys a Comic-Con Costume of the Day:

It was a tough choice out of the many…er…unusual outfits we snapped photos of today, but remember, you can find all of our pictures as supplementary coverage on our Facebook page.

~*ScriptPhD*~

Remember earlier this summer when ScriptPhD.com covered the Battlestar Galactica cast and crew’s appearance at the Paley Television Festival and promised you a very special look at the science of Battlestar in commemoration of the DVD box set release July 28th? Well, when we promise something, we deliver. ScriptPhD.com was proud and extraordinarily fortunate to sit down with Dr. Kevin Grazier, the man who made the FTL drive and Galactica’s space endeavors possible. In a candid, thorough interview, we talk about the physics of BSG, the inside secrets behind some of your favorite moments from the show, answer burning fan questions and address some of the controversy surrounding the series finale. Honest, witty, and informative, this is an interview you don’t want to miss! To read it, click “Continue Reading”.

ScriptPhD: Tell us a bit about how you transitioned into a science advisor role on television, and particularly on Battlestar Galactica.

Kevin Grazier: It actually started because of Star Trek Voyager. Years ago, my friend Ges and I weren’t really happy with the first couple of seasons of Star Trek Voyager. We thought it had a lot of potential that it just wasn’t living up to. And back then Paramount [Studios] would accept unsolicited manuscripts, meaning you didn’t have to have an agent to represent you, and they were quite honest about the status. They said, “We get about 3,000 a year, and the odds of a good outcome aren’t high. A handful of people every year have a good outcome. What we will promise you is if you send us your script, it’ll get read and you’ll get it back. Beyond that, it depends on the quality of what you write.” So we wrote a script and we sent it off and we thought we had a good story and we waited… and waited… and they said they’d get it back within eight weeks to eight months, but seven months elapsed and we hadn’t heard anything, so we were thinking that it could be pretty good. And I got a call from the executive producer’s assistant [on Voyager] saying, “She loves your story, it goes in a direction we don’t want to go, so we can’t use it. But we think your writing holds promise, so we’d like you invite you to come in and pitch stories.” Which means you stand there in front of a writer and say, “Hey! I think this happens. Or I think this happens.” And it turned out that we did that several times, and two of the people to whom I pitched, all but one time, were Bryan Fuller and Michael Taylor. Bryan Fuller had his first gig in Hollywood [with Star Trek Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine], and is now huge—he created Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, is an executive producer on Heroes. Bryan’s amazing! He also spent a lot of time with me. A pitch can last 20 minutes, but he’d spend an hour and a half with me talking about the details of the industry, and maybe how to improve my next pitch. He was amazing. Michael Taylor, I also pitched to him several times, and learned a lot from him as well, very different lessons, but I learned a lot. I generally asked for one these two when I scheduled a pitch, because they were both very different and it was just a very interesting experience with both of them.

Anyway, when Voyager ended, I stayed in contact with both of them to some extent—mostly Bryan—and when I saw Ron [D. Moore] present a little bit about the new Galactica at GalactiCon several years ago, I said “I so want to work on this!” I emailed Bryan and asked, “Hey, could you put in a word for me?” A couple weeks later he had sushi with Ron and said, “Hey, do you need a science advisor? I know this guy…” And so Ron called me in and after about a five minute interview, he hired me. Basically, [he asked], “Are you alive?” You know, it’s the first line of the new version of Galactica. And when I said yes, he said, “OK here’s a series bible, “33” and “Water” [the first two episodes of Season 1], have at it!”

Ironically enough, a couple of days later, Richard Hatch was in [with Ron] talking about his role in Tom Zarek, and as he was leaving, he told Ron, “Oh by the way, if you need a science advisor, I know this guy…” And Ron said that he’d already talked to somebody, and it was, of course, the same person they were referring to. So that’s how I got into the job, and of course, I got the follow-up job on Eureka because basically they were on the same lot and shared an office building. So at lunch one day somebody [from Eureka] asked the question, “How do you solve your technical problems?” Somebody from BSG said, “We have this guy at JPL…” and that led to a phone call.

On BSG I had the opportunity to work with Michael Taylor, who I think is a writing god–up there with Ron and Jane [Espenson]. Michael wrote what I think is the best episode of Star Trek ever, a DS9 episode called “The Visitor”. He, of course, went on to co-create Virtuality and he wrote the pilot episode as well. So having worked with him and Ron on BSG led to Virtuality.

SPhD: And we’re going to talk about Virtuality in a little bit. But before we get to that, what’s your best memory of having worked on BSG?

KG: Oh my God, there are so many! There are some on the set, some at conventions. I can think of two, actually, and they’re both similar because they’re both about the creative process. The first one was a moment where I was on the way to the set in Vancouver. I didn’t go very often because they really didn’t need me to be on the set. So I was in the airport in Portland, and was about to fly out to Vancouver, when I got an email from the BSG office saying, “You need to contact us right now, call Bradley ASAP.” I emailed them and said that I was about to board a plane, and would call Bradley the instant I landed. Bradley Thompson [series writer and producer], was largely my contact. He seemed to have been nominated by the other writers as the “You go talk to Kevin guy.” So I called Bradley the instant I landed. He told me, “You knew this was going to happen eventually. We’re rewriting [episode] 216, [“The Captain’s Hand”], and we need you to figure out how the FTL drive works so we know what components it has, so we know what can get battle damaged, so in a last minute Wrath-of-Khan-like maneuver the Captain can run down to engineering, save the ship, and give his life in the process.”

SPhD: Just that, huh? Very simple.

KG: Yeah! And I said, “Bradley, I’ve been up all night.” He said simply, “I get in tomorrow at 10:30.” I literally got a few hours of sleep and then paced a Vancouver hotel room for hours, and I had other technical issues to address in a most recent draft of that episode as well. But I basically put together an overview of how the FTL drive worked, in generalities. I literally hit SEND at 10:28. I have a book coming up, authored by myself and Patrick Di Justo, entitled “The Science of Battlestar Galactica” which comes out in December. I included the very notes that I sent to Bradley that day in the FTL chapter. From pacing the hotel room, and coming up with the final “I got it!” revelation, and getting it down on paper, and getting it out, and eventually seeing that episode—which is a good episode—was an amazing feeling. Although we didn’t use all the stuff I came up with explicitly, we had it for background information.

And another [great memory] was when they tasked Bradley, myself and [series composer] Bear [McCreary] with essentially creating the climax! You know, the climactic moment was a meld of science and music. How do we encode jump coordinates within “All Along the Watchtower” [the call of the Cylons]?

SPhD: That was really cool, by the way. Watching Starbuck put that together. I kind of figured it was going to have something to do with the final jump, but just watching the notes, and her realization and then [Hera], the hybrid, drawing that out, that was super duper cool! I would love to hear more about that.

KG: Well, that’s what they told us to do, was find a way to encode the jump coordinates within “Watchtower”. We actually, for what was literally a blip of time on the screen, spent a lot of time on that, a lot of effort. I think sometimes people don’t realize how much time we put into some of these issues. There were phone calls with Bear, and it was kind of fun talking to Bear, as he’s sitting down at the piano, and he’s playing the Cylon Call to Arms. And one time, I was listening to Bear, and I closed my eyes, and tried to take a mental snapshot of this moment, because this is a fantastic show, we’re wrapping it up, and there won’t be many more moments like this. So that was moment number two, just working on that project, realizing the series climax is in our hands, and finally working with someone as talented as Bear. I mean, I think Bear is a great guy, and it was cool to work with him in the very end.

SPhD: And I’m glad you gave that example because there’s a lot of studies that show the tremendous link between music and mathematics.

KG: Oh, yeah.

SPhD: And that people who are very talented musically are very talented mathematically—their brain literally works a different way. So it’s so cool to know there are practical situations where those two converge to produce such neat results.

KG: And Bear actually put out a fairly lengthy installment on his blog about that compositional process. [ScriptPhD note: Read it here].

SPhD: So you briefly mentioned the book, which I want to talk about. There is going to be a “Science of Battlestar Galactica” book.

KG: There is!

SPhD: And it’s coming out in December and everybody should buy it for Christmas.

KG: They should!

SPhD: So I want to hear a bit about how that came about and the experience of working on that.

KG: It’s been a lot of work! [laughs] I came in late in the project. The original writer, Patrick Di Justo, had pitched it, got it accepted by Wiley Books, he was working on it and he had asked me several questions about the technical aspects of the Galactica. And eventually, at one point, I said, “Hey look, you’re asking a lot of questions, and I’d actually considered doing this book myself, and I’m giving you my best stuff here, so why don’t we just collaborate?” Surprisingly, the answer came back, “Sure!” There were some legal wrangling between NBC Universal [who own Battlestar Galactica] and Wiley Books, simply because the series wasn’t over, I had access to spoilers, so there were some issues involved, but so far, it’s been a lot of fun. We have literally the last couple of chapter edits to get out the door, which should be done by this weekend. So [the book] is done. The edits, so far, have been few and minor.

SPhD: We had talked a little earlier about some controversy regarding the science content of the finale, with some unfortunate, and rather pugnacious, internet attacks against you personally. I would like to offer you ScriptPhD.com as a forum to address some of these attacks and set the record straight. Go for it!

KG: Okay. There is a saying in Hollywood, “If you make people think they’ve thought they’ll love you, if you make them really think, they’ll hate you.” And I think that’s nowhere better seen than the end of the storyline with Kara [Thrace, “Starbuck”]. Kara, as you know, just literally vanished, and people were upset and saying “Well, we don’t know the end of her story.” Do we know the end of her story any better or worse than we do Lee [Adama]’s? Do we know that Lee didn’t get bit by a tse tse fly or some kind of biting insect and die of some kind of disease two days later? No, we don’t! We don’t know any of those stories. We know that one person’s lineage survived, well arguably three. We know Athena, Helo and Hera’s line survived to some extent. And we also know that various human religions and literature are full of supernatural or spiritual characters who took corporeal form to perform a task or “set things right”, only to disappear after: Jesus Christ, Vishnu, Obi-Wan Kenobi (I mean really, was he there in “Star Wars” or a projection of the Force?). So, we don’t know their [projected] stories, but people hated that. They were so angry. And of course, one group of people guaranteed to hate that were the shippers. Do you know who shippers are?

SPhD: I am WELL aware of the shippers.

KG: Yeah, they’re the Lee/Kara shippers–they’re all about the “ship”, the relationship— and there was the Sam/Kara shippers, and instead of one group being able to go “Na na na na, [our relationship won]”, instead they were both furious! When Ron made you think—because it was Ron’s story—when there’s ambiguity, people get all angry! I couldn’t believe that. I thought—OK, let me say this upfront, I thought the ending was fantastic. I am totally on board with the ending. I loved it. But it kind of goes to show you how quickly people are willing to nitpick and to be really, vehemently, furiously upset and to go off.

Over the span of the series, people have been perfectly willing to go off on things like the science, or other aspects of the show, and sometimes when it comes to the science, I’ll set the focus a little bit more, oftentimes, their questions are snarky, they’re also full of entitlement, like they deserve their answer. And sometimes, the questions themselves aren’t informed. And I’ll give you a good example, because I have one here. Somebody complained, “I can’t get over how Galactica, with their cumulative structural damage, just could survive at the end when she rammed the giant Colony while Pegasus goes to pieces when she rams an ordinary base ship. No fair!” Would the fact that the Pegasus had a full head of steam matter here? Kinetic energy is 1/2mv², that energy dissipates upon impact, Pegasus is going full speed into something upon impact. As opposed to Galactica, which, I’m sorry, even at flank speed (which is even faster than full speed), do you think it got anywhere close to full speed in the 100 meters or so it had to accelerate before impacting the Colony? I mean, that answer is pretty obvious, and there is, I would argue, a high-school level physics answer to that. It surprises me how quick people are to jump on things. And sometimes, like in this example, they’re wholly uninformed.

