Battlestar Galactica's gripping exodus blasts off into its final season.
by: Gene Kosowan
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Bringing an erudite perspective to science-fiction is frequently a daunting task. Star Trek franchises that have managed to meld logic with speculation have traditionally been the exception. But for most escapist fare, from the likes of Lost in Space to The Invaders, trying to suspend disbelief was a silly exercise at best. Even the initial version of Battlestar Galactica, launched in 1978 and dismissed by critics as a ripoff of Star Wars, came across as a campy escapade of cheap explosions and bad haircuts.
So when the powers that be decided to resurrect Battlestar Galactica in 2004 as a two-part miniseries, the premise of survivors fleeing their home planet, destroyed by a robotic race called the Cylons, seemed to be a farfetched career path for Cambridge-educated Jamie Bamber. But Bamber, whose acting skills were honed at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, was intrigued by the anthropological elements of the revamped show.
"Battlestar Galactica is a creation myth of a civilization's flights of passage," says Bamber, who plays commanding officer Lee "Apollo" Adama in the show, which had since expanded to a series that premieres its fourth and final season April 4 at 10 p.m. ET on SciFi Channel.
"There was a real effort to explain the whole three dimensions and every aspect of this life lost and floating around in space to examine what the ramifications of that kind of existence on a psychological and personal level. When I picked up the mini-series script it made sense. This awful event where a ship has its umbilical cord with life and civilization is cut off and has to exist on its own and whether that premature birth is viable or whether this thing can survive and grow was really meaty."
Bamber also like the idea of the darker production elements of the show to add a sense of reality to the conflict among the crew and civilians who have to fend off the pursuing Cylons in search of a mythical planet called Earth, the reputed home of a long-lost 13th colony. The dogfights in deep space, on various planetary surfaces and even in the catacombs of the battleship itself were orchestrated mostly with handheld cameras, as if a photojournalist was entrenched in the action. That made special effects a nightmare at first, especially during combat scenes involving Cylons, which have evolved well beyond the clunky Cyclops warriors from the old series, although those first-generation enemies are still around in the newer endeavor.
Bamber is also grateful for a lack of gung-ho bravado in the new version that permeated the previous series.
"There wasn't that whole thing of how you play a Duddly Doright hero, which most of us can't relate to because it's not real," says Bamber. "Heroism is not real, it's a construct that we create around certain people because we admire them."
Bamber's used to playing anti-heroes, ever since his pre-teen years in Europe. Born in Hammersmith, England to an American father and an Irish mother, he first tasted the stage when he was seven, after the family relocated to Paris. His mother, who was an actress, and lacking a daughter at the time, cast Bamber in the role of the Wicked Witch of the West for a production of The Wizard of Oz.
He's since grabbed some more realistic roles in such outings as HBO's Band of Brothers, Cold Case, Ghost Whisperer and the British series Horatio Hornblower. He's also tested his acting chops as Mephistophiles in Dr. Faustus and Price Hal in the Shakespearean classic Henry IV.
As someone who's delved heavily in Shakespeare, Bamber says the idea of working in science fiction isn't much of a detour from playing the classics.
"Shakespeare wrote sci-fi in some regards," claims Bamber. "He set his stories anywhere but Elizabethan London to make his stories timeless and permanent. He had censorship to deal with in that he couldn't lampoon directly the Elizabethan society he lived in, so he forced himself to set his stories in places that were largely abroad and in different time periods. If you look at The Tempest, it's arguably kind of science fiction with a nowhere island and mythical creatures. I think there's a good parallel with good sci-fi to take the context away from our immediate settings."
As Battlestar Galactica finishes its saga this season with a 22-episode run, Bamber says that the grand finale will sew up all the loose ends surrounding the perilous quest for Earth.
"If I've got any faith, and if the fans have any faith in what they've seen so far with the writing, then I'm sure there will be a lot of closure¯ quite drastic closure," says Bamber. "I'm sure a lot of chapters will come to an end and I think the whole thing will be resolved in as comprehensive way as they can come up with. I don't think it's one of those stories that lends itself to leaving lots of threads dangling. I think there will be some finite end of one kind or another."