Podcast:Scattered
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Ronald D. Moore | |
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Hello and welcome to the first podcast of the second season for the episode "Scattered". I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. Thank you all for tuning in and for listening to the podcasts, which I will try to continue to do for as much of the second season as I possibly can. <chuckle> This episode of "Battlestar Galactica" to kick off season two went- underwent a great deal of changes all the way from concept on to final broadcast. Initially, we had a different plan to open the second season instead of doing a direct pickup on the cliffhanger ending from last season's finale "Kobol's Last Gleaming". I wanted to do something a little different and not come back directly to the cliffhanger and actually do a completely separate sort of episode that was an episode set some time in the distant past. I won't tell you too many details about that episode, because it's still sort of on the drawing boards and still something we're considering doing at a later date. But in essence, what is now "Scattered" and the subsequent episode, episode two, "Valley of Darkness", were actually going to be episode number two, and then as it worked out we decided not to go that way and decided to open season two a little bit more traditionally with a direct pickup into the cliffhanger. That said, "Scattered" really wasn't going to, I didn't want "Scattered" to directly pickup the cliffhanger.
Still, I was still kind of like fighting against that notion and wanted to really kind of ah subvert the audience's expectations of what we were going to do. And the episode in script form actually picked up or opened with an open scene in a bar on Caprica twenty years ago and you just kind of cut into this scene it was a bar filled with a lot of people, televisions and on in the background giving commentaries on pyramid games etc. And you went over, and there was Colonel Tigh at the bar, a much younger Colonel Tigh with hair, and he was doodling a Viper weapon systems on a napkin. And some guys came in, you realized they were crewmen from another merchant freighter that he was on and ah they were taunting him in some way and a fight broke out. And the fight got pretty ugly and Colonel Tigh ultimately has a man down and is about to break his neck when another man rushes up behind him and is about to hit him with a bottle and possibly kill him and you hear the chick chick sound of a shotgun and you pan off and there is Adama. And this was how Adama and Tigh first met. They met in a bar in between the wars. The backstory to the series is that the initial Cylon conflict was fought forty years ago and in that war both Tigh and Adama were young men who did not fight together, they fought in separate ways on separate vessels, had separate experiences. And after the war was over, both men were discharged along with many other service people out into the civilian world and they both sort of happened to sign up aboard the same civilian tramp freighter that was plying the trade routes in among the colonies and that was how they met.
In any case, that's how I wanted to open this episode. We were going to open this show with just that scene and show how the two men met and then come into the scene you're watching now where Tigh takes command of Galactica and Adama's been shot and there is all this chaos. And the episode was going to continue to sort of flash back onto their relationship of the early days of Tigh and Adama and how the two men met and what meant to each other, what it was that Adama saw in Tigh for the first time and sort of really go through the creation of the friendship. And counterpointing that with events in the current day Galactica where Adama's life hangs in the balance and Tigh is making decisions based on, in part on things that he learned from Adama way back in those days. And we shot those sequences. Those sequences were shot and ah edited together, and we looked at them. But ultimately, we didn't like them. We just didn't feel, they weren't quite the show, frankly. And um, and really not through any, you really can't point your finger at any particular person (missing) maybe me because it was my concept. And you know. I don't know that I created or had the writers of this episode Bradley Thompson and David Weddle; I don't know that I gave them really a rich enough environment to really tell that back story. In any case, when we watched the cut, we all kind of felt, and the director included, that it was, it would just be a better story to tell the tale in a more linear fashion. And that we would still use that material, still use the flashback material that we had. But instead of making it these objective points of view, we were going to tie them, we were going to change them into subjective points of view. That is, we would tie them directly into Tigh's experience. They would be from Tigh's memories instead of sort of the audience watching these events happen as if you were just cutting back in time. We would tie them all to Colonel Tigh specifically. So as you watch the show, you'll see that there are many places where we're going directly off of Tigh. You know, you're creating these flashbacks now in a subjective way. Tigh is thinking about Adama. You can see it subliminally there in the teaser. He's thinking about Adama along the table. He's remembering the moment he met Adama. It's informing his decision now. So it really kind of changed the tenor of the episode, instead of it being this sort of dramatic device that was sort of counterpointing present day reality with past events. It became more of a character study of Colonel Tigh because now you're sort of going inside Colonel Tigh's head. And sort of, you know, living with him – his experiences as seen through the prism of his relationship with Adama.
Now I apologize, because my DVD, <laughter> my DVD copy of "Scattered" is screwing up slightly. So it's freezing periodically. And I'm having a little trouble. I think it's my home system more than anything else. My handy dandy home system that I just got. In any case, I am now at the section where Dualla, where the Fleet is jumping away in any case. Dualla is just saying jump, there we go. So the roots of this story, even before the cliffhanger, this idea that the fleet would be lost and scattered across a vast section is actually something that predates season two. It actually is something that was in one of the first log lines for the series way back when I was sending up a list of potential storylines to the network saying that these are the shows that we would do if you would take us to series and on them were ideas like "33" you know the idea that the Cylons come back every thirty-three minutes was one of them. The riot aboard the prison ship was one of them. And the fact that there would be a jump and the fleet would be scattered across a vast expanse was one of them. This is a little slightly different instead of all the ships of the fleet being scattered and lost, it's essentially that Galactica is really the one that's been lost. You know it's Galactica that has jumped to a different location than the rest of the fleet. You'll notice I'm in the main title sequence here. The main title sequence you'll note has changed this year. We have lopped off the second part, the sort of upcoming scenes section with the drum beats and all that in favor of keeping just sort of the beginning and making it a little bit shorter. And I'll talk a little bit more about that when we come back on act one. And hopefully my DVD will continue to function. <quiet> Boom… Galactica.
Act 1
Ok. Act one. As I was saying, before I get into the Baltar-Six stuff that you're seeing now, we also changed the main title theme back to the UK version, which was always the preference of the producers and everyone on the show and there was some internal debate about which was the best main title, what's the best theme music. I think end of the day, basically everybody agreed that the theme that we had season one was not as evocative and interesting as the UK version so we all agreed to do that. The reason behind losing the second half was to just make the whole thing a little faster to get through the main title a little quicker, and also there were complaints. There had been- some people just don't like seeing scenes from the upcoming show. I really dug it. I always- I was always a big proponent of it and really liked it. I know that David Eick, my partner, also loved it too, but, there were legitimate people that just said, "Well, we don't wanna be spoiled. We don't wanna see the scenes that we're coming up on." So we decided to lose it.
So there's David and Bradley, who wrote the episode. And we're back in Baltar's head down on Kobol. One of the interesting things about this season in the way that this all begins is that there were so many plot threads to pick up from last season, from the end of Kobol. And we made the decision very early on- I really did not want to wrap all the storylines up in a nice, neat little package in the first hour. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel with- it would work within the parameters of the reality we've created and it was just far less interesting to try to bring all these people back to Galactica and get 'em back to where they were. Hit the reset button, as it were. So, we really opted to tease out the storyline. And the storyline kept getting bigger. I think initially there were going to be five episodes that would be dedicated to all these plot threads of people on Kobol, Kara on Caprica, and the people on Galactica, and Laura not being President and Adama being shot. All those things, I think, were initially going to be resolved in way or another by the time we got to, like, episode five. As we started developing the scripts, two of the scripts just became unamanagable as single, one-hour episodes, and this is one of them. "Scattered" initially- oh, and as a side note: If you're listening to this I hope you're into being spoiled because we're going to be talking about not just things coming up in this episode but things coming up in subsequent episodes so, fair warning. There will be spoilers given away here. "Scattered" had encompassed in its storyline not only- it just had this entire piece of material in that most of the action that was going to be in part- in what is now the second episode, in "Valley of Darkness", most of that storyline was also in "Scattered". All the action that takes place on Kobol in "Valley of Darkness" having to do with what you'll see in that one, the death of the- well, I just gave it away. (Laughs) In essence, what happens to Socinus in part two is all- was all gonna be in "Scattered". What happens to Kara and Helo in the second episode was also going to be in "Scattered". The eventual wrap-up of all the events on Galactica was gonna be on "Scattered". But we just couldn't do it. It was too many things to manage in a one-hour episode. An hour- we've always struggled with the length of our scripts and the length of our episodes. There's only, if you look at it, there's really only about forty minutes and change of actual program content and our scripts tend to run in the- in the early drafts they're always in the fifties. Usually we like them to be in the low fifties, fifty one, fifty two, fifty three. Sixty page scripts are not unheard of. An ideal page script for us going into shooting is usually about forty six, forty seven pages. Sometimes we make that, sometimes we don't. But even when we make that, and I think we did on "Scattered", I think we- in the final draft of "Scattered", I think it was around forty seven, forty eight pages. The shows are still too huge. They're still too long. The style of storytelling, I might have talked about this before, just requires spending more time on character, creating moments, really taking your time as you go through the show. And that just expands. And so "Scattered," in its initial draft, was just much too big to sustain one episode so we essentially divided it into two and created another action storyline for part two, which is "Valley of Darkness," which as you'll see at the end of this show the Cylons are on the ship. The Cylons have boarded Galactica and that's our cliffhanger ending for episode one. And then that becomes the primary action storyline of part two. But all the other tales that happen in part two, apart from the Cylon boarding, were actually all supposed to be in "Scattered" and there was just no way that the show could really support that. It was just too, too much to have to deal with. So we split them into two shows. Same- similar thing happened with episode six, which was going to be the place where all the storylines were wrapped up and Laura was eventually restored to the Presidency, and Adama's back, and everybody gets back home. Episode six became much too large to sustain one hour as well, so we split that into two. So now, essentially, season one and the storylines that we began in season one don't really end until episode seven of the second season. Which is great. It's a really, in a way, that's like- we have a twenty episode first season, if you want to look think about it like that.
Ok. Back to what we're dealing with here. This is Lee and Laura and their troubled and conflicted relationship now that Lee has sided- Lee very dramatically sided with Laura aboard Colonial One last season, and Laura did not back him up and I think that embittered him in certain ways and creates tension in their relationship because Lee was expecting her to be there for him. He put a gun to Tigh's head and then she immediately went, "Ok, I can't do this. I can't have Colonial officers shooting each other. This has gone too far." She has to stop.
All these scenes on Kobol, as are all the show, all the shows scenes are shot in Vancouver. You'll note that Kobol looks greener and more lush and the colors a little bit more saturated. This is a great piece of editing right there. That's actually two different pieces of film. That's really wonderfully done. All the scenes on Kobol are shot, obviously, in Vancouver, but so are all the scenes on Caprica and it's really a question about how you light it and how you digitally color time these shots to make them feel like two different planets. And our DP, Steve, is very, very talented and has been able to deliver two completely different looks to what are- what is essentially the same basic group of locations. If you look at this location closely and you went back and looked in the first season on- in say, episode one, "33", and episode two, "Water", the scenes on Caprica. They were shot in very similar terrain with very similar trees, very similar foliage. It's not that different. What is different is the way he chooses to light and shoot these scenes which gives you a vibe and a feeling that you are in different environments. Caprica is theoretically undergoing some nuclear winter, or at least drastic climate changes, so it tends to- the lighting scheme tends to be much more blown-out, much more ghastly, for lack of a better word. Whereas here on Kobol, the once home of humanity where it was once paradise, it's much more vibrant, verdant, green environment. Very Garden of Eden-type.
This storyline of what happens to the people down on Kobol is really one of my favorites of this season. It's a really interesting tale of this Raptor, that the survivors of the Raptor crash, led by Sam Witwer, who plays Crashdown, who was a small character that we established in "33" last season, we just need- essentially we needed a guy to replace Helo because Sharon was a Raptor pilot and a Raptor's piloted by two people. So Sharon needed to fly with somebody and we needed another character so I came up with this guy, Crashdown. And the initial guy- stories on Crashdown were very small, he was supposed to be a little funnier, a little more of a joker, didn't take things quite as serious, and looked a bit buffoonish and silly in some sequences and- but we really grew to like him and to like Sam over the course of the year and started use him more and more. Sam's a very talented actor. Very dedicated to the profession, and really interesting guy. And by the time we got to "Kobol's Last Gleaming" and this party had gone down, I didn't really know where this story was going, but I was fascinated with the idea that Crashdown would be in command of a infan- what has become, essentially, an infantry unit. They're troops now, down on the ground, and that Tyrol would be his chief petty officer, who starts to lose faith in him in that Crashdown is not really up to that task. As dedicated as he is as a character and as much as he wants to lead those men, he finds that there are many shortcomings that he can't quite handle, and it's a dark tale of what happens to those people on Kobol, and I just think it's wonderful. And I'll come back to that later.
We're back on Caprica. You can already see that the color tones here on Caprica, even though this is an interior, are very different. It's much more yellows and golden. It's a different color scheme. That brief shot of the exterior of the museum was much more blown-out. The color hues are much different than what you saw on Caprica. There was some debate, internally, about, when we saw these dailies, about how much blood was on Katee's face in this sequence. There were some people that were going, "God! There's so much blood. Why didn't you wipe off her face? You look just so horrible and scary and awful." Personally, I love it. I think she looks great in this whole sequence. The fact that she's got blood all over her face from the fight with Six. It just speaks to the violence of the world that she's living in and how desperate things have become and her raw emotion and her anger toward Sharon. I mean, this is an interesting dynamic. He's in love with the enemy now, and is trying to protect the enemy. But he's still a Colonial officer. She just got here, and knows immediately that Sharon is not "one of us" and knows that she has to die. I mean, it's a great, very operatic in many ways, storyline.
This was all shot, I think, at the same location we shot "Kobol's Last Gleaming" at. As I recall, we had to go back in. It was a very difficult to get back into these locations one more time. That's the shot I really like.
I really like her in that angle with the blood and the grime and just the look on her face. I think she looks great, actually, in a twisted, odd kind of way. I think she's really attractive in this whole scene, which might speak to my own strangeness more than anything in the objective reality. As I said, this really the only sequen- the only Caprica sequence in part one. And that was because we only had a few Caprica scenes to go over both parts and we felt like we needed- I think the second scene of- that's great. And this is my (chuckles)- I threw that line out, like, in a meeting and everybody just liked it and I just kept laughing when I said. Ok we're going to go to part two- act two now.
Act 2
Ok. Now we're in act two. Just to finish that thought, there was a second scene on Caprica in "Scattered" but we felt that it was better- it was a better scene to use in part two, in "Valley of Darkness", so that- so we moved it editorially into that episode, so as a result there's only one Caprica scene here.
This whole bit of bus- that's actually Jamie Bamber's wife, who's playing the medic.
Here you see- these are the flashbacks I'm talking about. There were entire scenes that took place in the past where you- where they talked about their relationship. Adama had come back in and kept him from killing another man and alluded to the fact that Tigh drinks too much and that they both want to get back into the fleet and that that was the driving force that- Tigh had given up any hope of putting on a Colonial uniform again and Adama never had. Adama was determined that he was going to get back into the Fleet. Part of the problem, I think, with the flashbacks when you just watch them as objective cuts as opposed to these more stylized pieces, was that we could only go so far in aging down the actors. We didn't want to get into heavy prosthetics to try to make them look younger because that starts to become its own artifice where you age them down and add so much prosthetic makeup to them that it looks false and then the dig- digitally doing it is incredibly expensive. So part of the problem was they didn't look as young as we needed them to, but we didn't wanna- we didn't wanna just recast with younger actors, even though in an early draft we did say that. We were talking about having "young Tigh" and "young Adama" and then you just go, "Why are we doing this?" You don't want to lose Eddie and Michael. That's the whole point of doing the flashback. So it's another reason why the flashbacks beca- are just more effective as stylized pieces.
This quiet walk around of Sharon, I think, is just great. I love this moment that Michael and- the two Michaels, Michael Hogan, Michael Rymer, created here. Sharon's fear. Tigh's anger, hatred, loathing, fear, concern, confusion. What is this thing? I can't believe it's Sharon. And then- ooh. That's gotta hurt. I like this scene a lot. It's a dark scene. It's a dark show. This is what would really happen, though, in my opinion. This is how these characters would behave. Tigh would not take a lot of guff off- Tigh doesn't take a lot of guff off of anybody, much less Sharon Valerii who just shot The Old Man. Oof! Oof. And there's those flashes of the number three on the door.
Now, in a couple of cuts, at that very moment- see right now there's a stylized piece. He sees- he remembers the door, which is a recurring motif throughout the show, that's, "What's the door about? What's the door? What's the door?" and then he sees a flash of Adama. In a few cuts of this we actually made it a more literal flashback, where Adama had literally stopped him from killing another man in the past when Tigh was drunk and Adama warned him, "Someday you're gonna kill someone and you're no- and you're not going to be able to call it back, and you're not gonna be- it'll be too late. And I won't be your friend anymore," he says kinda sardonically. And Tigh says, "Yeah, that'd be a frakkin' shame." And then you came back to the Sharon scene. It was a little to literal. It was a little too on the nose. It delivered the message a little- it hit you over the head with the message a little bit too much. So this is a much better version that Andy, our editor, cut. Where it's just subliminal and you know that there's meaning to it and that there's a bit of something from Tigh's subconscious and his past is slowing him down and keeping him from putting a bullet in Sharon's head right there.
This sequence actually we shortened. In looking for cuts he tightened that significantly. There was another Cylon- there was a Cylon attack there, where they start taking fire and they barely got away. And then you cut here, still.
This is all improvised dialogue, actually, that the actors came up with as they chatted back and forth. There was something else scripted but the actors went way off book here and with Michael worked out another little piece of banter, which worked out really nicely.
That's great. This is the kind of sequence you don't often really see, I think, where it's just the bolt from the blue attack that takes out somebody that you've started to form a relationship with, and you're just under fire. I like the sound design and all. This flat echo of the gunshots out in the forest feels very realistic. I like the fact that this is not scored with some giant, orchestral, pulse-pounding sequence, which would tell you that it's all ok on some level because, "Hey, there's music- there's action music." It's the agony of actually being shot. It's the terror of, "Where are those guys out there?" There's Cally squeezing off rounds. It's just great. I like this sequence a lot. It's a powerful one. It feels very raw. It's like they're out there and, man, the Cylons are out there too. And again, like I said, the Kobol storyline is one of my favorites because it just feels like we're dealing with real things that happen to real people and not- Things don't always go well for real people.
Act 3
-that we had trouble figuring out how to editorially get from the previous scene to this scene for quite some time. A lot of times the scripts are written one way, in a certain structure, in the editing room you play around with exactly where certain sequences fall and how you get from A to B. And for q- there were several cuts where we had those two scenes on top of each other where you sit sort of a dissolve or a quick cut that they had just gotten away and we had a different act one ending at some poin- or act, whichever act it was that just ended, act two. And we shifted things around to make that the act break and then you come back here.
This is an effective little moment, I feel. He's just a guy, he's a guy you barely know, but you just start to know him and you try to rescue him, and you pull him out of the line of fire, and he dies anyway. 'Cause that really happens. It's- war is an ugly, bad thing and for all the heroics of it and all the noble causes that can be associated with it, and the camaraderie, these things happen. It's death. It's ugly death. It's death that comes up to people that don't deserve it and people that do. And I like that. I like the fact that our characters have emotions. They're not just stoic. They don't just take death in stride, like so many people on TV do and just move on and just step over the body and, "Oh, it's a tough, tough world you live in, kid," and move on. It's Cally that's trying to pull the Chief off of there. It's not the other way around. Cally's not collapsing in tears in hysterics. Cally's got the medkit and the backpack and she's got the mission, and it's the Chief that has to be pulled away from his man. Which I think is wonderful. I think it says a lot of great things about the innate humanity of these character in the world of Galactica.
Gaeta, who's still feeling the guilt associated with screwing up in his- in letting the Fleet get lost. It's just- this too is a great little beat. It's not much dialogue, it's just character. We've started to find that these two, over time, Gaeta and Dualla have developed their own relationship and that it's an interesting- these are the guys that are not in charge. The guys that carry out orders and they have their own shorthand and ease even though there's a gulf between them as a lieutenant and a petty officer.
The bit of the soap... (Chuckles.) And I wrote- yeah, I remember- I think I added this little piece that Gaeta lines up the pieces of soap and gets an idea. It's just a nice little, easy to understand, gag. Then on we go.
And then we're into a bit of a bit of the technobabble, which no science fiction show would be without. It's hard stuff to write. It's unpleasant stuff to watch and film and somehow you still need it. Every once in a while you still gotta do these kinda gags where, just to explain what the hell the idea is, you gotta go into this mumbo jumbo jargon. We try to keep it to a bare minimum. At Star Trek, when I was working at Star Trek, there were times when we just had pages and pages of this tech kind of dialogue. I've probably ranted about this before on other podcasts, so forgive me if I'm really, if this is becoming a hobby horse, but I think a lot of science fiction, filmed science fiction and film and television, falls down on this front where there's just too much emphasis on all this gobbledygook stuff that doesn't exist and doesn't matter, ultimately. 'Cause it's really about the characters. It's about what choices they're going to make.
And for those of you who do listen- who's listened to these podcasts before, it'll be no surprise to you that the gardeners have decided to work across the street in the damn day of the podcast, here in lovely Southern California.
This is a sequen- this- now here you can see much more of the flashback. This ac- that shot right there. This one of Tigh, that we just slowed down, is actually stolen from another episode. In the editing room we were try- I needed- I wanted desperately to have another moment of flashback where we would get get a little bit more of their backstory and see more of what happened to the two men, and I needed a transitional element into it and nothing really worked. It didn't have a piece of Tigh by himself in a corridor, or anywhere else that I could really key off of to start this flashback because, again, these are subjective flashbacks, so I needed a Tigh piece. So those shots right there of him walking in the corridor are actually stolen from the end of episode four, "Resistance", and I went into the editing room as they were cutting four and I asked- I was looking- I was asking for a shot. Is there somebody got a shot of Tigh walking alone in the corridor wearing the blue uniform, and sure enough there was a piece, and that- those shots are actually stolen from the very end of "Resistance". We had to cut around very carefully so that we don't repeat the shots in episode four. But when you watch episode four and you see Tigh walk off down the corridor at the end of that show, you'll see where those scenes were actually cut from.
The beat that you just saw a moment ago of Tigh going in and getting Apollo's parole, so that Apollo can go fly the mission and be CAG, is actually an idea that dates back to, ironically enough, Hornblower, for me. And of course, some of you may or may not know that Jamie Bamber was in the A&E miniseries of Hornblower. In Hornblow there was just- Hornblower is one of my favorite books as a kid. It still- some of my very favorite books of all time. And in there was this whole notion of parole, when an off- there was a point where Hornblower, was a British Naval officer, was captured by the French and was held prisoner, but as an officer and a gentlemen of that time he was- he would give his parole so that he could walk out and be free for a time and parole essentially meant his word, his promise, that while he was out walking and taking in the sea and not being confined to his cell, he promised he would not try to escape.