In fact, sometimes I get a little upset by these things, and I’ve actually done a little research on this. There’s a great 1999 [scholarly] paper [in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology] by two psychologists from Cornell, Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Basically it’s about expertise, and they said that people who don’t have expertise in a subject also do not recognize expertise, and don’t realize how far they are from attaining expertise. So, it’s actually an interesting paper and it explains a lot of the uninformed questions, as well as a lot of the snarkiness. [ScriptPhD note: Read about the Kruger-Dunning effect here]. Again, the whole entitlement that people have sometimes bothers me as well. I write a blog, and I don’t update it as regularly as I should, the BSG Tech Blog on Cinema Spy. I’ll willingly go to great lengths to answer a polite question, or a particularly insightful question, or a well thought-out question. The snarky ones? Nah, I won’t answer those, because it’s like, who do you think you’re talking to?

One of my driving forces here is that I took martial arts pretty seriously for several years, and it’s pertinent here in two ways. Number one, I believe that if all you learn out of martial arts is how to beat the hell out of someone, you’ve missed a lot of the point [of the art]. And one of the related points is that I believe that if you develop an ego, your sensei owes it to you to beat it out of you. You’re always told that there’s someone badder, and eventually you learn to keep your ego in check. So I’ve been pretty cavalier about admitting, at conventions or online, about places where we or I have screwed up on the show.

SPhD: Yeah, and in fact, I don’t know how many times you have to say about the “Water” episode I feel bad about [the explosions in Galactica’s water storage tanks occurring while she’s replenishing the Virgon Traveler]. You were very humble about it.

KG: Yeah, although it was my second episode, and I was a baby science advisor back then! And more recently I admitted something about the Tomb of Athena episode people were like, “You suck! You suck! You screwed up and you suck! And for that matter, you smell bad and your mother dresses you funny!” And that was going to be my second point, which is that any martial artist will tell you that you know that anytime you throw something you open yourself to a counter. And when I throw out, “Hey, we overlooked something” it’s amazing the flood of negativism that comes back. I say these things to give you insight into the show and what’s my motivation for continuing to do this if people get so negative and so snarky?

Along the same lines of people looking to find flaws, there’s Television Without Pity. Some people thing that criticism is necessarily negative, and I don’t think it need be, but with a name like that I think it kind of forces you into a mindset. And at the end of a series, they list all their concerns or their questions about the show, and one thing that bothered me with them, this goes beyond the case of the previous example, where someone was uninformed and still asked the question. Here, they made the comment regarding Mitochondrial Eve, and Hera, how is she Mitochondrial Eve? It says, “The importance of this human/Cylon hybrid was drilled into our heads ad nauseam over the course of recent seasons, and yet it simply doesn’t make sense that she’s essentially the mother of all humanity on our Earth (and yes, we know we’re greatly simplifying the science here). The last we see of our rag-tag fleet, there are about 30,000 other humans and Cylons scattered across the planet, who will presumably produce plenty of human/human children, human/Cylon children, human/indigenous primitive children, etc. Doesn’t this make all of the sacrifice in Hera’s name a waste of life, not to mention viewers’ time?” And then they go on to make a complaint entirely based on the science they just simplified and edited out! If you know you’re simplifying the science here, then why would you ask a question like that? So you can imagine my frustration when I read things here. I’ve really kind of stopped reading some of these.

There’s another person [ScriptPhD note: we will not publicize his blog on this website] who took it upon himself to write endless essays and topics on the Galactica ending, and said upfront that the Battlestar Galactica ending was the worst ending in the history of screen science fiction. When you say “This is the worst ending of on-screen science fiction history” and that’s the title of your topic, keep two things in mind. First, you’re biased, anything you say is going to be biased and the fact of the matter is that you’ll probably tend to crowbar facts and selectively pick other facts to support that bias. And that’s kind of what I found in some of these writings. But secondly, when you say something like that, obviously you are subject to hyperbole. And so, he and a couple of other people actually said that they were shocked that I, somebody that advocates science teaching and someone who does a lot of public outreach, would be involved with that ending. Again, firstly I love the ending. Secondly, even if I didn’t, like I’m going to suddenly going to say, “Sorry Ron, I don’t buy into this. I quit.” I didn’t suggest many changes for the ending because I liked it.

Also, there were a couple of people that said that the ending had intelligent design implications and also took me for task for that. How could somebody who is a scientist and teaches about evolution and biology be involved with that [storyline] that preached intelligent design? One thing I teach my students is whenever you say something, there are underlying assumptions, and you have to find out what they are. And the underlying assumption of that [statement] is, “My interpretation of the ending is the only correct one and therefore you screwed up.” And that’s not true. The ending was certainly ambiguous. Instead of the interpretation of the ending that a divine being or god (although he doesn’t like that name, remember?) created these people who were genetically similar to humans and the humans happen to have found them and were given a second chance. That is an intelligent design view of things. There’s also the view that atoms combine in only so many ways. And we find water is pretty ubiquitous in the Solar System, in the galaxy and the universe. Amino acids and sugars are found on meteorites. The building blocks of life are out there.

SPhD: That’s absolutely true, and there is a theory that RNA (the precursor to a protein) may have originally come to Earth from a meteorite.

KG: Right, although there are plenty of ways it could have also formed here on Earth. Not in the current atmosphere, not in the current environment, but certainly back 3.8 billion years ago. So to say there is a better argument for the ending, or how I tend to see it, is more of a divine being created these experiments. The being set the wheels in motion and created the laws that govern things, set the experiment in motion and sat back and let it happen. And then when humanity wiped themselves out via their creation, the divine being did guide humanity back to this other place where the experiment was already underway. And that was the second chance, but it’s different than saying these people were created by a divine pattern as a way to give humans a second chance. It happened on its own. And that’s actually bolstered by what Number Six says at the very end, when they’re talking about humanity’s rebirth and they’re in New York City, and she says, “mathematics, law of averages, a lot of these concepts repeat themselves long enough, eventually something surprising will occur.” So obviously this is a similar complex system repeating similar results.

SPhD: It’s happened before and it will happen again. How many times could you have said that over the course of the series?

KG: I’m sure we could say it once more, but the point is, the whole “how did you buy into that intelligent design ending” is pretentious. First of all the hand of the Divine has been seen throughout from the very beginning. And there were parallels to the original Battlestar Galactica series. We had Pegasus, one of my first season one episodes “Act of Contrition” and then subsequently “You Can’t Go Home Again”, that was our version of the “What happened to Starbuck?” episode from Galactica 1980. I’ve never met with Ron or anybody but that’s what I think it was. And our angels were the equivalents of their beings of light. I kind of saw that coming and a couple of years ago, at the Dragon*Con convention, I said, “I think there are parallels that are yet to be divulged and they’ve been right in front of your face all along.” And Jamie Bamber [Apollo], who was sitting next to me, said, “Well obviously Ron is telling you things he’s not telling the rest of us.” But no, it’s just that I watched the original series, and I watched this one and I see a one to one parallel between a lot of things and I thought that Number Six was going to turn out to be a being of light. So we’re drawing a parallel with the original show. So I think a lot of the criticisms about the intelligent design ending are unwarranted and kind of arrogant. In fact, the aforementioned individual who’s been writing diatribes on how bad the BSG finale is said in one of his tomes, “You are much, much more closely related to a mushroom than you are to anything alien.” Given that we know of life on only one planet in the Universe at present, you would know this… how?

SPhD: You mentioned that you did more work for the 2 hour Virtuality pilot than you did for the first half of the last season of BSG. Tell us a bit about your involvement.

KG: I did! Virtuality was a lot of fun! We worked on that a year and a half ago now just before the BSG season 4 finale, and Virtuality was a lot of fun. We incorporated the Orion Drive [based on Project Orion, the first engineering design study of a spacecraft powered by nuclear pulse propulsion], which was something that was researched back in the 1950s and 1960s, and found to work by the way! Only with the Virtuality spacecraft Phaeton, it was antimatter charges instead of nuclear warheads. Essentially you drop a photon torpedo out back. Literally, the description of what those charges were is you have matter and anti-matter in a containment vessel and you turn off the containment and boom! And that’s the description of a photon torpedo from Star Trek. And then, calculations have shown that you can get one of those puppies up to about 0.5 to 0.8 light speed.

SPhD: And you actually had a pretty lucky guess about the star system that they were moving towards. Tell us about that.

KG: We did. I just posted an article recently about what stars should we pick as target candidates [for harboring life]. I picked stars that were kind of plausible for having life and some stars that come up again and again in science fiction because people have made the same kind of conjectures that I made. And this had to be the kind of star that could support a planet with life and then it had to subsequently be reachable within a ten-year round trip, and when you take into account relativistic contraction works, turns out that Epsilon Eridani, the star we eventually picked, is in range if you go at about 0.9 light speed (0.9c). So a little faster than the Orion drive could probably get you, but it’s science fiction and this is still more science based than a lot of things out there. And we actually explain it [on the show]. We were somewhat transparent in the science there. And it turns out that Epsilon Eridani has not one, but likely two planets and a couple of debris disks. So it seems like this is a star that could have an Earth-like planet and it wouldn’t surprise anybody.

SPhD: And you’d mentioned that for a lot of the fans like myself that enjoyed this pilot, what, to your knowledge is the future? You said hope is not dead, so what do you know that we don’t?

KG: Well I know that there are still fans who are trying to create a groundswell of support. I do know that if Virtuality isn’t dead, it’s certainly fourth and long. But there are people looking at other funding sources and I’m not sure of all the details, but what I do know is that you can write, and you can encourage your friends to write to Peter Rice or Kevin Reilly at Fox or alternately Mark Stern and David Howe at Syfy and say, “I love this show and I would love to see more,” and take it from there.

SPhD: And boy are they going to love me publishing their emails on my site!

KG: Yeah, they’re gonna love me too. “Dr. Grazier, your services will no longer be required.”

SPhD: Hey, at least we’re not sending in peanuts, so there you go. Taking away from television before we get to some fan questions, your own work with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory affiliated with Caltech is quite interesting in and of itself, and you’ve written several articles for Discovery magazine. What cool mission are you working on right now?

KG: Currently I’m on the Cassini mission to Saturn. And really have spent most of my career on Cassini. I did work previously at RAND and worked on Mars Observer, but pretty much Cassini has been it. We have just finished planning what is called our “Cassini Solstice Mission” or our “Extended Extended Mission” planning the spacecraft’s orbits out to 2017. And the spacecraft is doing really well right now. It’s really healthy, we have a lot of power, we have a fair amount of fuel, we’re doing well. And we are really literally rewriting the book on Saturn.

SPhD: How so?

KG: Well, before we arrived, the moon Titan had the largest unmapped solid surface in the Solar System. And we could only conjecture about what’s down there. We’re now seeing Titan with our imaging systems and with our radar, we’re seeing the surface. We’re seeing lakes of liquid ethane and liquid methane, the first open bodies of liquid outside of Earth in the Solar System. We’re seeing evidence that Titan may have a sub-surface ocean like Europa. There are some regions of the moon Enceladus that have geysers spewing ice crystals into space, which we believe is fueled by liquid water in the sub-surface. Astrobiologists will tell you that anytime there is liquid water, there is a chance, a possibility—not a probability—a possibility, of life. So we’re studying some really interesting environments here in the outer Solar System. And of course we’re learning about Saturn’s rings. The rings have gotten progressively thinner since we’ve been there. Now, they really haven’t gotten thinner. Our understanding of them has shrunk our estimation of their thickness. We went there thinking they were a kilometer thick, now they’re 100 meters thick, now they’re 100 feet thick, and et cetera. Now, as we approach the equinox, which occurs in August, when the rings are flat when viewed by the Sun, we’re starting to see moons and other structures that project very long shadows onto the rings. So things that we couldn’t see before will hopefully start to reveal themselves.

A couple of questions from our East Coast correspondent PoliSciPoli:

Just what was it that could differentiate Cylons from humans? It took a long time for Dr. Baltar to figure it out on a molecular level with his Cylon detector. What was he looking for? Yet a few years later, they were able to immediately recognize the bones on “Earth v. 1.0” as those of Cylons. What were they looking for there?

KG: I’m kind of hesitant to go over that, simply because we do cover that in the book. It is covered in the book, and that’s another thing that people have complained about, is the Cylon biology, how this doesn’t work, et cetera et cetera. I claim, and I think I persuaded my co-author eventually to agree, that you don’t have to modify the human form a whole lot to get a Cylon. One thing that is out there, we talk about the Cylons having silica pathways. That was determined in the first episode—in the miniseries. So silica means SiO², which means glass. Glass tends to be inert. Doesn’t react with a whole lot of things. That’s why you can store acid into glass [which is SiO²]. So if there’s silica in the silica pathways, then a Cylon would show an anomalously high level of silica in a mass spectrometer. And it also may not be detectable by other methods that we give when we’re giving a physical exam. So therefore once they knew what to look for in the Cylon detector—and by the way, let’s remember, Baltar’s Cylon detector did work. It just wasn’t in his interest to tell Sharon that she was a Cylon. It worked. And so therefore, if we assume that years later, when we’re at Earth v. 1.0, and they analyzed the bones, that he said, “Look, it worked. I don’t have a reason to hide this anymore. Let’s run this through my detector, let’s see what it comes up with.” Ka-blam. Cylons. There you go.

SPhD: Excellent! And again, the book comes out in December, buy it for Christmas, find out more!

KG: By the way, I should point out that for the chapter where we discuss the Cylon biology, my co-author and I discussed Cylon biology in a series of email exchanges. He took those and that chapter is a master stroke. It indirectly touches on a topic we’ve already dealt with and that is my frustration with fan questions. What he did with that chapter was frakking brilliant!

Robert Birge suggests that the human brain has a capacity of between 1 and 10 terabytes, with most people using about 3 TB of that. She’s wondering what sort of bandwidth, storage, and compression algorithms we’re supposed to believe exist in the Caprica universe to allow all of that to fit on a thumb drive.

[Distiguished biophysical chemist] Robert Birge suggests that the human brain has a capacity of between 1 and 10 terabytes, with most people using about 3 TB of that. She’s wondering what sort of bandwidth, storage, and compression algorithms we’re supposed to believe exist in the Caprica universe to allow all of that to fit on a thumb drive.

KG: Firstly, the estimate is a lot of data, and that’s not the estimate that Zoe gave. I’m not sure where [the show runners] got their estimate, but remember that Zoe Greystone’s avatar, said, “the human brain holds about 300 MB, not very much really.” So that was the number they were using. So I don’t know where Birge’s storage estimate comes from or where the Caprica writers’ estimate comes from. There’s a big difference between those two numbers. The 300 MB I could easily see fitting onto the device that they put into the Cylon at the end of the pilot. Certainly data storage devices are getting smaller and smaller and smaller over time. Also there’s the point that on spacecraft, we often compress our data from deep space. If, in fact, if the data is compressed, then there’s a lot more data that can fit on your 300 MB thumb drive than when uncompressed. So data compression of a third, which isn’t particularly good for a compression algorithm, gets 1 Tb down to about 300 Gb, which could in theory fit on a thumb drive. A REALLY GOOD one.

And now… questions from the fans!

Grey asks: How could just eight nukes have pushed the gigantic Cylon Colony into the singularity? It seems way too big for that.

KG: It is big, and certainly if a nuke hit the exterior of the colony, it would vaporize material and impart a change of velocity ∆v, which is the term we use in the space program. If you think back to the Orion Drive from Virtuality, you vaporize stuff and it causes ∆v. Very similar. But also, in that environment, there were rocks floating around them, there was constant pressure impacts and gas drag, they would have had to have been constantly thrusting to maintain their attitude and their orbit. They would have had to make constant adjustments. If you take out the thrusters…

Catie asks: How hard was it to create the Centurions?

KG: I really have no idea because those were created for us back in the original series. The Centurions we used for the show were obviously just modernized versions of the ’78 Centurions and in fact, the ones we used towards the end were in fact the ’78 Centurions. That’s special effects people. They just elaborated on the original Cylon design. In fact at JPL, in my office, I have sitting next to me a life-size Cylon Centurion poster [see picture].

Somebody named ScienceTim (who apparently knows you very well!) asks: Yo, Kev, I’ve been wondering — how come there were no birds or other animals on any of the botanically-inhabited planets visited by the Fleet? Did the mysterious and God-like forces wipe out animal life on all planets except for Earth, just to keep the plot focused? Seems kinda cruel, man.

KG: Yeah, I think I might know who Tim is. [laughs]

SPhD: I think he was just being funny, not mean.

KG: Yeah, I think he was being funny, because we certainly had animals on the Earth on which we’re living right now. And as far as the original Earth, I think they went the same way as the Cylons and were vaporized. Or died of radiation sickness. Yeah. I definitely think that was just being funny.

Fflav asks: This has probably been asked before and it probably will be asked again! There are two obvious ‘impossibilities’ that jump at you but are nevertheless necessary for the plot of one such show: FTL, of course, and also artificial gravity on the ships (even on a ship like Galactica, people would be floating around, not walking with their feet firmly on the ‘ground’, etc). Was there any conceptualization, especially on the latter, on how it could be achieved, or was it just left open and unexplained since it was necessary and inevitable?

KG: And in the book [“The Science of Battlestar Galactica”] we actually have chapters on both of these topics. The first thing I say upfront is, “If we knew how this worked in detail, we wouldn’t be writing this book, we would be packing for Stockholm [where the Nobel Prizes are awarded].” So but we can talk about some of the physics that can lead to FTL travel, or artificial gravity. And I do write about the Zephyr, the ring ship, how quickly that would have to spin and some of the problems with centrifugal gravity. And we also talk about what happens to your body when you’re not in gravity. And then I talk about, let’s say you create a theoretical artificial gravity generator. The gravity of a planet, a sun or any spherical body falls of as 1/r²—we learned that as Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation—but if you had a line of generators down the centerline of the floor, you have a cylindrical field and essentially your gravity is falling off as 1/r, and probably what would happen is the floors in your hallways would be bowed—you’d be facing outwards from the center line because the that’s the direction of the gravity gradient. So that’s probably not what they do and realistically, the long and the short of it is, it’s a production consideration because to simulate zero gravity would be financially impossible from a production standpoint. From a basic physics standpoint, what I always enjoyed in the original series were those little carts that took the warriors to their Vipers. Remember those little carts, the trains they stood in? One penny on a track and they all go flying!

SPhD: So the bottom line, Fflav, is buy the book and try using a bit of suspension of disbelief!

KG: Pretty much, yeah.

Jess asks: How hard do you tend to push for accuracy when the writers want to go for flashy effects? What can you tell all the hardcore science nerds who find it difficult to engage in willful suspension of disbelief during sci-fi shows?

KG: That’s a good question! And so, firstly, how hard do I push? It depends on how strongly I feel about an issue, and sometimes you also just have to pick your battles. A couple of examples, and I tend to use these over and over again. The “belly flop”, as fans refer to it, when Galactica plunged into the atmosphere of New Caprica. I essentially said, “I’d be remiss in my job as a science advisor if I didn’t point out that Galactica would probably break up.” I don’t care what it’s made of, any unobtanium that you come up with, it’s a mile-long spacecraft, plunging into an atmosphere, it’s going to do what Columbia did, it’s going to break up. But then I said, “However, owing to the high ‘coolness factor’, go for it!” I like exciting sci-fi and I wanted to see that. And it’s, like, the coolest space battle ever! So look, I work in the space program, science is what I do for a living, so getting into the second question, if I can deal with it, you can! And besides, did I mention that it was cool? But at the same time, it depends on how strongly I feel about something. How egregious of an error I think a script detail might be. Really, these writers were pretty good. There were very few things that I said, “No, no no, don’t do that!” So these writers were good, and the ones who tend to write the more tech-heavy episodes, which were like Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, often consulted me from the onset. They talked to me before they even wrote. So that alleviated some of the issues before they started. And again, those two guys were pretty savvy, so they would have done their research even without me.

SPhD: And as to her second point? Which we’ve talked about a lot, you run into it all the time. People just can’t handle it, but at the end of the day, it’s entertainment folks! Deal with it!

KG: And a couple of answers for that. In the book again, we have one of the laws of the “Science of Battlestar Galactica” is “It’s just a show, please relax.” And secondly, if you look at the science in our show, compared to some of the other sci-fi that’s out there, or certainly in the past, it’s way better. BSG actually had a science advisor AND they actually listened to him, more often than not. But rarely did I think something was just awful and needed changes. And if there was something I felt strongly about, I’d write a second note. Sometimes, I sent two, three sets of notes on scripts. By the time the third one went out, it probably wasn’t going to change ever again.

SPhD: And honestly? If you find it that difficult to engage in willful suspension of disbelief, maybe you shouldn’t be watching a fictitious entertainment show. Then tune in to NOVA on PBS. As mean as it sounds, that’s kind of the bottom line, is that you have to almost, to make it work and to make it entertaining.

KG: And like you said, sometimes I find that the people who are the most scientifically literate, the scientists, are the most willing to cut us some slack.

SPhD: Absolutely, I know I am! So we are actually looking forward to next week’s [Comic-Con convention in San Diego]. I have a press pass and we’re going to be doing tons of Comic-Con coverage on the site. You personally are participating in two very exciting panels on Thursday.

KG: Yes, we have the panel in the early afternoon. We’ve done this panel for the past few years, it’s Richard Hatch’s panel, the core members are Richard, Bear McCreary and myself. And there are special guests. Last year we had Tom DeSanto, and this year we have Michael Taylor. Yay! So theoretically, Virtuality could be on the table as well. Somebody else may stop by, but it’s not for certain so I don’t want to say anything.

SPhD: Later on that night, you are participating in what I think is an absolutely fantastic Discovery Channel panel.

KG: The Discovery Channel and the National Academy of Sciences!

SPhD: Which is the Science and Entertainment Exchange, headed by Jennifer Ouellette across the street from me here at UCLA. She’s absolutely terrific! She already told me about it. I’m going to be there with bells on my toes. I hope we have an opportunity to say hi.

KG: That’s going to be a fun panel. Last year, it was packed. It was wall-to-wall humanity in that room, and it was a lot of fun! Steven Cass of Discover, who has since moved on to greener pastures, moderated, and it was myself, Jaime Paglia from Eureka, and [astronomer] Phil Plait.

SPhD: Who is very funny, by the way! I follow his Twitter.

KG: Yeah, Phil is fun. We’ve been friends for a while. And we were actually both science advisors on a children’s show called The Zula Patrol. I got him that gig. Which I rub into his face regularly. But it’s going to be us, there are going to be writers from Fringe, and Jane Espenson. Need I say more?

SPhD: What kinds of things are you guys going to cover?

KG: This year, the title of the panel is “Mad Science”. Essentially, I think the theme is going to be, “Is science inherently good or evil?” We’ve got the people who do the science, and we’ve got the people who take that science and turn it into science fiction on the panel!

SPhD: I will see you next Thursday. I want to thank you for your time and for joining us, and so say we all!

KG: So say we all!

An enormous thanks to Dr. Grazier for generously taking time away from his busy schedule to talk to us and answer fan questions and an extra special thanks to all of you who submitted questions. (Sorry if we weren’t able to answer everyone’s.) The box set of Battlestar Galactica is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on July 28th, 2009, and The Science of Battlestar Galactica is out in stores.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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I’m honored to be joining ScriptPhD.com as an East Coast Correspondent, and look forward to bringing you coverage from events in such exciting areas as Atlanta, Baltimore, and New York City – as well as my hometown of Washington, DC.

And to that end, here is a re-cap of the World Science Festival’s panel “Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs on the Horizon.” For anyone interested in the intersection of Science and Pop Culture, I cannot promote this event enough. In addition to the panel I’ll be describing, some of the participants included Alan Alda, Glenn Close, Bobby McFerrin, YoYo Ma, and Christine Baranski from the entertainment sector. Representing science were notables like Dr. James Watson (who along with Francis Crick was the first to elucidate the helical structure of DNA), Sir Paul Nurse (Nobel Laureate and president of Rockefeller University), and E.O. Wilson (who is celebrating his 80th birthday in conjunction with the festival).

However, it’s time to return to the subject of this post – BSG and Cyborgs. To read more about the discussion at the intersection of science fact and science fiction, please click “Continue Reading”.

