SciFiAndTvTalk

Caprica's David Eick and Paula Malcomson - Vive La Difference!

Caprica co-creator/executive producer David Eick. Photo by Chris Haston and copyright of the Syfy Channel.

Paula Malcomson as Caprica's Amanda Graystone. Photo by Joe Pugliese and copyright of the Syfy Channel.

On January 22nd, 2010, the long-awaited Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica premiered on The Syfy Channel. A few days before, series co-creator/executive producer David Eick and cast member Paula Malcomson, who portrays Amanda Graystone, spent some time on the phone speaking with myself as well as several other journalists about the series. The following is an edited version of our conversation. Enjoy!

Can you talk about the intention to make Caprica different from Battlestar Galactica, because it definitely has a whole different feel to it.

DAVID EICK - I think we're very intently committed to the idea that this show stand on its own, and that it not in any way feel like an echo, a descendent or an extension of Battlestar Galactica. You'll note that the title is not Battlestar Galactica Caprica, but simply Caprica. The relationship that it has to Battlestar is purely inconsequential. It's kind of in an Easter egg sense of fun for the fans and audience that followed Battlestar Galactica. However, if you never saw a lick of that show, it will have no impact on your ability to really get involved in and relate to the characters as well as the drama that we're doing on Caprica.

People can pretty much watch Caprica in a lot of different places other than on the Syfy Channel, such as on-line. Is that part of your design or does that come from the network?

DE - Well, it was a network design, but I believe - and I'm not certain about this - that it's a release strategy or a distribution strategy that other networks have tried as well. I think Glee may have done something like this where the pilot premiered and after a period of time went by, the pilot re-premiered as a launch to the TV series. So I think in a multi-platform universe as it were, where people are consuming dramatic material on their televisions, DVD players and the Internet, it's really kind of smart and ahead of the game to figure out new and unorthodox ways to launch a TV show. But, yes, that was definitely the network's call and we were happy to get onboard. In fact, it gave us an excuse to spend even more money on the pilot, and the version that ultimately aired was sort of tricked out with a bunch of new shots and visual effects as well as a couple of scenes we even re-shot. So it's been worth it all around.

Paula, it seems from watching the first few episodes that your character has a lot of really tough moments to play, and she makes a lot of choices that might make her unsympathetic in the eyes of a lot of viewers. I'm wondering how you struggled with portraying that and making her a likeable character?

PAULA MALCOLMSON - It's definitely something that occurs to you in the back of your mind, but as an actor you have to sort of put aside your own judgements in terms of whether your character is necessarily good or bad. I think being a good actor is sort of understanding the complexity of the human psyche and also knowing that none of us are perfect. So it was tough and I did think about it, particularly that many people would perhaps find Amanda unsympathetic. I just really tried to tap into the character's loss and pain as well as the fact that she has made mistakes and then go from there, you know?

DE - I would also add that I don't think in the sort of canon of this show or shows like it, that there's a tremendous amount of concern for what I would call old-fashioned television tropes-like sympathetic characters. I think audiences want challenging characters and ones who are neither black or white but somewhere in the middle and who are going to challenge the audience's expectation in every way. One of the reasons that Paula plays her character so well is that you're never quite sure what to expect from her. And there are times when you expect her to maybe lose it, but, in fact, she completely holds it together and vice versa. I think that's human and real and part of what I think is the hallmark of the show.

David, how much impact did female viewership play in not setting the series in space or relying heavily on space scenes?

DE - Most of the people I spoke to about Battlestar in terms of the fan base were women, so the empirical demographic breakdown of the audience is something that I just chose to keep at bay and not pay a lot of attention to. So I never really think in terms of gearing a show towards a particular audience. In more general terms, yes, I do recognize the fact that perhaps a female audience might be more inclined to watch a story that's more of a soap operatic kind of melodrama and without the accompanying visual sort of ghetto and spaceships and outer space. Something like that might have more accessibility to a female audience just because of that generalization. But that was never a motivation for not setting Caprica in space. The motivation was to make it as different and unique from Battlestar as possible.

