How The Most Serious Sci-Fi Series Ever Made Snuck Toilet Humor Past The Network

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Battlestar Galactica has a well-earned reputation as one of the most serious sci-fi series ever made. Under the direction of showrunner Ronald D. Moore, this show was everything Star Trek wasn’t: grim, gritty, and absolutely brimming with character conflict. The original miniseries began with the attempted genocide of humanity, and later episodes regularly feature President Roslin tracking how many humans are left as soldiers and civilians are picked off by evil robots. In other words, Battlestar Galactica isn’t the show that you pop on when you want to enjoy a few laughs!

With that being said, the show does pepper in occasional moments of levity, which are that much funnier because they are surrounded by serious scenes. One of the best examples of this is the Season 1 episode “Six Degrees of Separation.” Most of the plot is appropriately grim, with Dr. Baltar worried that he is going crazy and racing to clear his name for the crime of betraying humanity. Amid all this, however, Moore went out of his way to include bizarre toilet humor in the form of Baltar hilariously confronting Gaeta in the bathroom!

When The Story Goes Down The Toilet

If you want to freshen up before we head to the bathroom, here goes: “Six Degrees of Separation” is a Battlestar Galactica episode where Dr. Baltar is startled by the appearance of a woman claiming he is a secret Cylon collaborator. The twist? She looks exactly like the version of the Cylon Six that he always talks to in his head. He freaks out trying to clear his name, eventually getting thrown in the brig for trying to destroy a potentially incriminating photograph. But after he prays to God for forgiveness, his accuser vanishes, and the photograph is revealed to be a forgery that was clearly intended to frame him. 

So, where does the weird toilet humor come into play? Gaeta is the one assigned to investigate the photograph, and while he’s in the bathroom, he gets a visit from Baltar. The not-so-good doctor wants to probe Gaeta for information, but one of his questions comes out horribly wrong: “How’s it going over there?” he asked the man in the bathroom stall. After Gaeta responds with a confused “uh…”, Baltar clarifies that he’s talking about how it’s going in the lab. After Baltar unsuccessfully petitions the man for lab access, Gaeta runs out of there, leaving the doctor to shout after him, “You forgot to wash your hands!”

A Very Stall Order

Just when things can’t get any weirder, Baltar’s accuser walks into the bathroom. He harangues her about being a secret Cylon while she denies all of his accusations. Eventually, she enters a bathroom and closes the stall door, effectively ending the conversation. This leaves a frustrated Baltar to make an angry exclamation that just so happens to be a pun on his first name: “no more Mr. nice Gaius!”

If you think this bit of weird bathroom humor is out of place for Battlestar Galactica, you’re not the only one. As recorded in Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion, “The network had its concerns and wanted to cut it at one point, and I was like, ‘No! I know how to do this and make it work. Just trust me!” The showrunner was right to be confident, as the final scene was funny without being too silly or gross. According to Gaeta actor Alessandro Juliani, one reason it was so funny is that director Robert M. Young rigorously adhered to the script, which “said in block capital letters, ‘STAY OUTSIDE THE STALLS’.”

The Best Improvised Line

As for Dr. Baltar’s weird little pun, the original line was simply “no more Mr. Nice Guy,” which was already pretty funny. Actor James Callis improvised “no more Mr. Nice Gaius” because the joke just “seemed obvious.” The improvisation made executive producer David Eick laugh, but he warned the actor that “I’m not sure that’s going to work for the audience.” Fortunately for both Callis and the fans, Moore liked the pun so well that it made the final cut.

There you have it, you frakkers: the story of how Ronald D. Moore snuck some wildly out of place bathroom humor into Battlestar Galactica. The toasters at the network were nervous that he couldn’t pull it off, but the showrunner managed to sneak just the right amount of laughs into the most serious sci-fi show of the modern age. Did he possibly activate a lot of nerds watching with the prospect of Tricia Helfer yelling at them in the bathroom? Maybe, but we’ll try not to hold that against him.