Editing Podcast:Islanded in a Stream of Stars

{{Podcast Data
|special=
|title= Islanded in a Stream of Stars
|season= 4
|episode= 20
|download link= http://media.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/420/bsg_ep420_FULL.mp3
|local=
|posted date= 
|transcribed by=[[User:Joe Beaudoin Jr.|Joe Beaudoin Jr.]] 
|verified by=
|length=43:36 
|finished=
|verified=
|scotch=[https://wwww.obanwhisky.com Oban Single Malt Scotch Whisky] 
|smokes=None
|wordoftheweek=
|rdm= Y
|mrsron=
}}

<blockquote>[[Ronald D. Moore]] details behind-the-scenes decisions regarding [[Islanded in a Stream of Stars|the episode's]] narrative, visual effects, and character arcs, often referencing changes made during and after filming, including alterations to the script and post-production edits. He also highlights the challenges of simultaneously producing the [[Daybreak|two-part finale]], discussing creative choices and addressing fan theories regarding the series' mythology, notably dispelling rumors about a connection between [[Kara Thrace]] and [[Number Seven|Daniel]]. </blockquote>

== Teaser ==
'''Ron D. Moore:''' Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am [[Ronald D. Moore]], executive producer and developer of the new ''Battlestar Galactica''. I'm here to welcome you to the penultimate podcast. That's right, the second to last [[List of Podcasts|podcast]] of ''[[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|Battlestar Galactica]]''. 

And there is something kind of sad. Just a word about the podcast. I apologize for this one being terribly late. 

It's such as life. There will not be a separate podcast for episode 21. Instead, I will do the [[Podcast:Daybreak|entire finale]], 21, 22 and 23 together this weekend. And hopefully have them up online for all of you to enjoy next week. 

They should be on time for the broadcast of the finale. I'm doing this one in the middle of the day and you can hear the dulcet tones of power tools way out in the backyard. My wife, [[Mrs. Ron]], is putting in a chicken coop and so I can hear the workers periodically throughout. The Scotch today is [https://www.obanwhisky.com/ Oban], but the smoking lamp is out. But rest assured that for the final podcast there will be a fresh pack of cigs and a brand new bottle and we'll all get roaring drunk and smoke ourselves. 

So, as a result, Episode 20, "[[Islanded in a Stream of Stars]]," [[Michael Taylor]]'s final effort for the show as well as [[Edward James Olmos]]' last directing gig. He is doing "[[The Plan]]." This is Eddie's second to last episode. This opening sequence here with the Six and the Eight, and the Six arguing with the [[Dealino|crew chief]] was originally written to be {{Inlineref|Figurski|[[Anthony Figurski|Figurski]]|bold=N}}, but unfortunately [[Don Thompson|the actor]] wasn't available so we had to go [[Darcy Laurie|with someone else]] for this particular moment. 

We played around with the idea. Now you'll note that there's a slight discontinuity here in that the set that we're using here is basically the identical set that we've been using throughout for all the cracks in the ship. This is where [[Galen Tyrol|Tighrol]] [[No Exit|originally showed it]] to [[William Adama|Adama]] and then later when they bring in all the crew that's when they've been doing the work. That fracture section of interior ''Galactica'' was sort of established to be deep within the bowels of the ship herself, very close to the keel or close to her back as it were. 

Now in this episode we play the same set but later in the post-production process we decided to play this set as actually being near the exterior of the hull. I felt that came about for a couple of reasons. Mostly that in the previous episode when [[Sharon Valerii|Boomer]] [[Jump|jumped]] away in the [[Raptor]], she jumped out of the [[Flight pod|landing pod]], the flight pod and jumped away very close to the ship's hull and there was an explosion, not a due compression explosion, very close to ''Galactica''. In this episode as scripted there were supposed to be residual problems from that but also there were problems from the keel, cracks in the keel itself and near where we had previously established the work being done. When I was looking at the visual effects shots and I thought it was confusing in that we were sort of angling in on the exterior shots of the ship at an area where the audience wasn't used to seeing work being done, and it felt sort of out of context a little bit so I decided at that point to sort of make the two into one. 