David, when you guys did Battlestar Galactica, you and Ron Moore (Caprica co-creator and executive producer) talked about how the plot of the show evolved organically instead of having everything mapped out in a specific direction. Based on your experience, have you changed that creative process, and if not, why have you stuck with that mentality?

DE -Ron Moore and I had a number of discussions about this very early on. We come from very different backgrounds in terms of how writers' rooms are run. On Star Trek - and I heard all this third hand and cannot confirm any of it - but presumably the outline process takes place in the room. It's very precise, very detailed. There's not a lot of jazz or improvisation invited or tolerated, and it's almost a military-like environment. That's not to say that the work was any less good, it's just that it was run with that level of discipline and structured parameters. I've worked with other writers and producers in a variety of different capacities and there was a much looser environment where young writers were encouraged to come up with ideas and contribute. You might throw some suggestions out, and you might find others brilliant. The downside of that is you would sometimes have an episode that didn't work.

So I think we wanted to sort of combine the best of both these [writing] environments. When it came to how the writers' room was run on Battlestar, and then later on Caprica, it's about having a structure or large picture plan usually concocted by me and Ron during the hiatus. That would then be delivered to the writing staff and everyone was encouraged to improvise and add and subtract and change and go crazy and just sort of create an environment where there are no bad ideas. If then we lost our way, we'd circle back to where we really wanted to go. So it really is a combination of running a tight ship and yet allowing for there to be a great deal of improvisation and changes on the fly, purely with the intent of developing the best ideas.

PM - That applies on-set with the actors as well in terms of loosely dealing with the script, so when a surprise or something interesting comes up, we have the luxury to be able to follow that instinct. It's really the only way to work as far as I'm concerned, otherwise there are no surprises and it's boring, you know? Just the other day one of the directors said to me, "I never know what you're going to do," and I said, "Neither do I." There's just something amazing and beautiful about that, and hopefully it works.

Paula, could you tell is a little bit about how you first became involved in Caprica and about your audition process for the role?

PM - I met with Jeffrey Reiner, who directed the pilot, and I hit it off with him. He's very smart and a huge film buff, so he just seemed like the kind of director I wanted to work with. So it was first of all responding to the material, and then meeting Jeffrey. I initially auditioned for the role of Sister Clarice, but Jeffrey wanted to see me play Amanda. I was hesitant about that, though, because I didn't know if I could play that character. I was frightened of that, and I realized that that was a really good thing. Then I met David and Ron and everyone else involved. I think was the first person they cast, followed by Esai Morales [Joseph Adama], Eric Stolz [Daniel Graystone] and then Polly Walker [Sister Clarice], so I was delighted with the people who I'd be working with.

David, with the first season of the show almost wrapped, what maybe have you enjoyed most so far about bringing the Caprica story to life?

DE - Well, the biggest and most pleasant surprise was the one that we sort of didn't allow ourselves to dream could happen, which was to get as lucky as we did with this [acting] ensemble. That phrase about you're only as strong as your weakest link really applies when you're dealing with an ensemble cast. And so we were very fortunate to have such strength across the boards from such established and well-recognized actors like Paula, Polly Walker, Esai and Eric, combined with people like Sasha Roiz [Sam Adama], who were going to be brand new to an American audience and are able to hold their own. Those are things you can't plan for, you just have to hope. We got together in Lake Tahoe way back in January of last year to start breaking stories, so it wasn't for lack of planning when it came to aiming to make the show good in every way that we could control. But as hard as you might work on casting and such, you just never know until you get there, and we just got incredibly lucky with our cast and crew as well.

As noted above, photos by Chris Haston and Joe Pugliese and copyright of The Syfy Channel, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!

