Editing Podcast:Taking a Break From All Your Worries

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|download link= http://media.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/313/bsg_ep313_FULL.mp3

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|transcribed by= [[User:Steelviper|Steelviper]]

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This one went through quite a bit of change. Which is, of course, something I'm sure you're shocked by; those regular listeners to the podcast often hear how radical changes have gone through. This one went round and round quite a bit, mostly in terms of tone and in what we were trying to accomplish with this episode. As the title implies, "Taking a Break From All Your Worries"- oh, and the trucks are back, as you can see, 'cause it's garbage day and I'm here at home in Berkley- home in Altadena, having returned from Berkley, briefly, to do the podcast. "Taking a Break From All Your Worries" is obviously a reference to the [[w:Cheers|''Cheers'']] theme song. This episode was conceived as a lighter one. This was our comedy episode, (chuckles) oddly enough. The irony of that is twofold, considering what the episode- how the episode turned out in terms of tone and feel and also the fact that the last time we tried to do somewhat of a comedic episode, we also handed it to [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie Olmos]] to direct. And neither one is probably a laugh riot, but I think the Tigh certainly, the "[[Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down]]" episode Eddie directed [[Season 1 (2004-05)|season one]], certainly had a lighter- a light comedic touch. This one was not so much a case of Eddie taking the material and turning it dark, it was just over the process of working through this episode, story lines and scenes and then on to performances and then the cut and mood just kept getting darker and darker, just by the nature of the material. But the irony is we all still thought about this one as our light, fun-filled, episode, right up until the point when we saw the finished cut. (Chuckles.) We went, "Oh. Ok. So we won't really put a laugh track to this one."

{{podcastref|wheelchairextra|07:07}}The young man you just saw there in the wheelchair was a visitor to the set who was a huge fan of the show and was actually confined to a wheelchair, and the cast and crew took to him and showed him around and really made him feel like he was part of the family, I hope, for the day or two that he was around, and put him in the set. Gave him a shirt, put him in. We're happy to include him in the show. So that's a very nice gesture that they made. That was some- indicative of the spirit of the cast and the crew on the set. It wasn't really something that I was personally involved with.

This idea of [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]] and [[Lee Adama|Lee]] sharing their problems a little bit, two married men dealing with the vicissitudes of marriage was an idea that we really liked. It felt natural in that these two, the chief of the deck and the [[Commander Air Group|commander of the air group]] probably saw each other a lot anyway. And would naturally talk to one another.

I was talking about earlier, why does [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] get access to material that he could construct a rope— why isn't he watched twenty-four hours a day? It's a conceit. We're pushing a little bit of believability. It's dramatic license if you wanna look at it that way. If he was under constant scrutiny, if they were staring at him twenty-four hours a day, we couldn't do much in the way of story for the rest of the season. And I think that the price that you- if you're gonna do that, you take that dramatic license, to be fair then you don't make them look stupid by allowing him to get materials that he could then escape with or that he could actually injure somebody with, so that there's never a penalty that makes the characters looks stupid for allowing those things to happen. I think that's how you balance the line between realism and dramatic license.

And, of course, here's a scene that I'm sure many of you at home have had, where you come home drunk. The wife is still there, still up. You've been out at the bar. She didn't go with you and she ain't too happy.

This episode probably deals more with their marriage than we have done in previous episodes, mostly because of the stories that we've chosen to tell haven't given us a lot of opportunity to deal with Lee and [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]]. At this point in [[Season 3 (2006-07)|the season]], it's starting to feel like we got a firmer handle on the character of Lee, of where he was going. We started to talk seriously about what the f- the rest of the arc was gonna do for Lee for the rest of the season, and [[Jamie Bamber]] also had a great deal to do with this story line and molding it and crafting it, and we talked to Jamie at length about various aspects of where the character was going over the course of the season and you will see in subsequent episodes, coming up, that the groundwork we're laying here with Lee, and in some ways with Dualla, will ultimately platform him to where we go by the end of the season.