That is to make Boomer's jump away as the proximate cause of this particular explosion at the side of the ship and that we would also make the work crew being done a sequence, just basically play that as if it was near the exterior of the ship. So it's a minor sort of glitch in continuity but you know shit happens around the old [[Battlestar (RDM)|Battlestar]] and that's a bit more of it. This episode overall did go through some changes in not really at the story or script level but more back at the concept level. This was one of the episodes that we had sort of talked about in very general terms in the previous summer's Lake Tahoe writers retreat and we had a certain arc that we were going for where the show was all going in and this was going to platform into that final story arc. Over the course of the writer strike I started to rethink the plan and started to have second thoughts about what we were doing and decided to check all of that and as a result this episode went in a very different direction than where it was originally designed to do. Unfortunately I can't really even describe the original direction without sort of laying out the differences between the new or the current storyline taking us to the end and contrasting that with the original storyline so you'll have to just wait on that a bit. As a side note I also have audio recordings of the entire writer's retreat of us in the room for like two, three days working through all the stories of the last season up to including what the finale was at that point and I'll probably be posting those on scifi.com at some point or perhaps including them with the DVD box set. 

We'll just have to wait and see how that turns out. There's also an older and even older audio recording of the original writer's retreat in Las Vegas before the fourth season began where we really sort of talked conceptually about how we were going to end the show and on what terms and that one will be posted as well. You'll see here that the opera house is making a return after being gone from the plot line for quite a while. That's deliberately done in that we wanted to start to bring certain of the threads together so that they could be woven into the finale and certainly the opera house is one of the continuing themes in the show and recurrent images and we wanted to get back to that and start to sort of imply that those threads will be tied up as well, which they will. 

A great sequence here of the decompression. Oh, I should also mention that there's a much longer version of this particular episode that I believe is going to be available on the DVD box set. That was Eddie's original director's cut and I think it's a good like 15, maybe even 20 minutes longer than this episode. Some of it will contain dropped or deleted scenes from the air version. Others are just extended sequences from what's already on the show. 

This sequence is one of them and I think in Eddie's version of the decompression, it's a much more drawn out sequence, a lot more cuts, really milking the tension a lot more. I think there was also further cutaways inside the ship as you saw ''Galactica'' being bounced around a lot more and really playing it for a much bigger explosion. I opted to cut back on that in particular because I didn't want this to sort of shoot our wad as it were in terms of damage to the ship, how badly damaged the ship was. Granted that this was a significant event in ''Galactica''<nowiki/>'s life and the loss of life and the physical damage to the ship itself. I didn't want it to feel like this was it. This is the one that sent the old girl into the bone yard and it really isn't. It's supposed to be one of many problems. It's supposed to be yet another in a series of hits and cracks and stresses and fractures that the ship has been going through over a period of time. So that's why I opted to sort of cut it back like that. Now we're in the poundy drums and out of the teaser. Okay, act one.

== Act One ==
There's more to the sickbay sequences as well. There's a beat where [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] comforts one of the Eights as she lays dying on one of the cots and she asks to see him and he doesn't want to go see her but [[Sherman Cottle|Cottle]] tells him, hey, she's dying. We just go the fuck over there and talk to her and hold her hand for Christ's sake. And he does and there's just this moment of the Eight looking up at him and talking to him a little bit. And it's sort of a beat of Tigh sort of realizing [[Final Five|his connection]] to the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] and that [[Significant Seven|they really are his children]] and that. That might be mixing where it takes place in the storyline. We might have actually done that cut away a little bit further along. 

No, they think about it. I really love [[Laura Roslin|Laura]]'s arc here in the final few episodes and where it takes her and how we play it out. It was important to me from the very beginning of the series that we played Laura's mortality and Laura's cancer as something real and something that was going to take her life eventually and to play the seriousness of it. Not that I'm saying that she's [[Daybreak|going to die eventually in the show]]. I'm just saying that we wanted to have it really hanging over everyone's head. This [[Quorum of Ships' Captains|captain's meeting]]. 

I'll come back to Laura in a minute. The captain's meeting I thought was important because this was sort of an idea that we had been germinating in the writer's room for a while about if they didn't have a normal civil government with [[Quorum of Twelve (TRS)|representatives from all the colonies]], how would they govern themselves. And this is sort of the only time that we got to really play that is, okay, now the government basically consists of people in charge of all the individual ships which would give the captains of the ship political power. They would represent their people, but you know, it's no matter how you slice it, it's still an uneven kind of representative government because the people and the captains represent different ships of different sizes and representing different populations. 