Ron Moore - Journey ' s End

[caption id="attachment_950" align="aligncenter" width="236" caption="Battlestar Galactica re-imagined creator and executive producer Ron Moore. Photo by Steve Freeman and copyright of the Sci Fi Channel"][/caption] It was back in 1979 that TV audiences first became aware of the futuristic war between humans and the robotic Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. While the series became a cult favorite with fans, it did not fare well in the ratings and after a year the show was cancelled. The same fate befell its short-lived sequel Galactica 1980. Twenty-three years later, writer/executive producer Ron Moore re-imagined the Galactica story with a 2003 miniseries, which led to a hugely successful weekly series. In it, Commander William Adama and his crew of the Battlestar Galactica together with President Laura Roslin fight to protect the survivors of the human race from annihilation by the Cylons. Like the original series, this one has plenty of action and drama, but it is also far darker in tone, which was deliberate on the part of its makers. "I felt it was important to never lose sight of the basic premise of the show, which is that it was born out of an apocalypse," explained Moore in a conference call with journalists earlier this year. "Billions of people were literally wiped out and their world taken away from them. Everything they know is gone and what they're left with are four walls along with a ceiling and the floor, all of which are made of metal. These people are nomads in the truest sense. They're going from place to place seeking an oasis, a home, this place called Earth. "In that context I didn't want to just magically say a few episodes down the line that, OK, these people got over it and life goes on. It just felt that in order to be truthful to that kind of event, the emotional reverberations of it would continue forever and that they would never really get over it. It would never be truly behind these people and always be with them in some way. However, that didn't mean that they couldn't laugh and tell jokes every once in a while. You could do stuff like that, but you had to maintain the reality of where they were. "If, again, you could be truthful to their experiences as human beings in the wake of this unimaginable disaster, then that, in turn, would allow audiences to invest themselves in what we were doing. So they would go with us on this ride, deal with killer robots from outer space and whatever else we wanted as long as we dealt honestly with the human emotions of it. That sort of dictated that there had to be a dark and oppressive type of air to a lot of things. They could never really just let go and have fun again, and even when they did, it was always with this thing hovering in the background." Although audiences did choose to come along with the ride, Moore had no idea that his re-imagined Galactica would appeal not only to Sci-Fi fans but also the casual viewer looking for a well-crafted dramatic story. "I didn't anticipate the critical acclaim of the show, how deeply it would penetrate out into the general audience or that it would be talked about as much as it has been and receive the awards that it has," says the executive producer. "I just thought that it was a good show. I believed in what we were doing and felt it would be special as well as something that I could be proud of, but that was about it. "So creatively, I'm very surprised where we ended up with the characters and mythologies. I had none of that at the start. I more or less trusted that we'd figure it out and we did, but I didn't really have a grand master plan of how it was all going to fit together. The first season was a lot about experimentation and trying different structures in terms of storytelling and what did and did not fit the program. By the end of the season, I figured that I had the answer to that and I better understood where we were going, what it was about and the best way that Galactica could tell its stories." Throughout the first two-and-a-half years on Galactica, the Cylons were determined to destroy what remained of humanity. However, in the season three episode Rapture, they changed course, literally as well as figuratively, and began a race with the humans to find Earth. At the same time, a civil war amongst the humanoid Cylons began to gain momentum. By the show's fourth year, Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) and President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) agreed to an alliance with a faction of rebel Cylons, and together in Revelations they made it to Earth. Sadly, it turned out to be a barren