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Colonial anthem

2009-04-04T18:46:19Z

TypoFixer: Another appearance of the Anthem

The {{audio|Colonial Anthem.mp3|'''Colonial anthem'''}} is the official state music used at official functions of the [[Twelve Colonies of Kobol]], composed by [[Stu Nomion]].

It plays as a fanfare when the television station [[Caprica 5]] announces a live interview with [[Gaius Baltar]].

The anthem plays briefly during a fly-by of the last [[Viper (RDM)|Viper]] squadron of ''[[Galactica]]'' during its decommissioning ceremonies held in its new [[Galactica Museum|museum]], shortly before a speech given by Commander [[William Adama]] ([[Miniseries, Night 1]]).

The anthem appears in a documentary on the crew of ''Galactica'' created by [[D'Anna Biers]]. A crewman, [[Stan Gibson]],<ref>This character, who hums the Colonial anthem while mopping the floors of ''Galactica'', is Battlestar Wiki's [[w:patron saint|"patron saint"]] for its [[BW:AN#Current administrators|administrators]].</ref> whistles a part of the anthem while he mops a deck on the ship, then an orchestral version of the anthem bursts into the documentary as several pilots enter the hallway to give the film an uplifting heroic appeal ([[Final Cut]]).

==As incidental music==
A variation of the anthem is used as incidental music to accompany the fleet's departure into the Sun ([[Daybreak, Part II]]).

==Notes==
* The Colonial anthem is a new recording of the [[Original Series]]'s main theme composed by [[Stu Phillips]], who assisted [[Bear McCreary]] in the new arrangement.<ref>{{cite online journal|url= http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/?p=117|title=The Themes of Battlestar Galactica Part IV| | journal=http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/ Bear's Battlestar Blog | last =McCreary | first= Bear}}.</ref>
* The scene in which the crewman is heard whistling the anthem confirms that the piece of music exists "in-universe" and is not simply part of the "real world" soundtrack (something that is not necessarily made clear in the mini-series, or by the anthem's use at the end of Biers' documentary, both of which could simply have been soundtrack elements for viewers).
* The audio sample in this article is from the [[Soundtrack (Season 2)|Season 2 soundtrack]], track 1, a modern arrangement of the original theme for the episode, "Final Cut", by [[Bear McCreary]].

==References==
<div style="font-size:85%"><references/></div>

[[Category:A to Z]]
[[Category:Colonial History]]
[[Category:Colonial History (RDM)]]
[[Category:RDM]]

Daybreak, Part II

2009-04-04T18:36:24Z

TypoFixer: Wordsmithing, removing unnecessary words

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{{Episode Data
| image=Battleofthecolony.jpg
| title= Daybreak, Part II & Part III
| season= 4
| episode= 20
| guests=
| writer= [[Ronald D. Moore]]<ref>http://rondmoore.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/4/18_Podcast_Success!.html</ref>
| story=
| director= [[Michael Rymer]]
| production=422-423
| rating=1.7<ref>{{cite_web|url=http://www.nbcumv.com/scifi/release_detail.nbc/scifi-20090324000000-4242update58.html|title='Battlestar Galactica Finale Blasts Away the Competition|date=24 March 2009|accessdate=25 March 2009|last=|first=|format=|language=}}</ref>/2,364,000 viewers (Live+SD)<ref>{{cite_web|url=http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/03/24/wwe-raw-hannah-montana-and-northern-lights-lead-cable-show-rankings/15073|title=WWE RAW, Hannah Montana and Northern Lights lead cable show rankings|date=24 March 2009|accessdate=25 March 2009|last=|first=|format=|language=}}</ref>
| US airdate=March 20, 2009
| CAN airdate=March 20, 2009
| UK airdate=March 24, 2009
| dvd=
| population=
| prev=[[Daybreak, Part I]]
| next=[[The Plan]]
| extra='''Series Finale - 2 Hour Episode'''<ref>http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/06/battlestars-fin.html</ref>
| forumthread=3050
}}

== Overview ==

===Act 1===

The episode begins with a series of events that occurred before the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|Fall]].
*In a strip bar in [[Caprica City]], [[William Adama]] and [[Saul Tigh|Saul]] and [[Ellen Tigh]] enjoy themselves. Adama questions whether to take a civilian job or take command of an aged battlestar,<ref>This is a side reference to the events of the episode, "[[Hero]]"</ref> finally deciding on the civilian job.
*[[Kara Thrace]] has dinner in her apartment with her fiancé [[Zak Adama]] and his brother [[Lee Adama]]. The conversation turns to Lee Adama's decision to join the [[Colonial Forces]], despite his idealism and his dislike of his father. He simply answers that he received college funding in exchange for service.
*Elsewhere, [[Laura Roslin]] greets her date, [[Sean Allison]], at her home. She eventually recognizes him as a former student from years ago. Despite the age difference, Roslin decides to let him stay the night.
*At the strip bar, Bill Adama asks Saul whether he'd have taken the civilian desk job. Saul doesn't answer.
*Lee Adama and Thrace manage to drag Zak to a couch after a night of drinking. But Thrace isn't done and challenges Lee to shots.
*Bill Adama is drunkenly sick, vomiting outside on the street. With a weak smile, he looks up to the stars in the night sky.

