What was up with Boomer jumping into bed with Cavil in the final season of Battlestar Galactica? We'll understand after we watch the BSG TV movie, Grace Park promised us. We also talked to Jane Espenson and Edward James Olmos.
So the BSG TV movie, "The Plan," is airing some time this fall, and it retraces the first two seasons of the show from the point of view of the Cylons. And, we've been hearing, the Machiavellian Brother Cavil will take center stage. So we asked Park if we'll come away from "The Plan" with a greater understanding of her character's sudden love affair with Cavil in BSG season four. She says yes:
Are we going to understand more about Cavil and Boomer's relationship? Yes, we are... It's kind of fun because it would get scripted one way, and then Eddie (James Olmos) would have us do something in the middle of it, and it would kind of change it, so it would either make it more intimate or creepier... It's not a normal relationship at all. And I don't think she understands it fully herself. What's really cool about is that because you have the seeds planted way back then, you realize... it makes way more sense later on why she's with him. She kind of inexplicably is drawn to him again, and they're a couple again.
And she says the TV movie explains a lot of stuff that we never really saw about Boomer, including how she got into the position she was in. Boomer never really knew that stuff, so we, the viewer, never knew either. At the time, she had come up with her own explanations, in her own head, for that stuff. But now she's learning that the official explanation is something different, and she's having to revise her own internal version of events.
She also says that it was really "quick and dirty" when Athena shot Boomer. She knew it was coming, and yet it was still shocking when she filmed it from both sides. "To me, that's really good storytelling."
We also talked to writer Jane Espenson about how this TV movie makes us see Cavil in a new way:
It's not until fairly late in the series that we start seeing Cavil as a pivotal villain among the Cylons. He turns out to be the one who erased the Final Fives' memories and left them on Caprica to live through the genocide, and he's the one who wants to enslave the Centurions and exterminate the humans. The sudden Cavil-centric villainy at the show's end feels a bit surprising. So will we discover in the TV movie just how important Cavil was all along?
Says Espenson:
This is going back and saying, "Okay, if Cavil is such a big villain, what was he doing during seasons one and two of Battlestar Galactica?"... He was up to something. He had found himself in this situation where they didn't think they needed a plan, because the plan was "Everybody dies." And now he's got to make it up as he goes along.
And we talked to director Edward James Olmos, who said William Adama isn't really in the TV movie that much. And he says it was "fantastic" to go back and relive the moments from the early years of the show, because he could paint with a fantastic pallette. "It took me eight months to edit it." And he says we'll realize how bad things really were, in those dark early years. And Olmos really believes that more BSG TV movies are inevitable — if we can sell half a million units of "The Plan." You'll do your part, right?