Podcast:Six of One

"Six of One" Podcast
[[Image:{{{image}}}|200px|Six of One]]
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Posted on:	2008-04-28
Transcribed by:	Steelviper
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Length of Podcast:	45:09
Speaker(s)
Ronald D. Moore	Ronald D. Moore
	Terry Dresbach
Comedy Elements
Scotch:	Woodford Reserve bourbon
Smokes:
Word of the Week:	individuation
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Teaser

RDM: Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 404 of season four. This is "Six of One". I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'm here to welcome you to the second podcast of season four. Hopefully this one will be slightly more together than the first one, but you never know.

This episode, as were all the episode- all the first half episodes of the season, were done- we broke them all as one- part of one long story arc. In the previous session's podcast I read some quotes from the initial story document on that episode, so I thought we might revisit that again here as well, if I can pull it up here on my handy-dandy Mac. From the initial season notes: episode two says, "The theme is civil conflict. In a nutshell: Laura and Kara present conflicting direction- directions to Earth. Lee brokers compromise. Tigh, Anders, and Tory take exception to Tyrol's growing obsession with Kara's Viper. Cavil and Leoben clash over the interpretation of reluctant Raiders. Results: shocking violence. Birth of Cylon civil war. In depth: The Cylon story. Leoben and Cavil go to the hybrid, ask, "Why do the Raiders turn away from the humans?" Hybrid is enigmatic, "Because they won't attack their own." Cavil: "Hogwash!" Unilaterally lobotomizes the Raiders to get them to follow commands, incensing Leoben, who responds by making the Centurions more alive. Centurions slaughter Cavil-thinking Cylons. Kara and Adama, vis à vis Kara with gun ending episode one, surrenders it to Adama, putting her life in his hands. Her raw emotional purity convinces Adama to reinstate Kara. Laura's outraged. Has her own vision on which way to Earth, plus visions tell her Kara is not Kara. Lee brokers a compromise. Kara will lead scouting mission in her direction while fleet embarks in Laura's direction. Adama promises to himself to be there for Laura and her cancer, regardless of their disagreements. Zarek gets Lee appointed to the Quorum as the new delegate from Caprica, and Zarek has his own plans. Final four: Tory is moved when Baltar tells her that the Cylons possess souls, and Cally becomes suspicious of Tyrol, who's sneaking off at night." And basically that is still the rough outline of this particular episode. As you can see, we knew from the beginning that we were gonna end on the cliffhanger in episode one, or episode three, as we continually call it around here, and then come right back in on the action. I was never quite clear why Adama left CIC in that little moment you saw when he rushes off to go downstairs. It's a dramatic device. It's like the commander of the ship, and he wants to be down where the action is, but traditionally he doesn't really do that sort of thing, and I guess it's because Laura is personally in danger that he feels the need to go off, but I never quite understood it, in all honesty.

This beat coming up with Laura shooting at Kara went through several iterations all the way through the process. Initially, in the first draft, I believe, sh- Kara puts down the gun, dares Laura to pick it up and shoot at it- shoot at her- shoot her, and Laura just refuses. She won't pick the gun up, because that kind of the ch- the way we established the character way back in "Valley of Darkness" when she was offered a gun by Lee, she just shook it off. And then I thought, well let's go a little bit further. Let's push that a little bit. Maybe she does pick it up. And I had this notion that she would pick it up and point it at Kara and decide to shoot her, but the safety was still on, and she didn't realize it, and she tried to pull the trigger, but she couldn't because the safety was on. And so sh- there was an intent to shoot her, but then Adama came right in. And that didn't seem to work for people. I think Michael Angeli objected and I think Mary did as well, that it seemed to make her look stupid, as opposed to just being fate that was intervening. There was something about- I'm trying to remember also- there was a version of the scene where Kara didn't push her quite as hard to do it. It was more just like, "Just shoot me. Just get it over with. End this, if you really think I'm a Cylon." And then she just picked up the gun and "OK," and tried to shoot her. And I think Mary's note, which I thought was well taken, was that you had to push Laura a little further. Had to get in her face a little bit more. Had to really go at her to get this sudden response out of Laura. And the way the scene plays now, of course, she puts the gun down there. Slams it down in a lot of anger. There's more of a beat in between thought and action here so that- there's more dialog going on. Laura has a chance to let the thought tool around her brain for just a second that maybe this woman really is a Cylon. And that really is a loaded gun sitting on front of me and Mary's point, which, again, I thought was well taken, was that if she really thinks that she's a Cylon, if she really thinks that Kara Thrace is a Cylon come back to destroy all of them, or to play some kind of sleeper agent thing on her, Laura probably would pick up the gun and shoot her. And she would take the moment to- she would take the action, because it w- the lives of the fleet could potentially hang in the balance and she thought it was the one time that she could see her doing it. And then it became she would miss her. And miss her at such close range. And that that would feel like the same kind of intervention of fate that I was looking for when she- tried to fire when the safety was on. And in this version it's- she shoots, Mary, closes her eyes right as she's fire- fires the gun and it just b- it just goes right past Starbuck's head, and she misses her from virtually point blank range.

This s- oh, and I'm dr- the scotch this evening is- oh, actually, it's not scotch. What am I saying? This evening, actually, we're switching. This is Woodford Reserve. We're heading for a little bourbon, which, I think, has come our way before in these podcasts. We're also not at home. We're in our home away from home. We're in Berkley, California, relaxing in the bay area. Taking the airs, as they say. A place we find a bit more comfortable than Southern California, in all honesty. So- but it is a wooden house, with wooden floors, and you will hear my children periodically pounding across the ceiling, in the room I'm in and screaming outside the window, and I guess that's just your tough luck.

I think what was important to me was this out of control sense of Kara- this shrieking, crying. She's just coming apart at the seams kind of a character that had seen something- had experienced something that she was trying desperately to convince people of. And that there was really no rational way to get them to listen to her, so she took this incredibly extreme idea of going and confronting Laura Roslin in her quarters. But then once that you got in there and you got the marines on her and you were holding onto her tightly and you had her in custody, then she would still be trying to plead her case, and trying to, like, say- trying to play on all their sympathies for her. I like the way Katee plays this as she's going out the door. You've gotta kill me. I love that. I love the way she just goes out the door just like shrieking at the top of her lungs. [chuckles] [coughs] Sorry, I'm also fighting off allergies these days.

I think as I explained in the previous podcast, I'm grasping, on some level, to remember production details and story details on how we broke these stories. 'Cause we're so close to the end. In fact, today, as I do this podcast, I was- started- I was writing the first pages of the finale, of the end. So I wrote "Fade in," for the last time on a beginning of a Galactica episode, which is kind of a bittersweet moment, at the very least.

[7:45]

Act 1

Act one. It's nice to get back to the Cylon baseship and this dissolving with piano music motif that we'd established in the last season. I like this idea that here's Boomer performing these nude Tai Chi things for Cavil, and that there's something going on between the two of them that's overlaying this whole thing with the hybrid. This is actually, literally, us, or me, in the editing room, compiling a few different scenes together that were shot as literal scenes. There was an entire scene there of Natalie, 'cause we start to refer to that particular Six that you saw as Natalie, she's Natalie-Six in our nomenclature, and that Sharon, there was a whole scene of them listening to the hybrid. Of the hybrid giving all the jar- the gibberish and talking about mystical things and that the Raiders wouldn't attack their own. And then there was a separate scene and Cavil and with the Tai Chi moment that was then interrupted by all these other Cylons coming in to talk to Cavil. And as we were putting them all together, the feeling was that- I mean, the episode was way too long, as usual, and this was a nice way of cutting to the chase of getting all the information out and also getting a sense of how the story had developed into this direction.

