By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you’re a fan of shooting firearms, then you probably spend a lot of time screaming at your TV because your favorite onscreen characters are doing a terrible job of blasting their foes. This is usually the fault of the actor…like, what else would you expect to happen when someone who has never fired a gun is suddenly handed a prop and told to go nuts? However, Battlestar Galactica’s Nicki Clyne (who played Cally) is the exception to the rule: she told Starlog that in the Season 2 premiere “Scattered,” she was actually scolded by the director for firing her gun too well!
Nicki Clyne vs Cylons
Now, if you know much about Battlestar Galactica, you know that Cally’s character doesn’t spend much time directly fighting the show’s iconic robot foes. That’s because she’s a deckhand who, like coworker and eventual husband Chief Tyrol, specializes in keeping the ship’s Vipers in the air and fully operational for Galactica’s pilots. Nonetheless, Cally was part of a firefight in “Scattered,” and Nicki Clyne trained for this moment so hard that when she started firing at the Cylons, the director said “you’re shooting those weapons too well” because “Cally hasn’t fired a weapon since basic training!”
If you haven’t seen “Scattered”, here’s some context: in this episode, some of our characters explore Kobol, a kind of fabled planet that is meant to be the original birthplace of humanity. Some are temporarily stranded on this planet while Galactica plays a desperate game of cat and mouse with a Cylon Basestar, and most of this episode’s action takes place aboard the main ship and the assorted pilots’ Viper cockpits. But there’s still plenty of action on the planet, as Cally discovers when her survey team is attacked by bloodthirsty bots and she has to provide cover for Chief Tyrol.
Understandably, Nicki Clyne wanted to get her big action scene against the Cylons just right, and that meant training: as she put it, “I focused on doing it right, because the weapons experts showed me how to aim and fire the guns.” This is what led to director Michael Rymer chastizing her for “shooting those weapons too well” because it would be out of character for a deckhand who never saw combat to be so good at it. The actor complied, but she also had a “defense” against the director’s criticism: “I figured, ‘Hey, if I can learn to shoot a gun that quickly, then Cally certainly can.’”
While Nicki Clyne’s comment may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, she had a point about her character’s first real firefight with the Cylons. A major theme of Battlestar Galactica is that our heroes are on their backfeet most of the time and have to learn new skills on the fly in order to evade their relentless pursuers. Cally may not exactly look like a crack shot, but based on how she adapts to some of the dramas she endures later in the show (including her husband turning out to be a secret Cylon!), it’s perfectly reasonable to think she’d be a quick study with firearms.
We really loved hearing about how Nicki Clyne was a little too good at shooting Cylons, but there’s just one problem: we’re now seized with the urge to rewatch the Battlestar Galactica reboot again for what must be the millionth time. The alternative, of course, is checking out some of the slop that passes for modern sci-fi television on various streaming services. And we’d rather have Cally simply shoot us down like just another Cylon before we settle for slop.