wasteland, and the following story, Sometimes a Great Notion, shows how this affected our heroes, including Lt. Anastasia "Dee" Dualla (Kandyse McClure) who went to pieces and then committed suicide. "We designed this episode and structured the fourth season with the intention that our characters would get to Earth and show the impact it had on them," notes Moore. "As far as what happened with Dee, I think it was because she always appeared to be one of the strongest characters. Dee was the one who, in many situations, had always been the voice of reason and would try to soldier on. She'd buck up [Admiral] Adama as well as his son Lee [Jamie Bamber] when either of them was down. There was this sense of her being the rock, and it was important to me that when they found Earth was a wasteland, that the psychological damage from that would be profound. "I mean, this was everything they had hoped for since the miniseries. If you take that dream away, then there's a consequence and a price to be paid," continues the executive producer. "Like I was saying earlier, it didn't seem like they should simply shrug their shoulders and move on. Given the circumstances, it felt that somebody would check out, and there was something shocking about it being Dee because they had relied on her and she had always been there. "Just because a person has been your rock and bucking you up, it doesn't mean that they don't have their own vulnerabilities or breaking point. And that breaking point might surprise you, which is why we chose Dee because it felt like the audience would be shocked, but her response would be true. I don't think she consciously thought about it. On a subconscious level she soldiered on, but then there came a time when she was like, 'I don't want to soldier on any more. I'm going to try to feel good one last time and then I'm out of here.' And it got a huge response from viewers. Every once in a while you want to reach out and grab them by the throat and say, 'Have a reaction, get involved. What does it mean to you that Dualla has suddenly and shockingly blown her brains out?' I thought it was great, and people can have whatever specific reaction they want as long as they're emotionally caught up in a show and it means something to them." Not everyone is pleased about the alliance with the Cylons, and in the Galactica fourth season's A Disquiet Follows My Soul, Colonial Vice President Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch) and Felix Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) set into motion their plans to lead a mutiny amongst the fleet. This episode marked Moore's directorial debut on the program, which was a very positive experience for him. "I had a tremendous amount of fun," he enthuses. "It was great to do it [direct] on a show that had been mine for several years and one where I knew the cast as well as the crew intimately. There was a huge amount of support and a lot of people wanting me to succeed. I got plenty of extra-special attention and help figuring things out. It was an environment where I could say, 'I don't know what to do here,' or, 'I'm confused about this technology,' and there was someone ready to help me. Things I wanted to do, they would make happen, so it was an incredibly collegial and welcoming type of atmosphere to step into. "It was also really gratifying because I got to do something that I'd never done before. I mean, you write it [the story] and then someone else realizes it. I would subsequently edit it or be very involved in editing the pieces together. However, I was always missing that middle step, and now I had a chance to shoot the movie in my head. When I write, I write themes to a script and I'm always playing the story out in my head - where would they [the actors] stand, how would the team be blocked and choreographed, where would the camera be - and this was the first time I could actually go and make that movie. I found that extremely fulfilling as well as fun and something I will be doing again." At the end of Galactica's third season, the identities of four of the five final Cylons were revealed. It was not, however, until halfway through the fourth year in the episode Sometimes a Great Notion did audiences discover that Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon) was the fifth Cylon. While this character was always a top contender for this coveted spot, there were other names being bandied about by Moore. "We considered all of our regulars, including Adama and Roslin," says the executive producer, "but we dismissed them pretty quickly because I thought that that would take something away from the show and actually hurt