And yet in the interest of fairness, they all sort of get one vote, sort of like the U.S. Senate where regardless of the size of the state, each senator gets one vote. I particularly like this beat of all the captains circling like vultures over ''Galactica'' before she's even gone, you know, and that I wanted to really play the fact of limited resources in [[The Fleet (TRS)|the Fleet]], their desperation for anything that they can lay their hands to and that they would not be shy. They would not shy away from being willing to pick over the bones of the old girl and lease sort of emotional reaction to it, you know, hammering home his personal connection to this vessel and to the place that is ''Galactica'' as their home. There was more of [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] on the [[wireless]] that we cut as well. There were longer versions of it. There was an interesting beginning with him saying, hello, in fact I think I have it here because I was going through my notes. Where's Baltar? 

I'm in the actual draft here. I can find it without too much delay. Yeah, it was, I liked this opening where he says:

''"Good morning, this is [[God (RDM)|God]]. That's right, God. Coming to you live, courtesy of his chosen emissary and vessel, Gaius Baltar."'' 

And he says, 

''"Not bad. I have you all going there for a bit, didn't I?"'' 

''"What worries me is, the past I still do, you still don't see through the scam, do you? God talks to me, I talk to you, you receive his wisdom. Seems like our God isn't much different than the God's [[Pythia]] in this respect.'' 

''"Many gods, many prophets, one God, one prophet. Who's left out of the loop? You. Each and every one of you. I'll tell you a secret. Something I've belatedly come to understand. God doesn't speak from the top down, though through some appointed human mouthpiece.'' 

''"He speaks to each of us directly in our hearts and it's up to each of us to hear him."''

And on in that, it was an interesting beginning. I think we did shoot and I think it is in Eddie's cut. I wouldn't swear to it though. This could have like disappeared in subsequent drafts. But I really like that. In fact, I might have made Michael cut it before the final production meeting. But I did like that sort of opening gamut of his saying, "Hey, it's God. How's it going?"

This―it's worth mentioning just in terms of how the logistics of how these things played out. [[Daybreak|The finale]] was originally scripted to be a two hour finale. 

Ultimately, as you all know, it became three. But originally it was two and in a standard sort of prep period, which prep is the period of time before the episode is shot during which the director and all the department heads are actively preparing or prepping the episode to be shot. And typically that's one, you know, as you're shooting episode 20, you would usually be prepping episode 19 and so on. For this for a two hour finale, that meant that you were, you needed twice the prep time. And as a result, you were prepping that episodes 21 and 22 simultaneously with episode 20. So while the finale was being prepped, we were also [[Islanded in a Stream of Stars|prepping this episode]], which meant that everybody was doing double time. 

There was a tremendous amount of work in the production office, a tremendous amount of scheduling conflicts, a lot of, you know, double demands on every single department head who had to prep this enormous finale, which was ultimately so large. Oh, I'm sorry. This moment with Tigh is in the show. And I apologize for saying that it was cut. I think it was cut in an earlier version or something and then put back in. 

Anyway, the finale was such a large piece that it required a lot of extra work on everyone's behalf. That is not Jupiter, by the way. There are people who have said that, oh, that's Jupiter in the background. It's not. 

It's just another gas giant with stripes and so on on it. The reason I was telling you that is that 20, 20, 21, 22, and ultimately 23 were all being done very close together. In fact, there was a lot of crossboarding, which means, you know, your booking scenes to be shot simultaneously with multiple episodes. It was a tremendous amount of running around and reboarding and rescheduling things in these last few. Then the cuts came in on episode 20, you know, obviously months later. But this was also the same time that the finale was going through many changes and revisions and so on and so on. 

As a result, my memory of a lot of events of 20 are kind of murky. I saw this. The script was in really good shape. I look back through my notes to [[Michael Taylor]]. I didn't have a lot of notes on the script, I mean the script draft, so it's pretty much as he wrote it into the act. As I was saying, the script turned out pretty much as Michael Taylor wrote it with some exceptions and obviously cutting for length and stuff like that being the biggest sort of changes along the way. And then when I saw the cut, you know, it was Eddie's cut and Eddie's cut was very long and the biggest challenge was basically just getting it down to time and sort of seeing the two versions, you know, sort of got mixed in my head. And then most of my time was spent on the finale and then earlier episodes and so on and so on. As a result, this is the first time I've seen the episode in a couple of months. So it's all kind of blurred in my head with the many versions of the script as so often happens. 

