Editing Podcast:Six of One

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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.

Act three. Just to continue that thought. There was a lot of growing reluctance to using [[Head-Baltar]], and I started to realize that I was just sending everyone out on a flier, so I started to pull back from it. And actually, I had the thought that I wo- I kind of thought, "Maybe I should've pulled Head-Baltar out of that [[Tory Foster|Tory]] scene altogether." But it was so much fun and we had- we were too far into the season to go back and redo it, so I kept it in. He's not gonna be a major player. It'll play fine in the mythology, and it'll still play in terms of explanations at the end of what the [[Virtual beings|head characters]] all mean, and all that, but I don't know that it was a completely necessary side journey that I took us all on. It's one of my mistakes. One of my many, for those of you keeping track.

This is a great scene. This scene with [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]] and [[Mary McDonnell|Mary]] is one of my favorite [[William Adama|Adama]]-[[Laura Roslin|Laura]] scenes in the series. It's- they've really progressed to a point of intimacy as people and trust, and they really are who they are, and they're not putting it on anymore. She just gets him to come over and sit down. He's drinking. He's getting hair of the dog. He's drinking a lot more these days. If anybody- I'm sure you've noticed. He's fighting for [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]. He just knows this sounds ridiculous. It's just- it's a nice reversal of their positions. It g- it really does hearken all the way back to the [[Season 1 (2004-05)|first season]] when she was starting to have visions, and needed him to believe in something that was not rational. And now he's coming to her and pushing for the exact same thing. And she just torments him. "A miracle." She wants to hear him say it's a miracle. I love that. I just love the way that she just takes the opportunity to box him right in at that point. I mean, I think these are two people that know each other extraordinarily well at this point. Sorry. I start and stop the podcast and start and stop the picture. You'll just have to run with me on this sort of thing. I can't edit the goddamn program to save my life, what do you want. Anyway. Back into the scene. As I was trying to convey here, the sense that these are two people that know each other, respect each other, care about each other on some profound level, love each other on some level that they can't put a name to yet, but are willing to really go for each other's jugular if pushed to it. That they're both very strong characters. That neither one is really gonna defer to the other one, if they think that they're right. They're both willing, and able, and fully capable of taking their claws out and really going at the other person to the point where they'll say really vicious things to one another. And that, on some level, is a sign of true love. [Laughs] At least it is in the ''Galactica'' universe. I love the fact that she tries to force him to face it, when on some level, she hasn't faced it. And she just turns him down flat. And the look on Eddie's face here- the look on Adama's face here when she just, like, shuts him down. He's made his plea. He's exposed himself. He's asked for things he never thought he would ask for. He's played the miracle card. And he got nothing for it. Yeah. He'd rather do that. And it's just- it's the human frailty of it that she nails him on. And Adama's not one to really let people get in and understand him and put words to his frailties. As flawed a man as he knows he is, he can't really stand to hear someone else be so true- be so accurate about the truth about Bill Adama. And then he just reaches out and casually claws her up. Watch her. He does it just- he barely- he just tosses it out there. And tosses it out with a casualness that makes you know he really believes it. And then she has to sit with that. And this little beat here, this nice little beat of pulling the hair out. What it means to her. And she comes close to just- as close as Laura comes to just falling apart. This is really the kind of scenes that I think you have to wait a while in a series to get to. You can't- I don't think we could have taken these two characters to this place before now. We had to lay a lot of groundwork. You had to have traveled a long road with these people in order to justify getting to that place. And to let the actors know their characters so well that they would be able to take them to those places. All the characters, and all the actors have matured and are grown and evolved over the course of time to the place- to the point— now we can send them to a lot of places that they never would have gone to in the earlier seasons. Or if we had tried, they would have felt false and forced, and it wouldn't have played with any kind of depth, and the actors may not have wanted to have taken them to those places, or might have resisted, or might have tried to go to someplace but not had the underpinnings and foundation laid to know how to get there. But at this point in the series, four years in, they know their characters extraordinarily well. They know their characters better than we know their characters in s- in many ways. Even though we're- we, the writers, I mean, are inventing them and tweaking their backstories and getting inside them psychologically on a daily basis, the actors live and breath them. They stand on those stages and they become them. They wear their clothes. They say their words. They laugh. They cry their tears. They feel their pain. They know them in a much more profound way than we know them.

This scene. I think I cut some of the middle of the inter- the interior dialogue out of this scene. I think there was more about the two of them. I think they reminisced a little bit more. I think they talked about their predicament- her predicament a little more. I think there was a little bit more reference to the fact that this [[Miniseries|wasn't her first time]] in [[brig|jail]], again. I think there were a few more lines along those lines, and then I shortened up the scene and tighten- in the overall tightening of the episode just looking for lifts. And in some ways, I think it made the scene a little stronger. It's interesting seeing [[Lee Adama|Lee]] in his suit. I think I said this last season. There's something really interesting about the way the character, to me, has come to life in the suit, in a way that he didn't quite come to life in the uniform. And I think that's actually symbolic of the character as well. I think the character was never comfortable in the flight suit. That was how the character was established, was someone who was- had gone into the service for presumably all the wrong reasons and was conflicted about them the day that we met him, and then became the [[CAG]] and became leader and put on the mantle and struggled with it and tried to find his own way, in many ways, and even became commander of the ''[[Pegasus (RDM)|Pegasus]]'' and still struggled with it. And now he's left it, and is leaving it behind and there's a freedom to it. There's a sense of him finding his own path, at last, and something that is not really living in his father's shadow anymore, and maybe more comfortable with knowing who his father is and living in that shadow, to use the word again.

That little scene in the [[pilot ready room]] is one that usually would be cut. Generally, you would cut that 'cause it doesn't- you could cut straight to this scene and not miss it, but I really fought for it and wanted to keep it in the show, 'cause I thought it set a nice tone and it made more of a journey for Lee as he went from one place to the other and I really wanted this last beat with him down in the [[hangar deck]], getting the formal sendoff- the pilots had given him the informal, drunken sendoff the night before, that there was still one more beat to play and I wanted them all there on the flight deck with their- in their dress uniforms and call him Apollo one more time and give him the salute and his father would be there this ti- again, and the President, and everyone would give him the respect that he had earned in the last four years. I think there was a beat that was cut- there was a little bit more of an exchange between him and Laura, because Laura had not quite- still had not forgiven him for being [[Alan Hughes|one]] [[Romo Lampkin|of]] [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s attorneys during "[[Crossroads, Part I|Crossroads]]", and there was a lingering animosity that she wanted to play, that Mary wanted to play and the character would naturally would play, but as I was going through the scene, it felt a little bit out of co- it just felt wrong in this particular moment to play that. It was a discordant note. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you want an elegiac beat like this to be leavened with a discordant note that reminds you that not all is well and good with these characters. There still are buried animosities, and so on. But, this time out I just didn't want to spoil the mood so I opted to cut it.

I'm- this was a risk, in all honesty. I'm kind of proud of it. It was a risk to take one of our characters out of the uniform, because there's a sense that being in the military uniform is everything. You gotta be a soldier in this kind of series to have any validity at all. And that him walking away from the uniform in a time of war and all that jazz would be seen as a despicable act on some level by some elements of the audience. And I'm kind of proud of the fact that we pulled it off, that we did it. And it seems to work within the body of the show. And that it actually seems to give us more story. And that it actually worked. But it was kind of a- it was a somewhat risky move. It was something that you just don't normally do. Not to go back to my [[w:Star Trek|Trek]] days, but it was certainly not thought of to ever take anyone out of a [[memoryalpha:Starfleet|Starfleet]] uniform once they put one on. It just wasn't really done. But I was glad- it opens up possibilities for Lee, and as you'll see it opens up great story possibilities for us this season. The Lee Adama story is made by that move.

This is a nice way to end this episode, back here on the [[Cylon (RDM)|Cylon]] [[Basestar (RDM)|ship]] with [[Natalie]], and the other Cylons. I like this- the way [[Dean Stockwell|Dean]] played- plays this conversation and they way that the [[Centurion]]s come in somewhat ominously here at the end. The look on their faces. You're like, "Eh, what's gonna happen here?"

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That's a great shot, sorry, to open up act four. The workmen— the repair work that they're doing on the [[Space Park|big ring ship]]. I thought that was very cool. I love that idea. When [[Gary Hutzel|Gary]] first showed me the pre-vis on it, I liked it— just the way that it was giving a nod towards the fact that we do have to repair the damage that we take in these battles and that there are scars. There's scars on everyone after all this combat that's goin'. And as you— if you go back and look at it, when you pan off of the ring ship over onto ''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]]'', ''Galactica'' herself is looking a little worse for the wear this season. The ship's been through a lot and it was im— you'll see, over the course of this year, ''Galactica'' will look a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more banged up, that the ship is nearing the end of the story. That we're getting into the final season and the ship herself is starting to feel it.

