New Podcast!

SciFi.com has posted up a bonus podcast for episode 318: The Son Also Rises

318 – Bonus Podcast: The Son Also Rises
Commentary by actor Mark Sheppard, (Romo Lampkin) and writer Michael Angeli

IGN Interviews Mark Sheppard

IGN posted up this fun interview with Mark Sheppard, who played Romo, Baltar's lawyer in the last three episodes of this season:

Battlestar Galactica: Defending Baltar
We talk to Firefly and 24 veteran Mark Sheppard about his new role on Galactica as Baltar's lawyer.

March 16, 2007 - When I first began to talk to Mark Sheppard about his new role on Battlestar Galactica, the actor put it to me as simply as he could, saying, "I think I have the best character on the best show on television." Sheppard is a very familiar face to TV fans, including notable roles as Badger on Firefly, as Ivan Earwich (AKA "Yellow Tie Man") on 24, and as the evil Dr. Charles Walker on Medium. He made his debut on Galactica this past week, as the memorably named Romo Lampkin, a defense attorney who takes the case of none other than the infamous Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis). Sheppard will be appearing in the final three Galactica episodes of the season, and the day after his first appearance aired, I spoke to him about his experience working on the acclaimed series.

When I asked how he got the part, Sheppard replied, "I'm a huge fan of the show. Absolutely huge fan," and noted that he is friends with Galactica executive producer Ron Moore and his wife Terry. "I know Ron through [CSI Executive Producer] Naren Shankar and [Medium Executive Producer] Rene Echevarria. They all started at Star Trek together. Ron and I got to be friends and talked and talked and I said, 'When I grow up, I want to be a Cylon.' And he tried to make that happen. It was gonna maybe happen last year, and I wasn't available and it just didn't work out. I was in the middle of doing Medium. I was totally crestfallen, because it's my favorite show, without question. Battlestar is, I think, the best written show on television."

Sheppard then recalled being at a party with Moore and Galactica's other Executive Producer David Eick, "And David said, 'You still want to be a Cylon, right?' I said, 'David, I'll play anything!' He said, 'We may have a trial coming up at the end of the season,' and I said, 'Keep me in mind.' Then I was at Ron's house, and he said, 'I have something for you.' And I said, 'What's that?' 'Three episodes of Battlestar.' I nearly fell over! I read the first script and Michael Angeli's characterization of Romo, which I think is fantastic. There's a lot more stuff then was in the episode. The intro scene [for Romo] was a three page monologue about fear, which was taken out. There wasn't room for it. But it explains the puzzled look on Laura Roslin's face and, 'I'm glad to hear you're not afraid about defending the most hated man in the universe!' Because I'd just given her a massive speech about fear, very weirdly."

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EW Review of Son Also Rises

From Entertainment Weekly:

Let's Kill All the Lawyers
On ''Battlestar Galactica,'' Lee has to babysit Baltar's court-appointed attorney, who becomes the target of assassination attempts
Watching Baltar's lawyer work helped Lee deal with Kara's death
Jamie Bamber: Patrick Hoelck
By Marc Bernardin

So, yeah. Kara Thrace is dead.

Her name's not in the credits. The survivor count is one lower than it was last week. The admiral is crying like a baby. Anders is drinking to excess and snapping limbs. And Lee's putting her picture on the Mausoleum Wall. It would be easy to say that Starbuck's death hovered over this episode, except that it didn't, really. Where was her funeral? For a show that devotes so much screen time to the formalities of ritual — personal, military, political — to skip something as crucial to a main character's death as a funeral ceremony? More fuel to the idea that maybe she's not dead-dead after all (and maybe that survivor-count decrease was due to Baltar's detonated lawyer).

But the new lawyer — him I like. Could be the accent — foreign makes it exotic, Irish makes it down-to-earth — could be the sunglasses (more on those later), could just be that a new character, one of substance, is a breath of fresh air on this show. The Galactica company is a great one, but it's so hermetically sealed. When we get a new face, he or she is usually a pilot we've never seen before, a miner, or just some nameless red shirt who's not gonna matter a bit to the story at hand. But this guy, this Romo Lampkin, he's slimy, he's hungry, and he's smart. (Mark Sheppard, who plays Lampkin, has done his time in genre TV, having guested on Star Trek: Voyager, The X-Files, Firefly, Medium, and 24.) And he's a petty thief, which is a great trait for a lawyer looking to steal a trial.

Didn't, however, buy the whole saboteur-assassin thing. The plot thread didn't pay off in any real way, other than to show that no one but the Colonial brass likes the idea of a Baltar trial. Oh, and to have Lampkin get injured by that keypad blast. But wouldn't it have been more interesting if Lampkin had planted that bomb himself as a ploy to gain sympathy from a hostile tribunal? As it was, those moments played like cheap dramatic tools to build suspense. And it didn't add much of anything that Kelly was the perp. The only real payoff of all that dross was the Sharon-Cally confrontation, which was worth its weight in skinny women.

