Editing Podcast:Six of One

Act two. Back on the [[Cylon (RDM)|Cylon]] [[Basestar (RDM)|baseship]]. This plot thread, as you can see, is clearly developing its own standalone story. This is— this time it's not about [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] being over there. It's not one of "our people" being over on the— over and among the Cylons. Now we're really and truly cutting to them as their own story. And why is that? Well, if you think about it, it probably means that this story is going to collide with the ''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]]'' story at some point. So from a plot sense, this is laying a predicate for the later sequences where the two stories do merge. Strictly in terms of character within the show, it's also lending greater credence to the Cylons as our characters. Now you're— you, the audience, are being asked to invest in the Cylons as their own story, to care about what happens to the individual models, to care about this divisions between them, to actually care about what the motivations of all these different models are. Which I think is an interesting challenge, 'cause they've— up until now they've been pretty much the villains. I mean, we started to differentiate different individual Cylons as far back as [[Season 1 (2004-05)|season one]], when [[Sharon Agathon|the Sharon that became Athena]] made her original turn. Into [[Season 2|season two]], where you started to see a little bit more in that direction. We did "[[Downloaded]]". You started to see more individuation of the Cylons and the [[Leoben]]s started to pop up more and more. [[Season 3|Season three]] you start to go to over to their baseship and start to get involved in their culture. Now, in [[Season 4|season four]], they become their own legitimate story and that their world is as legitimate as the ''Galactica'' world, in terms of storytelling. And I think that's an interesting and natural progression for this particular series. I think it's somewhat unusual in that you don't typically go over to your "villains" and start legitimizing them as characters and start saying that you can get as involved in their story as you can in the "heroes'" story and I think all of this is part of the effort on ''Galactica'' to blur those distinctions between the two and simply tell them as characters and not to sit back and say "Well these people you should hate, week after week, and these people you should like, week after week." It's simply "Watch the show." It's simply "Watch all the characters. Bring— make your own conclusions about likes, dislikes. Make your own conclusions about the morality of what they're doing and who do you wanna invest in." But the univer— the ''Galactica'' universe continues to expand outward, which I think is a fascinating and somewhat gratifying result of that decision. 'Cause now we get to get within all these different characters' heads.

Back on ''Galactica'', yet— yes, there's all kinds of fun things going on back here. Initially, I think, this was going to be a sendoff in [[Joe's bar]]. It was just g— it was much more informal. It was just like [[Lee Adama|Lee]] going and getting drunk with a bunch of the pilots on his night before he was leaving. And I remember calling Angeli, [[Michael Angeli]], I had this epiphany about a scene that I wanted to do that ironically is— I cut myself from the final show, but I called him. I was at [[w:Disneyland|Disneyland]], actually, one of my favorite places. It's the happiest place on Earth. And I was at Disneyland, and I was standing outside of Star Tours, make the irony of that what you will, and I was standing at Star Tours and I called Angeli with epiphany and I said "You know what? Before he goes, it should be— there should be a gathering of the pilots. They should all get together as one and s— tell him goodbye. And it's where Lee— and [[William Adama|Adama]] is there. He's not standoffish." 'Cause I think in the early drafts, Adama wasn't even going to be at the farewell ceremony. He was still kinda mad. But I thought that maybe he's forgiven him by this point, and he's embracing the direction his son is going. And I said "They give him a pilot's farewell, with a lot of drinking and revelry, and so on, but then we make a cut, there's a dissolve within the scene, and then you cut to this point where it's much later in the party and Adama and Lee are sitting by themselves, and they're both plastered, and Adama just kind of leans over and says 'You know that bell's gonna ring.' And Lee kinda goes 'Huh? What?' He said, 'The bell. You know, you have to get up and answer the bell.'" And it was like a boxing metaphor. And it was that he was giving Lee a prediction that even though Lee had given up the wings and the uniform and the flight suit and was going off to be on ''[[Colonial One]]'' and get involved in politics, that there was gonna be a part of him that was going to miss being a pilot. There was a part of him that was going to— that had gotten used to the idea that when the bell rings, when the fire bell rings, or the alarm rings, that certain men get up and answer that call. They go out and they rush towards the sound of guns. They run— it's the firemen that run into the building instead of away from it. And Lee had become one of those men, whether he understood it or not. And that he was— from now on, he was never gonna be able to do that again. He would be over there. He would be one of the people that had to be protected, and he would no longer be someone who would answer that bell. And that it was gonna bother him. And Adama was trying to warn him that that day was gonna come for him soon, and he wouldn't know what to do with himself when it happened. And it was a great little scene, and the episode was just really long, and ultimately we didn't need it, and so it's there to be enjoyed for you in the deleted scenes.

This little bit of business with [[Tory Foster|Tory]] and Baltar, again, this was originally going to be down in Baltar's lair, as we call it, where she was listening to him preach and he spotted her in the crowd, and then he made an approach to her like "What the hell are you doing here?" And then it devolved from there. As we started talking about interesting ways to go with all this, we talked about "OK. Baltar is out and about in the ship. He has protection. He has people watching him." This was so— part of the scene that I don't think quite comes through is that there are people— [[Cult of Baltar|his people]] are watching the doors, they're watching him, they're looking out for Baltar all during this scene, and Tory can only get so close, 'cause all these women and all these people are watching out for him. And then Baltar himself has to go over to her table. And then we talked about doing a [[Head-Six]] scene where Head-Six was pointing him in a certain direction with Tory, because it felt like "OK. What does Baltar do now that he's around one of the [[Final Five]] Cy— final four Cylons, who knows that they're a final Cylon." And it seemed like, well, there's a natural Head-Six tendency. But then we had this notion that'd been kicking around for a while that the head characters would start to do changeups. That maybe Baltar would see a [[Head-Baltar]], in the same way that [[Caprica-Six]] had seen a Head-Baltar. And we got tickled with that idea and I got tickled with that idea and it seemed like an interesting changeup pitch just in terms of what we'd been doing with this particular idea of the angel on Baltar's shoulder showing up and giving him advice. It was a way to give the scene a little bit more topspin to it and make it a little bit more interesting. And it was also a chance for [[James Callis|James]] to really— for James to show off, and for James to do some really interesting stuff, which he could be relied on to do. And it's a great little scene. It's a classic person-talking-to-himself scene. The visual effects have now progressed to the point where it's really seamless. It's really hard to spot any flaw in this scene whatsoever. James does a really good job, especially coming up here when he sits next to himself and talks to himself. The timing of it, watch the way that they overlap one another. I think he really thought through how he was gonna play this performance and on the set, of course, he plays it once sitting in one position, and then comes in, sits in the second position after the wardrobe change, and they play the audio of the previous scene— of the previous take, of where he was playing it the other way, so he has his own voice to get guidance too, but it locks you into that particular take as well, 'cause everything he's saying is timed to that prior take. So you can't— you don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of swapping out audio for other takes and other performances. It's pretty much keeping you down to one take that he did on the set that everyone felt satisfied with. Heh. "Who the frak are you?"  There's both such distinctive versions of Gaius Baltar, too. I mean, that's part of the charm of it, is that he's able to really convey the two different men. The real Baltar, and then the Head-Baltar character. See, right here. When they're sitting next to each other. It's pretty seamless. It's really hard to tell which one is in the scene, which one isn't. Who's looking at who and which one is not. Which one was there first? That would be very difficult. I think the guy on the right was the first take, and I think the guy on the left was the second take, if I remember how this was composited.

We had more— we were gonna do more Head-Baltar gags down through the season, and then I think we fell away from it. I don't think there's nearly as much of Head-Baltar appearing again as there once was going to be. I think we st— I was the one really pushing it through, and kept saying, "No, let's do more. Let's do more." And people kept following my lead on it, and then— and ever— but there was growing sense of reluctance to it.