Of all the major events in the great run of “Battlestar Galactica,” Dualla’s death was one of the most shocking. She recently sat down with Sci-Fi Wire for an interview about her character’s suicide.
What was your reaction when you actually got the script and it said something along the lines of “Dualla puts gun to temple and pulls trigger”?
McClure: I was floored. I think I was just as floored reading it as I’m sure people [were] seeing it. It’s such a personal and violent and shocking way to go, not only for her, but for the implications for the people around her. Suicide is a difficult topic at the best of times. People see it as being an ultimate act of selfishness on one end, but certainly from the research that I did and the people that I spoke to, there are so many different reasons that people get to that point. But I think for Dee it was just the ultimate act of surrender and the final act of control over her own life. She really wanted to find some kind of peace.
As far as you know, will we learn any more about why she took her own life? In other words, will someone read out loud a will or a suicide note she left behind?
McClure: So far as I know, no. So far as I know, that was it. She couldn’t see any way of ever finding any happiness for herself. That’s no good. Her husband [Jamie Bamber] is still in love with someone else. He’s turned his back on one of the things that joined them together, being in the military and that sense of duty towards the military and his father [Adm. Adama, played by Edward James Olmos] in particular. But I think that was it. It’s her final peace. It’s a very human reaction to a situation like that. Of course, I imagine that Dualla was not the only one on the ship, and certainly not the first one during the course of the whole saga, to choose that way out. I considered it kind of a strange honor to hold that archetype, to say, “Yeah, this is a very human thing. This is what human beings may choose to do.”
I missed “Dee” almost instantly. In many ways, she represented the sweetness and innocence of the human spirit, and she was beaten down by all that the fleet had to go through since the Cylon attack on the colonies. It’s nice to hear McClure, the person closest to this character, explain why Dualla took her own life.