Back to Lampkin, and the sunglasses. Shades have been used for years as a dramatic tool. The comic-book writer and Internet godhead Warren Ellis has a theory, one he came up with after watching this YouTube compilation of CSI: Miami teasers, in which the Carusobot almost always dons his shades before dispensing the One Liner of Justice. Ellis feels that the sunglasses are used to conceal emotion, to hide the inner workings of a heartless machine. ''To don the shades at the beginning of a story is the equivalent of Superman changing into costume.'' For Lampkin, however, the shades serve a different purpose. When he's wearing the shades, he's telling the truth. When he takes them off, when we can see his eyes, he's lying. (The omnipresent trench coat, however, just makes ol' Romo look like a bit of a tool.) When he lays on the Gaius-misses-you goop to Caprica Six, you can see the lie doing its job, making her believe in her own lie, the one she continues to tell herself: that Baltar still loves her. That exchange was some of the best Galactica writing I've seen all season.

In fact, it feels like the producers have settled on Lampkin as a totem upon which to hang some of their finest dialogue to date. Learning about the kind of man Joseph Adama was not only helped us understand the complicated relationship between Lee and Joe and Lee and Bill, but more about Bill and Joe. Every father is someone's son. We all exist in someone else's shadow and spend our lives trying to get out from under it. And it only gets that much harder if the shadow is both long and cast by someone you can't respect.

So, where do we go from here? Will Baltar get a fair trial? Should he get a fair trial? How far will Lee go to escape from his father's shadow? Will we ever see Starbuck again? If yes, when and how?
Posted Mar 09, 2007

TV Squad review of The Son Also Rises

Fom TV Squad:

The Son Also Rises

Posted Mar 11th 2007 11:42PM by Keith McDuffee
Filed under: Science Fiction, OpEd, Battlestar Galactica, Sci Fi

(S03E18) Since Ron Moore's podcast came out a few days ago, I'll do a little bit of recap of what he said along with the review.

Something that Battlestar does well that has bothered me with some other shows is how, when we have a primary cast of characters amongst a much larger involved population, I'm not left wondering why more background cast doesn't come forward more often. There's a decent balance here. It makes sense why someone like Kara is so highly mourned and regarded, while some other pilots aren't so much. And when a background character comes forward, it's done at the right time and place where it fits.

Moore mentions in the podcast that he needed to come up with a plausible reason for Adama to be selected to be on the tribunal, and the fishbowl scene worked for that. I agree -- I may have raised an eyebrow had they not gone the lottery route. It's definitely interesting to listen to this podcast, even without accompanying video, and hear what decisions were made along the way to help tell the story. I'm fascinated at how easily and naturally Moore can put these podcasts together, many times without even the hint of a pause in his speech, without uttering a key spoiler to the entire series.

In the scene with Lee adding Kara's picture to the wall, Anders drunk on a Raptor, originally that was going to open with Anders and Lee at the wall and a fight would break out. But with the time that had passed on the show since Kara's death, he felt it made sense that they were past that, that the reason for their rivalry was now gone.

Something else Moore points out that I think others have brought up before is how seemingly easy it was for Sharon to be given "human status" while Caprica Six is not, even though she clearly helped the humans. I think that's a point that could be argued to death, but the simple fact right now is that Six's actions have yet to earn her the humans' trust. A couple more human lives saved down the road and maybe we'd see things differently.

The quick mention by Lampkin regarding Adama's tarnished button seems to speak much more than I think was let on. If you put together what the Admiral's been through (including being shot multiple times in the chest), his quasi-relationship with Roslin and then this small revelation of him not caring to keep his uniform in shape, one might conclude that he's considering some sort of retirement. But is that even possible given the situation everyone's in?

Moore made mention of the talk lately of Lee's grandfather, his involvement with Caprican law and his relationship with Bill and Lee. While the spin-off series Caprica hasn't been greenlit yet, this is somewhat a bit of foreshadowing into who Joeseph Adama was and what he was like. Moore mentions that that wasn't his intent, but that it's more to explain Lee's attraction to the law. Actually, can your foreshadow something for a story of what happened in the past? Weird.

Romo's letter to Baltar seems to help put a finer point on what we have to look forward to in the coming episodes. Ever since the fat Apollo days, we've seen Lee and his father at odds with one another. The result of their rift brings up an interesting side effect. Lee's desire to step out of the shadow of his father will outweigh his want of Baltar to lose his case. And as the letter said, there is no greater enemy to the enemy.

