Galactica.com - SDCC 07: Galactica -- What if Gaeta Had Died?

By Eric Moro & Scott Collura, on 29-07-2007

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SDCC 07: Galactica -- What if Gaeta Had Died?
Scripter discusses what almost happened to the fan fave character.
by Eric Moro & Scott Collura

July 26, 2007 - Most fans of Battlestar Galactica agree: Lt. Felix Gaeta (played by Alessandro Juliani) is a favorite character. Sure, he started off as little more than a background player on the hit show, but in the past three seasons he's developed a bit of a following. Some say he's secretly a Cylon, others say he's the heart and soul of the titular Battlestar, but one thing is certain -- he very nearly bit the dust in a third season episode last fall called "Collaborators."

Today at Comic-Con, Mark Verheiden, who scripted that episode, revealed that in the early version of the script, Gaeta actually did meet his maker.

"One of our most controversial episodes, we had basically two of our heroes trying to throw a third out an airlock for violating… basically for collaborating with the Cylons at one point, which he hadn't done," he recalls. "[Those episodes] are very tricky. That episode by the way, which I wrote, was really tricky because … we really spent some time thinking about that. This was really a dark place to go. They were going to murder one of their comrades, someone who had been on the ship the whole time. And in fact this is [how] the thinking goes. In that episode we originally did kill him because we thought that would be an interesting and dark place to go. And then we said, 'Well, there's dark and there's freaking bleak.' And that was too bleak."

But you can't just have your heroes throw another hero out the airlock, so to speak. You also have to build to that point over the course of your storyline so that it's a believable turn of events, says Verheiden.

"You can't just one day say a character that's been true blue suddenly becomes a… suddenly tries to cheat on the election like [President] Roslin did," he says. "You have to have put that in their character and I think what's wonderful about Battlestar and the world that Ron Moore and David Eick created that I came onto is that the characters are all wonderfully flawed, flawed from the get-go. We have characters that cheat on their wives, we have a president that cheats on an election."

Verheiden points out that "Collaborators" wasn't the first time that the writers toned the final product down a bit.

"We've had a couple like that where we've pulled back from the brink," he says. "We had another one I wrote called 'Final Cut,' which is the one where we introduced Lucy Lawless. Originally, in that show we had a character who was very upset with something the Colonel had done. … Originally that character, the Colonel would try to talk him down and we had him committing suicide right in front of him. And the network just said, 'You know what? Again, we're not asking for birthday parties but, wow, that's going pretty heavy.' So it's making sure the characters can support that level of intrigue within themselves and [we're] not just pulling it out. I think the worst thing would be if you watch the show and the President is cheating on the election, and you go, 'I have no idea why she would do that.' But I think we set up as we went that it made complete sense [in terms] of who she was running against, and how much she felt that would have been a terrible thing for that other guy to get the presidency."

Bottom line: Gaeta survived. For now…

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IGN.com

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