Regretfully, the 92nd Street Y in New York City prohibits the use of any sort of recording equipment, which was not noted on their description of the event or on their policy page, but which I discovered as one of their staff came to scold me while I was testing my camera prior to the inception of the event. So while I took comprehensive notes, I was unable to record the panel in order to provide a full transcript. Nor did I get any photos.[note: and believe me, the reactions shots of Mary McDonnell and Michael Hogan to the cutting-edge science they were showing was worth the price of admission, and would’ve made fabulous photos!]

Faith Salie was the moderator for the event. Geeks may know her best as Sarina from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She’s also a Rhodes Scholar, host of the 2008 and 2009 Sundance Festival, and hosted the Public Radio International Program Fair Game. Her knowledge of Battlestar Galactica was impressive, and she’d also done a great deal of background research on the issues related to robotics and artificial intelligence, which allowed her to keep the conversation going, and give fair time to both the science and the scifi.

The science panelists were Nick Bostrom the director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association which promotes the ethical use of technology; Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis Group and Associate Professor of Computing & Information Sciences at Cornell University, who has actually developed self-aware and evolutionary robots; and Kevin Warwick a professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England—unlike Gaius Baltar, Dr. Warwick has a chip in his head. In anticipation of this event, Galactica Sitrep interviewed both Dr. Lipson and Dr. Warwick, and they are interesting reading for more insight into these scientists’ perspectives.

The BSG panelists were Mary McDonnell and Michael Hogan. Faith Salie very aptly introduced Mary McDonnell as “gorgeous” before briefly covering her film credits outside of Battlestar. Vis-a-vis Michael Hogen’s introduction, we learned that he also has X-Files to his credits. [A fact which is sadly missing from his IMDB credits, leading me to wonder which episode??]

The moderator opened the discussion by asking Mary McDonnell and Michael Hogan what life was like after BSG. Mary McDonnell pretended to sob, before acknowledging that “life after death is actually quite wonderful.” She went on to say that dying wasn’t so bad and that she enjoyed being the only actress ever to die first and then get married. At the audience laughter, she then smiled and said she was pleased to see that we “got it” as she made the same quip somewhere else recently and it went over the audience’s head. She pantomimed Adama putting his ring on Laura’s finger after her death in the finale and described the scene as “beautiful,” and her work on BSG, in general as “so compelling.”

She said she was going to miss the cast including “Mikey,” (Michael Hogan sitting next to her) and would miss the direct connection with the culture, and so she was excited by events like the World Science Festival Panel that would allow that connection to continue. She also said that the “fans are the best,” and applauded the audience to which Michael Hogan emphatically joined in.

Michael Hogan’s answer to the same question was that it was very good to leave when it did and “have it sitting the classic show,” and that the experience would stay with him for the rest of his life. He was then asked to set up the premise of the show for those few in the audience that had not seen it. His answer was

In a nutshell, Battlestar Galactica is about an XO who befriends a man who becomes the commander of the Battlestar Galactica and the trials and tribulations of their relationship.

After the audience stopped laughing, he gave the more mainstream description of Battlestar being about the war between the Cylons and humanity and the series opening at the point that the Cylons have just nuked the twelve colonies where humanity lives.

This allowed the moderator to segue into clips from both the Miniseries and the Season 2 episode “Downloaded” where we saw the character, Six, explaining that she is—in fact—a Cylon, and then going through the downloading process.

Following the clips, the discussion turned to the scientists in the panel, who were asked to answer the question: What is a robot?

Kevin Warwick explained that the term “robot” came originally from Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who envisioned robots as mindless agricultural workers. It’s now come to be used much more broadly for that which is machine or machine-like, and that in current usage there’s not much difference between a robot or a cyborg [Note: There are those that would vehemently disagree—a common distinction between the two is that cyborgs are a mixture of both the non-living machine and the organic]. Hod Lipson said that trying to pin down the meaning of that term was a moving target, much like trying to define artificial intelligence.

The panelists went on to talk about who all robots and artificially intelligent systems try to imitate something living—from the primitive systems such as bacteria, to more complex animals as dogs and cats, and now ultimately to humans.

The idea of artificial intelligence and robots that can think for then explored. Hod Lipson said that for the longest time the ability to play chess was recognized as something that was paradigmatically human, but we do now have machines that can easily beat a human at chess. As such the ultimately goal of artificial intelligence and machines that can reason gets moved further and further.

From there, the discussion moved back to Battlestar Galactica, and Faith Salie asked Michael Hogan how he felt upon learning that he was one of the Final Five. They then showed a clip from the Season 4 episode “Revelations in which Michael Hogan’s character, Saul Tigh, discloses his identity as a Cylon to his commanding officer and long-time friend, Bill Adama.

Michael Hogan explained that he disagreed vehemently with that decision, but that it was not something that he could talk the executive producers, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, out of. He said that for a long time on set there had been joking about who the final five were going to be—knowing that they were going to be picked from those characters that were already established—and had initially thought it was another bad joke. He also said that he’d seen an internet poll at one point asking who fans thought—among all the characters, both large and small—were the final five and he was second from the bottom, while Mary McDonnell was near the top.

When asked about researching his role as XO and later Cylon, Michael Hogan said that researching and getting into a character is part of what attracted him to the job of acting. This led to a side quip about it being a lot of fun to research a cranky man with a drinking problem. More interestingly, he was then asked: How do you research being a robot?

His answer was that he approached it like mental illness. He said he took it as a given that Tigh would already be living in chronic pain as a result of the torture he’d undergone on New Caprica and a functioning alcoholic, so that when he first started hearing the music (that activated him as a Cylon), it wasn’t necessarily a big surprise; it was just one more thing.

It was only after he had the realization in the presence of the other three Cylons that things fell into place, and then it was terrifying for him. He went on to say that Tigh, if not the chronologically oldest person in the fleet [which I guess means counting from the time at which they “awoke” with the false memories on Caprica] definitely had the most combat experience, and as a Cylon was therefore a “very dangerous creature.” To illustrate that, he then described the scene in which Tigh envisioned turning a gun on Adama in the CIC.

Kevin Warwick picked up on this thread and said that this was, “taking your human brain, but with a small change, and everything is made different.” Michael Hogan agreed.

In turn, the moderator then turned the discussion to the work Dr. Warwick is doing in using biological cells to power a robot. In essence, Dr. Warwick has developed bio-based AI. He harvests and grows rat neural cells and then uses them to control an independent robot. At this point in his experiments, he said, they’re only attempting simple objectives such as not getting it to bump into walls. However, as the robot “learns” these things, the neural tissue powering it shows distinct changes indicating that pathways are being developed.

He said he hopes that this research might some day lead to a better understanding of human brains and potential breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research. There is a video of this robot in action at the London Telegraph story “Rat’s ‘brain’ used to control robot. Other external articles include Springer’s “Architecture for the Neuronal Control of a Mobile Robot” and Seed Magazine’s “Researchers have developed a robot capable of learning and interacting with the world using a biological brain.”

The description of these neuronal cells led then to a discussion of the Cylon stem cells used to cure Laura Roslin’s cancer in the episode, Epiphanies. Mary McDonnell informed the audience that the story line original sprang from what, at the time, was the U.S.’s resistance to stem cell research. The moderator then decided to bring a little humor to the discussion by saying, “So, Laura’s character as near death, but your agent finally worked out a contract.”

Mary McDonnell laughed and said, yes, she was near death but she finally decided to stop pushing for a trailer as big as Eddie’s [Edward James Olmos] realizing that “no one gets a trailer as big as Eddie.”

Returning to the discussion of the plot, Mary McDonnell noted that what really fascinated her about this storyline was Baltar. She said that it was the first time we saw “the beginnings of a conscience” in him, and that as a result of that he took “profound action.” She then further described the course of cure based in the stem cells from a half-human/half-Cylon fetus, and concluded with saying, “Not to say I got up the next day and became a Cylon sympathizer . . .”

The panel discussion then segued to a discussion of the work being done by Hod Lipson on robots’ abilities to evolve—in a Darwinian sense—and to breed. Using modeling and simulation tools and game theory, Dr. Lipson is creating robots who self select based on desirable traits and from generation to generation become stronger, more mobile, and better adapted to their environments. His slides included a reference to the Nature article “ Automatic design and manufacture of robotic lifeforms.”

Dr. Lipson noted that many of the parts used in these robots are created using 3-D printing, which is, in itself a rather new and exciting technology that really excited not only the moderator, but also Michael Hogan and Mary McDonnell. What wasn’t discussed, is that beyond allowing robots to design their own parts, this technology has a lot of practical applications. One of those that has the greatest potential to positively impact people is that of prosthetic socket design.

In order for the robots’ evolution to proceed more swiftly and realistically, Dr. Lipson explained that he’s given them the ability to self-image. Yes, the robots are SELF AWARE. He showed a video (a variant of which can be found from an earlier talk on You Tube) which showed a spider-like robot experimentally moving its limbs and as it did so, developing an idea of what it looked like. At each generation, the robot’s idea of what it looked like got more and more accurate, and its ability to move grew more and more precise.

The researchers then removed one of the robot’s four limbs, and Dr. Lipson described how the robot became aware that its limb was missing and even adapted to walk with a limp This elicited sounds of sympathy from both the audience and Mary McDonnell until both the audience and Ms. McDonnell realized we were sympathizing for a machine. If this doesn’t show how the very blurred the line has become, I’m not sure what does!

Dr. Lipson’s other research involves robots that can self replicate. His slides for this portion referenced the Nature article, “Robots: Self-reproducing Machines.” These robots are modular and when given extra modules will, rather than adding to their own design, create a copies—exact replicas. (Yes, perhaps Battlestar Galactica wasn’t that far from the mark when it posited that “there are many copies.”) The reaction of both the non-science panelists and the audience to the video that was included of the tiny robots using extra building material was really that of astonishment. Michael Hogan spent much of this discussion watching the monitor with his mouth agape in wonder.

To the amusement of about half the room, the moderator than asked Dr. Lipson if perhaps he could “design fully evolved robots so that the creationists have something to believe in.” While an easy laugh, it also does raise the question that follows. While the moderator asked posed it as, “Are we in a paradigm shifting moment,” it could easily also be tied back to the Battlestar Galactica universe and Edward James Olmos’ (as then Commander Adama’s) speech in the miniseries when he suggested that perhaps in creating the Cylons man had been playing God.

The panelists noted that machine intelligence does not have the same constraints as human intelligence. A human brain consists of, as one panelist put it, “three pounds of cheesy grey matter” and performing functions takes 10s of milliseconds. A computer chip is already orders of magnitude faster. When asked to pinpoint the point at which human-level AI could be accomplished, the panelists were originally reluctant to give a time frame, though with great reluctance acknowledge that it could happen within our lifetime.

Hod Lipson suggested that the next step—that of superhuman AI—would be substantially shorter than the first step of accomplishing human-level AI.

This discussion then naturally led back to Battlestar Galactica’s dystopic view of a potential robot-led uprising. After all, if, as the scientists on the panel think that the accomplishment of an artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans is not only possible, but probable, what is the likelihood that this artificial intelligence is going to want to do what its human creators tell it to do?

The panelists dodged that question, saying that they found that part of the science of BSG highly unrealistic

It’s entirely improbable that [the Cylons] would begin by killing off all the ugly people.

They then discussed issues relating to the internet and networking relative to the evolution of robotics, which was another area that was of grave concern in the universe of Battlestar Galactica. The scientists all agreed that that aspect of BSG and Adama’s fear of networking was highly realistic. They said that the driving force for robotic evolution was really the software, because at this point given that many computers have multi-core processors independent computers, in some ways have mini-networks inside them. They also said that networking itself is a highly vague concept and that “it’s not like you can just ‘turn off’ the internet.”

A clip from the third season episode “A Measure of Salvation” which showed the discussion among the characters surrounding the potential for Cylon genocide vis-a-vis a biological weapon then followed. Mary McDonnell noted that in addition to the many ethical questions that were raised relative to whether or not one can realistically commit a genocidal act against “machines,” one of the remarkable points of that episode for her, was the scene that followed wherein Adama turned the choice over to Roslin (parenthetically, Mary McDonnell noted “as he often did with difficult decisions”). She said that it was fascinating to her to later watch Laura’s (parenthetically, again, she said, “her own”) face during that moment she ordered the genocide—because although Laura was did what she did for the same “reason she did almost everything” in making a choice for survival, that underneath that she could see a “pure cynacism”—the type of which is at the root of any difficult decision that you “ethically disagree with but do it anyway.”

