Editing Podcast:Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
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[[Ellen Tigh]] is never even mentioned by name in the pilot, but she was clearly someone of great importance in Tigh's life. And we had talked about various scenarios of bringing her back, and we had always sort of resisted them for the primary reason that— um, well, to be honest, y'know, it's a bit of a contrivance. Ellen's showing up in the series is definitely the writers' hand. It's us– it is us pulling on a string and making a character appear. I think you get a very limited number of those with the audience. I think the audience will grant you a couple of "gimmes". They'll let you slide by a few of these kind of things, but you can't do it very often. So essentially by having Ellen Tigh show up, we're really raising the bar pretty high before we ever do it again. So it's pretty unlikely that anybody else is going to have a family member that's still alive. I mean they're– after all, they're less than fifty thousand survivors out in our [[The Fleet (RDM)|Rag-Tag Fleet]], and the odds of anybody, ''anybody'' on ''Galactica'' knowing someone on one of those ships is pretty long. And then we— but as we decided to do it, we decided to make it a plus in the episode, and the fact of her survival is so unlikely that it helps fuel the paranoia of "is she a [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylon]], or isn't she?" | [[Ellen Tigh]] is never even mentioned by name in the pilot, but she was clearly someone of great importance in Tigh's life. And we had talked about various scenarios of bringing her back, and we had always sort of resisted them for the primary reason that— um, well, to be honest, y'know, it's a bit of a contrivance. Ellen's showing up in the series is definitely the writers' hand. It's us– it is us pulling on a string and making a character appear. I think you get a very limited number of those with the audience. I think the audience will grant you a couple of "gimmes". They'll let you slide by a few of these kind of things, but you can't do it very often. So essentially by having Ellen Tigh show up, we're really raising the bar pretty high before we ever do it again. So it's pretty unlikely that anybody else is going to have a family member that's still alive. I mean they're– after all, they're less than fifty thousand survivors out in our [[The Fleet (RDM)|Rag-Tag Fleet]], and the odds of anybody, ''anybody'' on ''Galactica'' knowing someone on one of those ships is pretty long. And then we— but as we decided to do it, we decided to make it a plus in the episode, and the fact of her survival is so unlikely that it helps fuel the paranoia of "is she a [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylon]], or isn't she?" | ||
Which brings us back to the discussion of paranoia and why this episode went in the direction it did. In the first couple of drafts, it was— Ellen showed up, and her task was essentially to stir the pot. That her influence on her husband, on Tigh, was such that she would cause him to start questioning things that Adama was doing. That there had already been this sort of notion that was out there in the Galactica world that any of us could be a Cylon, so anyone ''could'' be a Cylon, so who could it be? And we were always interested in the idea that Adama and Tigh would start to suspect one another. But they were such good friends, and they had such a deep backstory, that it was hard to get over that hill. So we felt that maybe Ellen starting to whisper in Tigh's ear would cause him to start to suspect Adama. And we had a couple of plot devices that— and they were devices— that were constructed in order to make some actions that Adama took look suspicious. There was something about a | Which brings us back to the discussion of paranoia and why this episode went in the direction it did. In the first couple of drafts, it was— Ellen showed up, and her task was essentially to stir the pot. That her influence on her husband, on Tigh, was such that she would cause him to start questioning things that Adama was doing. That there had already been this sort of notion that was out there in the Galactica world that any of us could be a Cylon, so anyone ''could'' be a Cylon, so who could it be? And we were always interested in the idea that Adama and Tigh would start to suspect one another. But they were such good friends, and they had such a deep backstory, that it was hard to get over that hill. So we felt that maybe Ellen starting to whisper in Tigh's ear would cause him to start to suspect Adama. And we had a couple of plot devices that— and they were devices— that were constructed in order to make some actions that Adama took look suspicious. There was something about a jump— that he was making the fleet take a jump to certain coordinates, and he wasn't telling anybody, and some convoluted reason why that I can't even recall at the moment, and their fuel resources were getting low, and why was Adama taking them over ''there'', and she starts whispering into Tigh's ear, and he's sort of suspecting Adama, and then Tigh's actions, and being suspicious of Adama were catching Adama's attention, and Adama started getting suspicious about Tigh, and in essence, it just became sort of a downward spiral that our two heroes, our two buddies, our two friends were starting to go at each other's throats. And frankly, it just didn't work. The honest truth is we just could not make that story work. And there were a couple of drafts of it, and [[IMDB:nm0900599|Jeff Vlaming]] is a good writer, and really tried to sell it. But we just couldn't sell it. I didn't believe it got to a point where they were pointing guns at each other, I just didn't. | ||
We were also having a lot of— as this show was being written, and going into prep for production, we were also in the midst of a veritable firestorm of controversy over the preceding episode, "[[Flesh and Bone]]". Which, as you know, because I'm sure ''everyone'' who is listening to this podcast has seen ''every single episode'' of course— Flesh and Bone is the episode where [[Kara Thrace]] interrogates and tortures the Cylon prisoner [[Leoben Conoy|Leoben]], and that episode brought with it a lot of controversy in-house, and with the studio and the network. The network was very concerned about it, we had a lot of spirited debate about it, all of it, I think, within the bounds of creative difference. And it was a very touchy subject matter, but the long and the short of it was we had just come out of a very heavy, very dark, very disturbing episode, and the very next episode was supposed to be "[[Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down]]", which was all about very disturbing, very dark, very— sort of unhappy episode where our two— two of our lead characters started pointing guns at one another. | We were also having a lot of— as this show was being written, and going into prep for production, we were also in the midst of a veritable firestorm of controversy over the preceding episode, "[[Flesh and Bone]]". Which, as you know, because I'm sure ''everyone'' who is listening to this podcast has seen ''every single episode'' of course— Flesh and Bone is the episode where [[Kara Thrace]] interrogates and tortures the Cylon prisoner [[Leoben Conoy|Leoben]], and that episode brought with it a lot of controversy in-house, and with the studio and the network. The network was very concerned about it, we had a lot of spirited debate about it, all of it, I think, within the bounds of creative difference. And it was a very touchy subject matter, but the long and the short of it was we had just come out of a very heavy, very dark, very disturbing episode, and the very next episode was supposed to be "[[Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down]]", which was all about very disturbing, very dark, very— sort of unhappy episode where our two— two of our lead characters started pointing guns at one another. | ||