Monday, May 04, 2009

Names, names, names...

For reasons too obscure to mention, I was poking around the Battlestar Wiki and found an entry for a character named Stan Gibson. Stan went unnamed on screen, but that was the name we gave the mop-boy at the end of the episode "Final Cut."

One of the fun things about working in television (or comics) is using the names of friends for villains, monsters, heroes or whatever. "Stan" is in fact an old, old friend from Oregon who has turned up one way or another in just about every television series I've done. Perhaps his best appearance was on an episode of The Strip (short-lived UPN show about PI's in Las Vegas) where "Stan," a nice nordic lad from the Northwest, somehow transformed into a Japanese wrestling fan.

But there were other name checks on BSG. The "Shevon" character from "Black Market" was named for a very nice fan up in Oregon named Siobhan (we bastardized the spelling in the script because so many people didn't know how to pronounce it). D'Anna Biers (also in "Final Cut") was a David Eick request, and I'm pretty sure the other writers populated their scripts with equally personal choices. Just a little fun fact as I wile away another day at the computer...