When asked by the moderator whether they were given the opportunity to provide feedback on the direction their characters were going, and Mary McDonnell and laughed and said they were “the noisest bunch of actors.” She said that it was particularly difficult for her at the beginning of the series because she had to shift a lot of her point of view in order to adapt to Laura Roslin’s own changes and many of the more “feminine aspects had to shift into the back seat.” She described a point at which she and [executive producer] David Eick were trading angry emails, and [executive producer] Ronald D. Moore had to butt in and send them back to their respective corners.

She followed that by saying that she’s never before “had the privilege to be inside something that engendered so much discourse.” Both she and Michael Hogan said that while they rarely connected with the audience outside of special events, that Ronald D. Moore was profoundly aware of the audience’s reaction and feedback and did sometimes take that into account, so that there was truly a “collective aspect” to the show. And they both again applauded the fans and the audience.

From that, the discussion then returned to the original subject of the clip, and that of “robot rights,” and whether it was possible to provide “rights” to robots and whether they had subjective experiences and a sense of self upon which the foundation for such a discussion should be lain. Dr. Lipson said he did envision a day where “the stuff that you’re built out of is no more relevant than the color of your skin,” and that in many cases “machines are not explicitly being programmed and to that extent it’s much closer to biology.”

Dr. Bostrom, who served as the ethical check necessary to balance the scientists’ curiosity cautioned against the “unchecked power” of the sort that comes with this technology after so the other two scientists suggested that given that AI lacks a desire for power, that it is not something to be generally feared.

Dr. Bostrom further noted that all self-aware creatures have a desire for self preservation, and that perhaps most relevant to the discussion of BSG was the use of AI in military applications, where the two goals were “self preservation” and “destruction of other humans.” He suggested that the unpredictability of evolved systems might be the very reason not to do it.

He noted that the “essence of intelligence is to steer the future into an end target,” and that looking at BSG as a cautionary tale, it is necessary to remove some of the unpredictability.

One of the other panelists noted that they regarded science fiction as “not so much a prediction of what will happen in the future as a commentary on the present,” to which Mary McDonnell emphatically nodded.

The moderator then asked Dr. Bostrom about his work in “Friendly AI.” He described it is generally working to ensure that the development of AI is for the benefit of humanity, and that he regrets that this pursuit has “very little serious academic effort.”

In a dynamic change of pace, the moderator then wanted to devote some time to Kevin Warwick’s experiments into turning himself into a Cyborg. Video of some of this can be found on YouTube and he’s also written about the experience in his book, I Cyborg. He described a series of experiments, one in which he implanted a chip in his head which was implanted so as to allow him to be linked to a robotic arm on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and actually feel and experience what this arm was doing, including the amount of pressure used.

He also described a second experience where a set of sensors implanted in his wife’s arm allowed him to experience and feel what she was doing from across the room, which is written up in IEEE Proceedings of Communications as “Thought communication and control: a first step using radiotelegraphy.” The description of this experiment caused a great deal of curiosity for all involved as they tried to understand exactly what he was feeling and how he felt it, and at one point even Mary McDonnell started asking questions with a great deal of amusing innuendo.

His final experiment involved providing his wife with a necklace that changed color depending on whether he was calm or “excited” based on biofeedback it received from a chip in his brain, and again led to a great deal of innuendo.

The moderator drew her portion of the panel to a close by asking the actors what they would take from their experience on BSG. Mary McDonnell said that

I no longer suffer from the illusion that we have a lot of time. On a spiritual and political plane, I’d like to be of better and more efficient service, because it really feels like we’re running out of time.

Michael Hogan said there’s nothing he could say that would improve on Ms. McDonnell’s statement.

There was then only time for two questions from the audience. The first question was whether or not AI should be regulated by the government. Dr. Lipson answered that indeed it should not, and that instead it should be open and transparent. Dr. Warwick added that based on the U.S.’s democratic system, that AI belongs to all people regardless.

The other question from the audience was directed toward Mary McDonnell and was whether or not she was surprised to learn that she wasn’t as Cylon. Ms. McDonnell answered that she felt it very necessary that Laura remain on the “human, fearful plane” and that to do otherwise with her would’ve been a cruel joke. As such, she wasn’t surprised by her continued humanity.

~*PoliSciPoli*~

Remember back during our complete coverage of the Battlestar Galactica panel at the Paley Television Festival when I said that event would probably be the last significant gathering of on and off-screen talent from the show? Well, I may have been lyingpremature in my declaration. It’s no secret that in the annals of television history, Battlestar Galactica will rightfully take its place as one of the most sophisticated, abstruse, demanding, and thoughtful shows to ever grace the silver screen. No issue or hot-button topic was off-limits to the writers: war crimes, torture, genocide, abortion, religious conflict, human rights, the rule of law, anarchy, the very essence of humanness. Though an action-adventure space opera to its core, BSG integrated storylines eerily germane to the times we live in, and transcended its medium in the process.

In recognition of these tremendous achievements, and in a television first, the United Nations hosted an invitation-only panel back on March 17th in the hallowed Economic and Social Council Chamber composed of UN representatives and officers, cast members Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos, and executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. As a pilot project for its Department of Public Information’s Creative Community Outreach Initiative, the UN hopes to partner more often with the international film and television industries to raise awareness and foster discussion of prevalent global issues. Unfortunately the first United Nations event took place at their headquarters in New York and we had to miss it (sadly, the ScriptPhD is not yet bicoastal). But luckily for us, the United Nations partnered with the Sci-Fi Channel to host a West Coast rebroadcast from Hollywood Thursday night. As a part of the Los Angeles Times’s annual pre-Emmy Envelope Screening Series, LA Times writer Geoff Boucher moderated a panel that once again welcomed McDonnell, Olmos, Moore and Eick, and UN representatives Steven Siguero and Craig Mokhiber.

Amid a chorus of enthusiastic fans and “So say

we all!”s, a lively and vibrant discussion ensued about torture, enemy combatants, race, and the upcoming Battlestar Galactica: The Plan TV movie event. ScriptPhD.com is proud to bring you complete coverage.

To read a transcript of the LA Times Envelope Battlestar Galactica Discussion Panel please click “Continue Reading”.

Geoff Boucher: Thanks for coming! Battlestar Galactica is my favorite show. I think it’s the best hour of television. So say we all?

Audience: So say we all!

Geoff Boucher: Thanks for coming here tonight. Tonight we’re going to celebrate Battlestar Galactica but we’re also going to do a little more than that. We’re gonna talk about The Plan. Maybe we’ll even see something? And we’re gonna talk about Caprica. And also we’re going to obviously have a discussion about how this show not only resonates and reflects what goes on in this very serious world that we live in, in our real world, with very dire human rights issues that we see all over the globe right now. But it actually may spur us to do something about it. Maybe we can find ways to take an artistic conversation and turn it into a real-world application. So with that spirit, we’re gonna have a fun night. I’m not a terribly organized person, so this is gonna be a little more jazz than marching band, but I hope you guys enjoy the spirit of the night. And if we flub anything, just smile and clap. Okay, you know, we have some famous people here tonight. And we have two very special guests that I want to bring up first. They’re joining us from the United Nations in New York. And first of all I have to say, when it comes to weighty, international conversation, you know really serious stuff, what says that better than Hollywood and Highland? Could someone go get Spongebob from the sidewalk [on Hollywood Boulevard] because we gotta talk a little waterboarding.

[audience laughs]

GB: Sorry. OK. We have two very distinguished guests for this event here tonight. Steven Siguero, senior political affairs officer in the Office of the Undersecretary General for Political Affairs at the United Nations and Craig Mokhiber, deputy director of the New York office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I’d like them to join me now on the panel. And of course we have two of the architects of this wonderful Battlestar universe, which has taken us to so many places we never expected, including Earth, let’s welcome David Eick and Ron Moore. Battlestar Galactica has a lot of heart in the show, but if you had to look at the emotional center of this universe, and all the challenges that beset these poor, desperate people, all you’d have to do is look at the two people who shared a love story in the middle of it all, and we’re very, very lucky to have two wonderful, wonderful actors with us tonight, Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos. I think we’re going to start by watching a very nicely put-together introduction to the show and the conversation tonight. So are we ready with that?

[clip of Battlestar Galactica’s greatest moments]

GB: Of course, preceding this event was the United Nations event that we’ve heard about. I’m sure many of you watched it. I had a chance to talk to Mary about it afterwards, I saw you at the screening of the finale, of the show, which was a fantastic—by the way, let’s hear it for that finale.

[wild applause]

GB: Mary, at the finale, you were telling me how you seemed to be almost pulsing with excitement about that day and what it promised and brought up. Give us a little bit about that. Maybe a snapshot memory and maybe an emotional memory of that day.

Mary McDonnell: Well, I think it was sort of a feeling of exhilaration in that first of all, it was such a pleasure and an honor to be with these people who are so brilliant and devoted and have such a perspective to offer us and to give us the comfort of their ideas and the sort of brazen commitment of their ideas in a public forum. To be part of that and to be inside

the UN was a great privilege as an artist. Because at the core, what we really want as artists is to be brought into the culture and to be able to serve. And so I think that the event that gave me the exhilaration was the [opportunity to give service] with people who are truly serving. And that was quite an amazing feeling. And it’s great to be back with you.

GB: It’s amazing how this show presents itself for scrutiny on very serious matters. There’s a lot of shows that they merely entertain. This one goes far, far beyond that. Craig, you have a presentation of sorts. You’ve sort of articulated in your own mind some of the ways that this show reflects and resonates with what’s going on in the world today. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about that?

Craig Mokhiber: Sure, with pleasure. I’m not sure I have a presentation—

GB: You can say you have a take on it or the star power that Spongebob would have if he were here today.

[laughter]

CM: It’s kind of hard to have a take on this, and to make linkages between Battlestar Galactica and the kinds of things that we work on every day in the United Nations. I mean, people talk about Battlestar Galactica as science fiction. It might be, and there might be some science in it, but from our perspective, it’s not a heck of a lot of fiction. If you do the sort of work that the hundreds of UN human rights monitors around the world do, you will realize that it is more allegory than it is fiction in the true sense of the word. Our organization was established sixty years ago, over sixty years ago, with a very particular idea in mind, the idea that you can have an international order in which the purpose of government and the purpose of society is to provide freedom from fear and freedom from want, and what more central theme in the many seasons of Battlestar Galactica can you find than freedom from fear and freedom from want? But the timing I think of this show is particularly interesting, because it is a show that was enjoyed by all of us during a period when we were especially worried about the state of human rights in the world. So many of the themes that we address every day in our work found their way into the story of Battlestar Galactica. During the UN Panel, I actually told the creators that they owe royalties to the UN because we were so familiar with so many of those themes. And I don’t have to rehash them for this audience. You clearly know the show very well, and you know the state of the world in which this show has been shown.

And the war on terrorism, for example, when we have seen for many years now the most basic and fundamental ideas of human rights being challenged in the name of some very old-fashioned notion of security. We had thought that we had reached a point in civilization where security meant human security, where every individual had a right to be secure and that security meant freedom from fear and freedom from want. Not old-fashioned, archaic notions of state security, where security is whatever the government says. But security that says that I have a right to be free from the fear that terrorists will hijack a plane and crash it into a building and kill me, but I deeply have a right to be free from the fear that my government will drag me away in the middle of the night and throw me into a dungeon because it doesn’t like my race or religion or my political opinion. Or at the same time, this problem of the growing number of chauvinisms or concept of ‘the other’ that we see, as people are identified according to, I always hesitate to use the word race around Edward because he and I agree that there is no such thing as race, but all of the ways that societies seek to identify ‘the other’ and in doing so to dehumanize them in order to destroy them. I made a comment during the panel at the UN that at any given moment in history, each one of us is a Cylon, each one of us is a colonialite. Today we can be the victim, tomorrow we can be the victimizer. Unless we live under a common set of rules that are applied to everybody that protects human dignity, that protects us from freedom from fear and freedom from want. And that’s what the international human rights movement is all about. That’s what UN Human Rights work has been about, and it’s very much the theme that there have been so many of the series that we’ve all enjoyed so much.

