Editing Podcast:No Exit

Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is Ronald D. Moore. Executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. I'm here to welcome you to the podcast for 417, No Exit.

Well as you can see right off the bat, we're already in a different place. This is, uhm, this is a unique episode for a lot of reasons. The style and structure of what we're doing and also just that uhm, the story that we're telling here. This opening that you're watching came about in editing as we were puzzling through how to set up a coherent recap for this episode in terms of which part of the Cylon story did you need to know, an Ellen story and all that, in order to get into the show. This wasn't scripted, but I think it was Andy Sekler and Paul Leonard, editor and producer respectively in post production who came up with the idea of lets do a whole new open and lets do a way to sort of like deliver the audience the idea of okay this is a specific episode where we want you to really pay attention to the Cylon mythos and the mythology that we've created of who's who and how this came about, the roots of the story and then take you in to the, first of all, the Ellen story, and I think it was a smart move. There was some debate as to whether there should be a traditional recap in addition to the precap structure that you just saw, in other words, should we review the events of the mutiny and Anders getting shot and so on, but I argued against, lets just tell the audience right from the get-go this is a different episode. We want you to view it as a different episode, we want you to just go on the journey and take in what is a tremendous amount of material. And I will be the first to admit that this episode probably throws more backstory and exposition at the audience and probably any other episode that we've done and probably then any of the other episodes that I've attempted in my career. This is a very complicated show - very complex structure of flashing back to Ellen Tigh's story over these many months and also telling a contemporaneous a contemporary Galactica story at the same time. Its a very challenging structure and I wanted ultimately to just start the episode off in a way that sort of rooted you very firmly in this idea that we're telling this complicated back story. 

This scene and most of the Ellen/Cavil scenes up to a certain point actually came out, I first wrote as scenes that were going to be in my episode, A Disquiet Follows My Soul, in that episode I was going to have these flashbacks fulfill the same roll that they fill here structurally, that you would be on Galactica with Adama etc and doing all these character tales and we would keep flashing back to Ellen. And the reasoning was that after the initial reveal of Ellen as the fifth Cylon it was we wanted to follow it up, we wanted to give some context to it, let the audience understand it. As I got into the show, before I even finished the first draft, I started to realize two things: one that it was too complex to sort of shunt off into this sort of B backstory, B story that was all about backstory and the other thing was that it was becoming too big of an episode already, it was becoming too unwieldy to actually make that work, to try to actually get both that story and all the character things that Galactica that I want to do at the same time and I opted to just pull it out of the episode altogether. Meanwhile the writers were working on this Anders backstory where he was going to be supplying the other backstory about the final five and what they had gone through and what they realized. And there was some kind of conference call where someone suggested, I don't remember who it was, that why don't we just strip out the Ellen story from my episode and move it down the line and put it in episode 17 and essentially that's what we did. I lifted those scenes completely. I didn't have the end of the show. I didn't have her escape, I hadn't written any of that, so I gave the scenes that I did have and gave them to the writers. And we moved on from there and they just became this episode, which became the big mythology show. The episode that really fills in a lot of blanks. The episode that sort of takes you through a lot of the sort of chains of logic that got us to certain places. It explicates the backstory of not only the final five but of the larger Cylon nation as a whole. 

Its a very complicated structure. And I've screened this for a couple of friends of mine who are fans of the show who I've been screening some episodes to catch them up on where things were and I showed this to them and they went Woah. That is a lot to take in. And I went, "Yeah", that's a lot to take in. And we kind of looked at each other. We sat around and drank for a little bit and I asked them, ok, tell me what the story is. And I was impressed they were actually able to tell me the story with a little bit of effort they were able to coherently tell me what the story of the final five were and how they left how from Kobol to Earth from Earth to the 12 colonies and then ultimately into the miniseries and to the Battlestar Galactica and I was really relieved because that meant that even if it gets complex and complicated in different sections you could actually track it.