And there's a great shot. This is one of those great shots that Gary Hutzel brings in and Zoic has created, I believe, it's Zoic. That wows everybody and we go, "Oh my god. That's the show."
And I'll come back here in a second.
Act 4
Ok. Now we're in the big action sequence of act four. A couple of these shot- there's not many recycled shots. That was one from the miniseries. That's another from the miniseries. This whole sequence is really, in my opinion, is one of the best visual effects sequences I've been associated with. It's just- that's a new shot. These are repeats of existing shots. That's a new shot. Off towards the Cylons. There's an interesting thing going on here that some of the writers did not like, actually. This dialogue in the cockpits between Kat and Flyboy- er Kat and Hotdog, etc., the rest of them, as they're eager for the battle and going into with a different point of view. Some of the comments came back that- that some of the writers felt, David and Bradley felt, frankly, that it was really out of context. That it was wrong for them to go into battle, given all the- with that kind of high spirit and competitive streak given that Adama's life is hanging in the balance and so many serious things have happened. And I understand that point of view. My initial reaction, when I saw it, was surprise too. And at first I didn't like it, either, and they had shot two versions of that whole sequence where one, as scripted, which was much more matter of fact, and then one that was more like this and I started to really like this version because it widen- it opened the world up a little bit more. It told me that there was a different story going on, down in the pilot ready rooms and in their cockpits and in their world, that really wasn't connected with the rest of the show and I liked the fact that they didn't- they weren't involved in the A story. They weren't involved in Adama's life. They weren't involved in all these little things. That they were doing their own thing.
Here's the new Heavy Raider. And now we start getting into, really I think, just amazing stuff. This upcoming sequence when they go in on Galactica's flak cloud I think is amazing. And they spin around. We're gonna go after these guys. There goes Kat. She comes around and there's Galactica off in the distance.
These are just great shots. And then there's this little interlude here which was much bigger- which was longer in other cuts, but this is really all you need to sell this story, is the emergence of some people starting to look to Laura Roslin as a prophet and a religious figure and her reluctant embrace of that role. That was a story thread that I did not want to lose as we went through all this.
This ethereal sound cue. It's hard to make these attack sequences more interesting, I think. As you do more and more of them, attacks on Galactica, you start repeating yourself and trying to do the same shots and what do you do to make it more interesting? Gary and his team really came through for us in this. I mean, it's just a really outstanding job. This sequence is just not something that I've seen before is they go in and then the idea that Galactica has a flak cloud that they- that wards off missles and incoming Raiders and it's like this really dense ackack that's flying around the ship. It's a great concept and it makes perfect sense, but it's hard- it's never really been visuallized like this. Here we go. I mean, this is- we're coming right up into it. They come down. You can see it- there's the flak cloud forming. Look at that. It's like- they're shooting back.
All these- there's a certain MASH quality to these operating scenes, which I really like.
And there- that's- this is what I start to really love. That shot. Lee's try- look at that. Look at that! That's unbelievable. That is such a complicated beautiful shot. That is really, really amazing stuff. I mean, that's just unbelievable. Look at what she's flying into, and then this shot. Whoah! It's just great. And then we have- you have more. This shot of the Heavy Raider, plunging, plunging, and into the flight pod. Now the thing to remember here is that that flight pod, for those of you in the know, is where the museum was. That's not the active flight pod. And there's a window, you can see its wreckage. But nobody's over there. I mean, it's an empty part of the ship. And they've taken a hit over there and an impact, but Apollo says there's no fire, no damage. The assumption is that a ship crashed into the pod and was destroyed. And they're still in the middle of combat and battle. They're rushing around and this is an undermanned crew. Which is all, essentially, rationale to explain why they don't know that they've been boarded until the next episode. And it's- you could say it's a shaky logic, but there is a logic to it and I think it does work.