it. If, for example, we had said that Adama was a Cylon, it would have felt like part of the journey itself wasn't right and wouldn't have had the same meaning that I wanted it to have. We also talked briefly about Dualla as well as Gaeta and, while interesting characters, it didn't feel like it heightened the stakes, but with Ellen it did." While choosing Ellen to be the fifth Cylon was certainly a feather in the caps of Galactica's creative team, there have been other not-so-popular ideas along the way. "There are always lots of blinds that you go down when you're in the writers' room," says Moore, "and you either watch it in the editing room and go, 'Ooops,' and cut it out, or you cut it out in the script or censor it in the writers' room. That's part of the [creative] process, though, and one of the things I like to do with writers is to not have any bad ideas. We'll take any idea seriously. If it doesn't work, fine, but you've got to be willing to take the risk. The big ideas that have really paid off were risky ones, such as jumping ahead a year in our [story] narrative, and revealing four of the [humanoid] Cylons at once. "There were some ideas, though, that were kicked off the chuck wagon and left by the wayside. There was a story point that I wrote for the season one finale that is now regarded within fan circles as the great stupid idea of Ron Moore," he jokes. "I had a premise where Baltar [James Callis] finds a temple on the surface of Kobol, which was a planet we were involved with at the time. He goes inside and the Number Six [Tricia Helfer] in his head tells him, 'Keep going, you'll find something.' Baltar walks into this dark room, where Dirk Benedict [who played Starbuck in the original Galactica] appears and says, 'Hello, Gaius. I'm God,' and shakes his hand. We were going to end on that moment. "Now, setting aside the fact that Dirk Benedict hates everything about this show and probably would never have done it in a million years, more fundenmentally, it was just a crazy concept. Back then I was seeking to find things about breaking reality and fantasy and what is and what is not a story and what is the link between Galactica's world and ours. I was playing around and this was a wacky idea that I came up with and put in the script. Well, there was a pretty universal reaction that everyone hated it, and I quickly said, 'OK, bad idea. That one's mine; let's kick it out and move on.' Sometimes, though, you have to swing for the fences." Although Galactica may have ended this year, Moore will be exploring yet another chapter of the Battlestar saga with a new series called Caprica. Set 50 years prior to Galactica, it tells the story of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas, living on the planet Caprica, where experiments in creating an artificial intelligence ushers in a new and dangerous era for humanity." "Caprica is getting under way," says Moore. "We're putting together the writers' room as we speak. It's a very different type of show and a very type of challenge. Galactica has set a very high bar, which makes everyone want to bring their A-game [to the table], and I think that's the spirit in which we approach Caprica. There's a sense of uncharted territory, and that's exciting as well as scary. It's daunting to have to get one of these things off the ground and hope that people will like it, especially when we know it's going to be compared to Galactica. But that's part of the reason why we're in this business, to take on these types of challenges." Prior to Galactica, Moore worked on such other shows as Carnivale, Roswell, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. While not averse to taking on other genres, he always seems to return to the Sci-Fi and Fantasy world, and happily so. "There was a point years ago when I was doing Trek that I thought, 'You know, I want to do something different; I want to get out of this genre.'" says Moore, "but I always seemed to find something that brought me back to it, either with an idea that was presented to me, like Galactica, or one of my own, such as the various pilots I've come up with over the years or movie concepts. "I just enjoy playing in this genre, but I like other things, too, that are not Sci-Fi or Fantasy. I will, however, continue to do what I think is interesting at the time. I think I've learned enough not to try to predict what next great creative thing I want to get involved with. You just have to sort of wait and see." Steve Eramo As stated above, the photo of Ron Moore is by Steve Freeman and copyright of the Sci Fi Channel, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any form. Thanks!