And I think I've commented on this before in the podcast. What tends to happen with me is I retain sort of a sense memory of the episodes in that I remember the original drafts, subsequent drafts, early cuts, conversations with the directors, dropped scenes, multiple scenes. And then, you know, I ultimately, I sign off on the final cut, the on air version, the locked picture as we like to call it. And then from then on, I deal with it in sort of smaller bites. I deal with it in visual effects shots and music cues and, you know, questions on sound effects and so on. So there's lots of little details of all the pieces, but all the pieces kind of come together to me in clumps. You know, I'll be looking at visual effects shots from multiple episodes at once. 

I'll be, you know, someone will have a musical question, but it typically has, you know, multiple applications. Are we repeating this theme in this episode or how long are we going to use so and so theme? And when you get to this point where we are right now, where we're so far removed from the physical production of the episode and we're a couple of months removed from the actual editorial process of the episode, it's all kind of vague to be honest. 

That's why you might hear me tripping over what's in the show, what isn't in the show at this point. [[Daybreak|The finale]] I'm a little bit more conversant with because it was the finale. It was a bigger piece. It took a lot more time. I had a lot more hands on in that I was writing it and, you know, cutting it and there was just a lot more discussion on exactly what the finale was. The [[Hera Agathon|Hera]] and [[Sharon Valerii|Boomer]] subplot was actually dropped in Eddie's cut. I think Eddie had a cut where he dropped this plot line altogether and he had valid reasons for doing so. But when I was looking at the finale, I felt like I needed to go back and re-institute these scenes because I felt you had to kind of platform into some of the events that took place with Hera in the finale. 

And I kind of needed some of these pieces to provide connective tissue to get there. Likewise, a lot of the [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] [[The Destiny|stuff]] that we'll be discussing as it comes up here in the show. I liked the character of Boomer and I really, I've said this before, I really like the fact that we brought her character back into the storyline in a very strong way. I think she's a troubled and complicated character. I think there was something we've always said that the [[Number Eight|Eight]] models were troubled in that they were a little more vulnerable. They were more apt to change their minds. 

They felt whipsod or whiplash between strong emotions. They had trouble picking a side and sticking to it as we've said in the show. And Boomer is the first of the models that we ever met, obviously. And I think there's something great about Boomer coming face to face with Hera and being forced to be on the Raptor with her and being with Hera all the way to the end. I think in Mike's first draft, this scene was Kara trying to get into the bathroom and having some of [[Cult of Baltar|Baltar's harem]] blocking her way and her just telling them to go fuck themselves and going in and sitting down and having the conversation. I think it was my note to have her already in there with a latch busted on the door and Baltar shaving. 

There's something just kind of great. Nobody plays these scenes. You just don't really, especially between men and women, of one on the toilet and another shaving and having a conversation. 

Particularly when they're not even married or something. I don't know. There was something very sort of intimate and oddly, if not domestic, at least sort of familiar that you got to play and that gave us a chance to bring [[Head Six]] back into the fold. [[Mrs. Ron]] will be joining us, I hope, for the [[Podcast:Daybreak|finale podcast]] tomorrow, even though there will be smoking and all that kind of stuff. 

''[Faint, unintelligible from Mrs. Ron, asking if this is the podcast for "Daybreak."]''

'''RDM:''' No, this is not the finale. This is episode 21. ''[to listeners]'' Mrs. Ron hasn't been feeling well, so. Mrs. Ron had food poisoning. Yes, but not from her own food.

'''Mrs. Ron:''' Okay, then I will see you tomorrow. 

'''RDM:''' Thank you, Mrs. Ron. Let's see. I think part of Kara's motivation here for outing herself to Baltar is I think she needs to tell somebody. She tried to tell [[Lee Adama|Lee]] a while back. 

She wasn't able to. Baltar is styling himself as sort of God's man here among the mortals and he has a lot of pious things. He's sort of putting himself in that position. Kara is very cynical about that, but she has profound questions about her own nature and who and what she is. It felt right that just giving their own backstory and who they are, she would tell him out of anger rather than as a confessional moment. 