One interesting thing about this episode is both [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]]'s d- well, two interesting things. Eddie's direction and the way the show is cut. Eddie really went for the dramatic jugular in almost every scene and he pushed the actors and pushed, I think, the nature of the show into some really interesting directions. You'll see a lot more closeup. You'll see a lot more charged emotions from characters you're not used to seeing. Laura in particular. I think Eddie pushed [[Mary McDonnell|Mary]] into territory that she wasn't entirely certain that she wanted to go, but ultimately she went there and trusted him and went there with him. And I think that it's a remarkable performance by Mary in this episode. I think that her ang- her genuine fury and anger and need for revenge on Baltar comes through. The- you get a sense of a great deal of history between these two characters. It's interesting to see that she's back in control and that the positions have been completely reversed from where they were on New Caprica. And how she handles it, that she's still maintaining the veneer of the President, but there's this rage that's boiling just beneath the surface.

It's an interesting question. What is Baltar's guilt? And I think we've played a lot of ambiguity over the last two and a half seasons in terms of what Baltar knows, what he doesn't know, what he did, what he didn't do. There was a whole back story that we started to go into in this episode, that was actually shot, that ultimately was dropped because we did not pay- we decided not to use it in the trial. And yes, we're heading for- we're obviously headed for a trial of Baltar by the end of the season.

I love Mary here. I love the chaos of the scene. This is really Eddie. This is Eddie sculpting the scene in a way to bring the passions to a boil, to really sense that it's getting out of control. Laura's completely capable of doing what she's threatening to do here. [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] is certainly capable of doing what he's been asked to do here. And when he's dragged out of that cell, I think there is a sense of "God knows where this is going. What's gonna happen to this man? What are they really gonna do to him here?" Early drafts had us doing more beatings of Baltar, Tigh was really gonna be in charge of the interrogation early on. It was really gonna be puttin' the screws to him in a literal sense, trying to get him to confess his crimes and to give them information on the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]]. Ultimately it felt like, well, we'd already [[A Measure of Salvation|physically tortured]] him on the [[Basestar (RDM)|Cylon baseship]] and didn't see a lot to be added to that idea to do it again, so this one became much more psychological. This whole thing about whether they'll throw him out the airlock, drag him away, trying to break him psychologically, the sleep deprivation, and then ultimately, the [[Interrogation drug|drugs]].

RDM: Act two. As I was saying, the [[Interrogation drug|drugs]] were then more of a mental and psychological way to torture [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] to get information out of him, which was in stark contrast to the way that the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] dealt with him.

There was a little bit more in the script about the fact that [[William Adama|Adama]] had used drugs like this on prisoners in the past, that we never really addressed who those prisoners were and what they- who they use them on. But the implication was that they were certainly- they were used on other human beings. They were used on [[The Twelve Colonies of Kobol|Colonials]] 'cause they had no reason to use them on Cylons, certainly, before the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|attack on the Colonies]].

Again, look at the way- look at the faces, look at the energy of the scene and the emotional- we're in tight here a lot. This is a lot of bringing you in to a very tense moment and really feeling the desperation that people are pushed and pulled by. Then we start this intercut. I think one of the interesting things that Eddie did in his director's cut was the way he intercut all the different story lines. It was much more aggressive than what we usually do and I would- say that it's thematically intercut instead of cutting on action. I like to intercut scenes a lot. You see that- a lot of the teasers that I write, or that I rewrite, I use that technique a lot of cross-cutting between disparate elements and giving them- discovering a thematic tie as you go along. Eddie's choices, and the editorial choices here by [[Andrew Seklir]], our editor, are much more in tune with the emotion of the scene and sometimes changing up the emotion of the scene by cutting to something to counterpoint it, other times to continue just the emotion of the moment, but a lot of the intercuts and where they occur were not scripted. This beat was not scripted to go in this place. This beat actually occurred much later in the script.

Terry: You can smell it all the way down the hallway.

 

I like the fact that Baltar admits that there are- mistakes were made. I think that- I think that this is a really interesting revelatory moments for the character and how he truly sees himself. He feels bad. He knows that terrible things were done and that he was in on it, but he doesn't want to adm- want to say that he was actually guilty of it. He doesn't want to say he was responsible for it. 'Cause he doesn't truly think that.