I was always interested in this notion that here these machines have been programmed not to think about the Final Five in any way, and yet, they do. They find themselves talking about the Final Five, despite themselves. That they all, for various reasons, come to this notion that there is- something greater that they all need to think about, to talk about, and the can't help themselves. As they mature, and as they grow, as sentient, thinking beings. It naturally pushes them, like it did D'Anna. The D'Anna models were all pushed toward trying to figure out what lies between life and death, and the rest of them, too. It doesn't take too much to get them to start to think outside their program, to start moving in directions that they were explicitly designed not to think about. That the Leobens, and it felt like this- these- this particular lineup of models, would take you there. The Leobens who are inherently more spiritual than the other ones that we established. The Sixes, which were manipulative and seductive, but more free thinkers of their own- less likely to go along with the crowd. Always angling for their own agendas. And then the Sharons. The Sharons are the ones that tend to be a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more naive. A little bit more prone to pressure and to change their minds about things. So it felt right that these three, that these three models would be the ones combining to challenge the notion of the Final Five and would also take great umbrage at the idea that they would go in- that Cavil would be going in and lobotomizing the Raiders. One of the notions that sometimes gets lost in the show is that the Raiders, themselves, are alive, in a sense. They are as alive as the other Cylons are. They are simply- exist on a different level of sentience than the rest of the Cylons, but in their world view, the Cylons- er- the Raiders have as much right to life, as it were, are as worthy of existence as the rest of them are, and the notion of cutting out part of their brains was abhorrent to them. I kinda like that. It was an interesting universe that was established over there.

You'll start to notice here in these scenes with the final four Cylons back on Galactica that divisions are starting to form within their ranks, as well, and their personalities are starting to pull them in different directions, despite Tigh, who is trying to keep them all together and try- who is trying to lay down the law, and who is trying to tell them what they will do and what they won't do. You can tell right away that Tyrol is already in a different place. Tyrol's already- he's giving far less- what's the word I'm looking for? He's paying far less attention to the rank and protocols of it all. He's already starting to separate himself from the authority figures and- he's starting to push away from the others. And then this conversation sends her to Baltar. I think in early drafts of this, Tory was going to end up in- after this scene, she was gonna just end up in Baltar's lair and just like go down there and start listening to him, and then we decided that she should be sent down there to go find out things about Baltar because of this conversation. In the early drafts, again, I think it was- certainly at the story level, it was more a case that she went down there out of curiosity, 'cause he was preaching about the one true God, and souls, and he had this connection with the Cylons, and she was curious, and then she got pulled in by the message. And then as the story developed, we started to feel like she should be sent down there, and it w- should be more of a mission. That she was sent on a mission by these guys to go get close to him, 'cause he knew, presumably, something about D'Anna.

In the first draft of the episode, Kara is initially not taken to her own cell. She's actually put in a cell with Caprica-Six. It was something like, "Put her in with the other Cylons." And once she got in with the other Cylons, she got right in Caprica-Six's face and was like, "Am I a Cylon? Tell me! What am I? If I'm a Cylon, I wanna know!" And she started like hitting her. And then Caprica-Six hit her back, and Caprica-Six, of course, it was a reprise of the season two?- When was that? Season one? Season one fight between Kara and Six back on Cylon-occupied Caprica, where the two really went at it, and I think everyone was jazzed by the idea of seeing another fight between the two in the jail cell. But as I read it, I had to, in all honesty, I had to feel like we were just doing it in order to do it, 'cause we all just wanted to see them beat the crap out of each other because they'd done it before. And then, essentially, she was dragged out of that cell, having somewhat worse for the wear, and then she has a similar scene with Adama where Adama hits her, and it just felt repetitive. And I couldn't quite discern the reason why we were putting her in the cell to begin with. It was a little shaky, in terms of the underlying logic. So we dropped that scene and went straight for this scene of Adama coming in with Kara. This scene- I think there's about a page that I lifted out of this scene in the editing room. There's a point there where it doesn't quite match, if you go through the scene again on these over-shots, if you're looking for the coverage over Kara's shoulder onto Adama and then over Adama's shoulder onto Kara, you'll see there's a change in expression on her face that doesn't quite match the tenor of her voice, and that's usually a good indication that— you can tell that something's been lifted pretty seriously if you can't quite match them. 'Cause you're struggling to match different emotional states, and the cheat is usually to play the- that's another great scream of Katee's at the end- usually as a cheat you're trying to cover over a problem and you can't match the performance, is what I was trying to say.

[14:53]

Act 2

Act two. Back on the Cylon baseship. This plot thread, as you can see, is clearly developing its own standalone story. This is- this time it's not about Baltar being over there. It's not "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 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 one, when the Sharon that became Athena made her original turn. Into 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 Leobens started to pop up more and more. Season three you start to go to over to the baseship and start to get involved in their culture. Now, in 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 you wanna invest in." But the univer- the Galactica universe continues to expand outward, which I think is fascinating and somewhat gratifying result of that decision. 'Cause now we get to get within all these different characters' heads.

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