Jane Espenson

"Caprica"’s Jane Espenson: "It’s Time For Sexuality to be Incidental"

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Gilmore Girls to Ronald D. Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, writer Jane Espenson has a knack for ending up on some of television’s most buzzed about shows. Hopefully, her luck of working on successful shows will hold with the launch this Friday of SyFy’s BSG prequel Caprica.

Set fifty eight years before the events of BSG, the plot of Caprica is to tell the story of how humanity inadvertently created the intelligent machines known as Cylons which eventually despised their creators enough to try and annihilate them. The futuristic world created by Moore in BSG was a complicated one fraught with danger, both physical and moral. Caprica promises to be no less complex.

AfterElton.com recently caught up with Espenson, who is an executive producer and writer for the show, to discuss how the writers are approaching the show’s gay material, what’s in store for the show’s gay character and how much . Please note, this interview does discuss some plot points of Caprica including the identity of the show’s gay character.

AfterElton.com: We’ve talked before about the lack of gay inclusion both on Battlestar Galactica and science fiction in general, so I’m curious as to how the character of Sam Adama came to be gay.

Jane Espenson: Ron [Ronald D. Moore] took the writers on a writers retreat at the beginning of the season, and laid out his vision for the show. He wasn’t going to be guiding us on a day to day basis, but he really wanted to be involved in laying out the arc for the first half of the season, establishing some important things about the characters. He’s the one who said, "Let’s put Clarice in this group marriage," and he also just said, "Oh, and by the way, Sam’s gay."

It was just this thing he’d known from the beginning, from the pilot, long before I was involved. He just laid it out as a fact. I was thrilled, because it had always seemed an omission to me from our world. I think it was something that Ron had tried to put in Battlestar, but it just hadn’t worked out. This was sort of the chance to do it.

At that point, we used the word gay. I actually tried to avoid using it after that, because I think that’s a word from our world, and I feel like in this world [of Caprica], it wouldn’t be a word. People fall in love with who they fall in love with. Why do you have to have a different word for who they fall in love with? Having a different word for a same-sex relationship struck me as something this culture wouldn’t have thought of since those relationships were just considered on a par and unremarkable.

AE: Given that the show deals with religious conflict and racial tensions and technological strife, why in this particular world do we have all those other contentious issues but the issue of same-sex relationships isn’t there?

JE: I think that one of the things I’m interested in is how cultures evolve, what they value, what they devalue, and what’s locked in. What do we assume naturally follows and what doesn’t? You could imagine a culture, as in the Caprican culture, where race is a matter where people have prejudices against, but gender and orientation issues just never occur to them. It’s not part of that culture.

You can wonder what their Stone Age development was such that that never developed, you know. Why did that get tied to religion in our culture? Was it absolutely necessary? I don’t think it was. Look at the Romans and the Greeks. Perfectly thriving, perfectly mature cultures with religion in it, and it didn’t have a stigma against gay relationships. In fact, those were considered the true love relationships that were exalted. The relationship between a man and woman was more procreatory, but the true love that inspires you to write poetry was not that.

AE: As someone touched on during the Television Critics Association panel, your world isn’t about Christianity which is where a lot of our biases against gay people come from. Is that fair to say?

JE: Absolutely. This monotheistic religion that they’re talking about [in Caprica] is not Christianity. There’s no Christ figure in it at all. There is a sense of redemption and forgiveness of your sins, but of course, what you consider a sin in totally culturally dependent.

Suppose the monotheists win in this world. Would they suddenly start saying homosexuality is a sin? No. That’s why Clarice can be a very enthusiastic monotheist and still be in a group marriage. There’s no conflict between those.

AE: Is the group marriage not a social issue? I ask because at one point when Lacy first goes over there, she’s sort of, "Oh, I’ve met some kids from group marriages." It seemed to me like she was a little surprised, as if it was kind of unusual.

JE: Yes, she was surprised. It’s a little unusual, but not hugely so. It’s probably the same as if you showed up and discovered someone you knew well was in an interracial relationship and you’d never known it. You’d have a moment of surprise, and then you’d be like, "Oh. I’m surprised because I didn’t know, not because it’s shocking or anything."