I kind of bought it in that sense. One of the threads that we dropped and never quite got back to was the fact that Baltar and Kara slept together [[Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I|a long time ago in the series]]. That was about as close as we came to touching in on the fact that these two had been intimate with one another and that there was some small connection between the two of them. I do kind of regret that we never got back to doing something with Kara and Baltar. They were certainly a volatile couple. There could have been something really interesting there to play. 

Okay. I love the writers are the ones that came up with the idea of [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] being [[Hybrid|hybridized]] as it were and functioning as sort of a hybrid character here and connecting him to ''Galactica''. When they pitched me that in the room I was like, wow, that's just great. I mean, that's the great thing about staff writing and TV for me as the showrunner is you get to come in and writers get to surprise you and they get to sort of say things that impress and amaze you that you never really anticipated, wouldn't really thought of. 

I never would have thought of hybridizing Sam Anders and they did, and I think that's a tribute to the creativity that goes into that room and I really like to encourage that. I like to encourage them to think beyond sort of the borders that I sort of construct for the show. You know, and sometimes you pull them back and say, oh, no, that doesn't work. 

We don't do that or whatever. But, you know, they come up with great notions like this, which I just think are inspired. And this is a great beat. I mean, this is a classic beat of the character who's about to shoot you and then suddenly the hand jumps up and grabs her and he starts babbling. 

And you know, it's an oldie but a goodie and it always kind of works and it worked for us again here. Was she going to kill him? Yes, she was. 

She would have absolutely, I have no real doubt in my mind that Kara Thrace was more than capable of pulling the trigger on this gun. A lot of discussion about how this was going to play and wanting to make the video. And I think that's a great thing. We went through a lot of permutations and sort of what could that be, how would we register it. And you know, sometimes the best ideas are the simplest and that you just flicker the lights. You know, you flicker the lights and everybody looks around and you keep cutting back to Anders in the room and everybody goes, oh yeah, that's Anders calling that. 

And sometimes you can spend a fair amount of time sort of coming up with things that are obvious into the act. 

== Act Two ==
And we're back. This beat coming up here where [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] has, pulls the it tells Adama about the [[New Caprican loco weed|joint]] in the book and they both sit here and toke together. I love this when Michael, Michael really wanted to put this in the script because you know, Michael wrote the original stuff back in "[[Unfinished Business]]" of them getting high back on [[New Caprica]]. And I thought I was going to have a big argument with the network about it and I was sort of leery of doing it again. But he kind of like pushed it a bit and I kind of went for it and I braced myself for an inevitable argument from the censors about the appropriateness of it, etc. And to my pleasant surprise, I didn't get any flak about it at all. 

I didn't have a word and I was careful how I cut it. I tried not to make it too much of them, you know, sucking it up and being dude and whatever. But you know, they just let it go. I think they didn't want to have another fight about it. And I think they had resigned themselves to it by this point. 

And the censors have pretty much left me alone. And I love that Adama takes a hit of it too. You know, it's like the guy's going to a funeral and if you know, if you can get high before you go to a funeral, if you can get high before you go to a funeral, I suggest you do. You know, it's just embroidering on Adama-Laura relationship a little bit more, having the relationship take us up into the end as well. And it's just all these character beads. 

It's all these little pieces of these people. I mean, I said from the beginning that the show was about the characters, that this was a drama first and a science fiction series second. And I'm proud of the fact that we held that to the end, that that really is what the show is. And all these character beats are what the show is about. The show was never about battles and things exploding and, you know, earth shattering kabooms. The show was always about these people and it was from the very beginning, which is why in the mini series we spent so long setting everything up and we resisted very strongly in the arguments that said to get to the action faster, why do we have to spend all this time with these people who cares about [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] and [[Lee Adama|Apollo]] and who cares about Laura, blah, blah, blah. 

And we just said, no, that is what people care about. That is what the show is about. And to us, to me, the show lives and dies in these moments. The show lives and dies in the, in just watching Laura and Adama talk to one another. 

I mean, that's why I love the show. It's these moments. It's the life of the characters. 

It's these people. I mean, the characters are people to us and to me. They're people I've known, you know, to love and who matter a great deal to me. And, you know, spending time in their presence is, it's the joy of doing this. 

It's why I love this job. We'll look on Laura's face. She's so good. She's Mary's just so good. They're all so good. 

I mean, you know, it'd be hard to overpraise the cast of ''Battlestar Galactica''. These are actually little beats. These are inserts. We didn't have a [[Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down|Balltar working in the lab scene]]. It wasn't scripted. It wasn't shot. These are your notes that [[Gaius Baltar|Balltar]] is not in any of these shots of the slides and so on in the microscope. 

That shot of him looking through the microscope is actually stolen from the first season episode when he was in the lab working. And when we were in post and editorial, we realized that we didn't really have a bridging piece. He takes the [[dog tag]] from Kara and then the next thing was he just shows up on the [[hangar deck]] and says, "I've done all this work" and you felt the missing step. You know, I didn't feel it in the script, but when you watched it in the cut, you went, yeah, you know what, we kind of need a beat there. But we were already off the sound stages and there was really no way to go in because we didn't see the cut until after the finale was already shot. And so there really wasn't a way to go in and just, oh, let's just pick up a scene with Balltar in his lab. 

That was already, you know, that ship had already sailed. So we basically just constructed it out of, you know, doing some inserts of the slide and the dog tag and the bottom of the microscope. And then I told the editors to just find me a piece of Baltar looking through the microscope. And they managed to find a piece of him looking in the microscope where you couldn't see his hair too well because if you pulled back from that shot, that shot was just a little bit wider, you would really see that his hair is at a completely different length than it is in this episode. 

Oh, let's see. Oh, there wasn't originally, I think there was no recon mission to go look for [[The Colony]]. And then we put, I think we had, we put that in at the last minute because we wanted, it felt a little too callous of a domino to not even go look to go check it out to see if he could find the damn place before he blew off [[Karl Agathon|Helo]]. And so we inserted that the last minute to sort of say, you know, he did at least send one Raptor to kind of go see if he could find it and, you know, putting off the question of whether they could do anything about it and that, you know, could they actually go and try to rescue her? He could at least kick that can down the road a little bit. But we felt it was important that he should, he would at least go look. 

So he does actually send a Raptor to go check. Great visual effects work there on the exterior of the ship as they're all working away. This is another classic sort of Adama in the corridor moment with, you know, Helo. 

Very powerful scene, very interesting scene. As in the first draft, it was really more the conversation with Laura that we just saw a minute ago that convinced Adama to abandon ''Galactica''. And then there were versions where it was this conversation and it became, at the end of the day, it felt like it should be a combination of all the above. It didn't seem right that you should point a finger at the one particular moment that convinced him to abandon ship of all these things adding up. And if there was a beat, you know, they felt like when he gets to that moment coming up later where he's in his bathroom and he freaks out and sees ''Galactica'' in his head. And that's kind of the summation of all these other scenes of where ''Galactica'' really is as a vessel and all the other competing interests and people's hearts and all these things combining to sort of force him to sort of see the writing on the wall and finally abandon ship. 

You know, it was interesting here that Adama, you know, Adama's attachment to the inanimate object of ''Galactica'', you know, it holds his heart just as strongly in many ways as Helo's attachment to the very animate object [[Hera Agathon|of his daughter]]. I'm asking you a chance to do something. Please. But no, no I won't. In fact, I'll just let you here, to cry alone in the corridor. 

Dude, I'm out of here. The funeral wasn't quite scripted this way. There were three separate funerals. We had sort of, they were scripted to be three pieces of the three different ones. And this was something that [[Andy Seklir]] came up with in post. I think it was Andy. 

I think it was his notion to do this in post. I might be in the stadium, but Eddie was very excited because it was, you know, how do you do the funerals? And here's three of them and a segue in one, two, three. They just found a way to sort of intercut all three of them blending, dissolving, going back and forth between the three funeral rites. That felt like it was actually a more powerful statement about how they were all connected in ways that they couldn't even really see at that moment. 