I think once again we're going to have people very much on both sides of the fence with this episode. It's guaranteed that a lot of you will be disappointed with it, that it was uneventful and lacked what we've come to love about this show. On the other side of the fence will be the purists, those who loved it and really felt the dynamic between many of the characters. But then there will be those few, like me, who can feel both ways about it.

If I were to judge this episode on its own, I'd say it wasn't great. But if I take what's happened thus far with what I believe will happen in the final two episodes, I think we'll come back to this episode and find it to have been great. A "great" episode to me is one that not only I can explain to non-BSG watching friends and get them to consider watching the show, but one I want to tell them about in the first place. This is not one of those episodes.

Other random things from the podcast:

- Roma Lampkin was originally going to die at the end of this episode, giving Lee sole responsibility for the trial.
- A cat makes its entrance for the first time in this episode. Moore made note of the fascination of online folks with the dog from earlier in the season (yes I was guilty of that, too). The cat was supposed to "run" out of the Raptor, but they sped up the film in order for it to appear that it ran, since it just sauntered out hen they actually shot it. "It's a little bit of Land of the Lost," says Moore. Later the cat runs because he thinks people on the set threw things at it off-camera.
- Some were worried about the sunglasses thing on Romo Lampkin, though Ron liked the idea and wanted to try it. I agree with Moore -- Romo Lampkin does resemble John Cusack in a few scenes.
- In the plot of who the bomber is, in the first few drafts, they were going to have the identity not revealed in this episode but keep him alive as a threat throughout the trial.
- No more kleptomania from Romo in future episodes.
- Moore always had qualms about both Lee and his father being in on the same case and went over it over and over in the writing room. He felt the dynamic between these two characters was important to show here.

Current fleet population: 41,399 (I'm figuring the death prior to the first act was counted in that number already and that nobody died in the explosion Lampkin was involved in.)

Son Also Rises Podcast

... Is now up: 318 – The Son Also Rises

Season 3 to be a Three Parter

This in from the SyFy Portal:

SPOILERS

BSG Season 3 To End With Three-Parter

SPOILERS: Ron Moore talks about what's to come
Source: E! Online

(December 08 2006) - The following story contains MODERATE SPOILERS for the third season of "Battlestar Galactica."

While the "Battlestar Galactica" story seems to be in transition again, expect that all to change by the time the third season of the hit SciFi Channel show winds up, culminating in what looks to be three-part finale.

"We meet Adama's (Edward James Olmos) wife (Lucinda Jenney) for the first time, in an unusual way, and see who is ex-wife is and the roots of why they were divorced and the problems Lee (Jamie Bamber) had growing up," series executive producer Ronald D. Moore recently told E! Online. "There are some big standalong episodes including one for Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) and one for Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), and there's a really pivotal episode with Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), sort of a fighter-plane episode about her. Beyond that, it starts to wrap up into our finale, and there is a three-part episode that gets us to the end of the season. By then, we will have major revelations and some major plot turns."

One of the new areas of the Cylons that Moore expects to address befor season's end has to do with the other five Cylon models that the existing seven don't like to talk about.

"I can't even really tell you when it will happen, but I can tell you it will definitely happen," Moore said. "The final five Cylons are different than the other Cylons, but I don't want to give away if they are newer or older or what their relationship is to the other Cylons. That's one of the mysteries we are teasing out over the course of a lot of episodes."

While the series has already made intimations that Adama and President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) may be finding romantic flame, it's not something Moore said he's looking to finalize one way or the other in the near future. The two might continue to have a strong bond with each other, but for now, that's pretty much where it's going to stay.

How long the show will stay on the air is a good question, but there's a good chance that it will ultimately be a decision by the producers, not the network, Moore implied. He said he still has another two years left in him to keep the show going, and maybe more after that.

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

"Battlestar Galactica," which airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on SciFi Channel, will air its mid-season finale on Dec. 15. The show will then move to Sundays at 10 p.m. in January. - Article by Michael Hinman

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Upcoming Episode Titles

The Patriot Resource has rounded out the rest of the titles for Season 3. Here's the new ones:

307: Hero
308: Unfinished Business
309: The Passage
310: The Eye of Jupiter
311: The Rapture
312: Taking a Break from All Your Worries (Spring 2007)
313: The Woman King (Spring 2007)
314: A Day In The Life (Spring 2007)
315: Dirty Hands (Spring 2007)
316: Maelstrom (Spring 2007)
317: The Son Also Rises (Spring 2007)
318: The Crossroads, Part 1 (Spring 2007)
319: The Crossroads, Part 2 (Spring 2007)

It's looking like The Passage and Eye of Jupiter are a two parter, and The Son Also Rises (A play on the book title by Hemmingway?) and both Crossroads are a three parter for the season Finale. As previously reported, Season 3 will be only 19 episodes.

Detailed spoilers for these episodes can be found here.