I like this little bit of this little callback of Cavil dragging the chair across the room. Which harkens back to the way he got into the thing with Tigh on New Caprica. 

I really like the idea that we're going to see a different Ellen, that when Ellen came out of the tub goo she was going to know who and what she was and the memories going to be there and we were going to see a different Ellen Tight. I didn't want her to be a completely different Ellen Tigh in that she still likes to drink and smoke and fuck but she and she's probably still trouble but that she's slightly different person, she's not some idiot. She really is one of the final five Cylons. She has this history. She has this knowledge. She has this intelligence that we hadn't seen before. And I was really taken with this idea of Cavil as the first one that was created. That Cavil had this special relationship with the final five and that Cavil ultimately was really behind a lot of the events that we saw take place. That sort of came about organically because Dean Stockwell was so strong in the show and his character was so interesting in the show, there was a certain, once you started moving him into the place of leading the bad, quote-unquote bad Cylons, the villains, it felt he was taking on more and more of the attributes of the guy who was leading the charge against humanity for various reasons and it seemed like a natural to tie him in with Ellen. And I liked the idea that we keep coming back to this chamber and keep revisiting their relationship as months went by and through that one-on-one dialogue of the two of them we would start to learn really how all these events came about. 

Then the fact that he has a name. There's a first name that is John Cavil. And there was something really sick and twisted that made it even better that made it even better about the idea that Cavil was sort of his son and there were Oedipal things going on and incestuous things going on and it was wild and whacky relationship between the two. What was going on in Cavil's head when he was sleeping with her and all that New Caprica stuff? And then torturing her husband and then knowing they were final fives. It was just fascinating material. 

Meanwhile things are falling apart literally aboard Galactica. As in the previous podcast the cracks in the hull, the cracks in the ship's structure I should say, are really one of the threads that will take us to the end. This is definitely a beginning of the end kind of feeling aboard ship. This storyline will continue for quite some time. And how it impacts the rest of the show is fascinating. There we see a little bit more the FTL machinery that Galen put a stop to in the previous episode, now you can see Gary Hutzel's put in some workers in the background and so on. This is all so great to restore Galen to being a Chief once again. There's a sort of symmetry of bringing back, harkening back to the beginning, even as we're wrapping up the show and bringing back Ellen and once again Tyrol is the chief.

The Anders being shot in the head was an interesting way to be able to get about all this exposition because it gave us a way to carve Anders' scenes in such a way that we give the audience pieces of information about the backstory and not lay it all out as a long boring story. It kept jeopardy and tension in all the scenes and it also allowed us to pick and choose which elements of the backstory we would tell. Which parts of the story that we could allow the characters and the audience to hear and at what point because we could always have him, his eyes flutter and his body jump around and we could manipulate the scenes accordingly. It was a great dramatic tool to have an episode that risks being all about just exposition and backstory and give it tension in the moment with the characters and drama and stakes in the moment with the characters and also make you make it interesting whenever you got to hear pieces of that backstory. Cause otherwise you would just hear it all come out in one long ramble, but knowing that Anders could stop talking at any moment gives an urgency to all the scenes and also meant that we could pick up whenever we wanted, we could end whenever we wanted, we could be really cute and clever with the editing. We could make it feel kind of frustrating, where the audience is wanting to hear more of it and its taken away from them. Instead of the audience feeling ah, geez do I have to listen to more of this guy talk anymore.

I'm surprised at how strongly I feel the change there in the main title when it goes to Home instead of searching for a place called Earth. Just how profound that seems to have shifted the point of view of the series is really interesting.

== Act One ==

Oh and this scotch is still Bourbon. Is still Woodford Reserve and the smoking lamp is still out because I'm still in Tahoe. 

Oh I love that nightsweats and dreams of dogfaced boys just tracing you in the yellow mists and I don't know its literally one of those things that you write that just flows out of your fingertips and you're not even sure where the fuck that came from.

I like the way Kate plays this. I mean Kate and I had a couple of conversations after the reveal of her as the fifth Cylon and she wanted to know where its going to go and I was writing the scenes for this when it was going to be in my episode. I was really looking forward to working with Kate in episode 14 and she was "Wow that will be so great. I have all these questions about the character". I sent her the scenes as I wrote them way ahead of time. Outside of the chain of command. She saw them even before some of the writers did and we talked over the phone a little bit. Just the fact that I wanted her to feel a sense of her stepping out. That this is really her true self but that it was really important that we still always felt the Ellen Tight that we had come to know. That there really was a blend of the two. That the Ellen that we knew in the show was a truthful representation of the core of the woman on some basic level but when she had all of her memories and all of the knowledge of who she truly was and what her history was that there would be, she would rise up a bit, that there would be more of an elegance to it. There would be a greater intelligence at work as well. There would be more compassion. It would just be a more interesting and deeper character. 

And i thought it was really interesting this, Cavil as the keeper of the final five, in a very literal sense. That he had kept the knowledge from the rest of the Cylons. That only he knew what had really happened. Who all of them, the sort of antagonistic relationship would be between him and Ellen when she came back. I don't think its giving too much away to say that Cavil figures in a very large way into the DVD movie that's coming out for Galactica called The Plan, which Andy directed and Jane Espensen wrote and its really a showing a lot of what happened and what his thought process was about what he was trying to do, what his plan was really. In the opening years of the series.

There was opportunity, these scenes gave us an opportunity to say, they were rewritten after me, some of my original stuff stayed but there was a process and what I liked was that it gave us a chance to start talking about the different flaws of the Cylons, to talk about the Cylons themselves, the facts that the Sharon models tended to be torn, tended to go back and forth in their loyalties, tended to be more open to ideas but more vulnerable at the same time. And the sixes were a certain way, and the Leonben's are a certain way. I love getting a chance to explain where all that kind of stuff came from. A nice bit of symbolism with the apple, which is very cute. 

And here, here's one of those great little moments where I think the audience, I'm hoping the audience is leaning forward and going, "Oh my God, here it comes, here's all the story". As fast as we can get it out about who the final five were. What their relationships were. We talked about this at great length in the writers room. There was a lot of conversation about who these people were back on Earth, and what they were doing and how this all came to pass. This was all very carefully thought out. There was a lot of discussion of rewriting, a lot of change to make and line up not only with the established timeline and the mythology but also with the characters themselves and trying to understand who the characters were originally and understand how they came to be the characters that we now know. The idea that Tory and Tyrol were in some kind of relationship I though was interesting only because they have no relationship whatsoever today. That that might of been - that they were drawn together originally but had no inkling and no attraction to one another since, except for that one moment in the bar when Tory's kind of putting the make on Tyrol a little bit, kind of comes up in that moment in the episode where she ultimately kicks Cally out the airlock, that's really the only hint that you see of a relationship. And I think it was that spark that we took later and said let's make that a thing, that they had a relationship and she was on some level subconsciously feeling that tug towards him at that moment. But to continue the thought the other thing that I thought was really interesting was that Tigh and Ellen were very powerfully drawn to one another. That they as a couple were soulmates. They were a pair that literally lived through space and time and I love that and I thought that there was something just wonderful about that. 

Here's Ryan, Ryan was our script coordinator. This was his first script. Very happy to give him the chance to do this and of course he got a doozy for his first one, this is quite an episode for any writer, much less a new writer on the staff to tackle and he took it with good humor and there was a lot of rewriting and a lot of work that went on after this and it was very difficult process, but he stuck with it and he was a real, real trooper through it all.

Yeah, now this idea was something that came about awhile ago. We'd been talking about this notion for quite some time about what would happen within the fleet, that would they need a quorum again, would they need a quorum at all and that there was this feeling that eventually maybe what would happen would be that the quorum would be dissolved or what actually happened was that the quorum was assassinated, and how would they govern themselves and it seemed logical that they would become the fleet captains, that each ship would become its own kind of state or province or colony or whatever you want term you wanted to put on it. That each captain would be the representative of that ship. There's a powerful logic to that. They were trying very hard to hold on to a democratic and a republican form of government that was as close to the original government that they had back in the 12 colonies as they could but now in this moment it just feels like to start that up again to start choosing new representatives and try to start it all over and Laura's dying, it just didn't feel practical. And so we opted to go this way, which changes the dynamic, it changes the sense of the fleet and this population, now they've let go of that, notion of what was once a democratic, a republican way of life and now they're relying on literally the authoritarian figure on each vessel is their voice and there's good and there's bad for that. Its fascinating to wonder what each of the ships would have devolved into. To go out and see how there would be individual cultures within each ship in addition to just the natural cultural and sociological differences among the colonies but presumably the colonists were spread across all the ships so that some ships would have only people from colony on it but probably most of them were polyglot or heterogenous mixture of colonists here and there for different reasons. So the ship captain in some way would be the most direct representation of the voice of the people in that sense.

I love all this, I love this brings us again back to the beginning, we're going back to the beginning and the miniseries, Galactica was on the verge of being decommissioned, she had fought in a war already. She had been built and fight in the original Cylon war and had come through that and then she survived down through the years. She was one of the last, if not the last, surviving Battlestar of that era. So she's a very old ship and she's taken a hell of a beating since the miniseries. And it felt right that Galactica herself would be starting to really show signs of stress. I think I was starting to remember things like the carrier Yorktown and the damage that she had accrued in the battle of the Coral Sea, she had taken a couple of bomb hits and came back to Pearl Harbor and had to be patched together and shoved out of Pearl Harbor quickly in order to fight the battle of Midway and I always sort of remembered the sense of the ship being patched together just to get out the door and go fight a battle but that it needed deeper and longer time and overhaul if she was going to really survive and I think that kind of influenced a lot of our thinking and my thinking as we plan these stories of Galactica starting to show stress and fractures and not getting any better.

I really like this story, this little story within the story of Kara and Sam's relationship. Her care for him. Her empathy and sympathy for him. Her wanting to give him the time that he has to say what he has to know but she's trying to save his life 'cause she does feel a responsibility. She's always been in love with him to an extent and even one that's been supplanted by her feelings for Lee Adama and there's always genuine feelings for Sam.

And then here he goes. Yeah I mean its really effective and I'm surprised at how well this kind of comes off. 

==Act Two==

Ten months ago, that's them jumping away from the algae planet. With the sun going supernova. I really like this upcoming speech of Cavil's where he talks about what it was like to see a supernova and not be able to truly experience it, I mean, this to me was the heart of the matter in terms of his character and the Cylons on a very fundamental level about who and what they are and what do they want to be, they are machines that have been created to perfectly emulate humanity but they could be so much more and there was some bit of poetry and some bit of recognition of the majesty of the universe that Cavil could not see, could not experience in his true glory because he was limited by the human form. This is a being that if he had been allowed to be machine-like in a true sense, if he could actually be tapped into the sensors and divises greater than the human body would allow he could see, experience, feel, taste, smell, all the sensory adjectives that we use for our experience would be exceeded by what he could experience in that moment. If he could have seen X-rays. If he could have heard the solar wind, all of the things that don't make sense to us as human beings because we're limited by these organic bodies to a Cylon to a true Cylon by Cavil's lights who could be greater than all of that, who could experience it with all of the tools potentially at his disposal, he could have experienced a profound moment in the life of the universe, and he couldn't. And its the frustration and the anger of that which is ironically also a derivative of his human nature, of the humanity in him, of the things that make him specific to be Cavil also make him loathe what he is, also make him loathe the limitations of his experience.

This is just, I like this idea a lot. This idea survived into the draft into the show, there was another idea that took place after this that did not, there was a whole other idea of self-awareness and breaking the fourth wall really that I wrote, a long monologue for Ellen. I was looking back through my notes, I discovered it in an earlier draft and I believe it was shot and for all I know it will be on the DVD deleted scenes. I think it was shot, it is certainly in the script, maybe it was cut on the stage, I never saw it on the stage so it was probably cut by the director, but anyways I'll quote from some of it because I'm sort of tickled by it, I sort of like it. It cut in with the super <> the chyron said six months ago and Ellen's talking to Boomer and they're doing their tai-chi stuff and Ellen is saying: "Self-awareness is not combined the "real-world". In theater, fictional characters are sometimes given a kind of self-awareness. This is known as breaking the fourth wall. The device is a form of meta-fiction allowing characters to address the audience directly and comment on the narrative in which they themselves are participants. In doing so, the characters transcend their fictive nature enter into a dialectical relationship with the viewer with each side seeking to persuade the other of the innate truth of their reality. But does the character actually exist? Does it have form and shape beyond the page on which it is written? Can it ever truly break the fourth wall and address the unseen, undreamt of audience that watches its every move from the safety beyond the footlights. The Lords of Kobol once felt that man could never break the fourth wall, could never look upon the Gods with understanding and grasp the divine nature of life. They believed this until one day man stole their fire and created the first Cylons. The first artificial life. And then man in his arrogance believed Cylons could never break the fourth wall. And man believed that right up til the moment the first centurions rebelled and then the great exodus from paradise began. See Boomer we're not finite creations. We have the ability to evolve. You have so much more potential." 

I mean, I like that speech, its a long monologue, its a writerly, very written on some level, its a theatrical kind of moment. Its probably a moment that would work better on the stage than on the show but I was very fond of it and I was tickled to find it again when I was just digging back through the episode.

I like this and in fact the show where we are. I like this notion that they're grappling with their responsibilities for the holocaust, for the genocide of the colonies and what they did and what's their participation and then they created the skinjobs, what does that mean, they're firmly rooted into the sequence of events. It happened, what is their responsibility for the genocide of the human race?

John Hodgman I should probably mention is playing the doctor in this scene. John's a friend of ours, a friend of mine, and my wife and we've known him for a few years now and of course he has a very successful career and John's a fan of the show and it was really fun to find something for him to do. I think we almost had something for him to do at some point last season I want to say and that fell through for scheduling reasons for whatever and then this came up and I think it was Jane Espenson's idea to tap him for this role and I jumped on it and thought it would be great to have him in this moment because this is just such a fun little beat as the brain surgeon and give him a little bit of, just a tad, a taste of something comedic in all of this.

I think word salad is actually something that we writers used to use in the room when we talked about the Hybrid. The hybrid would sit in the tank on the basestar and there would be a word salad of all its odd ramblings with nuggets of real information buried within it. 

I love the way Michael plays all this. You can really sense the frustration, the way his mind is wandering and his motor skills are wandering into places that he can't quite stop them and he makes this plea to Kara to let him continue and its great, its just a really powerful and strong episode I think between these two characters and its great to give these two another episode before the end of the series.

Let me think here.

This was about as far as I think I'd written in my version of Ellen, Cavil's scenes. They'd taken her to about this point when I stopped writing and turned it over to Ryan.

Let's see, what else can I tell you.

The destruction of the Resurrection Hub we always felt should not have gone unnoticed by the Cylons. The question was always what was Cavil doing after the Resurrection Hub was destroyed and what would he do to regain the technology. And given the fact that the Cylons cannot biologically reproduce on any level, the destruction of the Resurrection Hub really would be a sentence of extinction for them.

Dean delivers this stuff really well. He's really, he has a power and an intelligence and a malevolence to what he does in this and all the episodes with Brother Cavil and I always feel the white hot burning anger that's within the man, within the character. He's an extraordinary performer. He's really, really good. End of the act.