And their mutual losses, their shared grief, and ultimately their shared interests in trying to come together and trying to be one ship and in one fleet and have one goal after all this. And then Baltar's outing of Kara Thrace. There was this idea that we talked about for a while, that if Kara really is alive and she had really been dead, then she is the embodiment of the notion of [[resurrection]]. Certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the resurrection is the key event. It is the idea that defines Christianity, which is the notion that you could die and you could literally be resurrected. And that would be embodied, of course, in the story of Jesus. Jesus was literally a mortal person who literally died and who literally came back to life. That idea seems to be such a powerful one that if there was an example of that event happening in their midst, if there had truly been a person, an actual, verifiable, mortal human being, not a [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylon]], who came back from the dead, like Kara did, that that would mean a profound thing to Gaius Baltar and it would mean a profound thing to people who believed in God or in the gods or in any kind of divinity, that the notion of resurrection itself would be an epic event. And it felt right that Baltar, given the fact of where he is in his story, he would seize upon this as demonstration of what he has been preaching. And it would demonstrate to him, to himself, also that there is something to what he is preaching, that the resurrection of Kara Thrace would actually be meaningful, that it would actually say that there really was something that really had happened there. I should probably say as a side note, I know that there is a tremendous amount of speculation out there in the internet that Kara is the daughter of [[Number Seven|Daniel]], or that Daniel being the Cylon model that was killed or destroyed or aborted, however you want to choose to define it, by [[John Cavil|Cavil]], that there is a connection between Daniel and Kara and that is part of the revelations that we are going to reveal in the finale. I don't typically want to put theories to rest because it kind of spoils the enjoyment and fun of people on the show. However, I do think it is worth saying that that is not part of the plan. 

End of the act. 

== Act Three ==
Just to complete that thought, there is no connection between [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] and [[Number Seven|Daniel]]. Like I said, I don't typically like to sort of quash rumors and theories because part of the fun of watching a show like this is coming up with your own theories and ideas. But in this particular case, I don't want people to really be distracted through [[Daybreak|the finale]] by this other idea, which has gained a tremendous amount of currency on the internet and among fan circles. And that is probably my own fault because I don't think I realized the impact that the backstory of Daniel would have in "[[No Exit]]." I sort of thought that it was an interesting story that defined something about [[Number One|Brother Cavil]] or John Cavil and his backstory and how he reacted to the threat of someone else being as beloved as he was. It was sort of a Cain and Abel type allegory. 

All those reasons. I just thought it was an interesting piece of backstory, but in recent weeks I've realized that the cult of Daniel has grown. There's a tremendous amount. There's a lot of people out there who are now investing a tremendous amount of time, energy, and thought into the notion that Daniel is really a powerful figure in the show and part of the mythos is directly related to Kara. And I don't want anyone listening to this podcast―I don't want you to go into the finale with having your Daniel hopes up too high because that's really not part of the plan. And again, I apologize if people think that that was such a gigantic mislead or clue or something. I mean, that was not the intent. 

And I don't think I anticipated how strongly that would be grabbed by people. Okay, here we are at [[The Colony]]. For the sharp eyed among you, that is an [[Raider (RDM)|old style Cylon Raider]] there. As we've said before, The Colony is sort of the place where the Cylons live. This is kind of their home more than any. If there is a place that the Cylons call home, The Colony is it. For years in the show, we used to refer to a place known as "Cylonia." Of course, we never put that in a script, but "Cylonia" was what we kept calling the Cylon home world. 

And we always kind of say it's a place we don't want to go because you know, you're always going to be disappointed by whatever it is. It was just a big planet and "Cylonia" was just we just kept referring to it over and over again. But as we focus on the finale, even in the, I think the writers retreats, we were still talking about "Cylonia" as a place. And we just, I just kept getting dissatisfied with that. And it just felt kind of played and didn't seem interesting. And we came up to the idea of The Colony and I mean, an idea that's kind of buried in the show that I think we might have mentioned at some point, possibly in "[[No Exit]]" or possibly one of the earlier episodes is that the heart of The Colony, somewhere at the heart of The Colony, is the original ship, the original [[Earth (RDM)|Earth]] ship by which the [[Final Five]] actually came from Earth and traveled the distance to find the [[Twelve Colonies of Kobol|12 colonies]], you know, a long time ago. 

