Make sure that thing you’re destroying is a prop
March 6, 2007
WARNING: I’m going to try not to be specific, but there might be spoilers in here.
At the end of the most recent Battlestar Galactica episode, Maelstrom (which is a hugely significant moment in the storyline of the entire series), a main character is killed. Edward James Olmos, the amazing actor who plays Admiral William Adama, has the final scene alone in his quarters, and he is reacting to the death of the character. The actors and crew of the show were all incredibly upset when they read this script and found out one of their family would be gone after Maelstrom, so it was somewhat easier for Eddie Olmos to portray the incredible emotion he did in that last scene.
The interesting (and funny) bit comes from the last few seconds, when Adama, who had been crying, suddenly snapped and utterly destroyed a beautiful model sailing ship we had seen him working on over the course of several years. That in itself was not funny; it was an amazing display of rage and frustration, and conveyed how angry and tortured Adama was at the death of someone so close to him. According to Ron Moore (executive producer), that was not scripted! Olmos has done things “in the moment” before, things that weren’t on the page, but this was quite an explosion. He was sad and upset, in the moment, and completely destroyed the model ship.
Now, here’s the punchline: that ship, Moore said, was on loan from a museum and was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Oops.
Obviously, Eddie didn’t know where the ship had come from — he thought it was a prop — and fortunately it was insured. But the faces of the prop masters off camera were apparently, as you can imagine, completely white when that scene was shot. No word on how Olmos reacted when he found out what he had destroyed, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to tell him after seeing what he did to that ship.
I have been watching NBC’s new hit action drama Heroes since it started, and have been continually entertained by the show. It’s got a lot of interesting characters, some good action, and pushes everyone’s fantasy buttons with the heroes’ superhuman abilities. While I consider it a “good” show, it did have its weak points — like questionable dialog at times (can you say “dumb it down for the lowest common denominator network viewer”?) and horrible, horrible acting by a couple guest actors (like the FBI agent that Parkman was hanging out with for awhile; I’ve heard more believable lines delivered at a 6th-grade play). And while the writing is usually pretty decent, there’s been nothing that really stands out.
I was watching Stargate Atlantis episode 3×16, The Ark, when I came across a scene between the regular Atlantis crew and a guy who had been stored within a computer system for thousands of years with a form of beaming technology. Apparently there were a lot more people in the computer, but something went wrong:
