Podcast:Daybreak

"Daybreak" Podcast
[[Image:{{{image}}}|200px|Daybreak]]
{{{caption}}}
[{{{download link}}} Download]
This podcast hasn't been fully transcribed yet
This podcast hasn't been verified yet
Posted on:	{{{posted date}}}
Transcribed by:	Joe Beaudoin Jr.
Verified by:	{{{verified by}}}
Length of Podcast:	2:20:38
Speaker(s)
Ronald D. Moore	Ronald D. Moore
	Terry Dresbach
Comedy Elements
Scotch:	Highland Park 25 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky
Smokes:	Export
Word of the Week:	{{{wordoftheweek}}}
Legal Notice
All contents are believed to be copyright by the speakers. Contents of this article may not be used under the Creative Commons license. This transcript is intended for nonprofit educational purposes. We believe that this falls under the scope of fair use. If the copyright holder objects to this use, please contact the transcriber(s) or site administrator Joe Beaudoin Jr. To view all the podcasts that have been transcribed, see the podcast project page.

Note: Due to the discordant nature of this podcast, it has been sectioned off by topic and subject matter vs. acts. This will also help account for those who watch "Daybreak" as one long episode versus those who watch it in parts, versus those who watch the extended version vs. aired version.

Podcast

Ron Moore: Hello and welcome to the last podcast of Battlestar Galactica. I'm Ron Moore, the executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. Here to welcome you to the podcast for "Daybreak." And I'm joined, at least for a short while, by my lovely and talented wife, Mrs. Ron: Terry Moore.

Terry Moore: I mean, we should call me "Terry" this.

Ron Moore: We'll just call you Terry just to―

Terry Moore: Although, I don't know. Should we call me Mrs. Ron?

Ron Moore: Mrs. Ron to the bitter end.

Terry Moore: Maybe.

Ron Moore: Maybe. Well, lot to talk about: long episode because we're going to do the whole finale at once. We'll take a break here and there as as needed.

Terry Moore: I'm going to check out a little bit because I think that you guys deserve to have Ron solo, but he didn't want to do it all completely by himself. And I just want to say the "okay thread". I got my― We got our chickens. We got eight chickens sitting in their in the kitchen. A live chickens. Live chickens, I should.

Ron Moore: Yes, live chicken.

Terry Moore: Just a little aside. The Scotch for tonight is Highland 25, brand new special bottle for the occasion and the cigarettes, later on after Mrs. Ron has excused herself, will be Export―the taste of Canada.

Ron Moore: The second half of the season: because the Writer's Strike gave me time to reconsider and think about some of the directions that we were going and we decided to abandon some of those those those ideas. well let's talk a little bit about here: this open the finale as the on air finale has been restructured a couple of times from the scripted version.

Terry Moore: I haven't seen this.

Character Flashbacks

Ron Moore: The scripted version of the finale: the flashbacks were intermingled all the way through the show and they were not chronological in that in the opening you cut from Laura in sickbay with the drip-drip-drip of her IV to the fountain of Laura, and you the first flashback you saw of Laura was her in the fountain. Likewise, you saw pieces of Adama at the strip club. You saw Lee with the broom and the pigeon. you saw Kara and Lee together drinking and you saw all these things out of order. And as the episode progressed, I just dropped in pieces of backstory for each one of them along the way and they were, like I said, they were nonlinear. They were out of order and when you read it on the page it was very effective and people really responded to the script which was very gratifying to me. They really loved it and liked it and there was something about the nonlinear nature of all the flashbacks in the original draft that was really compelling and interesting, and you were trying to figure out what the puzzle was about when you put it together. When it was actually filmed and cut together that way, one of the first things Michael Rymer did was he said "Okay, when it's nonlinear like that you're watching it as a piece. It's just too confusing."

You couldn't hold all the images in your head at the same time for all these different plot threads. So, the first thing he did was to take them and make them chronological. When you did, they were still scattered throughout the show, but they were chronological in that you started at the beginning of the Baltar story, you started at the beginning of the Laura story, etc., etc., and went all the way to the end. That version with different monkeying around [was] the version that we initially went through, but then that version didn't seem to work as well.

Mark Stern, network executive at Sci-Fi Channel, who's been the creative exec on this project since the beginning―since the Miniseries―he said, "You know what? I'm just I'm having trouble connecting to it. I'm not connecting to these pieces as well as I should. And I love the script and I'm really supportive of the finale, but I I just can't emotionally invest and something's wrong and I can't quite get there." And at first I was like, "Wow, oh my god, really? It's not working?" And then I just went back in the editing room and sat down with the editors and Andy Seklir, our supervising editor, [and] came up with the idea: Why don't we just group them? Why don't we start off the show with a block of them so you kind of understand what the nature of the project is that you're going in? As Andy said, the flashbacks are the story really. I mean, it's really about these characters, and who they were and who they become, and where they end up. Why don't we start with that? And suddenly, when you blocked them together―when you open the finale with the block of flashbacks, and then eventually got to Galactica, it just gave everything a completely different flavor.

Suddenly the whole thing came together and Mark loved it, and then suddenly we we realized that the whole piece was going to work, and it was instructive to watch the process―or you know, to be in the process and see how it it changed from from page, to stage, to post. The individual stories that were telling in the back stories―here some of them were in the original show bible: the story of Laura Roslin's sisters all being killed and along with her father in a drunk driving accident was something actually I wrote in the show bible in part of her character backtory before.

Terry Moore: Do you assume that people have already seen the episode before you tell them that?

Ron Moore: Yeah, because the podcast never comes out until the episode's over.

Terry Moore: Oh, that's true. What if they wait?

Ron Moore: If they wait, then they shouldn't be listening to the podcast first because we give away, I always give away the―

Terry Moore: I know you can't really complain about spoilers.

Ron Moore: No, you can't. So the story of Laura was about connecting the pieces of how Laura eventually ended up on Galactica. I mean, the thought behind all the flashbacks was "it's about the characters."

We were having trouble―I was having trouble breaking the finale in the room with the writers. We had a construct. We had a general idea of what was going to happen. We knew we had to that the charact―that the everyone would have to go rescue Hera from The Colony and bring her back, and that by the end of it we would we would arrive at Earth and wrap up the show. And we were struggling with the mechanics of the plot. We were struggling with: How do they get aboard The Colony? What's the battle? What's the big twist? How does A lead to B lead to C? And it was just really unsatisfying. I had a very difficult day doing it.

Came home from a break session, was in a bad mood, and Terry said, "Why don't you go take a shower and chill out?" And I went upstairs, took a shower, and in the shower, I just had this epiphany that it was, "What am I doing? It's the characters stupid." It always has been. It's that the show has never been about the plot so much as it's been about these people and how these people reacted to the various things that we threw.

Terry Moore: I think you should go into that a little bit since people are having such a reaction to that story.

Ron Moore: Oh, she's reading―Terry's reading some of the online comments on part one of Daybreak.

Terry Moore: And maybe you should just explain it a little bit better so they know your thinking.

Ron Moore: Well, I always felt that from the beginning when I pitched the series, I said the show is going to be about the characters first and foremost. It's going to be a drama before it's a sci-fi series, before it's an action adventure piece, before it's anything else. It's a drama. It's about these people. It's about their lives. It's about who they are what their loves, their likes, their dislikes, their heartbreaks, what it is that makes them human beings. It was the series was always going to be about that. And then I went that day in the shower, I realized that's how we have to end the show. The show is going to be about the characters to the end.

Terry Moore: It's not at the expense of the plot. It's that that has been your focus.

Ron Moore: That's always been my focus.

Terry Moore: Okay. So, you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Ron Moore: No, no, no. We had a plot. I mean, the plot was going to work. I always have faith that you're going to figure out a plot, but character work is much more difficult and much more nuanced and requires more more thought and work. these when I came back into the writers room the next day and I wrote up on the board up on the white erase board gets the character stupid. It kind of freed everybody up. I said, "We're just going to set aside the plot for the moment. Let's talk about what we want to do with these characters. What do we want to learn about them?" And I think it was David Wed who said, "I just want to find out about things about these people I don't know. I'm just interested in their lives and who they are." And I said, "Well, the first image I have, because I had had this idea in the shower, too. I said I just I don't know what the story is about the characters, but I have this image of a man in a house with a broom and he's trying to chase a bird out of the house that's gotten into the rafters. And that's an image. And I said, "Let's just write that down on a card and put it up on the board." And I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know who had the broom, why why there was a bird in his house or where it was, but I loved it as an image and we just put it up there. And then from then, we started other images, other ideas. You know, Laura in the fountain was something that I'd wanted to do in an episode a long time ago. And okay, Laura's in the fountain. Why is she in the fountain? And then we started talking about her backstory and the car crash and the death of her sister. And then we started talking about Baltar and what do we do with Baltar and I wanted to find out that Baltar had a more complicated life before the miniseries began than then we realized that you know in the miniseries he's pres presented as this playboy. He's this genius scientist playboy rich you know lots of women narcissistic devil may care you know and is just living the life. And I wanted to discover that actually nobody really lives like that. Everybody has a family. Everybody has has traumas and dramas and everybody has these things in their life and even Gas Baltar had a father and had to deal with him and had to deal with him getting old and had to deal with this unpleasant reminder of where he came from with all the emotional baggage that came came along with it.

Terry Moore: Well, what's so great is that it really does explain so much of why he does what he does later on and his his essential deep insecurity that never leaves this character. I mean, why is he willing to do the crazy stupid shit that he's willing to do.

Ron Moore: Yeah.

Terry Moore: You know, and why is he so incredibly insecure? He's the most insecure character on this show.

Ron Moore: And marrying it into the plot, it also this storyline shows you how the relationship between him and Capria 6 came to be. What were the what was the crucial building block? And why would he let this woman access to the mainframe computer that he that he knew was classified, that he knew was top secret, that he knew he shouldn't be letting anyone in. And there was something fascinating to me about discovering that he did it out of to say thank you in a way. He did it because she had done his done this generous thing for his father who she didn't even know. And out of that he grew to love her in some way even though he couldn't he could barely bring himself to think that or say that. He there was an emotional tie between him and this woman that essentially he decided to do this gener what he thought was this generous thing that he could get in trouble for. and somehow that led to the destruction of the human race and I I thought that was a fascinating complicated story and you know how did you look at that and how did you feel about that but it was a very human story

Terry Moore: well and for somebody as shallow and insecure as Guy Balar to have some woman that he's just you know screwing around with have that kind of act of human compassion has to reach him on some level because he doesn't really believe in who he is

Ron Moore: um

Terry Moore: what's the matter worry about the sound levels. so that was the idea behind the flashbacks. There are there is a chunk of flashbacks that are actually missing from the air version. On the DVD, there's going to be a longer version of the finale, another 20 minutes or so that that was cut for the on air. And there's a series of flashbacks that have to do with Boomer and Helo and Tier. And when Boomer was a rook aboard Galactica and you see the first time she and Tier kissed and you see Cal telling Cheryl not to trust her and you see Hilo's longing for her you know, quietly expressed. And ultimately, that was the plot line that felt like we didn't need it.

Terry Moore: That's so poignant.

Ron Moore: Let me just imagine your whole family.

Terry Moore: Yeah, essentially her whole family because her mother was had already died sometime before that of cancer.

Ron Moore: It's just staggering.

Terry Moore: going back to I I started the podcast talking about there was an alternate ending that we were going to do. , there was a longer plot that had all to do with once Ellen woke up aboard the Cylon Colony with Cabell and realized who she was and we got through the backstory of the final five, which we which was pretty much the same. , the idea was that essentially she was going to once she found out that out there somewhere her husband was not that u Tigh was actually involved with a Cylon where he was involved with a with a six and that he had impregnated her that you know she was essentially going to become enraged, bitter, angry and all this flood of emotion that that was always part of Ellen was going to turn her against them and she was going to she and Cavil were going to become the big baddies in the show and they were going to kidnap kidnap Hera. I'm looking back at my notes trying to reconstruct this here. Balar Tori meets with Cavil decid discovers that Ellen is alive. Let me go back a little bit. Oh, that's the end of the act. Let me run back here to where we were going. Essentially, we were saying that in episode 14, Ellen was going to resurrect with Cavil. we were going to establish he was the er one the seeds of discontent were going to grow in the fleet. Everyone is beyond demoralized. Zerich co-ops gay to work with him. There was the revolution which became the mutiny story in episode 15. we were going to do the whole mutiny story that here it's noted as the insurrection French revolution committee of public safety. Zerk and Gada take would have taken Galactica to attack the base ship Cylon and at that moment Cavil Cylons were going to attack. So at the very moment that Galactica ICA and the rebel base ship were at each other's throats. Cavil silons were going to come in and attack and that was going to lay waste to about half the fleet. Adama and the rebel silons were going to retake Galactica and at that point Baltar saved Hera. Boomer and Cavil were captured. Ti starts to bring Boomer around to our side. It ended with a successful counterattack against Caval's forces and the capture of a Cavil and a and Boomer. Adama banished the mutineers including Zer Za Zerk and Gada. or gathers the fleet captains and gives fleet captains and gives them the option to leave. The fleet scattered went off in different directions. The idea was Eric was going to take a group of his own people that believed in in in charting a different course and they were going to go off into the cosmos by themselves. in episode 17, Tori was going to meet with Cavil and discover that Ellen is alive. Tori was going to use the Balterites to start Helter Skelter kind of crazy murderous. The cult was going to become dangerous and murderous below decks. and you were going to have this whole blood in the halls kind of story. , Baltar turned him made Baltar turns over and realizes what he's unleashed and he was going to turn himself in along with his followers. in episode 18, Tier was going to discover at that point that Nikki was Naro's son was the original idea. , in episode 19, Cavil was going to talk Ellen into being a loyalist El Sid character with, and this is where we were going to reveal him as the Lucifer of the skin. of the final five. Lucifer of the seven skin jobs against the final five and all that backstory was going to come out there. U Baltar and Cavil were going to calculate that the human race will die off in three generations and that the only viable future was together through Hera. And if we said Capria 6 was going to lose her child about this time because Tigh never truly loved her, Baltar and Capria 6 were going to start to reconcile and Hera would become her replacement child. In episode 20, the rebels were then going to unite behind what we were calling the Fab Five at that Fab 4 at that point. Boomer was going to tell us about Cab Caval's ethnic cleansing back in Sylonia we were still calling it just killing boxing the other models that didn't agree with him and she was going to Boomer was going to have us convince the other models to join a human silent alliance then build up a fleet of base ships for the for the battle and in episode 21 there was going to be an Amar Armageddon massive attack on Sylonia from the Galactic ICA and the masses of spaceships. Cavil escapes with Ellen in the last spaceship with Hera. And in episode 22, it was much more the finale was much more vague. Kara was going to find Earth. It was like look behind the yellow sun and that it was that the battle the previous battle and the escape of Caball had taken them to a different section of the galaxy where there was a yellow sun and Kara had some inspiration and said our earth is there and she finally finds Earth through through the final five in some mechanism. We didn't know why. Helo and Athena were going to sacrifice themselves. They were both going to die for Hera and the survival of the human race.

Terry Moore: What are you trying to do? Go over the entire series.

Ron Moore: Well, I was going through the alternate.

Terry Moore: Oh, okay.

Ron Moore: the battle start they were once they found Earth. Well, the gag was going to be ultimately it was Ellen versus Ty. Ty with us. Ellen with Cavil and Tigh trying to convince Ellen to call off the last war and the final battle and ultimately bringing her back to the side of the angels. And it was it all kind of boiled down to that to this the marital tension between Tigh and Ellen that transcended many generations and thousands of years. That was the concept. And when they found Earth, the battle star was going to crash onto Earth or jump onto the planet surface of Earth or something. We didn't quite have what that was. And then like Cortez they were going to Adama was going to order the ship burned to show the commitment to staying on this earth. Carr was going to disappear. Adama and Laura were going to get a raptor and just go off into the stars. and then we got into a lot of the same things that this actually ends with the population beginning to rebuild and Lee saying, "No, let's not do this again." and realizing that that that both races were doomed without Hera and that the love of a human and a Cylon together had saved the future. And that if they hadn't brought Hera to Earth, the human race as we know it today would not practically exist because Hera was going to be the mother of in in a in a genetic sense of everyone here today. So what did you want to say to

Terry Moore: nothing? I was just asking you're going to try to bring everybody up with the plot for the whole?

Ron Moore: that was the concept that's kind of scattershot. There's a lot of ideas in there but essentially that was it was a very different arc because it was all going to center around a split in the final five between Ellen and Tigh and various battles and plot mesh and in terms of the writing the writing process. What happens when you have a you know this this plot generally laid out and then you deviated you know why and how does that work? It's not just happen stance. It's not just

Ron Moore: well we threw it away because during the writer strike I started to think that that wasn't going to work that you couldn't hang the whole end of the series on Tigh versus Ellen. That that wasn't going to be a satisfying final journey for the for the characters. And I started to have second thoughts about it. And as the strike went on, I just had more and more time to think about it. And I was just determined that we had to go back in the room and start over. So that was the first thing we did is we got back in the room and we I said, "Let's just throw all this out. I don't think this works for this, that, and the other reason. Let's start over." And then we started saying, "What are the things we really like?" We liked the idea of the French Revolution insurrection kind of plotline that eventually became the mutiny arc in season 4 and Gada's death and Zerk's death and all of that. We knew we wanted like the story of Lucifer as C. who turned against God and because he wasn't he wasn't beloved enough. There's the end of the act

Terry Moore: coming back.

Terry Moore: And is this the way it works in a writer's room?

Ron Moore: Yeah. You you you lay out an idea, a chart, an idea, but then sometimes you're staring at it up on the board and you just say, "This isn't going to work or I don't like this or it's just not holding together or we're struggling too long to figure out this problem here in the fourth act." And

Terry Moore: what happens if you stick with it no matter what just because you said that's what you were going to do?

Ron Moore: then you just get bad bad work and bad material and you're not inspired. You have to be free, in my opinion, you have to be free and willing to go back and throw it all out and start all over again and invent something else because no matter how much you've charted it and said, "Okay, this is the plan. This is what we're going to do for the season. When you get down to it, when you're sitting there actually doing the work, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work." And you have to you have to free yourself up from that. And you have to be willing to improvise and you have to be willing to take chances and go in different directions and just kind of see what the Fallout is going to be. I knew from when we did break this episode finally, when we had got gotten through all the rebroken all the other episodes and sent them off to drafts, we held off the break of the final episode for quite a while. And when we finally did sit down to break it, like I said, day one wasn't very productive. Day two, suddenly everything just broke loose. When we came up with the flashbacks and what the interior stories of those flashbacks were going to be we just threw the cards up on the board randomly and said, "Okay, these are generally the ideas for these for these these story lines and that these is really the backbone of the of the show and it's really going to be about these particular story lines and not so much about about the plot because the plot was going to be very straightforward and we kind of knew what the plot was going to be. It was going to be about attacking The Colony, a last big battle and rescuing the little girl and that during that process Galactica would make her last jump. And when she made her last jump, it would break the back of the ship and that would be it. And when you turned around, there would be Earth. And then, oh my god, you've actually arrived at Earth. And we knew that that was the structure of the last few episodes. And I knew we were in good shape because I went up to Vancouver. I was up on the set for some reason and I was talking to some of the actors and they were asking me about the finale and I pitched out just that much. I said, "Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to get to a place where Cavil has Hera. Adama first doesn't want to go. after her, but he he thinks that he just can't leave that little girl behind and then he asks for volunteers and only a few people decide to go. The Galactica goes, the ship's falling apart. , all hell breaks loose. They get the little girl. They're trying to jump the hell out of there. And they don't know where to go. Car cars at the controls and Donna says, "Just jump. Jump anywhere. It doesn't matter." And then she puts it together. She realizes that there's there's meaning in the music and she enters in the coordinates that she had she had constructed out of the music of all along the watchtower and that the coordinates of that would take them to earth and that and when I told the cast that they all went wow I love that that's great and I knew that I really had something and that's when I started feel really confident about the direction that we were going so the plot as such was always kind of in hand we always kind of knew what the plot was but you know it was about how do you make it special how do you make it interesting how is it worthy of the show and how does the finale really you know comment on the entire piece that is Battlestar Galactica how is it the end end of this epic saga that we've been telling and that seemed like it always had to come back to the characters because it was always about the characters from the get-go. When I pitched the series originally, I spent more time talking about the characters than and who they were. Who was Carth Race? Who was Billama than I did about you know the plot of the miners?

Terry Moore: It's always been about the journey of these people in these circumstances and asking us as the viewer to imagine ourselves in in their place and what choices we would make. I love it. I love the I love the flashbacks because it it tells me so much about why they are doing what they're doing now. I mean why is he the way he is? We've had little glimpses along the way of their history, but it feels like it now fits that Laura is the president of the colonies because her family was killed in a car accident and wouldn't have been there probably otherwise.

Ron Moore: Now, when it came time to film all this, the production was very complex because this is a very large piece. Again, it was scripted and designed to be a two-hour finale. We always knew we were going to do a two-hour finale for the end. And that was how I wrote it. I wrote it as a 2-hour piece. And the draft came in a little on the long side, but not obscenely so. But when you got right down to it, it was there was no way we could shoot it in the 20 in the in the 16 days that were allocated to shoot. And suddenly it became became a big question. Well, wait a minute. What are we going to do? Are we going to gut this thing? You know, are we going to have to take all the flashbacks out? Is it going to become just a straightup action piece? And I was just I refused to do that. And I played a game of chicken with the network and the studio. And I the network actually, it's more the studio than the network on this on this on this level. the network loved the finale from the from the get-go. Really liked the script. The actors all liked the script. And then it became a question about money. And that's where it became playing chicken with the studio and I just s said I wasn't going to change it and we had to do it. This was what the show was about and you weren't going to make me like s you know compromise in the finale and I didn't make any changes and we kept prepping and I kept getting these calls about well you know I don't know if we're going to be able to do this and I don't know how you're going to get this into two hours and then the idea came up I think from Todd Sharp who's the head of production at Universal saying well what if we made it a threeh hour would would that be able to make this work. And I said, "Yeah, if it was three, if you gave me 3 hours and I had the sufficient production time, that would do it." And he said, "Well, I don't know if I can get you the money, but I'll try and no promises." and Todd's been a huge supporter and huge fan of the show all along. So, once he once that was his idea and I knew he would kind of run with it, I started feeling like we were going to pull this off. And lo and behold, they they came up with the money and there were a lot of people at the studio who were fans of the show. I mean, the great thing about this series has been that the people that you work for, the people at the network and the studio became fan fans of the series as well and started to love the show as much as you did. And at the very end when the chips were down and we were seriously over budget and we were looking at there's the end of the act when we were at the end of the series and we were looking at major cost overruns and budgeting an extra hour that an extra hour had not been contemplated. Spending millions, literally millions of dollars to do this and adding a third hour to the broadcast schedule and I'm me saying this is the way the show has to end. Ultimately, they said yes. Every one of them said yes. And they they moved to heaven and earth to make it happen. And you know, I think that a lot of people in my position find ways to bitch about their employers and the studios and the networks they work for. And I've certainly bitched about the studio and the network in the course of this series. But I have to say, when I really needed them. When I really needed them to put their money where their mouth was and I really needed them to back me and I really needed consideration in this series in the way that I wanted to, they were there for me and they made it happen and I I will always be grateful for that and I will always respect them for for doing that because they really came through.

Ron Moore: Unfortunately, as not to take anything away from that, this was not shown as a three-hour episode.

Terry Moore: No, I mean you broke off the way you meant to do it.

Ron Moore: Yeah, the first hour was broken off and shown a week earlier, which I thought was a mistake and I said at the time, but I was I didn't I made my case. I made my argument as strong as I could that you it only really worked when you put them together cuz that's how it was designed and shot and you know that was the whole concept, but they just couldn't. They they just decided for their own scheduling purposes that they had to do it this way. So, as a consequence, a lot of people saw hour one by itself and then like, "Huh, what is this?" And, "Huh, these flashbacks don't make any sense." And well, yeah, they don't make any sense because it was the first hour of a three hour piece. So you have to kind of watch all three hours together to even understand what the

Terry Moore: So, then you go back and you do that when it's out on DVD.

Ron Moore: Yeah. Well, you should watch them together on DVD or what hopefully people are watching all three hours together on the on the on the night that it airs.

Ron: Yeah, they are. They're doing all three hours of the night. back to what's on screen at the moment. This scene with Baltar and Lee is actually a nice little piece and I wrote it. I remember when I was writing the finale, there were little things I wanted to do and I wanted to put certain characters together for the last time. I want to had certain antagonisms played out for the last time. One of them was Lee and Baltar. And I also just frankly wanted to wanted to give Jaime and James a last scene together because they're they're very good friends of the cast. And I just thought it would be cool and I wanted them to each have wanted them to both have a moment together in the finale. There was lots of like what's the last time they're going to be in CIC? What's the last little bit here and there and that really influenced my writing of it as I was going through. It was a wish list of what I wanted to do in the finale. The last little bits that I wanted to see this bit with the pigeon here and Lee is out of sequence. You know, this is actually the end of the arc of Kara and Lee Lee's little arc in the show. This is after we in in in the story so far. You haven't seen the fact that they got drunk and almost slept together. But this is him arriving back at his house after after almost sleeping with Kara and finding the bird in there. And what does the bird mean? You know, and what does the metaphor and what's the symbolism of the bird? You know what? I don't know. on some level it's it's just art and I don't know what it means. It was just an image that came to me in the shower and I thought it belonged in the show and that it had some meaning and that there was something about birds and something about flight and something about Lee struggling with the broom to get it out of his house and when it eventually did fly out the window and it just fit and I couldn't say why it fit and I didn't couldn't say what it meant but I knew that it belonged in the show. this whole beat of Adama and Kara putting the tape on the deck and putting the line down the center and making people choose comes actually out of one of my favorite stories from American history out of the Alamo. when I was a kid, my father used to always make us watch John Wayne's version of the Alamo every year when it came on network TV, which it was a twoight that tells you everything.

Ron: It's been about standing on stand choosing choosing sides. You know, are you worthy enough? And goes right back. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the show and

Terry: what are you willing to do?

Ron: Are we are we are we worthy of survival was the question Adama posited in the original in the in the original miniseries and are we are we worthy of surviving?

Terry: And what are you willing to do in order to survive?

Ron: Yeah. And what are the risks you're willing to take and what does it say about you? And I so the line to me was a powerful idea and I wanted it was also important to me you'll see coming up that when they do make their choices most of the crew doesn't go into the act oh I was saying you know most of the crew doesn't actually go with him most of the crew actually stays behind aboard ship because that's actually what they would do

Ron: adjusting the microphone obsessively sorry hello

Ron: truly there's a great little bit with Laura in her in her apartment on the phone setting up the date with Shawn. it was Mary Mary wanted sushi. It was actually her choice to have sushi in the in the in the is what Laura was sitting there eating and you know that that goes to some specific thing of Mary's that I don't I I don't know. But you know, it's like who cares? And sure, she could eat sushi and as the series makes clear by the end of the finale, all this all the culture that's in the show that we feel like is from us is actually from them. So, it felt like sure, you put in whatever you want.

Ron: I was there when they shot this stuff. Actually, I went up for a few days of the end of the of the final episode and I was up in Vancouver for this and I remember in between takes walk walking out from this apartment out onto the roof of the apartment building with Michael Rymer and everyone else and standing there and smoking and looking out at the skyline and while this was shooting, Capria was also shooting the pilot was shooting simultaneously and there were days and during the final shoot when I would literally go between sets between locations of the finale of Battlestar Galactica and the beginning of Capria and there was a really I don't know it was really moving and it was really amusing at the same time that you know there were times on the soundstages where they were shooting on adjacent soundstages and I had two pairs of headsets on with like a a com which is a little device you wear in your belt and you put on the headsets and it allows you to listen to what's being fed through the microphone on the stage. And I had one set of headphones for Galactica and another set of headphones for Capria. And I would literally walk out the soundstage door, walk across the aisle, the alley into the next soundstage, and I could watch the beginning and the end of two of my shows. And that was a unique moment in my life that I will never forget that that sense of the circle of life kind of thing. One was ending, one was beginning. and I was intimately involved with both. And there were people I cared about on both sets. And there was the freshness and the unknown quality of one of who knows where this was all going to go. And then on the other, it was laden with memory and nostalgia and a sense of remorse and a sense of pride. And you just had this in tremendous whip whiplash effect of the two of the two two sound stages. this is all there's obviously a great deal of CGI going on here about extending the deck down many, many sections past what it actually is on the stage. we Gary Hutzel filled in the crowd digitally to make it much larger than it is.

Ron: The idea that it's everybody or is that really everybody?

Ron: This is supposed to be everybody aboard ship. It's supposed to be down here right now except for the watch keepers who are actually up on the CIC manning the watch and in engineering spaces and stuff like that. there is a little bit of there was a a cut in here coming up. There was a little bit more with Balar and Paula where Baltar was tempted to go across the line and wanted to go across the line and Paula kind of talked him out of it and he eventually stayed and I just cut it because it kind of slowed it up when you were looking for cuts. He didn't need it anyway. The look on Ballar's face kind of told you that he was tempted and then he ultimately went back.

Terry: I love that.

Ron: I love this thing with Codle.

Ron: Donnelly Rhodess is one of the great unsung heroes of the show. I mean he's a really been a He goes

Terry: great at he wants to go and Odama sends him back and I also give him a first name here for the f you know there's something interesting about the characters you never give first names to and the actors kind of notice

Ron: you know there's like something about actors that don't have first names kind of get annoyed about it and are it's feel like half a person

Ron: and Donnie never said a word I mean he never said anything to me that codle didn't have a first name but there was something satisfying about being able to say at the very end that it's Sherman was his name

Terry: Sherman

Ron: Sherman Codle right there that beat with Baltar is actually a little longer. So, you can kind of tell he's just had a conversation with her.

Terry: It's a great

Ron: He started to go forward and now he's kind of stepping back.

Ron: This is digital, too. We've actually extended the number of people. This is a pickup.

Ron: That's so moving.

Ron: I know. I love And the way Mary plays it, you can really feel the fragility

Terry: and him.

Ron: Yeah, him too.

Terry: Everybody should have a man like that in their lives.

Ron: Yes. Kara,

Ron: that's the shot I wanted. I kept saying I wanted a smaller group going than a group staying behind because that felt real. I mean, what you expect is

Terry: families, people

Ron: and you expect everybody and their brother to go. You expect everyone to volunteer and they would

Terry: they wouldn't go.

Ron: Everybody wants to think that they

Ron: Everybody wants to think that they would, but not in tr in truth they wouldn't racrack and skulls I mean, I it's it's great that I I got to use them again and we kind of it's an in joke there of her of racetrack saying it's same old skulls saying when you got when you got to stick your ass out over the edge and see who's going to take a bite, send racetrack and skulls and that's great because I had used them all through the series is they're the ones that make the key discoveries and the key finds. U we wanted a big scary place for The Colony to be. I mean, the question was where would The Colony be? What's the most interesting place to go. We decided, okay, it's going to be near a black hole and go right for the sci-fi aspect of it and put it in a really dangerous spot where it would be really hard to get to. the notion here is that there's a black hole at the center and that there's all this this current. It's almost like a whirlpool of debris and stuff swirling around and that it would be virtually impossible for the Galactica to jump in and wage a conventional attack against The Colony. And that forces them to take this take this different approach that they come up with here. And we just wanted to set up the you want to set classically, you want to set up the impossible task that then they have to find a way to make possible. And then that was where we began. And when we were figuring out where part one ended, where Daybreak part one would end, we Andy said Andy Seceler said, well, what if we end with let's get to work. He thought he could find a way to maneuver the pieces around slightly and adjust the timings on the different acts so that this would fall at the end of night one. So, we weren't giving away any of the battle. We weren't giving away any of the big surprises, but that night one would have a coherence to it. I kind of feel like night one is it's not a satisfying episode by itself. It's just not an episode. I mean, Daybreak part one is just a prologue. And so, there's the to be continued. And I always I I still continue to think that it's it's best seen only in conjunction with the other two episodes. Okay, welcome back to the podcast. We're now going to do day part two. I'm still Ronald Dymore and I'm still the executive producer and still developer in the new Battle Star Galactica. Mrs. Ron is not here at the moment. she's taking a time out to give me pause so I can smoke eight export a taste of Canada, which is not their slogan, but probably should be.

Ron: For the record, I really don't smoke that much contrary to popular belief. I smoke in Canada, almost exclusively on the sound or heads downstages and I'm mostly a social smoker that enjoyed smoking with James and Michael Hogan and various other members of the cast that like to smoke and I I essentially enjoyed the camaraderie of it and decided I didn't didn't give a fuck whether you know it was socially politically correct at the moment or not. I just enjoyed it and decided to smoke with the cast and export a were my cigarette of choice

Daybreak, Part II

Ron: So here like I said Now I'm looking at the recap for for "Daybreak, Part II." as I said before, this was never designed to be broken into two pieces of an hour and then two hours. It was always designed to be a contiguous story. Originally, it was written as a two-hour finale and then it was broken up or it was expanded into three hours once the production realities of actually shooting this became apparent. and when they gave us the budget to do so. but the I still fought very hard to keep the 3 hours together because I knew that part one was not going to be that satisfying in and of itself. It's not really a cohesive coherent episode. It's really part of this larger story. But you know what? the network and the studio both had given me a lot of latitude. They had spent a great deal of money that they weren't planning to spend to do the finale. So the fact that I lost the argument about only showing them as a three-hour together and breaking off the first hour. It doesn't kill me. It's just one of those things. And it's okay. Ultimately, the show will live together on DVD as one piece and it will live together in whatever formats there are in the future and online. I don't know that anyone will ever want to watch just part one by itself. Here's the strip club where Tigh and Adama have their conversation. there are more scenes in the strip club of Tigh and Adama together. with Ellen coming into the scene later on. U there are there's a scene shot that is on the DVD version that you can you can look at where Ellen actually gets up on stage and starts stripping for the crowd as well as part of her you know she's a a libertine. She's sexually free. She likes showing off. I kept saying during the production meaning that it was important to me that the strip club feel very co-ed because you know what we had said about the the battle star society was is that it was very genderneutral in a certain way. And that was always very important to me in this concept of this reality that there there there weren't a lot of stereotypical roles for men and women in a certain sense, although they were still men and still women. You know, I got uncomfortable with the fact that we were using that bitch was an epithet. And even though I think I used it myself in one in one episode where Carth said the bitch took my ride, I started really getting sensitive about it and really saying this is a very genderneutral world. And so I wanted the strip club to also be gender neutral and I wanted there. I said in the production meeting several times that there should be male strippers as well. I wasn't there when they shot this which may surprise some of you that I wasn't there on the day of the strippers but there I wasn't. And I don't think they I don't know if they actually did have male strippers or if they just Michael Rymer show chose not to shoot them or feature them in the cut. But essentially the idea was it was supposed to be a pretty much a co-ed strip club that it wasn't really just a gathering place for men that women were there watching men strip and men were watching men strip and women were watching and it was just this free-for-all kind of sexual place.

Ron: Sean Allison here with Laura.

Ron: Thank you. The idea was you know that Laura realizes that he's one of her students which brings home her age, her mortality, which is a theme for her throughout the series of her own of the ephemeral nature of life and her impending death. And she's reminded of that in this moment where she's trying to forget about the death of her of her family and try to move on with her life and trying to enjoy herself. And she's brought short by the fact that this this tall, very tall, very handsome man you know was actually one of her own students and I liked the idea that that was actually the catalyst for for what pushed her into Adar's political campaign and ultimately brought her to the end. I was up in Vancouver for this scene. This is as I said in part one. This was one of the scenes that they were shooting in in Laura's apartment where I was I'm outside this room watching this on video the video monitor with my headset on and I would walk out onto the city out onto the rooftop and look out at the city of Vancouver. And I remember standing there

Ron: some time ago

Ron: on the rooftop and looking out of Vancouver and realizing how much I love the city, how much what a powerful city it had been in my life. how the show was so powerful to me and here I was wrapping this up and as I looked out across the city skyline, I knew that Capria was shooting at that very moment somewhere else. And so that this my my association with Vancouver and my association with the Battlestar universe was not entirely over, but there was an ending that was happening in front of my my very eyes. Apologize for the banging in the background. That's one of the cats trying to get the fuck into this room, which I've barricaded to try to keep him out. Hey,

Ron: it was cool that I was really glad that we were able to bring back the actor who plays Zach for this thing in the finale. You know, there was a concerted effort on my part to try to bring back as many familiar faces as we could to try to bring a lot of you know beginnings and endings together to hearken back to the miniseries to hearken back to the roots of the relationship. You know, in the miniseries we talked there's the scene the the backstory of Zach and Kara is is right there from the very beginning. I wanted to revisit that here. This moment right here where Katie picks up the glasses and she giggles and she says time for shots is one of my favorite in the finale and it's it's really kind of definitive for who she is as a character and I think as an actress I think that's Katie you know that's that's Katie it's like why you you know you you just got to love her you just got to love Katie Sackoff I mean that glee that joy that she does that little line reading with the shot glasses just I love her I just absolutely adore her and then here's a looking up in the night sky This transition from the starry sky to then go out to the stars and then discover Galactica is a little out of style for us. We don't usually do a transition like this because we kind of kind of hue to the more naturalistic sense of always being true to the documentary sense and we don't really try to do very stylized transitions like that. But here in the finale, it just felt like it was a moment that you had to do.

Ron: this was literally the last scene shot in this set

Ron: of Baltar's lair as we called it in set description and you know this had a whistful sense to it as well and one of the last Baltar heads six moment aboard Galactica and you know James plays it well and that you know it's just a classic moment between hearing him and six

Terry: guiding them to their end

Ron: Jesus the cats really see the cats always want to get into where they're where they're not

Ron: Terry can you call this cat Okay,

Ron: cats are just always trying to get in where they they're not supposed to be, as anyone who knows cats will tell you. You'll notice that the gull emblem is up above the door there. gull was a an acronym for God, unity, life, and love. End of the act.

Ron: I take that back what I was saying a moment ago. A gull is actually for grace, unity, life, and love, which was this concept that one of the writers came up with to symbolize that the gull symbol would be part of Baltar's cult and we never really said it very often on camera. This scene was important to me because I felt like Codle was a key figure in Laura's life and she had never really thanked him. And here at the very very end, I thought it was important to acknowledge the fact that she hadn't been the easiest patient and he has this gruff manner and he has this fuck you attitude towards his patients on some level and smokes in their presence and all that kind of stuff. But I did want to acknowledge that there that she understood that she knew that what he had done for her and that she was willing to acknowledge it at the very end and that that it was it was part of who Laura Roslin was, but she wasn't going to leave this unsaid. You know, that

Ron: given that other people might not ever say something like this to this to this man, to this doctor, and many people probably had not to said anything like this to the character, but I thought, you know what, Laura would and that she would be moved by it. And I thought it would be a lovely touching moment and it is.

Terry: Well, I don't know what to say.

Ron: No, no, don't don't.

Terry: Don't spoil your image. Just light a cigarette and go.

Ron: Just light a cigarette and go.

Terry: Is it your patient now, EJ?

Ron: You know, Donnelly plays it really, really well.

Terry: You say hi.

Ron: And that There's a a point that kind of gets lost a little bit is how pumped full of drugs Laura is to get through these last couple of days that she's taking injections that are essentially keeping her going and keeping her on her feet and she can barely see.

Terry: But one thing's clear. Raptors get the toughest job.

Ron: And this was great. This little beat with Helo and the Raptor pilots there's there's a certain camaraderie almost a tribalism among among pilots in their aircraft. And you know, fighter pilots are different than bomber pilots.

Ron: Two ships on the line slugging it out at point blank.

Ron: And I like this idea too that you know the Galactica was going to be so close to The Colony that it was going to take them back to the kind of battles that the ship in Adama's quarters would have fought. You know, the famous model that that Eddie destroyed a couple of times was a was a was a a ship of the line

Ron: and that he that the ships of the line, they would come up against each other and they would just try to lay lay their ships alongside one another and they just blast away and I like the idea that that was Galactica's last mission was going to be like an or an ancient ship like a sailing ship ship of the line battling it out muzzle to muzzle, cannon to cannon with the with the enemy. There's a dropped scene here after this scene that is in the extended version. after Tier says there's only the best way to do this is to put him hook him into CIC, there's another scene that's really great that hurt to cut, but we had to cut for the air time where T and Kara go to Adama's quarters and confront him with this idea. And it's the last gasp of Adama saying, "I don't want I mean, Jesus, he now has to network his ship. He now literally has to hook a silon into the CIC and he freaks out about it and says no and Kara yells at him back and it's a great little scene and you can see it on the DVD. There's yet another reason to buy

Ron: spaceship and the fleet are yours."

Ron: I also thought it was important to say, well, if Adama leaves and Laura leaves, what would the human race look like and who would be in charge. And I wanted to lay that predicate down to say that, okay, they really are taking this seriously. This they really don't expect that they're going to all make it back and that everything's going to be okay and that they made plans to say how the human race would continue after this failed mission of the Galactica. And that Hoshi is the most senior and the most trusted officer left who decided not to go and he would become the admiral and that Romo Lampkin would become the president of the colonies. I I wanted a last beat with Hosshi and I wanted the last beat with Romo and I was looking for a way to get Romo back into the show and I just came up with that in the spur of the moment. a lot of this episode was not written in the traditional way in that after the break session in the writer room and we broke out the general aspects of the show and the general shape of things in the in the episode. we did I didn't write an actual story document. I just pitched it to the network on the phone and then I went straight to script and I essentially wrote it by instinct which was how I had written the episode 33 and I hadn't really done that since and I I wanted to get back to that kind of writing which I hadn't done in a while which was just to feel one scene leading to the next leading to the next so I didn't have a formal structure I would just write the scenes and decide what the cut was and what the next scene felt like it should be and u the process of writing the finale was very emotional in well I shouldn't even say it was emotional because it I didn't feel the emot as I was writing it, but it was very instinctual, I guess, is a better way of putting it. It was it was really written from my fingertips. It was written what I thought the next beat would be, what I thought the next line would be, and I just went with that impulse and wrote it. There's Jake the Dog One Last Appearance for Jake the Dog and Roma Lin. Um,

Ron: I just wanted it to be honest. I just wanted it to be everything I thought about, and I didn't want it to be overly planned. and I didn't want it to be overintellectualized. I wanted to just write what felt right. I wrote it in a couple of weeks. it was very difficult. I was very pressed for time. I was juggling a lot of things in terms of production and other episodes and not only the pilot for Caprica but the pilot for virtuality which was a pilot I developed for Fox. I was pressed for time. I kept feeling like I was behind that it wasn't working. It wasn't very good and I was very snappish and very pissed off to people that would interrupt me on the phone or in person

Ron: and it was an unpleasant writing experience by and large. I completed the draft on a Friday. it was 130 pages and I realized that was way too fucking long. I spent Saturday cutting 20 pages from it. So, it got down to about 110 or thereabouts. And then I turned it in, sent it to Ryan, Ryan Mottesheard, who is our script coordinator. He read it, he put it out on Sunday evening and then I waited and then I flew up to Vancouver. I waited for for response as I flew up to Vancouver on the following Monday

Ron: and I the first responses I started to get were from the cast. I was on the set and different people read it at different times and to a man and to a woman, they really liked it. They were all moved and some of them very much so and they all felt that it was what they wanted to do in a finale and every had something to do. Everyone's character had an arc and everyone's character had a completion and a resolution and they loved it and the network loved it and there and Michael Rymer the director loved it and there was this sense of wow you know everyone's really into this episode into the act and just to complete that thought everyone really liked it and we had our first pre-production meeting where we sat in a big room with all the department heads and went through the script and the ad reads the episode out loud and basically his he's reading the episode out loud. you stop for every scene and he's telling you what happens and then you have a brief discussion of what you're going to need to accomplish that scene, where's the set, what's the location, how many extras, all that kind of nitty-gritty and you go through the whole script that way, which you do on every episode. And as we got into the last 10 or 15 pages, I started feeling very emotional and it was the first time I had any real emotional connection to the finale because when I wrote it, I was on this very different headset. I was just trying to get it done, trying to do it, trying to be honest and annoyed with anyone who would interfere with me. But I wasn't connecting with it to me personally, emotionally. It wasn't making me cry. It wasn't making me laugh. It wasn't making me feel something. I just knew what I had to accomplish. But when that ad was sitting there reading the words and reading the ending, tears just started flowing down my cheeks and I had to like put a hand over my eyes to hide it because I didn't really want everyone to see me crying in the first place. and I just sat there and I just felt it and it was amazing. That's when it the end of the show really really hit me. you'll notice that we paint all the red strip all the Silent Centurions aboard Galactic with a red stripe. I didn't I didn't feel like we needed to explain that. It just felt like you would understand as the as the as it went on, what was happening. That was my philosophy for the entire battle sequence and what the plan of attack was. Instead of telling the audience what the plan is and then watching them execute it, I wanted essentially to just jump into it, see plan unfold and then everything would become clear as as you watched it. And I think that most of the ideas really do come through that way. I love this little bit here that Caprica 6 says that she's actually probably been through more battles than Balar is. So, she's probably better with a gun than he is. And he's like awkwardly trying to be the be the tough guy, be the man with the gun here.

Ron: You know, it's it's it's it's really worth saying just for to take a moment here to acknowledge and really elevate the name of Michael Ryce and his contribution to Battlestar Galactica. the show that we know as Battlestar Galactica would not be this show if not for Michael Ryr. From the very beginning, he had a huge imp on the series from the from the start until the very end. it's his style of shooting, it's his interaction with the cast, it's his sense of being a storyteller, it's a sense of being a filmmaker. I I'm just humbled really by the experience of having worked with Michael and worked by worked with someone of his talent and his vision. And I I'm just will be eternally grateful that the fates and the gods found a way to put him into the right place at the right time and to make this series of mine possible because I don't know what to say beyond that. I'll sit here and I'll start to cry if I if I get too deep into it. But Michael Rymer is every bit he's every bit one one of the parents of this show as much as I am. I mean this is really our series together with Michael and I and David I can you know what he contributed here is often overlooked because I I tend to get a lot of the press questions and comments and praise and here and there, but Michael Ryman just really he he owns this. This is part of his personal property as much as in his mind. Tremendous work here by the visual effects team under Gary Hutzel. this was one of those episodes where I just kept sending them back and forcing them to redo shots and you know they they came up the artists came up with a a different kind of sequence of Galactica actually going inside the the Cylon colony, penetrating the ship itself and being almost completely inside The Colony during during the final battle. And I nixed that cuz I just kept I just had a specific image in mind of Galactica fighting on the exterior of the ship being very close in and the and space still being around them. And that's ultimately what we have here in the finale. And I just I beat the shit out of the visual effects team. And I'm sure they they sat in front of their computers cursing my name for many long hours. They worked almost 24 hours a day for weeks on in without a day off to complete the visual effects for this for this episode and they deserve a tremendous amount of credit because this is this is our best battle. You know, this is this is this is it. This is the final one. And they really they really came through. I like this idea of the raptors jumping from within the ship and how it would damage the the flight pod museum that we haven't really used since the miniseries. Again, revisiting ideas of the miniseries is something that we we did all the way through this the finale. going back to the beginning as we as we acknowledge the end.

Ron: The shot that that shot is actually of the hands moving the levers for is actually stolen I think from the miniseries as we didn't have that insert shot into The Colony itself. lots of things going boom here for those of you who are missing things going boom in part one. You know you get all your your nice nice juicy little beings. you know, I was just trying to think, well, how would they how would they do this? How do they assault The Colony? And it felt like, okay, well, how do you get from A to B? You know, you have the raptors coming in over there, but Galactica needs to be doing something over here. And it was the idea of this Penser movement, but you had teams assaulting The Colony, assaulting the front door as it were from Galactica bridging the moat and trying to smash through the gates, and that would be where the primary attack seemed to be. And then But then you would jump these raptors out to the side and they would come and assault The Colony from another direction. So in in between the two that the two teams would meet up and try to find Hera and get her back to Galactica together. And then again we here we have the last dog fight, the last you know mix up of the this the Vipers and the Raiders, Lee and company blowing the hatch and coming inside. this is all just really great visual effects material. I I saw them do this actual shot here. This is actually just a green screen stage. There's really nothing there. There's guys up in the rafters on the sound stage with u Jamie Bamber actually doing his his own stunts here way up off the 20 30 ft off the soundstage floor repelling down in in costume and in character against just a green screen backdrop and then going in the final assault. And now you can see the utility of the red stripe because it's the red stripe being the only way that you could tell friend from foe when you were in this environment. pressure. We've got pressure, sir. The"

Ron: useless, you know. I thought there would be something effective about losing racetrack and skulls in this very unexpected moment that you're just with them all and you're you're piloting with them and then suddenly they're they're taken out. It's worth saying that in the background in the shot behind the raptor behind behind racetrack right there one of the one of the guys in the background there is Garrett Reisman who is an actual astronaut who came to the set who was a Battlestar Galactica fan who has actually watched the show in orbit aboard the international space station and Garrett would tell came to the set and was telling us stories of being aboard the space station with his laptop computer and watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica while he was floating in zerog and he came to the set was telling everyone about it and it was hard to say who was more amazed and thrilled to be there whether it was him or whether it was the cast but there was this amazing thought that somebody in space was watching our show about space while they could see real space out the window and I just was so tickled by that and while he was there they invited him to be in the show and he said sure and they gave him a marine outfit and put him aboard these little shots here of cutting their way in are actually stolen from another episode in the series where they were assaulting I believe on in Bastile Day where they had to assault the prison ship and we we kind of needed a little bit of extra connective tissue to make that idea clear. So we went back and stole those shots from from from that episode. There's some of the original the old style Silent Centurions that date back to the original series. Gary Hustle wanted to insert some of them and the Silent original Silent Raiders into the show. and I said, "Sure, why not? Let's just bring let's bring everybody in. Let's really make the finale feel like it's it's a culmination of everything that is Battlestar Galactica." And I was I was happy to do that."

Ron: like I said, there were other flashbacks building up to Boomer Boomer's turn here that her her her conscience getting the best of her at the very end again. And you were seeing other flash ects of her and how she came to fall in love with Terrell and her relationship with Helo and getting back to the idea of who Boomer was. So, okay, there's the end of the act. To complete the thought, I wanted to get back to the original idea of who Boomer was in the miniseries, but you knew her as the Rook pilot and the young the young girl who's who's struggling to just make a landing back in the miniseries. And I wanted to kind of revisit that to you know, lay in who who Boomer is at the end and redeem her one last time and have her bring Hera back to the good guys. And in the in the finale as we were looking at the on air version, it just felt like you could do without those scenes that you the one scene that I did feel like you needed is the flashback that's coming up in the in in a few moments where you go back to the moment that she you know, she's standing tall before the man. She's standing in in Adama's quarters with Adama and Tigh and she thinks she's going to get kicked off a ship and she actually gets a second chance. And she says that I owe you one. And he says, "Yeah, everyone owes me one and they never seem to pay me back." And that but ultimately Boomer would find a way to pay pay him back."

Ron: And but she she paid him back at the very end to engage in gestures of futility."

Ron: Great work as always from Simon, Doral and Cavil. I mean they they became the face of the bad Cylons, as it were, the final villain of Cylons, and they're just consummate pros and they they pull it off and with little moments and tiny little beats like that. The relationship between Capric 6 and Baltar is it was it was put in the show from the very beginning that here's this woman who tempted this man and then the human race fell and in a in a real sense. It goes back to Genesis. It goes back to Adam and Eve. You know, Eve tempts Adam. Adam bites of the apple and mankind falls. And I I always kept that notion alive between the two characters. But I also wanted to realize that Eve loved Adam and that Adam loved Eve and that there was something real there and that she wanted to be proud of him. That that was the thing that was missing between the two of them really is that she loved him but knew how flawed he was as a human being and that She always knew that that he could be a great a better man. He could be a better a greater man than he was and that that he just couldn't get past his own ship. And then in this moment we start to realize that they realize that they have been seeing these head beings all the way through. And just as they make that realization of you see them too, boom, something happens. And you're starting to lay in these pieces that are bringing everything to an ending that you're starting to tie all threads together. This is when you're starting to realize there is going to be an answer to the head coaches. There is a deeper truth going on. There is something something greater than than than people could see in front of their faces that there there are things beyond their kin. That there was a different hand at work here. these scenes in the in the Cylon Colony were a lot of these scenes were being shot on the final night of production. the scenes with Baltar and six firing at the Cylons that's coming up with the last night of production that the last official shoot of battle star and we were all there and these scenes this the stuff on the Cylon colony was being shot simultaneously with the main unit like this most of the stuff here was second unit although this is not this particular scene with Hera and Boomer was main unit but a lot of the scenes of shooting in corridors and running around were the second unit meaning that there was a a splinter group of you know deep a second unit DP, second unit script supervisor, camera operators, etc. that was happening on the sound stage simultaneous with the main unit action that was shooting over on the A stage. And there were certain actors that would go back and forth like Katie Sackoff, like Jamie Bamber when we wrapped out the shoot of Galactica at the final night at like 3:00 or 4 in the morning and everyone called rap and or I got to call rap. I said, "That's a wrap for Battlestar Galactica." And there was a lot of crying and hugging and kissing and tears and drinking of champagne. Jamie Bamber when he wrapped production a few like an hour before that he said thank you and everybody cried and said goodbye to Jamie and then he said okay I got to go back to work and he went over to the second unit stage where a lot of this action was being shot and Jamie was over there still shooting scenes while we were wrapping officially Battlestar Galactica on the A stage because it's just one of those little rituals and formalities of how a series is done is you you announce the end officially with the main unit, even though there might be splinter units and inserts and pickup shots that are still being done. Main unit wrapped officially with me and Michael Rymer. The last shot was Baltar and six in the corridor shooting shooting at silence as they ran away machine guns blazing. And that was when Michael Rymer called cut. He turned to me and he said, "You want to call it?" And I said, "Sure." And I walked down to the stage and I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap for Battlestar Galactica." And there was this huge cheer. And like I said, there was a lot of tears and hug ing and we had champagne and then we all went out to the camera truck which is outside the sound stage and with Steve McNut and the DP and we all stood in the camera truck and Steve produced Bottles of Scotch and we stood there and drank and cried some more and talked and we watched the sun come up and it was there was something really beautiful and moving about you know watching daybreak on daybreak and knowing that that was the end and that's how we ended it. We ended it with this magical moment of watching the sun come up over Vancouver you know, while we were drinking scotch at the end of the end of a long day shoot."

Ron: And this is this was the plan that that now he would fight their way back that the teams, however many teams came, managed to get into The Colony from the outside, would meet up with the the Galactica assault, from the from the other side, and then together they would try to fight their way back ship. great visual. You know, I could just go on and on about the visual effects, but I would get kind of bored."

Ron: Well,"

Ron: this is where it gets hard to to talk about because I get to this point in the show"

Ron: in the story and the battle is happening and there's a part of me that's just very connected to the fact that it's the last battle and you know and I how much I loved watching these people fight and die together and how much of myself is invested into this series and into these characters and into this story and how beautifully it all came together. Oh, fortunately there's the end of the Okay, now we're back. more so I've been saved from having to cry here on on microphone. this scene this This is all the last night this sequence with Baltar and Caprica 6. This is the last night of shooting Mania on Battlestar and you you're all tucked away video village which is where you watch the video monitors and listen to sound and the director sits and the DP and everyone is gathered just on the other side of that wall and we're all sitting there and watching and laughing and people kept showing up. You know, the actress who played Cat showed up and Tori was there and people just kept showing up for the last night. People knew that it was the last night. So, it was this constant kind of influx of people who were there only because they knew it was the last night of B of Battlestar. And so, there was this this nostalgic sense. and then you would have this all these emotional, heartfelt moments. And then you'd have and then they'd say, "Okay, fire in the hole. Here we go." And you'd have to put your fingers in your ears because suddenly all these machine guns would let loose on the stage and it would be this unholy cacophony of incredible noise on this in this very cramped face and it was so fucking loud that you couldn't even believe it. And you know, most of us were like, "Oh, we don't need ear protection. We'll just put our fingers in our ears." And we kind of regretted as a nice one night went on. This was great. I loved the fact that we came up in the writer room about this idea of the of finding a way to incorporate the opera house back into the finale. The opera house was just a notion. It it didn't have a lot of meaning when we first came up with it way back in Cobalt's last gleaming."