The piece that I think hit home the most for us was the way the series captured the concept of moral relativism, or exceptionalism, this idea that okay, there are these rules, these quaint ideas about human rights, but it’s a different world, and we’re under threat, and it’s an emergency, and there are special circumstances. Therefore, in this case, maybe we have to torture people and waterboard them, for example. That’s a very dangerous, slippery slope that I think the show demonstrated very well. There are very few, a very small set, of human rights that are so absolutely universally agreed upon as to prohibit their violation in all circumstances. Torture is one of them. What are we to think that we live in a moment in history when people are debating whether or not we should torture in the name of terrorism.

[audience applause]

CM: This idea of exceptionalism, this idea that you can find excuses, security excuses for torture, is the same idea that has been used to justify slavery on economic grounds and genocide on political grounds. You can make those arguments but it’s unacceptable under all circumstances and testing those very difficult issues through boring UN documents is one way to do it, but doing it in popular media and in an excellent television program like Battlestar Galactica is a much more effective way of doing that.

GB: Ron, I wanted to ask you, let’s hear it again for Ron.

[audience applause]

GB: It’s well-recognized that you came into this show with a manifesto of sorts, a belief that the show had to embrace a certain amount of realism and break away from the tropes of science fiction, some of the things that kept science fiction back, especially on television. But tell me about the political stuff, the idea that as the show went along it would really be torn from today’s headlines and tell the issues that you really don’t see on most science fiction shows.

Ronald D. Moore: Well I think from the outset one of the first things that David [Eick] and I talked about was the fact that we wanted the show to be relevant. That we thought, you know, let’s do a science fiction show that isn’t purely escapists, that isn’t about people and civilizations that mean nothing to us. Let’s do a show that’s more along older and more traditional science fiction that’s sort of common to the audience and contemporary society through this interesting prism. And I think that while we’re both sort of historians and science majors, I think we also decided from the outset that the show was not really a soapbox for our particular political viewpoints. You can’t help but let your own worldview leak into what you do. I don’t think any of us can fool ourselves into thinking that it wouldn’t, but it was important to us that the show was not really just an opportunity to say “This is what we think the right answer is, and this is what the answer to these difficult political and moral questions are.” It was really an opportunity to examine them, to ask questions or look at them from a slightly different point of view, and sort of say, “Here’s a group of characters that we are now going to ask you to invest in. This is what these characters decided in these different decisions, and make of that what you will.” I think as the show, as we got into the series, is when we started dealing with more and more of these kinds of things. I tried very hard not to make it simply a way to sort of attack the Bush Administration, to advance a sort of agenda. And I sort of took the approach that we were going to sort of try to represent all of the sides of these debates fairly. We would try to sort of take [Abraham] Lincoln’s phrase of “With charity for all, with malice towards none” and make that what the show is about. We were gonna give everybody their time and their place, and we would give these very difficult, very thorny issues a hearing and sort of watch how characters like Adama and Laura Roslin would grapple with these issues but not pretend that it was a simple or a political instance one of the two. We didn’t want to say, “Well the Liberal point of view is this, therefore the show is going to promote that.” And at the end of the episode, the captain will say, “This is what the right answer is.” It’s always going to be difficult to get to anything resembling a right answer in these very complicated sort of questions.

GB: Eddie, it seemed to be on this show, that a lot of times whatever the character believed in the most was eventually ripped away from him. It’s like everybody was broken down by the circumstances around them and testing. Tell me a little bit as an actor, it must have been pretty phenomenal—just think of it, the relationship with Tigh, and the different things that you went through, that your character went through with your son, and the way things are flipped around. This show really tests the boundaries of what science fiction could be on television.

Edward James Olmos: Well, I think it tested our humanness towards one another. I think I had most response from Admirals and military hierarchy when they would come up and say thank you to us because of the fact that we had allowed them to see themselves in the way that they really are, in the respect of having moments of complete devastation which were left laying on the ground either drugged up or in complete chaos under the weight of what they’d done. And, you know, many of us never see that because they won’t do that in front of people. And they’re strong and as far as anybody is concerned this guy is like a rock. And I think that’s really the beauty of what the show did. To everybody, not just to Adama, but to everyone. Laura, pffft, [EJO pulls an imaginary trigger against his head]

[audience laughter]

EJO: As well as Starbuck. “We’re going the wrong wayyyyyy!” No shit, Sherlock! For years, we’re going the wrong way. But I gotta say, it would never have been this way had not the writers in this media, especially on the show led by both Ron and David, and the superb writing of the highest caliber, everyone involved with it, said, “Yes, you can criticize anything.” But I will say that I am so honored to have been able to get those scripts, because I was like you. I was waiting for the next one because I had no idea what was going to happen. No one did. No one knew, and I mean, I never complained once. If anything, they would complain to me about taking it too far. They’d say, “Oh, you really want to go there?” and I’d say, “Yeah. I’m an alcoholic as far as I’m concerned. You want me to take a drink? Watch.” And as we got into the third and fourth season, I took it away. I mean [Adama] had lost it. And it was the sadness, because there’s what our core, our ADMIRAL, and you know he was completely gone. Many times he was left on the ground, and yes it was devastating, and it hurt everybody, as I’d watch I might say, “Well this is really not healthy for everybody to see. You know, we don’t really want to know this about ourselves.” And yet, it was what drove the UN to say, “You know what, thank you very much guys. And we want to thank you very much for presenting to the world subject matter that we have been trying to understand and we can’t do it alone and you can’t.” But now the UN in the last two times that we’ve been together, has hit a new level of understanding between all of us, especially, that were inside of the show and saw us go to the UN. And the rest of the world, because the blogging and the amount of participation on the internet and watching at the UN has been monumental. It’s been unprecedented. I don’t think the UN would have gotten this kind of an understanding had it not been for the courage of them to say to us, “Yeah we like Battlestar just like you do.” I mean, you’ve really put yourselves out there from the very beginning of this show to say critically, “This could be the finest television show EVER.” And I just sit back and go, “Oh my goodness.” But it came down to one thing. It came down to the writing. Period.

[Audience applause]

GB: There are people, I am told, tweeting, even as we speak. I’m speaking, they’re tweeting. This is going on, there’s obviously a great focus on the internet, this is going to focus beyond this. Steven, there’s some other ways that the ideas and discussions tonight are going to move forward. Will you tell us a little bit more about that?

Steven Siguero: Sure, I’m here representing the Department of Public Information, a whole new department, that is the department of political affairs. And just so that those in the audience know more about the UN, I trust that you all have heard of the UN. We have a good world presence. We feed 90 million people around the world in 70 different countries. We are currently taking care of refugees in several different continents, including the Swat Valley in Pakistan and of course in Gaza. And we led the charge to combat cholera, we led the charge to eradicate small pox and polio, we’re fighting for gender equality and much like on the show, it is a completely engendered environment where there is complete equality between the sexes, which is something that the UN sees as an ideal. So the UN has a presence, and it has a breadth and complexity of the issues that we deal with. And it has always been a challenge for us to communicate that to a mass audience and to get the support that we need to fight the battles that we all really share. And so this type of an initiative is something that we’ve been thinking of for quite some time in the organization. We saw films such as “The Constant Gardener” or “Blood Diamond” or “The Interpreter”, which was the leading edge of interacting with the UN. Obviously, the UN had the circumstance from it’s creation until the 90’s, the early part of this century, of bit player or prop if you will in several films. But over the last decade, we really started to become interactive with the creative community, and I think in the last year or so we really wanted to increase this focus. And just seeing the power of Battlestar Galactica and seeing what could be done through this media, it’s much clearer to us that you are much better at communicating some of these themes than we are. And it’s like, we’re very good at doing our boring documents and setting norms and setting standards, negotiating around cables, but we haven’t really hit the way to communicate that until this moment. And as Eddie said, with the Battlestar Galactica event back in March, we hit whole new groups of people that we really never thought we could access or that would listen to some of the things that we were trying to talk about. And so we’re really very, very grateful.

GB: David tell us a little bit about, you know there’s so many things that the show touched on, social issues that we’ve talked about, the torture episode that people have a hard time forgetting about, it was very searing. Maybe pick one or two things that you saw during the show that you would hold out as a proud view of the way that it was handled or the nuanced way or provocative way?

David Eick: Well, most of the things that were created and now are being analyzed by the United Nations and great performers were dreamed up in sports bars. It’s surreal for me to contend with that, but I think Ron touched on this earlier, we were averse to attempting to adapt headlines. That wasn’t what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to make it feel like we were taking the New York Times stories and turning them into episodes. There was a sense of course, of this fairly restrictive Administration and a period of time when it seemed like human rights and freedoms were being restricted and that we were being misled and that we were not clear about why we were doing things that we were doing and why our sons and daughters were being lost. And I think that that sort of just uniformly indoctrinated itself into the work, and the work was all about drama and about trying to make people feel what we were feeling in the room, what we were feeling as we discussed things with each other and it wasn’t that dramatic, it wasn’t that situationally specific. It was really about just trying to tell good stories and finding ourselves amidst this period of time in America where those good stories were being informed by the sick world and an upsetting world. And in the final analysis, I think that that has bared itself out, that there’s a sickness and a darkness and a tortured quality to the heroes of Battlestar Galactica that, if we had done this show ten years later, never would have happened.

GB: That’s very interesting. September 11th certainly, with the destruction of Caprica, it is hard not to watch that episode and not think about that. We’re going to have another clip here in a minute, but first I wanted to ask about looking forward with Caprica, Caprica anyone? [See the ScriptPhD review here]

[audience applause]

GB: One of the boldest things about the show that I believe, and sophisticated, was its use of religion and the way that it set people apart from each other by their most basic belief. We saw a little bit of that already with Caprica moving forward. Ron, can you tell us a little bit about religion and Caprica?

RDM: Well it’s one of the core concepts of the show. Because anyone who saw the pilot can tell you, it’s sort of about the creation of the Cylons and it’s about how the clash of two very different theological point of views. There was a group of people in the colonies that believed in who they felt was the one true God, and the rest of the colonies were polytheistic, and the clash of these two ideas that sort of helped to inform the how and the why of the Cylons’ ultimate coming into being, and as the show progresses, as the series goes, that idea is very much part of the show. The story of how these two fundamentally different approaches to a worldview and how they collided and what happened in that collision, it is really part of the story of Caprica.

[brief clip of torture and conflict scenes in BSG]

GB: You know, the world is so messy, and brutal and with all these different tugs and forces between us. After these things are over, after these terrible events happen, there is always this urge for accountability. That’s part of what you guys are working towards, figuring out a definition of that isn’t it?

SS: Yeah, that scene [the Cylon Leoben being tortured with the bucket of water by Starbuck] was particularly impactful when I saw it a few months ago, but one of the things that comes up most strikingly is if everybody is accountable, how do you actually purge the guilt? And I think this is something that we face quite often in our work. When I think of that scene I think also of the earlier part of it where Lee Adama is talking about being in an impossible situation and what would you do in an impossible situation when your choices aren’t so clear? And I think the big question for the UN and for many of our missions in the field is trying to reconcile this challenge between peace and justice and do you make political compromises to assure some level of stability? Some level of security for everybody, while burying the accountability issues, which will only in the end come up later? And I think that is something that we always see. We have this new mechanism, the ICC, the International Criminal Court. It’s running around the world trying to develop the concept of justice, but there’s challenges every day. I’ll let someone else speak.

CM: No I think Steven said it very well. For the United Nations, peace and justice are two sides of the same coin, and we set up some of these false dichotomies that you have to choose now between security and human rights. Peace or justice. An endless list of ultimately false dichotomies. You set yourself up for failure in advance. And I think what we learned from conflict situations around the world is you don’t develop peace processes and solutions that are fundamentally based upon human rights where there is redress for the real grievances of victims, not vengeance, but here we’re talking about accountability under the rule of law. And there have been many, many experiences in countries that have been torn by war and mass atrocity of so-called ‘transitional justice’, where you know broad consultations with communities that have been most affected are held to find out what is their concept of justice? What is necessary to bring this society to a place where it can begin to heal? And one thing that we know for sure is that impunity does not serve the end of conflict. There is a temptation, always, to say, “Well, we’ve had a very bad situation here, lots of mass atrocities, but let’s look forward. Let’s move on.” Unfortunately, those things buried in the closet have a tendency to come back and to erode any effort at reaching normalcy, at reaching a sustainable peace for example. And so accountability is a part of reconciliation. Accountability is a part of restoring the rule of law. And societies all around the world are struggling with the same kinds of issues that we saw in this clip. I was very happy to see my boss [the UN Secretary-General] quoted at the end there, by the way.