Aboard ''[[Galactica]]'', [[Gaius Baltar]] sits in the former home of his [[Cult of Baltar|followers]], now empty. [[Virtual Beings|Virtual Six]] tells him to trust in [[God (RDM)|God's]] plan for him, a plan she says he is already following.

===Act 2===
Aboard ''[[Galactica]]'', final preparations are made for the mission...
* In [[sickbay]], Dr. [[Cottle]] leaves assistant [[Layne Ishay]] enough medication to allow Laura Roslin enough lucidity and mobility for 48 hours. She thanks him sincerely, leaving Cottle uncharacteristically speechless.
* In the [[pilot ready room]], [[Karl Agathon]] briefs the [[Raptor]] teams on the special nature of their rescue mission. Despite the odds, all volunteer.
* Lee Adama briefs the [[marines]] on Hera's likely location: deep inside the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylon]] [[The Colony|colony]].
*In CIC, Admiral Adama work out the tactics of the battle against the colony; Close-range combat - no nuclear weapons and missiles.
* The [[Final Five]] plan to use [[Samuel Anders]], now effectively a [[Hybrid]] on ''[[Galactica]]'', to disrupt the Colony's Hybrids, a plan which requires Anders to be brought to [[CIC]] and connected to ''[[Galactica]]'''s computer systems.
* Saul Tigh is disturbed at the sight of gooey wires and conduit used to interface Anders with the battlestar.
* Admiral Adama hands over command of the [[The Fleet (RDM)|Fleet]] to [[Hoshi]], noting that if they aren't back from the mission in 12 hours, they will never come back. Similarly, Lee Adama appoints [[Romo Lampkin]] as President of the Twelve Colonies. He joins Admiral Hoshi on the last Raptor to leave ''Galactica'' for the baseship, the Fleet's new flagship.
* Baltar's followers get in the ship. Baltar enters, but then tells [[Paulla]] that he must stay on the ship. Lee Adama throws Baltar a weapon. As Baltar is given a weapon, a Number Six leads a large number of [[Cylon Centurion]]s down the [[hangar deck]]; a red sash painted on them for identification.

===Act 3===

*A shot of the Fleet shows that the rebel [[Basestar (RDM)|baseship]] fully regenerated since the [[Cylon Civil War]], and ready to lead the civilians to safety. ''Galactica'' separates from the fleet, retracting its [[flight pod]]s to prep for [[FTL]].

*Adama asks to go "around the horn", with the [[Saul Tigh|XO]] calling out combat stations over the loudspeaker.
** In sickbay, Layne Ishay prepares sickbay for wounded, with Laura Roslin assisting as best she can.
** [[Viper (RDM)|Vipers]] are in [[launch tube]]s, and the entire Raptor squadron, armed with troops and missiles, have been placed inside the starboard flight pod deck, amidst the ruins of the old [[Galactica Museum]].
** Lee Adama and his force of marines (including Sergeant [[Allan Nowart]]) and red-striped centurions take their positions.
** Gaius Baltar is a soldier protecting the hallways against boarders. He is surprised to find [[Caprica-Six]] by his side.
** In CIC, Ellen Tigh signals that Anders is ready to work.
** Adama gives a final speech, a final understanding and call to arms.

