Podcast:Resistance
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, here with episode four, "Resistance". My apologies to those of you who were waiting in vain for the podcast on episode three, "Fragged". I was not in town last week, having taken a much needed vacation with my family up to Big Sur for a little camping expedition, because, at the moment we are in a production hiatus. We have suspended shooting for about a month in order to catch up on scripts and give everybody a break. Because, as most of you know, this season we're doing a twenty episode order and we're broadcasting it in two groups of ten, which gives an opportunity to take a little bit of time off and I took advantage of it. So there you go. Hopefully I'll be able to get back and give you commentary on "Fragged" at some point.
So I'm in the recap of last week's episode. Crashdown's just died and "Resistance" is one of the episodes that, of course, I think I mentioned this before but, essentially the first six or so episodes of season two were pitched and structured at the very beginning of the season in that we knew that we had a storyline that was gonna take several episodes to unfold. Stories dealing with the aftermath of the shooting of Adama and the various other cliffhangers and so "Resistance" was developed in that context. I went back and looked at some of the early things on "Resistance". What they did not have, in early story outlines, was this sequence. Was the idea of Tyrol being under suspicion of being a Cylon and this subplot that happens throughout the show of Tyrol under suspicion, his incarceration, his somewhat rapprochement with Sharon, and then ultimately Sharon's untimely death at the end. That was a somewhat more later developing subplot. This story was always conceived as- we kept calling it the "Kent State" episode, where Tigh's repressive leadership would essentially result in the deaths of civilians. There would be an explosion of outrage in the Fleet, and this would prompt the prison break of Laura Roslin and the start of a counter-coup, or counter-revolutionary movement, within the Fleet, and at the end of the episode would culminate with the return of Commander Adama to the Galactica. And that was always the concept of this show.
There was a Sharon-Baltar storyline early on in this episode, that dealt with Baltar being back aboard Galactica now and getting his hands on Sharon. He was supposed to be interrogating Sharon, developing a psychological- an interest in her psychologically. Trying to get inside her brain so you know, here's a Cylon, who is now at my mercy, more or less. She would be incarcerated. She was going to be held in very difficult circumstances and Baltar was gonna be sent in to figure out who she is, what she is, how we can counter beings like her in the future. And there were a couple of drafts of story and, I think, even structure that explored that idea, but ultimately it wasn't that satisfying and what we started to come around to was the fact that Sharon had returned to- or, I'm sorry, that Tyrol had returned to Galactica, it felt like, well, here's the guy that was in love with Boomer. Here's the guy that protected Boomer. Here's the guy that everybody on the ship knew was involved with Boomer. So wouldn't he be under some kind of suspicion? And that's- as soon as we landed on that, I don't recall off the top of my head who came up with that notion, but once we angled the story that direction it became much more intriguing. It's like, ok, let's open with Tyrol sitting in the room with Tigh. Let's start the episode there. Here's the guy that just went through this horrific ep- encounter down on Kobol and he comes back and suddenly he's in jail.
And here we begin the resistance storyline on Caprica. This sequence, initially, as you might imagine in several drafts and even of the script was more traditionally plotted where we would have started with Helo and Kara out in the woods trying to plan their escape or plan their way to find a Cylon air base and then you cut out to these guys out in the woods watching them and that the guys in the woods are saying, "I think that they're Cylons." And it was fine, but it felt very pedestrian and there was something vaguely unsatisfying about it all the way along and so there came a point where I believe it was the director, but I could be wrong, Allan Kroeker, who directed this episode, I believe it was his suggestion that we start with the resistance and begin with their point of view, and I immediately thought that was a great idea because it just- it's a more intriguing way to start this little sequence, which really isn't very much. This is a very traditional plot move. It's like, ok, good guys are about to be shot by other good guys. Ooh, scary. But, by beginning it on the other foot, by starting with these people that you don't know and haven't seen before, wondering where- you're lost for a moment and trying to catch up and like, "Ok. Wait a minute. What's going on? Who are these guys? Who are they seeing out there? Ok. They seem to be- they're humans. I guess they're fighting Cylons. And..." It's just enough to hide the moment that it's actually Kara and Helo. I'm sure sharp-minded viewers can jump ahead, but basically if you're watching the episode it's a nice effective way to just hold off the reveal.
And I'll come back here after the tease.
Act 1
So now we're back once again on Caprica. This shooting sequence- shooting sequences, action sequences like this, really is very difficult on a television budget just for, essentially, for lack of time. Action sequences in feature films like this and in the subsequent followup sequence to this can be much more elaborately staged and planned and you have much, much greater time. A feature film might shoot maybe a page or two a day, on a big feature, and maybe a sequence like this is shot over several days if they were making a meal out of it. With us we have to this in a day or less. We can't really afford time on our shooting schedule to do the kind of elaborate set pieces that you see in feature films so we're always a little hesitant to write in just random firefights because we feel an obligation to give you a good one if we're gonna give it to you and what we did here, you'll notice, you'll notive that in the cutting we never cut to the bad guys or to the resistance guys in this case. We're staying with Kara and Helo and giving you an impression of a bigger firefight than what you actually see. What's interesting about that is that it ends up putting you in their point of view and being under fire with them as opposed to, "And then the angle on the bad guy shoots and then the richocet," and trying to choreograph all these things.
This plotline about Cally ultimately being Jack Ruby I believe was suggested by our co-executive producer, Toni Graphia, who wrote this episode. And it was, I think, Toni's idea- I'm pretty sure it was Toni's idea in one of her drafts. As we started talking about Sharon and what happened to Sharon, somewhere along the line came this idea of a shocking end to Boomer. That Boomer would just get shot and killed. And it was a great instinct because at this point in the storyline I think you're assuming, "Ok. And now they have Sharon and now Sharon's gonna be in the brig and they're going to go down and play a lot of scenes with Sharon and they're going to talk to her through the bars and it's gonna be a lot of touchy-feely stuff." And it's really not. And what we wanted to play was, again, a little bit closer to the reality of some of these events, as close reality as we can get. In that there would be tremendous amounts of anger and conflicted emotions about having her on the ship at all and from this point forward, even though Cally's not talking about Sharon, it's essentially that there's that Cylon woman in there who's representative of an- of all the problems that we have- that we had gone through on Galactica and it's also that she is the root cause- as a person and as a representative of her race, she's- everything that these people have gone through can be tracked back to her, so wouldn't there be tremendous amounts of ill will toward her.
This little beat in CIC is important for plot reasons. It's the place where we establish, "Well, shouldn't Baltar come back and just take over the reigns of the Presidency?" No, he can't because Tigh has declared martial law. The Baltar story in this, like I've indicated earlier, went through several iterations. The early one being him plumbing Sharon's psychological depths, the second one being starting on this foot and still having him going down to the brig and- I think in a couple drafts he was still interrogating Sharon. He was still trying to get information out of Sharon. He was making a little bit of progress. He was intrigued by her. We actually, I believe, at one point started playing with the idea it would become a triangle between him and Boomer and Six and that there would be this competition that Baltar's interest in Boomer, even though Boomer was more- cared more about Tyrol, obviously, than she did Baltar, but that somehow Baltar's obsession/interest in Sharon was going to compete with his relationship with Six. It never really worked and I don't anybody was ever really satisfied with it and I believe I was taking a polish on this script at one point and was fixing some things and none of us were really happy with Sharon-Baltar and I latched on to the scene that we, coming up later, with him going down into the brig with Baltar and Sharon.
Anyway, back to where we are now. This was the key idea of the whole show, right from the pitch, which was that Tigh's leadership during what is essentially peacetime in our Rag Tag Fleet, they're not under attack at the moment, his peacetime leadership would lead to disaster. That he's not a political genius. This is not what he does well. He reacts emotionally to things that he should think through cooler. He is very easily affronted. He is manipulated by his wife. He's not the guy you want in charge of this particular situation.
This beat with Lee, as the CAG, continuing to do his job, also still harks back to the idea that we established in "Valley of Darkness" that Lee has essentially given his parole that when he's not on duty he's not going to be working against Tigh and then when he- I'm sorry, when he is on duty he won't be working against Tigh or helping the president and then when he's off duty he will go back down to the brig.
This scene serves a couple of purposes. Some things that we're develop later in the season, hint hint, are beginning here with this relationship between Dualla and Lee. We always like the idea that Dualla had a special relationship to all the pilots, because she's literally the voice in the phone. She's the voice that called them home and the voice that told them it was ok, or the voice that told them where danger was. And that she had this almost informal relationship with all the pilots on the ship. And this little scene is a nod in that direction where they've established this routine each day of her happening to fall in with him as he walks back toward the brig. The guards deal with it, they like her, nothing untoward ever happens. But he was also a subtext that maybe there's something else here and this little look here at the end from Kandyse. What- I love the fact- What is she looking at there? She seems to be looking, why wait a minute, our Specialist Second Class, Petty Officer Dualla, what are you looking at?
Tigh and Ellen. You'll note that we're making much greater use of Ellen in these episodes. This was one of the great opportunities to have Ellen on board the Galactica this season was to play the dynamic of a husband and a wife. How that dynamic can influence events to the detriment of other people. In the pilot, in the miniseries, the mention of his wife, without even giving her a name, causes him to kick over a table and take a swing at Kara. So, what is up with that relationship. And she- he welcomes her back into the fold and- but what is it that drives you crazy about her and what is the- she's not just a screaming harpy. That would be pretty easy. If she was a screaming harpy and, yeah, somebody that was always in your face and denigrating you it'd be easy to dismiss her and you figure even Saul Tigh would probably divorce her. But there had to be something going on. There has to be a real marriage here. There has to be some back and forth psychologically of what she provides to him in the way of some kind of comfort and yet at the same time she's "comforting" him there's also a bit of the twist of the knife and there's also a bit of manipulation. Some of it, conscious on her part, some of it unconscious. I think there's a part of Ellen that doesn't even really understand what it is that she does. I don't think she consciously is trying to get him to do specific things so much as she does react in the moment and reacts to weakness in a very predatory way. She sees weaknesss in her husband and she- it makes her almost go on the attack. Almost like a pack mentality kind of a thing.
Back out to Caprica. Again, this- I believe this was all still shot on the same day in the same location. So you can see just how much work there is. We've moved locations. Not dramatically, but a company move is always a company move and there's a lot of gunplay. All this has to be choreographed. The armor has to be there. There's a lot of safety issues. All this takes an ungodly amount of time. And you don't have a lot of time in TV. So you don't get a lot of takes to do this. You don't get a lot of chances to go back and redo it. You certainly never get a chance to watch all your dailies and then put the piece together and say, "Oh. Well, well we're missing this coverage," or whatever, because nine times out of ten you can't return to that place.
This sequence- it- this works. This was my idea. That they would come to this standoff. It's hard to play these kinds of beats. Nobody does them better than John Woo, the Honk Kong film director who's done several American films, to get to a place where the characters are pointing guns at each other, but don't actually pull the trigger.
And I'll come back in a second.
Act 2
In all honesty, there's really no reason why they don't shoot each other from the very beginning. It's a bit of a dramatic conceit and I'm the first to admit that. The conceit that you get these characters in this action moment and then they have the guns trained on each other but they don't pull the trigger at the last moment and the dramatic conceit is that they- what I wrote in the script was I (I took a polish through this section, as well) was that they, Kara and Anders, both see some- they both have intuitive sense that the other is not a Cylon. There's something instinctual that says to them that the other is human and not synthetic. That idea doesn't quite pop through. It's something you write in a script and then how do you play that? It's like Kara- "We see by the look in Kara's eyes that she thinks that he might be human." (Chuckles.) It's- I think almost literally what I wrote. But that's hard to convey and it's really hard for a director and an actress to go out there and actually do that. So I knew that this was a bit of a push and a bye that you'd have these characters pointing guns at each other and that'd you'd be able to buy this in the moment and so what I opted for was to go- there was also this idea that Toni and I discussed where maybe the resistance- we were talking about who are these resistance guys? Where'd they come from. Are they just going to be a bunch of other army guys? 'Cause that's not that interesting. Who are they? Are they survivalists? That's almost interesting. And then somewheere in our conversation one of us popped out with, "Maybe they're basketball players or something." And we just both started laughing. I thought, "Well that's actually kind of great." I liked the absurd quality of that, that these guys would be a Pyramid team and then there was something that started to make sense. Oh, it's a Pyramid team and they're out doing high altitude training. Oh, they're in the mountains. That's why they survived. It means they're not crackerjack army special forces guys, which makes them interesting as well. And Pyramid being the game that Kara's backstory- she wanted to be a Pyramid player before she became a fighter pilot. It provided a certain connectivity to her story. And it just also a great opportunity to play the attitude involved and then see the game and... we just decided to go for it. I thought there was something really- just, it's one of those odd, absurd moments that, "Yeah, in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust that you might happen across the L.A. Lakers or something." It just seemed like one of those odd groupings that might actually occur because crazy shit like that happens in these sort of circumstances.