Ron Moore & Kate Vernon - The Fifth Element

[caption id="attachment_489" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Re-imagined Battlestar Galactica creator/executive producer Ron Moore. Photo by Trae Patton and copyright of The Sci Fi Channel"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_490" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Actress Kate Vernon - Battlestar Galactica's Ellen Tigh. Photo by Randee St. Nicholas and copyright of The Sci Fi Channel"][/caption]

After the faces of four of the final five humanoid Cylons, or "skinjobs," were revealed at the end of Battlestar Galactica's third season, fans longed to discover the identity of the fifth Cylon. Re-imagined series creator/executive producer Ron Moore kept them waiting until the second half of the show's fourth year when, in the episode Sometimes a Great Notion, Colonel Saul Tigh, a humanoid Cylon, experiences a flashback of his past life on Earth, and realizes that his wife Ellen is the fifth Cylon. "I'm not quite sure exactly when I picked Ellen," said Moore during a conference call earlier this year with journalists. "It was some time in the third season. I think the option of presenting her as one of the final Cylons was kicking around for a while, but we really didn't intend on revealing four of the five final Cylons in the season finale [Crossroads: Part 2] until we were breaking that actual episode. That's when the identity of the fifth Cylon became a more pressing question. In-between the two seasons we went on a writers' retreat and talked about everything in detail, and Ellen was the primary candidate to be the fifth Cylon. We discussed other possibilities but none of them really held water, so we stuck with Ellen. "And I would say it worked primarily because of her relationship with Tigh [Michael Hogan]. It really sort of anchored that couple as something very special. Also, as a character, Ellen had been an off-camera presence right from the beginning of the show in the [2003] miniseries. We began hearing about Tigh's wife and it was one of his key defining characteristics, so we knew she was important in the mythology of the show. I also liked the idea of saying that this couple had been together a very long time. Theirs had been this sort of eternal romance and love, which I thought was cool. It completed the framework of the final five and just fit. It also made the fact that Tigh had killed his wife back on New Caprica even richer and further complicated as well as filled with irony and more conflicted feelings. "I liked Tigh and Ellen because they were both flawed and noble characters who tended to get in their own way, and I liked the bad choices they made as much as I enjoyed their good choices. I loved watching them claw at each other and the fact that they couldn't bear to be apart from one another. Usually the two lovers who transcend time are people who long for each other and are such good and noble individuals that you hate them. Ellen and Tigh just feel like a legitimate twosome. They're a married couple who have to go at it periodically as well as have major issues and this and that, but their bond was one that literally could not be broken. And I thought that that was a really interesting and, ultimately, positive thing to say." Saul and Ellen Tigh are among those colonists on New Caprica when, in season three of Galactica, the planet ends up under Cylon occupation. After her husband is imprisoned by the enemy, Ellen begins having sexual relations with the humanoid Cylon Cavil (Dean Stockwell) in order to secure Saul's release. Cavil, in return, uses Ellen to gain information about the human insurgency. Her betrayal is eventually uncovered, and although Saul realizes that his wife's actions were out of love for him, her collaboration with the enemy is punishable by death. Rather than have his fellow resistance fighters kill Ellen, he gives her a poisoned drink and she dies in his arms. Given her character's demise, actress Kate Vernon, who plays Ellen, was surprised to subsequently be asked by Ron Moore to once again return to the show. "Ron called me one day and he sounded really sad and kind of morose," recalls Vernon. "He said to me, 'I spoke with the [NBC] network and I'm sorry to say that they agreed to green light this project. It's unfortunate, but you're going to have to come back to work for us.' Ron messed with my head right up to the very minute of actually letting me know that I was coming back. "At that point I didn't know what that meant. I was just elated that I was coming back, and then the conversation evolved into Ellen being the fifth Cylon. I wasn't sure he was talking to the right person or teasing me again. My jaw fell open and I was waiting for Ron to say, 'Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I'm kidding.' I had been invited back for a few episodes and was hoping to be invited back again, but I was not expecting this, so I was stunned." Once the actress was told about her character's resurrection and true identity, was it difficult for Vernon to keep it a secret? "Oh, gosh, yes. There were waves of intense agony and frustration, and then I would completely forget about it," she says. "I mean, it was quite a while before I was back on the [Galactica] set, so I actually did forget about it for a bit. For the most part, though, this was something I desperately wanted to talk about just because it was such an honor to be given this role. "When Ron killed Ellen off, I went up to him, looked him straight in the eye and asked, 'Isn't there any way I can come back?' He looked at me very gently and assuredly said, 'No,' so in Ron's eyes I was done. However, in my heart I personally had a love affair with Ellen as an actress and this show, so I never let go of it. Ron can attest to that because I called him many times, and, bless you, Ron, for taking all my phone calls." Continues Moore, "I have to say that, creatively, killing off Ellen was a great move. It was one of those big sort of, 'Wow, what