This was an interesting little beat that we talked about with [[Tory Foster|Tory]] and [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]], is an interesting pairing between the two. We had actually talked about, I think, a version of Tory involved with Baltar before the [[Crossroads, Part II|revelation]] that she was a [[Cylon (RDM)|Cylon]], when we— back before we'd actually even come up with that idea. So the notion of linking these two on some level had been kicking around the office for a little bit, in various guises. And this seemed like the perfect time to do it, because we hadn't— we just hadn't played the sexuality of Baltar in a while. We haven't played that carnal aspect of his character and what kind of trouble it could get him into, and certainly now, gods know where this is gonna go, with Baltar involved with one of the final four Cylons.

Yeah, back to the Cylons. I like the way they look at each other. Or no, I guess they look at her. But there's that head turn on both of them that makes them very suddenly realize there's a sense of individuation going on. "Why don't they leave?" That's about as much tech talk as we're gonna do here on the old ''Battlestar'', so I hope you enjoyed it. [Chuckles] None. [Laughs] I like the way this all really plays. I'm sorry. I'm just kinda tickled by this scene, and watching it more than commenting on it, I know. The [[Centurion]] storyline is interesting. I can't talk too much about it now, obviously, 'cause we're so early in the season, but there were a lot of conversations about the Centurions and what this would all mean. And that the hierarchy within the Cylon world, and how it developed, and what they— what the Centurions might think or feel, on some level, as they came to awareness. It's sort of in a repetition, again, all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. That now another group of Cylons are starting to become aware, and becoming aware of— they're being used as slaves, essentially. But now this group of Cylons would choose not to treat them as slaves and choose to acknowledge them more as thinking beings. We didn't play nearly as much of that as I thought we would, so, don't look for gigantic moves in that direction in the future. But it was like a fascinating idea that we did toy with for quite some time.

There was a— to get back to ''Galactica''. There was a fascinating little storyline that [[Michael Angeli|Angeli]] had in an early draft that I really liked and kept wanting to find a way to make work, but I just couldn't make it work in my head, where [[William Adama|Adama]], out of his frustration and his desire to understand what [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] was going through, he went down and he got in that [[Viper 8757|pristine Viper of hers]] that she flew back in, and he got in a flight suit, and got in the cockpit, and flew it out around the [[The Fleet (RDM)|Fleet]] by himself, and he was going through some internal thing, and he starts firing the guns and he's yelling, "Ahhhh!" And gets out his frustrations and you cut from that and you come back aboard ship and then he brings her out and gives her the ''[[Demetrius]]'' and gives her the mission. And there was something Michael was going for about him going out on that mission, not even a mission, out on that flight, by himself that informed him or catalyzed him in some way and made him change his mind and I liked it. There was something very cinematic about it and very interesting. I just couldn't quite figure out what it meant, and usually I'm willing to take the risk or really want to take the risk in going a direction where I don't understand what it means and just throw it out there and make it work, but this time out I couldn't quite grapple with it. I couldn't quite understand what he was going toward and it just seemed like it was ra— because it was a mystical moment when this pristine Viper came out, when Adama flew in it I didn't wanna play the message that maybe he was being influenced by it, or whatever. So in any case, I chickened out, and when I watch the episode now I always think back about that little storyline that Michael came up with and wonder if I made a mistake in losing it, 'cause it was a really interesting idea. It was beautifully written.

The other thing that did not get played in this episode, at the end of the episode in one of the dr— in the drafts was a beat with [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]] at the end, looking— inspecting the— Kara's Viper and looking up and finding little hieroglyphics on one of the wheel wells— one of the skid wells. And there were like strange markings on it. And it was dropped because we didn't know what it meant, and it was one of those little beats that we started to throw in for mystery and then decided that "No, no, no. It was a huge thing, and we went to pay it off, and we'd have to keep going, and decipher them, and figure out what the hieroglyphics meant." And it turned out that that wasn't a direction that we wanted to go in any case, so it all got dropped from the draft. I don't think we actually shot that scene.

Now here, of course, begins an entirely new plot. [[Helo]] was not originally gonna go with Kara, I believe. I have to look back, maybe before I do the podcast for the next episode I'll look back and try to remember who the original crew was for ''Demetrius''. But Helo was not going, and I think there was a note from the network, actually, as we were just stroking out the first few episodes, and they noticed, "You know, we haven't given Helo much to do." And I kinda went "Oh, god. You're right. Hmm. Let me look at that. " And I was— it bothered me. 'Cause Helo's one of my favorite characters, and they were right. When I looked at the stories, we hadn't played a lot with him. And so I think it was at that point that I decided to go back, and I think this show was already in prep, I think this episode was already in pre-production, and I went back to Angeli and said "OK, Helo— I wanna put Helo on that ship, and maybe [[Sharon Agathon|Sharon]], too." And that was how Helo came to be the [[XO]] on the star-crossed mission of the ''Demetrius'', which I will talk about in the very next podcast, which hopefully I'm going to do right now.