AE: Sam is revealed as being gay in a very casual, off-handed way. Nothing on television happens by accident, so what was the thinking in that revelation?

JE: I particularly wanted him to come out in a very casual way, like you said, and I wanted him to come out in a casual way in front of Willy [Sam’s 11-year-old nephew], so that we knew that Willy knows. If we know that Willy knows, then that tells us in an instant that this is not shocking or something you’d hide from kids. It’s not even the first time Willy’s heard about it. It’s just the way the things are.

AE: We’ve already seen Sam kill once in the pilot, and at the end of episode 103, he is tasked with killing someone rather shocking who we won’t mention here. How do you feel about the character of Sam? How do you view him? On one hand, he has a loving home life and a great relationship, but he’s also a killer.

JE: He’s a killer, but he’s not a crazy serial killer or a psycho killer. He is a man with a job. He’s the hit man with a heart of gold. He metes out justice because he doesn’t feel that the authorities are the people who can best do that. He feels that he’s grass roots. The Halatha is an organization of the people and it metes out justice. He’s just the instrument that does that.

I think he would prefer to not be in that line of work ultimately. He talks about if he and Larry were to have a family, he would not want to be in that line of work. I think he has a strong ethical core; it’s just that his job happens to be a very tough job with tough decisions. If he worked in a hospital and had to decide when that patient was beyond saving, he would probably see it as fairly similar. He has a job that regrettably just happens to involve decisions of life and death.

AE: Maybe I misunderstood the Halatha. Are they analogous to the Mafia or...

JE: Yes.

AE: So you described them as meting out justice. I don’t really think of the Mafia as meting out justice so much as ruling by intimidation and fear.

JE: I guess it depends on who they’re dealing with, if they’re dealing with people outside the organization or inside. If you can imagine some guy in the organization has failed to turn in money he’s made, that’s going to lead to disorder, a mob war, and death. He’s done something wrong. Justice has to be dealt, and Sam would be called in for that sort of assignment. The judge who refuses to release a prisoner despite having accepted the bribe, he’s got to be taken care of. He didn’t play by the rules. It wasn’t fair.

I’m defending the mob! [laughs] That’s not what I had hoped to spend my day doing, but I’m trying to get Sam’s point of view on it. I do get the feeling that Sam rationalizes it, so I’m trying to get my own line on how he rationalizes it. It helps to understand the character.

AE: It’s a tricky thing, and it’s tricky for the audience too. We all know about the Sopranos and how ruthless they could be, but people followed them and cared about these people who were doing these horrible things.

JE: And of course, you walk the line of, "Oh, does that mean we have an evil gay character?" Or are we doing a good thing because there’s a gay character who is tough and he’s not, you know, designing the interiors of fine restaurants.

AE: It’s very 2010. I really like the character.

JE: It is a concern we had. I mean, Sam’s a killer, Clarice is a terrorist, and they’re our two most sexually diverse characters. Are we doing more harm than good? But I kept coming back to they’re complex, real people who we aren’t bending them around to accommodate their preference. They’re the most interesting people for our world and our stories, and making the sexuality incidental. It’s time to start doing that.

AE: What can you tell me about Sam and Joseph’s relationship?

JE: Sam and Joseph! I love their relationship. They are good supportive brothers. We’re going to find out more about their childhood history. We have a whole episode coming up well into the second half where we see what they went through as children on Tauron during the war. We’re actually going to go Tauron and see that, and we’re going to learn a lot more about how they see each other.

They support each other. As much as they might fight and argue and yell, they’re trying to save each other, protect each other. They are a good team. There’s a scene where Sam is angry at Larry, and Joseph says, "I don’t have a spouse anymore. Value what you have."

It’s a beautiful scene. I hope it made the final cut. I haven’t seen the final cut of that one yet to see if it’s there. We write more and film more than we have time for, so some stuff falls away, and unfortunately, Sam and Larry’s stuff — the home life of a character that’s not one of our four leads — is stuff that can get cut. We don’t see as much of Larry as I would have liked.