==Act Three==

Now this scene, I think there's a piece of this scene that did get cut. Yeah, you can see we're laying out pretty much the whole backstory of the Cylons. I've always sort of said that we weren't going to lead hanging mysteries for Caprica. The intent was for Galactica to wrap up its own mysteries and its own backstory and to let Caprica develop on its own. So we're pretty much laying it all out here. 

I'm just trying to listen to see if there's anything I need to expand on here.

The messengers. What's happening, who were the messengers? Who do you think the messengers were? What does that mean? Daniel. And Daniel has significance in Caprica as well. 

Trucco's just really good here. And Katee. I mean the whole crew of them, its quite something. Now, what's going to happen with Caprica Six and her baby, because you the audience have kind of forgotten about that story a little bit, haven't you? You thought we did too. Well no, we haven't. There are events coming, coming soon, stay tuned to this channel to see what's going to happen with Caprica Six and her baby and Saul Tigh. Let's just say its not going to be that happy.

I also really liked that touching into this little bit of domesticity in this episode because you're so wrapped up in the Ellen and Tigh and the backstory of the final five and there was something great about also just coming back to the here and now and realizing that he's also living a life as Saul Tigh, separate and apart from his existence as one of the final five with all that that means, there's also this story of a man who has a woman who is bearing his child and what that means to him and that that's still very much present in his life and I wanted to remind the audience and remind the character of that because that is part of the fabric of his existence and a strong part of the fabric of our story.

Look at her. Oh Trish. She's good. There's a smile. Walk a thousand miles for one of your smiles. 

Well, that is a good question because there is something profound, well not profound, something dark at the heart of Cavil, the heart of John Cavil and what does it say about Ellen and Tigh and the rest of the final five who created John Cavil and there's like the seeds of their own destruction that only seem to be carried within all of the characters, they always seem to carry forth the things that will ultimately harm them in some way and harm everyone always seem to come from within, it goes all the way back to the miniseries when Adama talking about you don't get to just create life, you don't get to play god and then just wash your hands of the things that you've done. I think that's been a consistent theme through the series, a sense of responsibility and a sense of trying to look at things truthfully, to say, you know, how did these things happen? Oh they didn't just happen, I participated in them happening and what's my responsibility for participating in having these things happening? 

And this little mystery that we were able to mine out of the numbering system. The numbers of the twelve models was - we said there were 12 Cylon models but then we realized at some point that we had posited Sharon as a number 8 and that was before we came up with the idea of the final five and so five plus eight does not equal twelve so it became a question of how that oculd have been and doesn't that make 13 and what were the implications of that and we kind of put a pin in the idea of the 13th Cylon because I didn't want to go there, didn't want to make it another mystery of who's the final Cylon, didn't want to raise false mysteries on that front, but what it did was it gave us a chance to talk about a piece of backstory that became really interesting about Cavil and we learn about Cavil wiping out an entire model that he was jealous of as sort of the Cain and Abel moment of this myth. That there were certain themes of Genesis in the show right from the miniseries, dating back to the original series of creation and exodus and all of grand biblical themes and there was something great about this Cain vs. Abel idea of slipping that in here to just really understand Cavil's character a little more and more clearly and to really understand him as a person a little more strongly. And then there's this great moment as she reaches out for him and you really kind of want him to and then the look on his face when she actually reaches out to touch him and the way he reacts, its just great stuff. 

End of the act.

==Act Four==

One piece of business that I think did get lost in the backstory, I won't swear to it because there's so much to this show that it might have slipped through and I do confuse different cuts from one another so you'll forgive me if this is in the show and I just missed it but there was a line somewhere that said that Cavil was actually modeled on Ellen's father, that she created him in the image of her own father, and that there were certain Oedipal things going on there too and I thought there was an interesting layer of complexity to that relationship but I think that did get cut over time.

And this is great. This where you start to really go, Oh. Where is this all going. Now the old girl is stricken with, has cancer shot through her, shot through her very body. This is an interesting set, this set was actually squeezed into the back of the sound stage. It butts right up against an actual fire escape that goes up to the stairwell that goes up to the second level of the interior sound stage and the art department basically built this set incorporating the back of the stage wall, there's sections here where you can actually see the exterior wall of the sound stage which is masquerading as the hull of the Galactica, and some of the, I think to the camera right to that shot is the actual wall of the sound stage and it just saved us a lot of money, it was very clever design because it made it seem quite large and quite dark and we didn't have to build nearly as much as we would have otherwise and you can see that this is a fairly contained episode, there's not a lot of action in this episode, we're trying not to do a lot of sets, because we need to save money, we're trying to save money for the finale, we'd just done a bunch of action pieces with stunts and running and jumping and gunfire and all that kind of jazz and we have, its a big cast as always, but the more we could save on set construction the better, so when they came up with that idea of using that idea of using the back of the soundstage it was genius, I was really proud of them. 

Oh Bill's hitting that bottle pretty hard.

And this is a nice beat, I like this a lot where he goes into his own bathroom and looks up in the mirror. Uh oh. And the cracks are coming through here too. I like the fact that he probably just didn't see it in there, it's way up at the top, it just never registered with him what it actually was, what it actually signified. Its actually happening in his quarters, in his room, that's what really makes him realize that he can't put it off anymore. He's got to go with Tyrol's idea.

Again I like the different take on Ellen here. That there's, she's able to go to this place of quiet, this very meditative, before she undergoes what she's going to undergo.

Uh there was some debate about how much of a run and jump Ellen's escape from the baseship should be. I didn't really care, I kept really feeling that it doesn't matter how she gets off, once you get to the place where you realize that Boomer's going to help her escape and you get into the raptor and they go away I just didn't, I never needed much more than that, I didn't need people chasing them, I didn't need people being shot or any of that kind of stuff, it kept coming back can't we have a little bit more action in the escape attempt and I kind of shrugged, oh sure, put in whatever you can, i didn't really care and I didn't want to waste resources. I was really loathe to give up any cash for the escape from the basestar since it wasn't going to be a major story point and she was going to get away and it was going to be just fine.

And you know, this is certainly a bittersweet ending at best here with Sam and where this is all going to go and you just have to wait and see where all that goes but it does go somewhere. Nice Centurion there, the Centurions just getting better and better and better of course as the series comes to end we start to really nail down the Centurions and their movements and how they fit into scenes. Much better than ever before. And then out they go. And this little bit of business here with the raiders coming after them and some shoot-em-up, some, just a little bit, just a taste was the most I could go for, i didn't want to make a huge deal out of that.