And this beat where Baltar's head comes up, and there's the many burned children. This was also an area of great controversy, as you might imagine. We cut the- there was a wider angle that you could see that they were all children, and they were all looking down at him. Oh. There's one of the wide shots that we managed to hold on to. There were more cutaways of the kids. More cutaways of- the kids were symbolic of all the many victims, the innocence of the people that died when he was President and the people that died in the apocalypse of [[The Twelve Colonies of Kobol|the Twelve Colonies]]. And there's the big question, isn't it. Are you a [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylon]]? No, or I don't know  would be closer to it. I think even there he's lying to himself. I think even there he's- that's what he- that's his honest answer to it, but does he actually know? He doesn't know. He was- still wonders. And then the girl comes down. And this, I think is a great shot. This is one of the best shots in the whole show, of the girl taking Baltar down, down, down in the depths. That's a great sequence. Just a really inspired choice by Eddie. I don't- I might be wrong, but I don't believe that this was in the script at all. I think this was something that Eddie came up with on his own.

There was also- this is the scene with [[Felix Gaeta|Gaeta]] that I talked about earlier that was always in the show and always- we were always intending to have Gaeta do this gag where he suddenly stabs [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] in the neck. The choice though to, again, to intercut that with the personal story with the [[Lee Adama|Lee]] and [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]] was something that [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]] came up with in the editing room. And it's just a- it's a really interesting example of the power of that technique of- if you know how to intercut these scenes, if you know how to go from emotional moment to emotional moment, in that thematic ties are not screamingly obvious. That you're not going from a certain look to a certain look. If you're not going from a joke to a- from a setup line to a punchline. If you're not going from action to action. If you're not going to counterpoint directly for comedy, but you're going thematically and you're going emotionally, and you're finding these deeper moments to motivate your cut, it really lifts all- this entire show and I have to say if- I pride myself on being able to go in and play around in editing room and playing the scenes and emotions and moments, and I come up with a lot of intercuts sometimes. I could not have cut the show this way. This is something that really Eddie and [[Andrew Seklir|Andy]] came up with and I- it was startling, and it was dramatic, and different, and I think overall this episode has a different mood and feel for the series than we've really experience before, and that's a testament to the director's abilities. It really- this one really is a director's piece, more than I think anybody else's. This is really Eddie's finest moment as a director in the show. Of course, he' only had two, but this is, I think, a great effort. One of my favorite turns as a- of any of the directors that we've had on the show, and I think it's a very effective piece.

And then back out to [[Joe's bar]]. {{podcastref|ReturntoJoesbar|37:33}}We'll continue to go to Joe's bar over the course of [[Season 3 (2006-07)|the season]] and probably into [[Season 4 (2008)|next season]], as well.

{{podcastref|Baltarstoryline|38:23}}There was another whole storyline that was going to be setup here that had to do with not just what Baltar is saying here in the scene. There were also allusions to another matter which was going to figure prominently in the trial episode which had to do with a whole storyline that we developed at length, and ultimately dropped, which- back on [[New Caprica]] there was a subset of people, the [[The Twelve Colonies of Kobol#Sagittaron|Sagittarons]], which will be dealt with in another episode, and the way the Sagittarons were treated during New Caprica and that they were a colony that the other colonies weren't too fond of. They were the victims of not quite racism but some kind of prejudice, essentially, and that there was a nasty little story that took place back on New Caprica which was one of the few things that they could actually nail Baltar directly on, that he had hand in directly killing somebody and there were witnesses to him killing somebody and Baltar's conversation there with Gaeta was starting to edge into those directions of the guilt about what had happened on- about the Sagittarons and that was also- and that Baltar was also blaming Gaeta for that, and that also was what prompted Gaeta to attack Baltar there in the cell that's coming up, here in a second. That storyline was developed quite a bit, as I say, into subsequent episodes and then later dropped, and so we had to go back and excise all those little bits and pieces from this episode, because ultimately, that was not a storyline that was going anywhere so we didn't want to set up this expectation that there was this whole secret between the two of them that then went nowhere. In fact, I think it might have been part of what Baltar was whispering there in Gaeta's ear. I think part of that had to do with the Sagittarion backstory on New Caprica and the fact that Baltar was gonna implicate him in what had happened if it all- if things really- push came to shove, that Gaeta was really the one responsible, and that pushed Gaeta right over the edge, 'cause he knew that he had nothing to do with that and...

See? This- This scene, again, took place after the Caprica-Six conversation that was cut from the show that's now a deleted scene. This is also, in a subtle way, setting up a revelation for Laura that will happen later in the season, just the staging of this scene and the emotion of it and where it's going. This is also foreshadowing certain events that will happen later- later this season.