GB: I’m sure he’ll read that tweet. You know, I guess when it comes down to it in times of great calamity, in times of great peril, there is a tendency to maybe lose ourselves. I guess that’s maybe when we should try to find ourselves. Our true selves, to find our spirits and how we want to be judged in our own mind and by the world. For Roslin and Adama, these two characters at the very heart of the show, they were lost and found so many different times, Mary and Eddie, maybe if you guys can take a little minute and tell us about the journey for your character, and maybe just some of the things that fit into this entire conversation that we’re having. Mary can you talk a bit about Roslin and her journey?

MM: Absolutely. I really think that these ideas are central to what playing Laura Roslin felt like. It was a constant negotiation between a deeper, more wise, perhaps slightly more evolved spiritual person living inside a very frightened human being who felt very responsible for an idea, which was to save the human race or at least to make it possible for the human race to continue. What was hard about playing it was almost like reversing one sensation, instead of sort of having a straight back and an open front, I felt like she had a closed front and a broken back, because of the inability to get beyond the idea of saving and defending due to fear of loss and fear of death ultimately, when it comes down to it. And really to get beyond that and see something more progressive in the dialogue rather than bringing it to the airlock, was a phenomenal opportunity for me as an actress to sort of experience the pain of a limitation like that. And I think that that working through feeling that there isn’t another choice and learning what that feels like and seeing that it’s a dead end inside one’s heart even though we don’t see there’s no way out was kind of instructive. And I’m grateful for it. And I also wonder how we begin to tell that same story as well as find the human beings who finally lay down the arms and the guns. How do we tell the stories about the laying down of arms in the middle of greatest fear, facing one’s death, saying “I’m not going down the road of violence”, where does that take us? So this whole experience has sort of been nice into thinking more about those stories.

EJO: As a military leader, it was ridiculous that reconciliation was even anything inside of our memory that I had no way that I was ever gonna give up without dying. I’d rather die than to let it go. And it was really interesting because we fought all the way and we learned it the hard way, I was crushed by some of the things that I learned while I was, as an Admiral watching Laura, the President of the government, make the choices that she made. I was stunned. The first time we airlocked someone, I was like, “Well, that’s pretty cold.” And it was something that I really felt as Adama. That he was questioning. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, we blew it from the very beginning. We should have just stayed and fought and dealt with everybody else. We really lost out and I find that out in the last season. That’s when I finally confess that and I say, “I made the biggest mistake.” And she agrees. She says, “Yeah I think we blew it.” And we did in some ways, but in other ways, we would have never been able to survive as humanity without reconciliation. There was just no way. And, look it, I’m an atheist, as Adama, I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in God. Ever. Never did we believe in God. Are you kidding? Please! It’s just a matter of, “This is it. One track, one time. Wherever the flower goes, when it dies, that’s where I’ll go with it.”

And so it was really a very direct line to understanding what this war and this battle was. And then to see me get to the end, and just completely say, “Boy, are we lucky we didn’t do what I wanted to do?” It would have been stupid. And it would have been exactly, exactly what we’ve done to ourselves today. We’ve boxed ourselves into a hole. And I don’t know what’s gonna happen with North Korea, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with Pakistan. They all have nuclear weapons. There’s still I think three or four pieces of nuclear weaponry from the Soviet Union that is in briefcases that haven’t been located. I think that that’s a truth. I’ve heard that from many, many sources. The decimation of the Soviet Union. And if that be true, that where are they, what’s gonna happen? I mean, the fact that they didn’t drive the planes instead of going into the Twin Towers, if they had driven one of those planes into one of the nuclear power plants? I don’t know what would happen. I don’t know what to do. Could that have melted down—could it have been a China Syndrome? I don’t know. I used to know at one time. I remember during the ‘50s, when they told me that 19 consecutive hydrogen bombs activated at the exact same time would knock the planet off its axis. And they said, “Well, no one’s gonna let 19 bombs at the exact moment go off.”

GB: Not 20?

EJO: 19. They had it down. I remember, I said, “Right now, today, how many would it take to knock us off our axis?” From what I understand, the first strike syndrome is if you throw one, we’ll throw 20. I think that’s how it works, correct? I mean we knock it out, they throw one at us, we’re gonna throw 5 or 10 at them, nuclear warheads going after that one. And we’ll hit that one, but the other ones are going to hit somewhere. They’re gonna do something. They’re gonna blow up somewhere. And I think it’s gonna be a lot worse than we really anticipate, and we don’t want, none of us want that. So, my character only wanted to defend us in a war understanding. And that’s why I think the most critical scene was the scene where he says to Tigh, “We’re abandoning ship.” That was it. I mean, that cracked everybody. Everyone that knew this program knew it was over. It was over man. And you could sit there, and you could see Tigh just going, he was just crushed. It was over. We weren’t gonna have a battleship anymore. Who are we gonna fight, what are we gonna do? So we threw a war and nobody came. Oops.

But again, I really appreciate—I don’t know, I find it hard to understand the death penalty. Me personally, as a human being, okay? And yet I understand the Nuremberg Trials really well. I mean, [emulates a gun killing a Nazi soldier]. Just, yeah. Next. Ugh, next. And yet I can’t—how do you deal with that? What do you think of the honesty of saying to you, “OK. We get Bin Laden. What do you do with him?” Reconciliation time. Go, reconciliator.

GB: Wow.

[audience applause]

EJO: You tell me. Go.

CM: I work for an organization that opposes the death penalty. We are an organization that has held that over a period of many, many years, and has become increasingly prohibitionist. It’s based upon a common value that says that human life is sacred and if the solution to our problems is taking human life rather than restoring and defending human lives, then we’re definitely on the wrong track. So, we, after September 11th, were as horrified as the rest of you guys. We are based in New York, as you know. And the High Commissioner of Human Rights at the time said that what we had witnessed was a crime against humanity. Not just an ordinary act of war, or an ordinary crime, but a crime against humanity. The targeting of massive numbers absolutely. And the appropriate response to a crime against humanity is precisely to find the perpetrators and to bring them to justice. And there are justice systems internationally that have been effective in holding fair trials and bringing war criminals and horrific criminals of all sorts to justice without capital punishment. So there’s no doubt that you can have effective justice without capital punishment. We can be humane, that we don’t have to stoop to the levels of terrorists and war criminals and others in order to win the battle against them. To the contrary, you can get yourself caught up in an approach, where in the name of defending yourself from outside threats, as we saw in Battlestar Galactica, you contribute to the corrosion of your society from the inside. Then, what’s the point? What’s the point of the fight?

[Audience applause]

DE: On the other hand, if we had captured Osama bin Laden, I think there are a lot of us, even on the left side of the aisle, who would’ve loved to see that motherfucker airlocked.

[audience applause]

MM: It’s OK for him to use that word. I coined the phrase.

DE: You really did.

MM: He can use it whenever he wants.

GB: Steven?

SS: Yeah, I think also just to extend on the right side of the aisle, the politics of it. So you airlock Osama bin Laden. You get a thousand more Osama bin Ladens, and this is commonly known. You create another phenomenon. That’s what you’re doing in the end. I mean, you get some personal satisfaction, okay, what’s it worth? Is it worth the thousand other attacks that are going to be encouraged? And I think for those of you who heard President Obama’s speech today [to the Muslim world], it’s clear that there has to be a new approach. There’s some columnists that are calling it the mother of all reset buttons. There’s a new tone, and people can look at and address each other as peoples, nations looking at each other with respect. Because otherwise, I don’t think there’s much of a future.

GB: You know, I wanted to take a second and mention the Los Angeles Times is a part of this. I’m very happy to be here for the Times, and we’re very proud of our entertainment coverage, but a lot of the things that we’re talking about today, the Los Angeles Times has one of the greatest global reports, world news organizations in the world, and we have people, friends of mine, who are risking their lives all over the world, bringing us great news. People like Barbara Demick in North Korea and John Glionna in North Korea, Paul Watts in Iraq. We have people in Burma and I can’t tell you their names, because we don’t put bylines in the story to protect them. And I think that everybody up here would agree, and everybody probably in this room, the only way we can really find any sort of solutions or any progress within ourselves in a society this large is to be informed. And so I would encourage you to read the LA Times. I would ask you guys too—and the New York Times and everybody else—us mostly. And I don’t care if you read it, but buy it.

[audience applause]

[ScriptPhD special note—cannot agree with this more. A big thanks to all our venerable journalists risking their lives around the world to bring us news coverage. Please support your local newspaper.]

GB: What about people who love Battlestar Galactica, and have been energized by this conversation, tell us maybe down the panel, something people can do. Either something that they can actually go and do, maybe a book to read or a website to visit, or something to volunteer for, interact.

SS: Well there are no shortage of opportunities to volunteer for human rights. I mean, right here in the United States, there are a number of excellent organizations doing human rights work. One in every one of your local communities to be sure, not to mention some of the big ones like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch who do fantastic work. I think the most important thing though is to find out what the heck is going on and the United Nations is a club of countries, of member-states, of governments, and I always thought that most people knew the positions that their own governments were taking around the world on human rights inside the United Nations. The compromises that are made, the disappointing declarations that come out of those exercises, you would be rather surprised. So whatever is your government, whatever your government representative, make your voice heard and tell them that you expect that your country will defend human rights, that it will respect human rights at home, that it will respect human rights abroad, and it will defend human rights in government organizations. So I think number one, finding out what’s going on is easy these days, to go on to the website, to get the human rights story of any of 192 countries. There are 192 countries in the UN, including yours, and every one of those countries violates human rights. Find out what they’re doing, make your voice heard, and demand that you want a law-based, respectful government that believes in accountability, that believes in accountability for perpetrators, redress for victims and that is not particularly favorable to things like waterboarding and airlocking. By the way, the UN would call airlocking extrajudicial, extralegal in summary executions. Try and put that on a T-shirt! This is why we need Battlestar Galactica!

CM: I would just say care. Care about one thing. Care about one issue deeply and act.

RDM: Yeah, I think you have to decide what matters in your life. I think you have to decide that it’s not just a theoretical idea, not just a political concept that you happen to agree with. I think you have to decide personally that this is something that matters to you, that you care about the world that you live in and that you decided that “This matters to me, and I as a human being want to help effect change in some way.” It matters who you throw your vote to, it matters who you throw your money to, it matters how you treat your neighbor, it matters how you check yourself out in the world, and I think if you make that kind of choice for yourself, however you express it and however you choose to act upon it, it goes towards the larger goal of helping to improve the world.

DE: I just think we have to find someone to beat the hell out of Glenn Beck. I mean, we all have friends who watch that shit. Bill O’Reilly. We’re all intelligent people here, we all read books, well with hard covers I guess, but I think we’re exiting the age of ignorance as a virtue. And entering a period of time where it’s OK to ask questions, it’s OK to be intellectual. It’s all right to be smart. And all I can say is tell a friend.

MM: On that note, look who I got stuck between. [laughter] No, I don’t really have anything to add, except that perhaps we can remind ourselves that being compassionately involved in life is more fun than being separate and defensive. That would make it an easier adjustment.

EJO: I’ll just end it by saying that everything everyone said about information is the key, but the problem is my son and daughter-in-law just got back from Turkey and they were watching CNN in Turkey. It’s a little bit of a different kind of news coverage in Turkey than it is in the United States and that really bothers me. That national BBC is kind of different in every country, it kind of goes with wherever you’re located. And that tells you an awful lot about what we’re receiving in this country. And it really hurts as soon as you realize, “You know what, it’s hard to get constant information, even from the LA Times.” Everybody has got a problem, because we are human, and we love to put in our own sense of being in everything that we touch. So we really have problems with that. So I say, like David said, “Tell a friend.” Because you really have to be careful. You are what you eat, you are what you think and you are what you do. That’s a given. Good luck.