Ron: And we didn't know what it meant, what the symbology of it was. But I I felt that eventually you could figure that out and that the joy of the show was in figuring these things out. It was setting up puzzles for yourself and then deciding what the answers were. And the idea that eventually we would get to the opera house and explain it and give it meaning was something that we knew we had to do. And if you listen to the podcast recordings of the writer retreats, you'll see that we're constantly talking about getting back to the opera house that we have to explain that. And there just became this of brilliant symmetry that happened when we started to realize that if they were aboard Galactica and they went into CIC, if they got into CIC and you had Sam up on the second level and you put the final five up there and Baltar and Six walked in the door, it would it would essentially evoke the opera house. and that moment, that epiphany was just so gratifying because I realized that really it did all happen to me that regardless of how you got to that point, I never felt that it was important whether you plan it out in advance and sat there and knew precisely what the final beats were or if you made it up as you went along that the only thing that mattered was the end result. The only thing that mattered was what was on the screen and what the audience was able to take away. you know, I've been very honest and very open over the course of the series to say how the sausage is made and to say this is how we come up with things and I don't know what this means and we'll figure it out later or I didn't know what this was and so on. And I because I just didn't feel like there was any point in lying about them, trying to pretend it was otherwise. But the fact that the opera house links into the finale in this way with these key players walking through the steps that we laid in a couple of years ago and finding a way for it all to make sense and then all to give cohesion and to all come together here at the finale to me validates the entire approach because it's it really says that you can have freedom in the writer room."

Ron: You can sit there and throw things against the wall and see what sticks and go with your instinct and say, "I think this is going to work. I don't know how it's going to work, but I really like it and we will figure out what it means later." And to trust in your instincts and to trust in your abilities as as writers to come up with the explanations later, which is always the process. You know, you sit down with a blank page and most people don't know where it's going to go. This how many novelists have I heard talk about the process where they sit down with a blank page and they don't know what the end of the book is going to be and eventually they find it. And on a certain level as a intellectually you don't know what that means and it sounds kind of cockamamie and it sounds bizarre but as a writer you realize that there's a tremendous amount of freedom and a tremendous amount of value in that approach because it it allows for surprise. It allows you to surprise yourself. It allows the characters to surprise you. It puts you in the moment. You know actors will talk about being in the moment on stage. This beat right here. Here you are. These two coming through the corridor. the the shot previous to them previous to them finding out that he's out of bullets. When they came through that doorway and they were shooting behind them, that was literally the last shot of Mania in the Battle Star Galactica. Anyway, discovering that you that the process is full of surprise and full of wonder on the page is analogous to what actors will talk about about being on the stage in front of the camera and in the moment they discover something. In the moment they portray a certain action in the moment they say a certain line or they have a certain emotional response. And that's true of the writing process as well. I've discovered is that you can just be in the moment and you just come up with something and it doesn't have to be thought out. It doesn't have to be pre-planned. It just has to be true. As long as it is true, it's valid and you put it up on the board or you put it on the page and you go with it. It just has to be true."

Ron: And this is this is a a perfect example of that. You know, we didn't know what the opera house meant. We didn't know what these pieces how they were going to line up, but eventually they did and eventually they became part of the fabric of the of the finale. And it's one of the things I'm really proud of in the finale is that we were able to make you know to weave that thread back into the tapestry and like you know the thread worked into the mosaic of what we had created. I'm sure I'm mixing my metaphors. And then it comes back to Baltar and Hera and that this this is the key moment of the of the finale is him realizing the connections and him Baltar is the man who has been thinking about and talking about God from the very beginning since the moment that Caprica 6 said God is love and Baltar dismissed her belief and mocked her belief takes you is there's a direct connection between that moment and here where Baltar in the finale realizes truly realizes There is a different there there is another hand at work here that there is something else going on that there is a greater truth that there is really something to this idea of destiny that there there really isn't something to this notion that that he is a player and a grander play and that he has to fill that role. And I was really intrigued by that and I really wanted that to be part of what happened at the very end was seeing the circle complete of seeing know that there really is meaning to all of this. this is a great little scene coming into the into CIC and not understanding what the hell had happened there, that there clearly was a battle. People were shot. I love this beat with Eddie. Eddie just like kicking the knees out from under Simon and sending him down. There was something great about not seeing what had happened in CIC and letting your mind imagine that there were all these other things happening. And there there you go. Had a long conversation in production about whether we could see all five of the final five up on that balcony, you know. They had to cut away a big chunk of the rail there in order to make everyone visible."

Ron: You know, there was a lot of discussion of camera angle and where you put the camera and at what angle you could look up and actually see all five of them to replicate that moment in in the in the opera house, but they were able to pull it off. And the production team spent a long time and a lot of manh hours trying to make that happen. And this is a very complicated scene. There's a lot of shit going down here at the very end and happening very fast. And this all takes a very long time to shoot. This makes it a lot easier."

Ron: And then here you've got the beat with the cabbell and the and a dominant all kind of coming to a head. I mean, this is kind of the pivot point. And the pivot point is whether or not they're going to get out of this situation. We've had standoffs before. We've had moments of where it looked like all was lost. And the question here was who was going to save this who was going to step forward and save the thing that that you that got them out of this circumstance. And it felt right? That the man who started it all, Gas Balar, who allowed the Scion's entree into the mainframe at the very beginning, he's the guy that is going to get them out of this. And he gets them out of it by realizing the larger story, by realizing the supernatural, by realizing the divine, the divinity of something and realizing that there's some force here. Whether you want to call it God, whether you want to call it the gods, whether you want to call it the energy of the universe, or mathematics as Einstein would probably term it. The acknowledgement of this man of the secular man, his acknowledgement that there was something greater that wanted them to make it, that there was rooting for them, that was trying to help them and trying to guide them. that felt right. And it felt right that the man who we had grown to loathe and hate and despise and want to die over the course of the seasons because he always got away with things and he was never on his shit that he always seemed to be just in it for himself that ultimately he saves the day and he actually makes the piece happen and he actually is the one to look around and to see the greater truth. I loved that idea and I just think that's great. I just think that's that's what the show is that that's that's the series in many many ways in mind."

Ron: How do you know that God is on your side?

Ron: How do you know God is on your side?

Ron: I don't God's not on any one side.

Ron: God is not on anyone's side.

Ron: God's a force of nature beyond good and evil. Good and evil. We created those. You want to break the cycle. Break the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, destruction, escape, death. That's in our hands. In our hands only. requires a leap of faith. Requires that we live in hope or fear.

Ron: If I leave you this there are people who said the show is nihilistic and the show is bleak and the show is too brutal to watch and the shower just says something negative about people. And I never felt I tied up together and one cannot exist without the other. And that's my part of my personal understanding and awareness of life. And it doesn't I don't know if I don't pretend that that's particularly profound or that that's particularly new. It's just the the story I chose to tell and it's how I chose to end it. And we're back and Mrs. Ron has joined us for the end.

Terry: Yeah. Smoking light's off.

Ron: Smoking light is off again. Does it help my asthma?

Terry: Well, the Official smoked as well.

What's that movie with Glenn Close in the bathtub?

Ron: Oh, Fatal Attraction.

Terry: The Fatal Attraction of TV.

Ron: Oh, thank you, sweetheart. That makes me feel that makes me feel so special. That's why I'm here.

Terry: Only steal from the best.

Ron: To make you feel special.

Terry: Now, for a moment, we're going to know everything there is to know.

Ron: I loved this bit. We were struggling to figure out we wanted to pay off Tory killing Cally. That was important to us. We didn't want to just let that plot thread dangle. We knew that he had to find out at some point. And there was something beautiful about the idea that in the moment of their final triumph when peace is at hand that a very human emotion a sense of rage a sense of betrayal.

Ron: Can you stop talking so I can listen?

Terry: Yes.

Ron: You haven't seen this in a while, have you?

Terry: No. And I haven't seen this cut this far into the cuts. I have to watch it again.

Ron: You'll have to buy the DVD.

Terry: Yeah. Or sleep with somebody to give it to me for free.

Ron: Yeah. Wouldn't be the first time.

Terry: One more.

Terry: You slept with me just to get free DVDs at Carnivale. Admit it.

Ron: Yeah, that was it.

Ron: This is just again I really like this. I like that it's feels like everything's going to be okay and then he sees the truth and the rage of it even though that in the other life he and Tori were lovers and were going to be married and realizing that what she had done to him done to his wife. And that that destroys the fragile piece that they had just founded.

Ron: God, it was hard to stage all this. Michael Rymer and company really struggled with Oh, yeah. That little beat of Cavil killing himself. Actually, as scripted, Tigh was going to pick Cavil up and throw him off the second level to his death. And Dean Stockwell called me personally, which Dean never did. And Dean Dean was just the consmate pro and never called. He called me and he said I I just I'd like him to kill himself. I think he should just look around and say it's over and he should put a gun in his mouth and do it. And I said, you know what? Absolutely. That's how we did it.

Ron: And I love this and I love this little beat, the race, the dead racetrack. you know, is jostled somehow and launches the nukes and she probably she presumably had all the nukes that were left from Pegasus and Galactica were either on her ship or a couple of raptors at most and that she launches the final nukes that destroy The Colony and there was something really great about that and giving racetrack you know a hand in the final victory and then it all comes here. This is where you know it all kind of comes together all along the watchtowwer which we established a year ago and its meaning and suddenly what's the meaning of all along the clutch tower. You convert the notes to me to numbers and you enter them into the coordinates and that takes you to Earth. And that I just found an elegance to that and we all got excited about it and we all realized that that was that was how they were finally going to get get home. this sequence of flashing back to the previous episodes was not scripted. Actually, this is something Rymer came up with. This is another and he works his work in the editing room. He just realized that we really had to nail this moment a little more firmly. And so he came up with this whole montage of remembering the musical notes and their significance."

Terry: "I saw it didn't have"

Ron: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Rymer came up with all this"

Ron: and Bears's music and you know this is just the series kind of you know knitting together. I mean here we go and this is the moment moment that you've all been waiting for is they jump out and where do they jump to? Boom. Jumps away. Colony destroyed presumably. And this little beat of Kara, it always intrigued me. You know, this is again, this is one of the few remaining out of sequence moments, but There was something what's she afraid of? Starbucks is not afraid of death. And Starbucks is afraid of being forgotten, which I think is"

Ron: and the ship"

Ron: and the ship breaks her. The notion that Galactica breaks her back. That was that was something"

Terry: "which is so great considering she's now alive anyway."

Ron: Yeah."

Terry: "Look at that. Oh, I never saw all this."

Ron: Yeah. This is all stuff we got added later."

Ron: I didn't want to tear her apart. I didn't want it to explode. I wanted her to just be broken and then to she had done her last. She had done what Adama said she would do, which is to get them all home. That's all she had to do. Now, line is scripted here when when Laura says, "Where have you taken this Starbucks and or where have you he taken his car and Katie her car's line was somewhere along the watchtowwer but I think Rymer didn't like it. He never really said anything but I don't think he ever actually shot it. Oh really?"

Ron: I don't think he did because I didn't see it in the cut. I don't think it's in the dailies and they just quietly dropped it because it was like one step too far and I think they were right. I think this is this is a better a better ending. We toyed with the notion of putting a tier flashback right here to tier kissing Boomer and then Cali coming in and saying, "You got to know who to trust and who not to trust." And then that fed into the Torian line, but we dropped it because ultimately I didn't want to interrupt this moment, the emotion of the moment of where are they and what's going to happen to them and where have they ended up?

Terry: "Where was he taking this camera?

Ron: Somewhere along the watchtowwer was the was the line, but I don't know. It works really well without it, so I don't miss it. But that that was the line that that was the same as scripted. And then this this this is inspired by two shots. The pan up from the moon is the Apollo 8 shot of them coming around the dark side of the moon, the famous Earth rise. And then the actual image of Earth is inspired by the Apollo 17 astronauts shot of Earth. And then we're back and you know right from the when we were structuring it, we knew that we had a lot of we wanted to give enough time to really end the show that the battle was not the end. You know, the final like boom boom was not the end. The end was going to be what they choose to do on Earth and what is Earth? And one of the bigger questions was when is Earth? I never considered having it really be in our future. I always liked the idea"

Ron: North America shot."

Terry: "Yeah, the Africa shot."

Ron: Yeah. No, but you would remember there's a big debate about whether"

Terry: "Oh, there's North America. Yeah,"

Ron: North America."

Ron: I I never questioned that internally that Galactica was in our past was somewhere deep deep in our past. And I thought for a brief period of time that they should come to Earth in this the classic Greek era and they would be part of the inspiration for the Greek myth."

Terry: "You decided that was too"

Ron: decided that decided that was too Star Trek on one level and also decided that it didn't wasn't deep enough and true enough and it didn't feel like it was important enough and it tied them to western civilization and it wasn't about all of us as human beings and I and we started talking about where could they land that they could influence human evolution and for a time we talked about them coming to earth at the period where mankind was just starting to learn language and or agriculture or different things and then we came to this idea of I think I stumbled across some reference to the fact that there they were scientists had had never were had postul later that there was this idea that there was a single ancestor genetically to everyone on the planet that there was a mitochondrial Eve and a mitochondrial atom and I immediately went that's it that's Hera Hera is mitochondrial Eve she is the root of all of us because we always talked in the writer room about the fact that eventually we went into Galactica on the note that all these people were somehow related to us that we were here because of something that they had done and that that was what the show was about. The show was essentially about us and who we are and how we got here."

Ron: So Hera grows up and has a child with one of the inhab"

Ron: with some of the inhabitants of the planet or some other child and you know, but essentially everyone and everyone on Earth is related to Hera and therefore related to the Cylons and to the Colonials."

Ron: these were all shot in Canada. I mean, and this is all like the slight of hand. This was shot in Canada. there's not there's actually less digital work going on in here than you think there is. the production staff actually just found a location that looked much like this. And what did what we did digitally was just play with some of the foliage in the background. Make sure that the trees felt like Africa as opposed to we took out a lot of evergreens and pine trees. This is in BC"

Ron: and Lee says you know we will bring the best of ourselves we'll give them our language our culture our art politics and we will try to give them you know all those things and that it enters the collective unconscious on some level some of it's literally handed down and that"

Terry: "I know yeah isn't that greatience charges ahead. All of this essentially plays as a piece. I mean, I wrote it as a piece. I didn't divide this into act breaks. I just decided this is to me the entire finale is really one. It's a movie. It's not It's not an episode."

Ron Moore: I'm glad we got Callum Keith Renie back for the final. Yeah, got him back just for a day to wrap him up because we it was really important. I mean, Callum was a big part of the show and you know, I I there wasn't a role for Leabin in the finale particular to his character, but I really wanted him to be part of it just like I wanted Mark Mark Shepard to be part because they were they were key people in in the mythology of the show and to bring them back to the end.

Ron Moore: And I wanted to say that the centurions would go off and have their own life. You know, there was something, well, what do you do with all the centurions on the spaceship? I thought, well they they're not here. What would they do? And I and there was something beautiful about the idea they want to be free and that the and that the humans in Cylon set them free. to find their own destiny and to do whatever they did among the stars. And I I'm glad we did that as well.

Terry Moore: So sad.

Ron Moore: Yeah, it's hard. It's hard for me as we get into the end here. It's

Terry Moore: He's not going to be able to make it through the end.

Terry Moore: You better start talking, Terry.

Terry Moore: Really? He's already starting to get all choked up.

Ron Moore: It's

Terry Moore: I think this is a beautiful scene. You know, their relationship was so fraught and you know, you wanted her to love him, but then you wanted to love Lee and you your heart just broke for him. And to see her finally come to this it's really

Ron Moore: yeah and I liked writing it where it was it was pretty much a one-sided conversation where you know they couldn't have seen together

Terry Moore: but it's not I mean that's just it it's

Terry Moore: that it's that moment when somebody's dying. You've seen it a million times where someone's dying and you're you're you're you know the person is still alive standing by the bedside just hoping that some thing is going in on some level

Terry Moore: and that's where she is that there's that there's a a glimmer of consciousness that can feel that

Terry Moore: and that's that's you know the hope of the hope of life and the hope of a soul and spirit

Terry Moore: which I think the show has always been about really. Good for you, Kara. She redeemed herself in my eyes. You know, I've always had problem with her.

Ron Moore: Oh, that's true. You have always had problem.

Terry Moore: She was selfish. She finally is commits a really selfless act.

Ron Moore: great. You know, Michael Tro, I've talked about him before. He's really good. He's brought something really special to this show. That's the end of the act.

Terry Moore: What did he say?

Ron Moore: See on the other side.

Terry Moore:

Terry Moore: Oh, what he said is just so much more poignant.

Terry Moore: You know the end.

Ron Moore: Yeah.

Terry Moore: Huh.

Ron Moore: Yeah.

Ron Moore: I almost didn't do this. This was not in the first draft. I didn't have Adama flying the last Viper off the ship. It was something I had set up in in the early scene, but then Adama was just going to get in a raptor. He was going to take a last walk around the deck and get in a raptor and go off with everyone else. And it really just kind of dawned on me

Ron Moore: at the last minute. It was deep into pre-production. I I was doing some other changes in the script and in the back of my head I had this thing about what about that Viper thing? There was such a a romantic notion that he was going to fly the last Viper off the ship and why doesn't he actually do that? And then I just threw it in at the last minute to give you know, Adama his last moment aboard. And then coming up here, we do the flashback to Dama and the lie detector and you know I don't know how to explain it but there was something about the fact that Adama was offended deeply as a person by the idea of having to take a lie detector test to do a job and his

Ron Moore: since all these characters are pieces of you.

Ron Moore: Yeah. Basically,

Terry Moore: it's also great I finally saw Eddie in a Viper. Viper's beauty just being able to see Eddie flying the Viper.

Ron Moore: The only time

Ron Moore: only time he was We actually shot a section of him flying a Viper in an episode a couple years ago, but it was cut and it wasn't included in the in the final.

Terry Moore: Oh, there's such poetry in him being there the last one.

Ron Moore: the whole cast really just they they left it all on the field on this episode. I mean, they were all really committed into what they were doing and the story. at the end

Terry Moore: Weeping.

Ron Moore: It was just an amazing thing. They just every single one of them

Terry Moore: I love this. I love that you tie in that thing about

Ron Moore: Yeah. the little bit with him and the gym

Terry Moore: tub

Ron Moore: and that's where he ends and the flashbacks ultimately were about where they end up. It was all the flashbacks are all a a tool towards talking about how we end. each of these characters. It was about each one. It was about who they were and where they ended up in our story.

Terry Moore: And flashbacks are are now used as a device in film. But if you if you redefine them as memory, what are flashbacks or memory and what it makes us today?

Ron Moore: And the and your memories inform who you are and create who you are.

Terry Moore: And these people at the end are all informed by who they have been and who they were before we knew them,

Terry Moore: which is why the flashbacks are so relevant. So, this is what you

Ron Moore: Aaron Douglas was very taken by this little beat and he said I said he found that that Tier had seen some island off of the northern coast someplace. and he wanted to go there and Aaron immediately said, "Is it Scotland? Is Terrell going to Scotland? Is he going to the Highlands?" Fuckin' a. And I and I was I hadn't I was like I just thought England, Ireland, something. And then he said Highlands. I said, "Sure." And so I put Highlands in the script because Aaron was really taken with the idea that tier went off and his the

Ron Moore: forebears being his last name.

Terry Moore: Douglas being he's up there in the highlands and all the Scots are related to the Tier.

Ron Moore: There you go.

Terry Moore: All the Scots are all ti essentially. That's what we're saying. That's what the show is telling you definitively that Kalin Tier is the is the father the tribal king of the Scots.

Terry Moore: So there you have it.

Ron Moore: They're the tribal king. And these two, I mean, there there's another I I loved ending them on the note that

Terry Moore: they're just together.

Terry Moore: You and me in a house in a tent or homeless and I have always said to each other.

Ron Moore: That's what I've said to Terry a very long time ago. You and me in a house or a tent or on the street.

Terry Moore: Hopefully not on a street thing.

Ron Moore: But you know, it completes the And then Ron does that.

Ron Moore: Yeah. Then I do that. Then I yell and screech. Into the act. And we're back. Oh, this was the this is the most gut-wrenching stuff with Laura. I mean, originally there was a thought in, as I said earlier in the podcast, we were going to I was going to send Dama was going to get a wrapped with Laura and just say, "Let me show you the stars and they were just going to fly off and you weren't going to see her die on camera." And I never actually wrote it that way, but that was essentially what we were talking about in the room quite a bit. And Mary actually heard about it and said, "You know,

Ron Moore: we always talked at the beginning that Laura was going to die, that we were going to complete her story and I really want to do that. And I immediately went, "Yeah, fuck. You're right. I always did say that." And so I decided to write her in to let it

Terry Moore: This is the part when I first saw the ending that I just falling apart.

Terry Moore: This is such a beautiful scene.

Terry Moore: What a what an amazing relationship.

Ron Moore: Oh yeah.

Terry Moore: Between these two people.

Terry Moore: Really lovely.

Terry Moore: And I love that Adama calls it Earth.

Ron Moore: Mhm. I mean, I just I'm sorry. I hate to continually pat myself on the back in these things, but I just love that.

Ron Moore: I love that aspect. I love that part of the show. I love that. That's

Terry Moore: I think there's a difference between patting yourself on the back and speaking to what you love and what makes you passionate. Stop calling it that.

Ron Moore: Oh, it's hard from here to the end. It's just it's just This was the point in the production me I started crying. I just I just listen to the ad reading these scenes and tears are just flowing down my cheeks and I'm always moved by the show and I get to this point. I just I'm always right here with them and look at them.

Terry Moore: I think I should go to New York. I wanted her to I wanted her to have that at the very end. Well, that must have been a hard scene on set with these two.

Ron Moore: These two, all of them.

Terry Moore: Such a extraordinary relationship in real life.

Terry Moore: Jamie and Eddie.

Ron Moore: Yeah,

Terry Moore: I know. I mean, I will the rest of my life, I will remember them at this point in their lives when they were these ages and had these relationships and these actors.

Terry Moore: Nothing better than hearing Jamie do an Eddie and Oh, Jamie and James can both do a mean Actually, they can all do a pretty fair Eddie imitation, but Jamie is probably got the best.

Ron Moore: He's probably got the best

Ron Moore: because there's just

Terry Moore: there's such love between them.

Ron Moore: Yeah.

Terry Moore: And Eddie really is the father figure. He really is the father and Mary's the mother. I mean, he really is

Terry Moore: mom and dad to this entire cast. And it was it was just an amazing thing to watch and to feel when you were down there. He's with her in death the way he was with her in life. See, now we're both crying.

Terry Moore: I know it's hard.

Terry Moore: My first memory of my father is him arriving on the plane coming back from Vietnam.

Ron Moore: Oh, isn't that something? Is

Terry Moore: this your first memory?

Terry Moore: That's my first memory of my father is him getting off of a plane at the Fresno airport coming back from Vietnam.

Ron Moore: this is the end of Kara. I know there's a lot of question about who and what she is.

Terry Moore: You mean screaming?

Ron Moore: Screaming and people, you know what? I just decided that this was the end of Kara. The was a question that on some level could not be answered to a certain extent but that she didn't want to be forgotten and that was the most important thing about who and what she was she was resurrected she came back there was something about

Ron Moore: you know the that she was connected she's connected to some greater truth and I felt like to put a a definitive answer on that just would take everything away from that she's a much more powerful

Ron Moore: and trust me I begged him to finalize this Yeah, and we talked about it. You know, there were various options we could have gone for and that we did discuss in the writer room to give her a definitive end,

Ron Moore: but none of them felt like they were as intriguing as not knowing exactly what she is or was. She was resurrected and she came back and she came back and took them to Earth and then she's gone and she's connected to something greater that they cannot understand. And I think they and we can't understand it. And if they could understand it, then it would not be divine. Oops.

Terry Moore: Oops.

Ron Moore: And that's I love that because you've really forgotten about Zach. Yeah.

Terry Moore: You're really caught up in Lee and Kara and watching them

Ron Moore: and as are they and that they forgot about everybody all the way through

Ron Moore: and they had consciences and they did pull back and they didn't do that. But that

Ron Moore: moment defined their relationship forever

Terry Moore: cuz they kept on like

Terry Moore: they kept coming back to That same place, that's the place K and Lee have been in forever since this moment in time. They never quite left that moment on the table. Look how much has passed on their faces.

Terry Moore: Well, in this situation, can you take out the elephant dung? And

Ron Moore: don't know why there's elephant dung in the house, but let's just say compost. Good shot.

Terry Moore: And poof.

Ron Moore: And that I that just has to be the end of the car. You just have to not see her go. You just turn around and she's gone.

Terry Moore: Cuz you always just turned around. She was just gone.

Ron Moore: Yeah. And Yeah. That's been the nature of their relationship since the beginning as well. This I cannot believe they actually got this shot of the bird flying out the fucking door because this was endlessly talked about in the production meeting in terms of we will never get the bird to fly out the door. So, and there was a lot of Gary Hutzel involved. Okay, can you do a VFX can you do a CGI bird flying out a CGI door? He said, "Yeah, okay. It's not going to be easy." Blah, blah, blah. And look at this. The bird flew out the door

Terry Moore: she is really in it all the way to the end. What if I go to New York on Monday?

Ron Moore: You can fly in New York if you want.

Terry Moore: Ron is speaking at the UN on Tuesday.

Terry Moore: Mary and Eddie and I can't believe I'm not going to be there.

Ron Moore: These are shots inspired by Out of Africa. I remember the Out of Africa sequence with them flying in the biplane low over the veldt and or not the veldt, but over the

Ron Moore: this was evident. I wasn't there when they shot this, but both Eddie and Mary and everybody involved talked about how difficult this was and Eddie breaking down and Mary talk tells the story of her trying to remain motionless and trying to be dead and then almost losing it because she feels a tear of Ed, literally a tear fall off of Eddie's face, cheek onto her hand, and she was just they're both saying goodbye to their care.

I think this was the last scene they shot. it was very difficult. It was very―it was just everybody in the crew was talking about the next day just just how emotional the moment was and how this was everybody really dealing with the end of the show was really the scene. This was the scene that that really the cast and the crew both felt ended the show emotionally that it was Laura dying with a dog.

Terry Moore: This is where his tear is from.

Ron Moore: Somewhere in here. I don't know if I don't think we actually have it on camera because I think we were up on her. I think that's what happened. The camera was up on her and then missed it. Pan back down. And Eddie just did this. He just improv this on a sec because this ties into the beat he did last year when earlier in the season. There's someone in the message board who has I just want to see them in a cottage together.

Terry Moore: Yeah, that's all I want. It's not too much to ask, is it? And they got it.

Ron Moore: Back and "Daybreak." I think I played around with the title for a little while. I think I was trying for the day that was the last day, or the day at the end of the day, or I was playing with various plays on the word "day" and at some point "dawn" flickered into my head and then I [thought] "Dawn" was kind of a boring title and I thought "Daybreak." Yeah, it's "Daybreak." It's daybreak for the characters in the show and it's the end of this journey. Originally in this scene we were in the background you were going to see raptors exploding like they were destroying the raptors in the scene as you were painting. ing across and fairly late in the ed in the post-production process, I decided to take it that out 'cause then it would really distract you from this moment and you'd be wondering what these explosions were in the background and it seemed like an unnecessary additional riff on what was going going on. This was interesting in that Tammo when Tamo read the script he was convinced Helo was dead when he when he read the beat with him getting shot in the corner and he said too everybody kind of does and I didn't really intend it that way because I always knew that Helo was coming back and I just ended him on a moment of jeopardy and there wasn't a moment to kind of reestablish him as a character. And Tamo said when he was reading the finale script, he read that and he's like, "Well, that's it. Hilo's dead. He's dead. He's still fucking dead, man." And then he read this part. He was really overjoyed that actually he made it and they were going to be okay. Like I said earlier, we were going to kill Helo and Athena both and that they would sacrifice themselves for the girl, but that seemed unnecessary. It feel very expected.

Ron Moore: as a group as an ense are an ensemble. And I think

Terry Moore: and they're all still friends. Everybody still stays in touch and stays at each other's houses and you know

Terry Moore: I think it it is meaningful to say I was once part of the Battlestar Galactica ensemble. I think that that is a special thing that only those people

Terry Moore: 20 years in the business. I never saw anything quite like this with a group of people forming the kind of bonds that everybody here bonded with.

Ron Moore: This is at the University of British Columbia. I was there for this. This was one of those days when I I drove from this from this shooting to a location on Capria. And again, I I there was something about wanting to bring back the beginning where it all began here at the very very end. Here the human race is destroyed. Here is it. Here is it saved. The same two people and I like the discomfort of watching this at the very end. I liked reminding the audience of something that is an uncomfortable fact in the story and a really difficult act to try to understand and to deal with and how billions of people died because of this and try to bring that back and not to shine it on and not to forget about it and try to pretend like it didn't exist or that it didn't matter. Look at

Terry Moore: I know,

Terry Moore: guys. Ballar finds redemption at last

Terry Moore: and finds a woman and goes back to where he started on the farm.

Ron Moore: Yeah.

Terry Moore: Doesn't have to be ashamed anymore. No, he's he's he's made the journey.

Terry Moore: And you find yourself rooting for them.

Ron Moore: Yeah.

Terry Moore: You root for them despite it all. Yeah, this is the thing where we took out some of the pine trees in the back here.

Terry Moore: It's so hard for me to watch,

Ron Moore: is it not? It's hard.

Ron Moore: we always want to David Ike and I a long time ago talked about the final image of Battlestar Galactica being the shot of number six in her red dress walking through Time Square and we knew that we wanted that to somehow be the end of the show and that there was something about connecting the series to us that was important to us from the very beginning. I mean I remember having that conversation in season one with David Ike about you know the last shot of the series should be number six walking through Time Square and both of us just like really loving that. And then I included Head Ballar because it made more sense and tied the mythology together here at the end. But I loved I just I love this whole notion of bringing it all back to us.

Ron Moore: Oh, and this is of course my cameo.

Terry Moore: Finally putting myself in the show at the very end.

Ron Moore: Well, people have seen the trees.

Ron Moore: Now we're there 150,000 years later. This is downtown Vancouver,

Ron Moore: which has been digitally surgically altered to be New York.

Ron Moore: And there I am. There it's me. This is This is what I had to do is stand and read and then walk away. And I I concentrated very hard on just trying to read and walk and go, "shit, walk away." That's it. Thank God. That's all I had to do. But I did keep the shirt, the t-shirt. that I'm wearing in the shot is a Jimmyi Hendris t-shirt, which I couldn't show on camera because you couldn't show Jimmy and it would also be too much in the scene. But that was the t-shirt that cost that wardrobe had selected for me and I kept it and I I have it to this day. I wore it at Comic Con.

Terry Moore: Yes, she did.

Ron Moore: And I was going to say something on stage about I'm wear someone on the stage is wearing a piece of costume for the finale, but I didn't even want to give that away.

Ron Moore: Favorite line here is that that's in God's plan and you know it doesn't like that name and I I like somehow that's kind of that that changes the whole dynamic and really I like I don't know you know it doesn't like that name which just says well what is that what are we talking if it's not God and wait a minute you know it's just ending the series on this huh

Ron Moore: and then finally hearing the Jimmy version I'm panning up here you know we A lot of scouring went into this. A

Ron Moore: lot of scouring to get robot footage and eternal fucking battles about rights issues and nonsense with people who wouldn't let us use their robots and all kinds of crap like that. But to get

Terry Moore: Who would want that? Yeah,

Ron Moore: I found that piece. That's the

Terry Moore: You did? Yeah. Terry found some of these shots on online and then we tracked down the rights. This one is the most disturbing. She Yeah, you found this. This She's freaky, man.

Terry Moore: Cuz she's six in the making.

Ron Moore: She's six. That's why we used it. It's like Oh, and she's six and there you have it. And there's the six walking through Time Square, which is what we always want to do.

Ron Moore: Let that be a lesson for all of you who've got that little computerized vacuum cleaner popping around your living room.

Terry Moore: Yeah. Don't turn your back on your toasters. Well, that is it, ladies and gentlemen. That is the finale. That is the end of Battlestar Galactica and the last of the podcasts.

Ron Moore: But but there will be there will be, if I have my way, Okay. A followup. What's that other thing called that you do? Blog.

Terry Moore: Oh, a blog. I will try to do a blog.

Ron Moore: A nice long one.

Ron Moore: Nice long one. And thank you all for your I want to say viewership or audience. Thank you for listening for these many years and for enjoying the show and for joining us here at home with our cats and our dog and our our children

Terry Moore: and our chickens

Ron Moore: and our chickens still to come. So that's it.

Terry Moore: And thanks to all of you. You know who you are. who've hung in there and been fans and come to the conventions and posted on those message boards and

Ron: The show is for you.

Terry: Yep.

Ron: Thank you very much. Good night and good luck.

Re-imagined Series definition: "rookie," typically refers to those on their first tour of duty after initial training ^{(TRS: "Miniseries")}, q.v. nugget

Re-imagined Series definition: the process of using the FTL engines to make an near-instantaneous apparent faster-than-light transport of a ship from one point in space to another

Re-imagined Series definition: nerve center or "bridge" of a battlestar, see: Combat Information Center

Galactica 1980 definition: Troy attempts to use a phone booth near a gas station prior to their first run-in with Jamie Hamilton ^{(1980: "Galactica Discovers Earth, Part I")}.

Re-imagined Series definition: in military parlance, directive to continue the attack; otherwise used to refer to journalists ^{(TRS: "Maelstrom")}