an ending. Man, that's going to be powerful.' There was great excitement about what it was, but, you know, it was hard to let go of that character and know that Ellen wouldn't be in the program any more. Honestly, probably my most difficult experience on the series was calling Kate Vernon and saying, 'We're killing off your character.' It was really emotional as well as heartbreaking, and I think that on some level I carried that with me a lot. It certainly gave me the impetus to want to bring her back." Says Vernon, "I thank you for that, Ron. That's a wonderful compliment." Adds Moore, "When it comes to keeping the secret, I know that a number of fan sites out there as well as several of the on-line communities fervently follow the series. Sometimes things slip out, and this one was really well-suppressed. However, we didn't have to do too much to keep the secret because there's so much bad information out there about the show in general. There was all this speculation posing as fact where people were saying, 'I know who the fifth Cylon is.' Occasionally one of them would say Ellen and we'd all be like, 'Oh, crap, it's out.' Then on the same website or a site that it's linked to, someone was saying it's Boxy [a character from the original 1979 Battlestar Galactica series], and we're definitely bringing him back. Again, because there was so much bad information out there, our hope was that the few nuggets of truth would be hard to sift out of the rest of it, and that's what happened." In the fourth season Galactica episode No Exit, Ellen Tigh wakes in a fright, covered in goop and sitting in a Cylon re-birthing tank. The time line is 18 months ago and she has been reborn after her death on New Caprica. Ellen is on-board a Cylon base ship and being held there by Cavil, whose disdain of her and the four other Cylons who created him and the other seven existing humanoid models has only grown worse. When the Cylon resurrection ship is destroyed, Cavil orders Ellen to tell him how to reconstruct the technology, but she refuses, so he plans to cut her open and extract the necessary information from her brain. Ellen is in a very different place than any we have ever seen her in before, which provided Vernon with new challenges when it came to her performance. "I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to do," notes the actress. "I needed the material, though, to see what direction Ellen was going in, and because the writers on this program are so brilliant and their imaginations so incredible, I just really had to open up and trust these words and this concept. I also had a couple of talks with Ron as well as the directors about where we were headed, but I'm a feeling actress. I didn't necessarily go in there and intellectually just break it down on a mental level. I know who Ellen is and I took this new information, which was so rich and profound, and just let it guide me through the change that Ellen experiences." During the final moments of No Exit, one of the Boomer (Grace Park) models double-crosses Cavil and uses a Raptor to fly Ellen to safety on-board the Galactica. No one is more surprised to see her than Tigh, and the two of them waste no time in becoming reacquainted. Ellen is later shocked to discover that Saul and Number Six (Tricia Helfer) are involved and the Cylon is pregnant with their child. Reconnecting with her onscreen hubby Michael Hogan was a joy for Vernon. "Michael Hogan has always been extremely encouraging," she says. "At one point before I began shooting I was still a little worried and walked into his trailer. I was coming back as the fifth Cylon and felt a tremendous responsibility, which included quite a bit of dialogue. Michael looked at me and said, 'Just know that you are Ellen and everything will be fine.' Basically what he was saying was that I was already Ellen; I didn't need to do anything more, but, again, just let the words guide me. It was the kindest and most supportive thing an actor or anybody could have said because I was quite concerned whether or not I'd be able to creatively answer what Ron and the other writers intended to reveal." There is no doubt that Ellen Tigh's return to the Cylon fold causes further unheaval in what has been an extremely volatile period in their history. Although Ron Moore will be working on the Galactica prequel, Caprica, he promises that fans will not have to wait for the new series to learn what the future holds for the Cylons and humankind. "Caprica will explore how the people on the [12]colonies developed the Cylons and how all that came about," explains the executive producer. "However, as far as the larger mysteries as well as mythologies along with the hows and whys and how everything plays out on Galactica, we set out to answer as many questions as we could by the end of the show, and that's what we did. We didn't hold anything in reserve and say, 'Oh, well, we'll deal with this on Caprica." With Galactica's fourth season also being its final one, that means the show's actors have said goodbye to their alter egos. While sad to leave Ellen behind, Vernon will always be grateful for having had the opportunity to portray such a sexy, playful and intelligent character. "Ellen is the best role I've had in my career," says the actress. "I had no expectations when I auditioned for the part. I was told there might be two or three episodes, but they kept bringing me back, and with each new story I couldn't wait to crack open the script because the writers seemed to really indulge the character's naughtiness, feistiness, trouble-making, the complicated relations she had with her husband, etc. "I found Ellen more and more fascinating as well as dark, delicious and misunderstood. So as an actress it was pure discovery, and I never expected to continue on as much as I wanted to. So it was just a wild ride." Steve Eramo As stated above, all photos are courtesy of and copyright of The Sci Fi Channel, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any form. Thanks!