[Brief clip of The Plan]

EJO: I couldn’t have imagined this kind of a situation happening at the end of this kind of a show, where you would actually start at the beginning, and it’s a masterful piece of understanding, Ron. I know that Jane Espenson and all the writers who thought this through—David, you guys—GENIUS. Because after you’ve seen The Plan, you’ll want to go back and see the whole series again.

GB: I’m gonna have to go back and buy it on DVD.

EJO: The difference between the show and the DVD you know. By the way, the DVD of this is coming out sometime in September, I think, in August, I don’t even know.

[Unknown person]: July.

EJO: You’re kidding?!

GB: The series is coming out in July. The Plan comes out in the Fall.

EJO: The Plan comes out in the fall. Big difference, if you haven’t seen it on DVD, it’s a big difference with what you saw on television. For instance, The Plan is 2:06 the way you’re gonna have it on the DVD. When you see it aired, it’s gonna be 88 minutes.

DE: Plus they’re all naked!

[laughter]

MM: They ARE all naked.

EJO: All I can tell ya is that it’s an extraordinary look at what the Cylons—how they masterminded what they did. And I have to tell you right now Dean Stockwell [Cylon Model 1] is a brilliant artist.

[applause]

EJO: Gotta really give him his due, because he does a magnificent job of completing The Plan. And I gotta tell ya, not to give anything away, it is exactly what you think it is. You see the complete opposite of the entire first 281 days of what we went through. Because they’re seen through the eyes of the Cylons. It is breathtaking. It’s fantastic, it’s not fun. But I will say that you will sit there going, “Oh my God.” But basically, you will go back and see everything when you go back and see the series then again, you’ll see it on DVD, you’ll see the extended versions of everything, correct? All the DVDs are extended. You’ll see, everything I directed, nothing was under 65 minutes.

[laughter]

EJO: Anyway, The Plan is exactly that. It was how they planned to do what they did and how it happened. And it was monumental. I have to ask Ron, did you enjoy it?

RDM: It was okay.

[laughter]

EJO: He’s drugged.

GB: Mary, you were introducing someone before the music came on.

MM: I was. Michael Reimer, where are you? Could you stand? Michael Nankin? Both of these directors were responsible for a great deal of the forward movement of the show and the articulation of these themes that we’re all talking about tonight. They came in with great understanding and talent and fearlessness, too, and brought these performances to the surface. Literally, brought us out. And I know that many of you in the fan bases are very aware of both of them. I don’t think Michael Reimer has ever been to one of these events, so we’re very thrilled to see him here.

[audience recognizes them]

GB: Now we are going to turn it over to you guys for some questions. There are people with microphones in either aisle. I would ask that you don’t make proposals, declarations of self, I ask that you don’t threaten, or pitch anything. Literally or figuratively. So if there is something that you would like to say that ends in a question mark, please go to the microphone.

Question #1: This is actually for the UN Gentlemen. There’s the ICC and the ICJ. Which one handles disputes between nations and could you give us a little background on what they’re both doing right now?

SS: Sure, the ICJ is the International Court of Justice, it’s also known as the World Court, and that’s the court that handles disputes between nations. The ICC is the International Criminal Court, which I think is one of the most important developments in recent history, that we managed to get an international criminal court. All these years after so may people campaigned to get one, since Nuremberg, that could deal with disputes around the world, individuals, criminally accountable under international criminal laws. So it deals with individuals, it’s distinct from the other. Both courts have wonderful websites, I see you’re online right now, so you can check that out to see what’s on the docket. Both of them have a very active caseload, the International Criminal Court, right now is engaged in cases from Darfur, cases Rwanda, and a number of other cases. But they have a political process.

CM: I just wanted to add that one can’t understate the impact of the ICC. Never did we think—I’m originally a Canadian diplomat, where we were pushing this forward, well it was being pushed forward for several decades—but when I was involved, did we think the impact would be as huge as it is. We now have people, militia leaders, rebel leaders, who are frightened of the ICC. So this is where you have a chain of accountability and accountability actually has impact. Joseph Coney is hanging out in the jungles of the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] and he’s afraid. He’s literally afraid because of all of the atrocities he’s committed, he will be pulled before the bench in The Hague. That is having an impact throughout Africa, and hopefully in 15-20 years, you’ll have people that will see that there is going to be accountability and there will possibly be an end to these horrendous atrocities.

GB: Let’s have some applause for that.

[audience applause]

Question #2: My question is for Ron. It’s basically, as you’ve said, you’ve tried not to make it too obvious what the headlines that you were trying to work into the specific political context of what you would show. I’m wondering if there was ever a time where you were inspired by something that maybe you wanted to work into the show but it either felt it didn’t quite work, there wasn’t a right place to put it, maybe it was a little too heavy, or just something that didn’t seem right.

RDM: I don’t know if there ever was. I’m trying to think. Were there things that sat on the writers’ boards? There was a guy who wanted to break something into the show and I can’t quite remember what it was—

DE: He wanted Mary to be bathing naked in the fountain.

MM: No, no, that was Eddie who wanted that.

RDM: The answer is yes, and unfortunately I can’t remember any specifics. But there were sort of various story ideas that were touted around here and there because we would realize that there were some things in the headlines that we could potentially use, or we could do a spin on a theme. And there were a couple of them that just sort of fell out over the course of time that we were never able to work in.

DE: Hollow did remain strange throughout the duration of the show.

[laughter]

GB: I want to know what happened to Boxey, okay [the young Season 1 stowaway who took a particular liking to Starbuck’s cigars only to disappear into the bowels of the Galactica].

RDM: Ohhh, that’s the next spin-off series.

Question #3: Years ago, my girlfriend, who is Chinese, had an abortion, it was my child and I never dealt with it until I saw your show. I really want to thank you for that. And it was rather unfortunate. Anyway, I was curious what the adaptation for China would be and how the show would have to change to be appropriate to that nation? Just wondering if it is illegally distributed or if there is a distribution. What have your thoughts been on that? [ScriptPhD note: Is it just me or was that first part the worst segue in audience question history??? Awk-WAAAAARD!]

RDM: I have no idea. That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know really what the status is of distribution to China in terms of—

EJO: It’s already there.

DE: Is it?

EJO: The internet.

RDM: I don’t really know what those issues are. I know that there are various issues in terms of censorship and government approval of the DVD, but I don’t know what NBC Universal’s deep deal is with that territory. If they have a deal, or if there is an issue that has popped up. But that is a very interesting question.

Question #4: My question is for Mr. Olmos. In the beginning, for your character, there is a speech that he gives, and he says that humanity never asked itself whether it deserved to survive. And I was wondering if you thought that question was answered by your character at the end of the series, and what you think of our humanity asking the same question.

EJO: That IS the question, isn’t it? Do we really deserve to be here? You ask the polar bear, and you ask the wolf, you ask the animals that are being decimated who really deserve to be here, if they’d answer in that way. I don’t know if they’d answer in the positive. I know that we have a hard time with it. In the show, I have a real hard time with it. And I don’t think I ever answered it. I think at the end, I just gave up. And I was very grateful that when Starbuck took us to this new place, and we landed there, whatever that was, mostly we look out the window and there’s this rock and it’s kind of looks like [unintelligible]. And only to find out that we didn’t get there, Laura and I never got there together. We got there, but as soon as we were there, she passed away. And so what happens to Adama? He ends up by himself. And in actuality we’ve taken it further because he built the log cabin. And then he went on to get a call—one day Tigh came up and knocked on the door and told him “We have a problem.” And we went off and solved it and found Lee, and he was in trouble.

[Audience laughs and applauds]

EJO: Wait til you see that! It’s coming up, and then watch out! But I don’t know, do we deserve—you tell me, do we deserve it. That’s the question. You ask yourself that. I think we do, because I really believe that we’re something that should understand ourselves and move forward and help. We’re here to help but a lot of us don’t understand that. If you can help, please do.

GB: You know when you were talking about the log cabin, it just occurred to me that Lorne Green went from Bonanza to Battlestar. You went the other way.

MM: I want to say something about the log cabin, which was mine. Just along the themes of sort of the ending. And the interesting thing. I am the only actress in the history of film or television to play a character who dies first and then gets married.

DE: It makes the wedding gifts so much easier.

[laughter]

DE: Until death do you…

Question #5: So we’ve been discussing a lot of things that are in today’s society and are around the world, but in the future, and this is more of a speculative question, if we get [artificial intelligence], will it necessarily be this conflict-driven AI that makes this television show so popular? And if it’s not, then what are we dealing with?

RDM: Well that’s the question that we all sort of face and we’ll probably face it sooner than we like to think about. It’s a classic trope of science fiction, machines rise up against us, it’s part of our story, it’s a part of other tales in this genre. And the more profound question may well be, what if they don’t rise up against us, but what if they’re just alive? And what do we do with that and what does that mean to us? What does it mean to look at something that may not have a bipedal form—if we don’t create robots that look like us, and you look at a blank wall of computers and somewhere within those hard drives is something that thinks, something that feels, and something that has all the definition of personhood, that you and I accept as being a person, what do we do with that? How do we feel about that? What does that do to our sense of identity and our sense of self in the universe? And I have no idea what the answer to that question is. But that question may well face us within our lifetimes. We could well deal with that situation at some point. And how we answer that question may be one of the defining moments of mankind. So I don’t know, but I sense that it leaves out there and waits for us.

Question #6: This question is for Mary. Laura Roslin, I think it can be argued, is probably one of the strongest characters on television in years—

[audience applause]

–and Battlestar is one of those weird shows that I find has a very large female audience. What’s it been like for you to—when Geena Davis made that joke when she won the Golden Globe, that little girl that looked up to her saying she wanted to be the President. So what’s it been like for you with the younger women in the audience and the genre being a little bit “We can do anything we want.” And Laura Roslin kind of helps us with that.

MM: It’s been a privilege. It’s been a great responsibility and it’s been very controversial because the timing of Laura Roslin’s presidency as we all know in this country was mirroring the Democratic Primaries. And Hillary Clinton obviously was running. And I was getting a lot of mail and a lot of questions and a lot of hope sent my way that I could affect the character of Laura Roslin or play her in a certain way or have her be a certain kind of President that young women and middle-age women were projecting unto Hillary or whoever is going to be our first female president someday. And so it was a very interesting position to answer to them and say, “The humanity that I’m playing and the choices that I’m making your ideal choice or your ideal first female President, or one that you see on television, but—” Oh, I’m sorry, someone is on the telephone.

[ScriptPhD note: I kid you not, folks, someone was yakking away on the phone while Laura frakkin’ Roslin was talking. Airlock!]

MM: Anyway, I was going off on this long-winded answer again. It felt great, it taught me a lot, and it sort of deepened my responsibility, particularly to young women, because I’ve been brought into this new generation at a time when I didn’t expect to be. And I was raised as a girl who was told she could do whatever she wanted but I didn’t quite believe it and I think you need to, so…

[Audience applause]

RDM: Just before we wrap up, I just wanted to say something I’ve never had a chance to say in a public forum, but it’s what I’ve always felt and said in private a number of times. David and I often sort of lauded and we get a lot of press and we sit in front of audiences and we talk about the show quite often. And we’re often talked about as the fathers of the show, and that it’s our property and you know we do this, and it’s our vision and this and that. But the truth is that there were really three of us that were at the creation of the show who were really important to guide the show from the very beginning, and I just wanted for at least one time for an audience of people to stand up and acknowledge the contribution and the vision of the director of the mini-series, of many of the most important episodes, of the finale of this show and who really deserves a tremendous amount of credit and often is overlooked in these formats. And he’s here tonight. So ladies and gentlemen, please stand with me and acknowledge Michael Reimer.

[standing ovation]

GB: What a wonderful night. Steven and Craig, thank you so much for flying here from New York. Thank you so much for your time. Ron, Dave, Caprica, early next year, that’s what we hear. Mary, Eddie, thank you so much for Battlestar. Thank you all for coming, thank you to the LA Times for this wonderful series, and good night.

~*ScriptPhD*~