And that around it, this colony had sort of been built. Okay, we have [[William Adama|Adama]]. This is Adama's final realization that the ship is falling apart and there's not much he can do about it, which culminates in his epiphany in the bathroom. I think as I look through these final episodes, I would say if there's a mistake that I made, I think as a storyteller, is I think I hit the story of Adama and his losing his ship a little too hard. I think I played too many of these beats of Adama, you know, being concerned with the cracks and working on it and feeling it and being upset about it. What seemed like a couple of beats here and there in the story plotting process, when all is said-and-done, you look at the completed episodes―I feel like there's a repetitive quality that we hit this too many times. We should have just kind of reduced the previous beats or cut a bunch of the previous beats so that this moment would have much more impact. I think I got too in love with the idea of breaking Adama here in the last few episodes. Everything from finding Earth and [[Revelations|finding out that]] Earth is not what you think it would be, to the revelation that [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]]'s a Cylon, to losing [[Laura Roslin|Laura]], and then finally [[Galactica (TRS)|losing a ship]], I really like the idea of breaking the man down all the way. But I think I might have hit this too many times and too hard when all this is said and done. Part of that comes out of the fact that he was such a stoic figure that nothing really touched. 

Well, even that's not true. He was such a stoic figure and so powerful early on in the series that I really wanted to go after him in the last section here. Just a quick note, that little stylistic thing of Adama looking at the ship with something that came up in post, it was originally Eddie's idea and we refined it quite a while through the process. But anyway, I think that there's a little bit too much of Adama and his ship. 

Part of that also came out of the fact that we had never really played Adama's personal connection to ''Galactica'' the way that, say, in ''Star Trek'', there was a personal connection between [[Memoryalpha:James Kirk|Jim Kirk]] and the ''[[Memoryalpha:U.S.S. Enterprise|Enterprise]]''. Kirk overtly loved the ''Enterprise'', called her she, called her a beautiful woman when he was affected by various viruses or alien minds. And you always knew that to Jim Kirk the ''Enterprise'' was the lady of his life, that Jim Kirk was married to that ship and meant to profound something very profound to him. We didn't play that with Adama, but I liked the idea that as we approached the inn and as the ship was falling apart, we would then discover that Adama, no less than Kirk, had a very personal and emotional connection to his vessel that would surprise us was the feeling. Because you wouldn't expect Adama to have had that feeling for his ship based on what you'd seen before. 

But I think what happened is that we hit it so many times that it became a little bit too easy here by the end. Originally this episode was going to go out in the previous scene with [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] and [[Sam Anders|Anders]], her working on [[The Music|the notes]] and trying to figure out what's the significance of the music with Anders. But I felt that this is really the end of the show, the announcement that Adama's abandoning ship and the two old guys sitting together drinking and saluting ''Galactica'' and saying that the end is here. You've been talking about the end coming, the end is coming, we the audience know the end is coming, the characters have been smelling the end is coming for a while. But to hear the old man say the end has arrived and that we have to transfer the flag to the [[Rebel basestar|base ship]] and it's all over, that's really the end of the show. 

That's going to have the biggest impact of all. And I think originally Tigh was going to push him into making this final realization that―Tigh was going to have to force Adama to face it. But then it felt more interesting to find that Tigh doesn't want to let go, that Tigh is really trying to almost talk Adama out of abandoning ship. [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]] did shoot some actual abandon ship scenes, there are some big shots of crew members on the [[hangar deck]] getting into [[Raptor|Raptors]], being processed on their way out, big exodus moments in Adama standing up on the catwalk looking down. You'll see those in the extended version. We will also sneak those into the recap [[Daybreak, Part I|on the finale]] where they say "previously on ''Battlestar Galactica''"―you'll see some of the shots of them actually exiting the ship. As we found that little trick of putting in little beats that got cut from the series and inserting them into recaps along the way. 

A trick that I'm proud and willing to continue to use. ''Galactica'' the finest ship on the fleet. Boy was she ever. Well folks, there's only [[Podcast:Daybreak|one more big podcast left to do]]. It'll be a hard one to get through, I'm sure. But I look forward to doing it and sharing one more of these sessions with you. There will be a commentary track for "[[The Plan]]" but that will be done in studio. 

So there really is only one more of these at home sessions to do. I will do that probably tomorrow and upload that and then that will be ''Battlestar Galactica''. Thank you all. Thank you all for watching. Thank you all for listening. Good night and good luck to all of you. 

{{Podcast list (RDM Season 4)}}