This little running thing with Corporal Venner, which comes to a head here of course when he ultimately aids in the escape of Laura Roslin, we talked for quite a while about who Venner was. And Venner being representative of a more spiritual type of person in the Fleet. He comes from Gemenon. We've established that Gemenon's more fundamentalist- "fundamentalist" planet in our mythos and that he would have a special connection to Laura and that that religious was going to override his sense of duty to the command. But you're seeing the whole command starting to fracture along different lines anyway, under the leadership of Tigh and I think the episode in some ways also underlines how fragile this situation is. What's important to remember is that there is no higher power for these people to deal with. There's no Fleet back there. There's no headquarters to deal with. There's no judicial system. There's no governmental structure at all. There's no replacements coming for any of these guys. They're out by themselves. So essentially, right or wrong, anything that happens, they're gonna wake up with the same people tomorrow and nobody's gonna change any of that.
Now we're out to the Gideon. This was the k- this is the key sequence. The concept here- we kept calling this Kent State. In fact there was even an early draft of the script that as a temporary title just called this script "Kent State" for- to keep it simple so we could keep all the stories straight. At a much later date I started going this really isn't Kent State. That's a misleading- mis- type for what this episode is about and what happens here. A more accurate description of this sequence is the Boston Massacre in that a group of soldiers is pinned in a situation that they're unprepared for and a tragedy happens. The Boston Massacre group of British redcoats, before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, were backed up against a building in Boston and- with a mob and a mob grew ugly and started throwing things and the situation got out of control and somebody in one of these situations- like in that situation, our situation aboard the Gideon, somebody squeezes off a shot. And it's really key to the idea that you'll note that we didn't show you who squeezed off the shot, where the first shot came from. Was it one of the civilians? Was it the marine? How did that Marine fire the shot? It doesn't matter. But the mistake is made. One shot goes off and then the other Marines in this situation that all of th- that they were completely unprepared for, fire back on instinct and people are killed. That's not Kent State. Kent State is a very different political situation. A very different setup and it carries with it a great- a heavy political connotation. This is truly a little bit more of the Boston Massacre, which then became a propaganda thing, the Americans, the Colonists used it as a weapon. It was a massacre. That they had fired indiscriminantly into this crowd. And the truth was actually more complex and as a historical sidenote, I believe it was John Adams actually defended the Lieutenant, the Leftenant, in charge of the Redcoats of the Boston Massacre. It was John, I believe it was John, maybe his brother, his cousin, Sam, but I believe it was John Adams defended them in court and got them off. They were not con- he was not convicted of any kind of negligence or homicide in the Boston Massacre incident. It was just kind of an interesting thing I've always liked.
This notion- here we're back on the Laura breakout. Again, this- the massacre or the shooting incident, I should say, that propelling Laura and Lee to finally get out of jail, were the key ideas of the show. That Laura would not be plotting a way out and Lee certainly would not be waiting- plotting with her until he got to a certain breaking point. And the massacre, sorry, I keep saying that, the shooting incident on the Gideon. It will be called the "Gideon Massacre" in subsequent episodes, that's why I keep messing it up. That the "Gideon Incident" would be the key moment.