Podcast:The Son Also Rises

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Teaser

RDM: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, here to welcome you to the podcast for what we call episode seventeen, "The Son Also Rises". I am joined here in my lovely home by my equally lovely wife, Mrs. Ron-

Terry: Love her or hate her.

RDM: Love her, or hate her.

Terry: (Chuckles.)

RDM: Just- but don't call her ditzy. Mrs. Ron- Say hello, Mrs. Ron.

Terry: Hello, Mrs. Ron. I'm gonna be very intellectual this time, I'm sure.

RDM: Yes. There are various dogs and cats wandering the room, randomly. The Scotch tonight is Highland Twentyfive, a very nice bottle of Scotch my wife lovely gave me.

Terry: For Valentine's Day.

RDM: For Valentine's Day. The smoking lamp is, unfortunately, out. Mrs. Ron-

Terry: Sorry.

RDM: Mrs. Ron doesn't join us when the smoking lamp is on- is lit.

OK. "Son Also Rises". This is the beginning of the finale, really. We snuck this in as a making the finale of the season a bit of a three parter, even though we never really said officially to the network that we were making a three parter. But it kinda is a three parter when all is said and done. And this is the first piece of it. As we approach the trial of Gaius Baltar, we knew that a couple of the things that we were pretty determined to do was to somehow bring one or more of our cast members into the courtroom, as participants. We knew that that was gonna be difficult and we came up with various and sundry ideas for how to legitimize the idea of some of our people being participants in the trial. And this was where we ultimately ended up. Initially, we had talked about Lee being the sole attorney for Baltar, and finding a way to justify that.

Terry: But that seemed a stretch?

RDM: That seemed too much of a stretch. We just couldn't really get there. But we also knew that as a practical matter, to do a TV series like this, to get to a place where we're gonna do a trial episode, in a series that's not setup to do a trial episode, it seemed wrong to have all the players in the courtroom. Players being the lawyers on either side and the judges, have them all be guest stars, 'cause none of your major characters would be utilized very well, and the drama would essentially- you'd be constantly pulling away from the trial to go service the other characters and find other things for them to do, where the meat of this story is really what's happening in the courtroom. So, we bit the bullet and said, "OK. There's gotta be a way to get Lee into that courtroom in a plausible scenario." And this was the scenario that we came up with, which is to start off as a guy doing security for Lampkin, and ultimately have him aid in Lampkin's defense. It also raised the question of how do we get anyone else. We all quickly loved the idea of having Adama be one of the judges, or be a judge. In the course- at first he was gonna be THE judge, and then we altered that and decided that'd he'd be one of several judges in the courtroom.

Terry: So, there's an excellent thread on the Scifi board right now, written by a bunch of lawyers. And one of the points they made, though, is, "Why wouldn't Adama have to recuse himself as somebody who was extremely involved in this case."

RDM: We...-

Terry: How do you get around that?

RDM: We did grapple with that. We talked about it at length, and we decided that what we were- that ultimately, there really weren't anybody in the entire Fleet who could legitimately say they weren't involved in the case.

Terry: Yeah, but I mean he's very directly involved.

RDM: He's very directly involved, and it's a push, and we all admit that right off the bat. It's a push. All this- we wanted to get more drama into the show, so what we did was we came up with the lottery that you're watching in these intercuts. The lottery of drawing the names of the ship captains to be the judges. There wouldn't be a jury. There'd be a tribunal of judges and that they would be chosen randomly, and Adama's name was in the hat, and it came up, and he was chosen. And that it would be chosen in that method. We also talked about the idea that the system of justice that had been prevailing in the Fleet up to this point, such as it was, was probably administered by each ship captain as that ship captain saw fit, so that the captains of the various vessels in the Rag Tag Fleet had been dispensing justice on their ship for several years now, so they were the most- they seemed the most logical people to be the judges in the tribunal because they were already dealing with the administration of justice all along.

Terry: So the legal system, such it may have been, before everything that has gone on, may not necessarily be what they're pulling from in this case.

RDM: Yeah. I mean, we have always proceeded on the assumption that the legal system is a very fragile thing, in the Galactica universe. That there probably precious few lawyers. That there's really no police force. There's no real force, other than Adama's military.

Terry: So you keep the gist of the law, but not the letter.

RDM: You keep the gist of the law, but they don't, probably- we've said they don't really have a law library. They don't have much more than the law books that Adama kept from his father and passed onto Lee in a previous episode.

Terry: Right.

RDM: So the idea was that each ship probably administered its own justice, and ran their ship accordingly. Just in the tradition of the captain of the ship being the ultimate arbiter of what was legal and what was not. And that there's some kind of balance, 'cause obviously Laura does exert authority in the Fleet and has, on occasion, issued presidential directives. The "no abortions directive" being one of the examples. The Quorum has authority. I think there's a lot of flexibility and a lot of gray areas in terms of what the legal authority is in the Fleet. But in any case we decided that- pull a set of judges from the ship captains, Adama's one of them. He gets pulled in. Yeah, you could argue that he should recuse himself, but at the same time, we just decided to brush off that and keep going. 'Cause the drama was more important to us at this stage of the game. Then we started- in all versions of this story, we always had this thing about Baltar's lawyers being assassinated, and killed, and under threat. And this is- this was clearly influenced by the experience of some of the defense team of Saddam Hussein. When Saddam Hussein was on trial, various members of his defense team, and members of the prosecution, and members of the judiciary, were all coming under attack in Iraq, for various- by various factions with various motives, and we wanted to play this in that same tenor.

I think this section- I'm always struck by how much the actor playing Baltar's lawyer there looks like John Cusack. But he's not.