So now we're back. Which is great, because it's great to know that Colonel Tigh- Colonel Tigh did guide them successfully through this crisis. Which is a salute to his character and the fact that Adama did see something of value in him. That there was a reason why Adama brought this man back into the fleet and kept him by his side for many years. And in light of subsequent episodes to this, when things are going to go from bad to worse under Tigh's leadership, it was really important to see that Tigh, in a crisis, in a combat situation, in a wartime scenario, is the guy you do want at the command. He can get you through that and he will guide them successfully through this episode, and through "Valley of Darkness", 'cause when the Cylons are on the ship Tigh knows what to do about that and it's only after the guns start shooting, it's only after the crisis passes that Tigh is the man that you do not want in command of your fleet. 'Cause he's not very political and he doesn't think like that and he does drink a little bit too much.
So it's relief... relief. And this is Jamie's wife. Jamie Bamber's wife, ladies and gentleman. Lovely lady, lovely actress. Pleasure to work with. It was a pleasure to have her on the show.
My DVD has paused once or twice here, so I might be slightly behind the rest of you. I have a- and Tigh ends and the medic on screen right at my moment. Pan off to Tigh.
And then we're coming up onto the last flashback here, of Tigh in his hotel room. Tigh looks down at Adama. The idea of the door being a recurring motif through the show is actually, I think, David Eick's. I was looking- I was creating this sort of thing in the editing room when we- I was determined to hang onto the flashbacks. I felt like- 'cause I did see a cut without any of the flashbacks in the show at all, when you just played the show straight, just as an action piece and I just felt it lacked heart. I felt it lacked emotional depth. I felt that it lacked complexity. You didn't understand what the show was about. And I did like the idea a lot of using the flashbacks stylistically throughout but we needed something, a hook, you need a recurring image that would lead you into these flashbacks. And it was the- David's idea was that it's the door. The door is what leads you back in. And that you don't- until get here you don't realize what the door is. Now there is a woman lying in the bed behind him, as you- as sharp eyes will note. It's not Ellen. We did cast another actress and in a longer takes that you see that she's very clearly a brunette 'cause this was not how he met Ellen.
The great thing here is this is- there's a definite homage quality in this to Apocalypse Now which is one of our- a brilliant film. One of our all-time favorites and we certainly wanted to pay respect to that in certain ways with this scene. But it's not the same scene. They don't put him in the shower and sober him up. It's- he just goes off and pulls himself together. Which, for our story, is more effective. There was something great about him getting ready to light his own medals on fire with the lighter fluid and I wanted to convey this idea that he might- the whole place might go up but we didn't q- we weren't able to quite convey that.
And you don't- who- leading characters don't say this. What leading second-in-command that you can think of has this, "I don't wanna command. I'm not up to it. This isn't the way it's supposed to be. I should have died back there." I think it's true. I think it is was Colonel Tigh really thinks and feels but it's unusual to see that portrayed in television, a sign of honest, "I'm a screwup and I know it," kind of quality to it.
And here we're getting ready to go out of the show. There's the big window, as you- which was a part of the museum, for those of you who saw the miniseries. They had a museum in here 'cause the ship was getting ready to be decommissioned. But there's nobody lives in there anymore. Nobody works over there. Nobody's gotten over there anymore to inspect that particular piece of damage. They have other things to do and they're landing pilots. They're- they have other damage. They have actual fires in other areas of the ship. They have things to deal with. And so- and here we go. Very cool. And right into camera. And "to be continued". So, there you have it. There was "Scattered". Thank you for coming along on the ride and hopefully I'll be talking to you next week on "Valley of Darkness". Take care and I'll talk to you then. Bye.