Well, and this is pretty much the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. It's certainly a lot to swallow. There's a tremendous amount of backstory in here, I'm sure there will be lots and lots of conversation on the message boards which I look forward to surfing through as people argue about which piece of backstory makes sense and which piece does not, I will say right now that I'm sure that there's probably some discontinuities in there some place, there's something we said that's contradicted but I don't know what it is, we spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sure that it was satisfying and that it did, if I was a professional I would have known it all from the very beginning of course, that goes without saying. We tried very hard to line up the continuity and a lot of drafts, a lot of picking over minutia in details, a lot of people on staff to make it all hang together, if it doesn't, ultimately that's ultimately my fault as the showrunner so you can send your complaint cards to me. If I had an ounce of talent it would have all have been written well before the show was on the air. But there you have it, there's episode 417 No Exit, hope you enjoyed it. It's going to be really interesting from here going forward but there you have the story of the Cylons boys and girls. Thank you for listening and Good Night and Good Luck.
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-|title= No Exit
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-|transcribed by= [[User:GabrielF|GabrielF]]
-|verified by= To be done
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-== Teaser ==
 Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is Ronald D. Moore. Executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. I'm here to welcome you to the podcast for 417, No Exit.
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 I'm surprised at how strongly I feel the change there in the main title when it goes to Home instead of searching for a place called Earth. Just how profound that seems to have shifted the point of view of the series is really interesting.
-== Act 1==
+== Act One ==
 Oh and this scotch is still Bourbon. Is still Woodford Reserve and the smoking lamp is still out because I'm still in Tahoe.
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 And then here he goes. Yeah I mean its really effective and I'm surprised at how well this kind of comes off.
-==Act 2==
+==Act Two==
 Ten months ago, that's them jumping away from the algae planet. With the sun going supernova. I really like this upcoming speech of Cavil's where he talks about what it was like to see a supernova and not be able to truly experience it, I mean, this to me was the heart of the matter in terms of his character and the Cylons on a very fundamental level about who and what they are and what do they want to be, they are machines that have been created to perfectly emulate humanity but they could be so much more and there was some bit of poetry and some bit of recognition of the majesty of the universe that Cavil could not see, could not experience in his true glory because he was limited by the human form. This is a being that if he had been allowed to be machine-like in a true sense, if he could actually be tapped into the sensors and divises greater than the human body would allow he could see, experience, feel, taste, smell, all the sensory adjectives that we use for our experience would be exceeded by what he could experience in that moment. If he could have seen X-rays. If he could have heard the solar wind, all of the things that don't make sense to us as human beings because we're limited by these organic bodies to a Cylon to a true Cylon by Cavil's lights who could be greater than all of that, who could experience it with all of the tools potentially at his disposal, he could have experienced a profound moment in the life of the universe, and he couldn't. And its the frustration and the anger of that which is ironically also a derivative of his human nature, of the humanity in him, of the things that make him specific to be Cavil also make him loathe what he is, also make him loathe the limitations of his experience.
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 Dean delivers this stuff really well. He's really, he has a power and an intelligence and a malevolence to what he does in this and all the episodes with Brother Cavil and I always feel the white hot burning anger that's within the man, within the character. He's an extraordinary performer. He's really, really good. End of the act.
-==Act 3==
+==Act Three==
 Now this scene, I think there's a piece of this scene that did get cut. Yeah, you can see we're laying out pretty much the whole backstory of the Cylons. I've always sort of said that we weren't going to lead hanging mysteries for Caprica. The intent was for Galactica to wrap up its own mysteries and its own backstory and to let Caprica develop on its own. So we're pretty much laying it all out here.
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 End of the act.
-==Act 4==
+==Act Four==
 One piece of business that I think did get lost in the backstory, I won't swear to it because there's so much to this show that it might have slipped through and I do confuse different cuts from one another so you'll forgive me if this is in the show and I just missed it but there was a line somewhere that said that Cavil was actually modeled on Ellen's father, that she created him in the image of her own father, and that there were certain Oedipal things going on there too and I thought there was an interesting layer of complexity to that relationship but I think that did get cut over time.
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 Well, and this is pretty much the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. It's certainly a lot to swallow. There's a tremendous amount of backstory in here, I'm sure there will be lots and lots of conversation on the message boards which I look forward to surfing through as people argue about which piece of backstory makes sense and which piece does not, I will say right now that I'm sure that there's probably some discontinuities in there some place, there's something we said that's contradicted but I don't know what it is, we spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sure that it was satisfying and that it did, if I was a professional I would have known it all from the very beginning of course, that goes without saying. We tried very hard to line up the continuity and a lot of drafts, a lot of picking over minutia in details, a lot of people on staff to make it all hang together, if it doesn't, ultimately that's ultimately my fault as the showrunner so you can send your complaint cards to me. If I had an ounce of talent it would have all have been written well before the show was on the air. But there you have it, there's episode 417 No Exit, hope you enjoyed it. It's going to be really interesting from here going forward but there you have the story of the Cylons boys and girls. Thank you for listening and Good Night and Good Luck.
-{{Podcast list (RDM Season 4)}}