This sequence was always pretty much in even the early preliminary drafts of the show. I think the major changes had to do with what Lee's story were- was, in this episode. In the original story document, it was much more about- a Lee-centric story about Lee going in and interrogating Caprica Six and he was going in to talk to Caprica Six to get evidence, to see what she was willing to testify to. Could she testify? Lee was the guy that Laura had appointed to put the legal system together, and we were playing with the idea that as- in part of- part of that job is Lee determining whether Caprica Six could be a witness at trial, which went to the heart of, "Is Caprica Six a person?" If Caprica Six is a person, then her testimony would be accepted. If she's a machine then they could not take her testimony.

That's the end of the tease.

Terry: Mark Sheppard.

Act 1

RDM: Act 1-We in Lee's pursuit of Caprica Six it was going to be actually a lot of him going into the interrogation room one on one with Caprica Six; talking to her trying to determine whether or not, which is very controversial in the Galactica world, once they decide that Cylons are people it had other implications on how they should be treated and what their legal rights etc etc. Which is also complicated by the fact that Adama had designated Sharon as a person since he gave her the Colonial uniform. It also went to the heart of the backstory between Caprica Six and Baltar, she was going to give up the fact that he participated in the destruction of the colonies, that was going to be a major piece of testimony that she may or may not give. We shyed away from that storylie ultimately because it felt claustrophobic on the one hand. It also felt like the issues were not as relevant as the trial itself, that it was a lot of him digging for backstory from Caprica Six that the audience already knew. They already knew what Baltar had done and not done. That wasn't really what was most interesting in teh show. So we opted to go with this other route that dealt with the aftermath of Kara's death on Lee and Adama. Watch Rumble Lampkin and how he handled the case.

I liked this sequence a lot, his is where Lee is dealing with teh pilots and Lee is not really himself. I didn't comment on the other scene earlier in the tease, when we see Anders drunk and beside himself on the Viper and he falls off and breaks his leg. In the early draft of this show we had actually opened with Lee and Anders both going to the memorial wall putting the picture up on the wall as Lee had promised. In the midst of that a fight broke out between teh two men, that their anger and emotions of the traumatic event; they vented on each other and it turned into a real brawl. We decided not to do that because it seemed too expected to have them fight and it just didn't seem to like it gave you any real juice in the show.

Act 2

RDM: One of the things we did is we discussed the law and how this would all work, was we were always aware of what the truth was. How the American legal system would work. And then we would bend that to fit the Galactica universe, and say, "OK. We have some free play, 'cause it isn't America. We can change some of the parameters." But we wanted- we always wanted the trial and the surroundings of the trial to feel familiar enough to the audience, who's- has been watching legal shows since Perry Mason-

Terry: Right.

RDM: -and understands the basic conventions, the right to counsel, how testimony is given, objections, overrulings. All those things, the audience has a fluid memory of and can follow along and we wanted to keep it in that groove, but give ourselves enough flexibility, like every legal show does. I mean, truth to tell, Perry Mason-

Terry: Right.

RDM: -bends the rules quite a bit, too. And we certainly bend some rules in our portrayal-

Terry: Well, you have to, 'cause if you ever sit in a real courtroom it's dull as-

RDM: -dull as dishwater.

Terry: Yeah.

RDM: But at the same time, when the characters- when they take actions that step- that break those rules, we generally have them acknowledge it, and say, "This isn't permitted," and then you move on and justify it in some fashion, so it- so you don't gloss over it. I love this- the way that James play- is playing the character of Baltar here. He's really taken the idea of the manifesto and the prisoner writing his political manifesto from jail and running with it.

Terry: Baltar reinvents himself, one more time.

RDM: Yeah, he reinvents himself one more time. The obsession with, "Gimme a piece of paper." The thought that has to be written down right now.

Terry: Baltar becomes Che.

RDM: Baltar as Che. Exactly.

Terry: (Laughs.)

RDM: And he really plays it, and James sells it, and- it's a really interesting transformation of the character.

Terry: What I like about it, and what I think is really the beauty of how James plays pretty much everything is that you really get the sense that whatever persona Baltar has adopted, this time, he believes it.

RDM: Oh, yeah.

Terry: He believes it thoroughly and completely himself.

RDM: He's sold, yeah.

Terry: "Well, I'm a political prisoner."

RDM: Yeah. "Of course I am." And yet his first concern being about Caprica Six, knowing what she knows, and that she can sink him. And wondering what's gonna happen on that angle.

Talked a lot about the sunglasses. The sunglasses came up quite a bit. Again, an invention of Michael Angeli of Lampkin wearin' the sunglasses until a key point in the script and then taking them off and putting them back on, and so on. It was right- hovers right on the edge of it- of being an artifice and I- even Mark, I think, voiced concern, and the direc- they were all wondering, "Are you sure you wanna do the sunglasses thing?" But I believed in it, and I believed in what Angeli was trying to do, and said, "Yeah. No, let's do it. Let's keep it." And I think it works. I think it's really effective and interesting, and I don't think it crosses the line into parody. I think it's an interesting way for this character to relate to everybody, 'cause he's essentially putting it in their face that he's walking around wearing dark sunglasses. And also I work with people who wore dark sunglasses in rooms.

Terry: I have too.

RDM: Ira Behr, who was my mentor.

Terry: Ira wore them?

Original Series definition: a Colonial court hearing (see: Law of the Twelve Colonies)

Re-imagined Series definition: initial skills training; can refer to basic military indoctrination, and arms and ground training (TRS: "Fragged"); and basic flight training (TRS: "Miniseries")