AE: What about Sam and Willy’s relationship? That seems interesting and confusing, in that I don’t really know what Sam’s motivations are, or that Joseph would approve of what’s going on with what Sam is teaching him.

JE: Sam has to step up when his brother is distracted from raising his one remaining child. Joseph is very much caught up in the loss of Tamara, his daughter, and so Willy is sort of getting ignored and Sam steps into the breach.

No, it’s not what Joseph would want for his kid. Joseph is a Halatha lawyer, but he finds it hard to justify what Sam has to do. Sam is doing the best he can. A lot of the show is people doing the best they can. I think it’s really telling that everything Sam does for Willy is done with the exact right motivations. Ultimately, I think Joseph understand that.

AE: It seems like Sam is exposing Willy to his life and work, teaching him some, um, interesting lessons that I’m not sure Joseph would agree with. But you think ultimately he will see that it’s all for the good?

JE: I think he’ll understands that Sam’s coming at it with the right motivations. I don’t think he sees it as all for the good. I don’t think he approves of the kid hanging out at Goldie’s and making all those mob friends, but he knows Sam’s heart is in the right place. He sees that someone has to be taking care of Willy.

And Joseph is Halatha himself. It’s hard for him to take the moral high ground. It’s complicated. That’s what I like about it. It’s complicated and very real.

AE: In just a couple sentences, how would you describe Sam’s journey this season?

JE: Sam is motivated by his need to take care of his brother, to do things he never thought he’d do, but he stays very, very true to himself. We’re very conscious that Sam is a fascinating character and he’s caught all of our imaginations. We try to give him a lot to do that obviously doesn’t have to do with his sexuality. We didn’t want it to be he’s there to “be gay.” He’s there to be Sam.

He actually has an adventure with Daniel and Amanda later in the year, where we’re sort of crossing those characters, getting them involved in a project together even after stuff happens earlier in the year where you might think those are the last character to ever come together. We really worked hard to integrate Sam into the show with as many characters as possible. It really lets us learn more about him and his moral code: what he will do, what he won’t do.

AE: There was a poll on BuddyTV about the direction SyFy is going, especially with Caprica and 77% of the folks said they weren’t happy. How concerned are you about having to pull off the feat of doing a prequel, which is always a tricky thing to do, and also doing a very different drama for SyFY. JE: I think if you start writing toward what polls are telling you, you end up in trouble. Then you don’t have an internal compass anymore if things are going right or wrong. You have to keep going back and asking people, "Okay, is this what you want? Wait! Let me try this. Is this what you want?"

You have to have your own internal compass. All you can really do is write the show you want to watch. As long as we’re doing that, we should be on the right track. I don’t think I’m that much different from the average SyFy viewer. I love SyFy. I know what I want to see. If I write something that would satisfy me, I think it will satisfy people who are like me far better than me trying to write for people who aren’t like me and guess what they want. That’s just not going to work.

AE: Are you a fan of Torchwood?

JE: Yes! Yes, I am a fan of Torchwood.

AE: Do you think the character of Captain Jack opened the door for SyFy the network, and sci-fi in general, to be more open towards characters’s like Sam?

JE: I have no idea how much Torchwood affected anyone at SyFy’s executive suites. I know it made me feel more comfortable going like, "Okay, the SyFy audience will be cool with this." It’s also just an amazing show with the unexpectedness of the plotting, the willingness to embrace dark subjects.

The Children of Earth miniseries that was their Season 3, oh my God, how brilliant! The decision that he can’t save his grandson, his grandson has to die. Yes, that’s a very Battlestar-y/Buffy kind of decision to pay the dark price. Go there. Don’t make everything sweet and wonderful and all tied up. Make it ugly and rough and emotional.

The way they own Jack’s sexuality is very admirable and very much like what we’re trying to do. The people around him have to be comfortable with it because he’s comfortable with it. It’s fantastic. Love Torchwood. Love it, love it, love it. Russell Davies is a genius, and all those people in the Russell Davies camp. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet them and wow. What a room full of geniuses. Fantastic.