*The battlestar jumps away from the fleet, and [[Battle of the Colony]] begins...
** ''Galactica'' arrives only meters from the edge of the Colony, and is immediately besieged by the Cylon batteries.
** Ellen starts up Sam Anders, who makes contact with the Colony Hybrids and takes them and the guns offline. Ellen warns that [[Cylon Raider]]s will appear any minute.
** ''Galactica'' responds by launching its fighter wings. The Vipers launch, and the Raptors jump directly from within the starboard pod to the opposite side of the Colony in a flanking position. The Raptor jumps, however, cause massive damage to the pod, with gas venting outside from a gaping hole.
** Adama orders the battlestar's engines ahead at flank speed, ramming the alligator head into the Colony. ''Galactica's'' inhabitants take a beating, but breach the Colony through the forced entry. Lee Adama leads his marines and several Cylon Centurions inside from a front airlock.
** [[Racetrack]] and [[Skulls]] arm their nuclear missiles, presumably to strike the Colony after the rescue. But suddenly a piece of debris strikes their Raptor, killing all aboard and leaving the Raptor adrift.
** Several Raptors, including the one with [[Sharon Agathon]], Helo, and Starbuck, dock and make their way into the Colony.
** Deep inside the Colony, a [[Simon]] works on young Hera as [[Sharon Valerii|Boomer]] looks on in disgust. When she questions why he continues to work on Hera when they are under attack, the Simon explains that they maintain and superior force and numbers. Boomer assaults the Simon, snapping his neck, and takes Hera out of the room.

===Act 4===

* The Colony's halls are filled with gunfire. Cylon Centurions, including older [[Cylon Centurion Model 0005|Model 0005s]] fight each other as the Colonial fire teams push through.
* [[Cavil]], a [[Number Five]] and another Simon decide to go on the offensive, to attack the battlestar with their troops.

* In a hallway in ''Galactica'', ready to repel boarders, Caprica-Six and Baltar come to terms with their old relationship. As they kiss, they hear a Six's voice. "All of the pieces are falling into place."
* The Virtual Six--''and'' the Virtual Baltar--stand above them. To the surprise of Caprica-Six and Baltar, they can hear and see each of the avatars.
* With a shudder, the battlestar hull is breached as waves of enemy Centurions, both old-model and modern, pour into the ship.

* The Agathon's team find Boomer, holding Hera. She gives the child to them, telling them to tell Admiral Adama that she "owed him one." With the child safe, Athena shoots Boomer.
* A flashback scene shows what Boomer meant: a time back in her days on '''Galactica'', as Adama and Tigh redress her but give her another chance to be a better pilot.

* Ishay has her hands full in sickbay, trying to triage and treat as many people as she can. The event is taxing, physically and mentally, for Roslin, as she comforts more dying than not.

* Lee Adama's team connects with Starbuck's team, with Hera in tow. When Lee asks where Thrace was, she answers, "Stopped for coffee."<ref>This might be the one time in the history of the series where an obvious joke to [[w:Starbucks Coffee|Starbucks Coffee]] has been used.</ref> With their objective complete and no other Colonial troops found, they head back to the battlestar's alligator-head.

* ''Galactica'' batteries are being targeted by Raiders. She is losing what little defensive ability she has left. Enemy forces are coming at the reserve forces--where Baltar waits.

===Act 5===

* Caprica-Six and Baltar hold off the enemy Centurions. Baltar's passion at killing Centurions gets a bit out of control as Lee Adama's team reenter the battlestar with Hera. As more enemies appear, Lee and Baltar fire away.
* Laura Roslin sits and experiences yet another vision of the [[Opera House]] and little Hera. Struggling to walk, driven by something she can't fully realize, she gets up to find Hera.
* Starbuck leads the Agathons through the hallways, but a Number Five appears from behind, seriously wounding Helo in the leg and killing a marine before Starbuck eliminates him. A damaged, but still functioning enemy Centurion shows up and in the confusion, Hera runs away. Athena runs after her at the request of her wounded husband.
* Hera walks amidst the gunfighting, when soon she encounters Roslin, who pulls out of the path of an enemy patrol and to safety. But when Roslin turns back to the child, she is gone again.
* Caprica-Six and Baltar are running, and are out of ammo. Suddenly they see Hera, as well as Roslin and Athena--all grouped together as in the Opera House vision. Caprica-Six scoops up the child and enters a hallway, closing the hatchway, preventing Athena and Roslin from following. The opera house vision had Caprica-Six and Baltar closing the door on boht Athena and Roslin after picking up Hera.
* As the scene shifts between visions of the Opera House and the corridors, Baltar and Caprica-Six realize what they must do: follow their vision into the Opera House--which turns out to be CIC, where the Final Five reside, overlooking the lower deck of CIC as they appeared in the vision, standing above.
* Adama and his men have apparently just finished defending the CIC from a break-in by Cavil, a Doral and a Simon. The Doral and the Simon are dead, and Cavil is under guard. An explosion rocks the CIC, and Cavil picks up a gun and grabs Hera as a shield.
* Baltar pleads for the child's freedom, telling Cavil that Hera is key to humanity's survival as well. He reasons with Cavil that there are higher forces at work, that led them all, here, for a reason. Baltar also reveals that he has been visited by angels - the agents of God. When Cavil questions if God has his people's interests at heart, on how Baltar knows that God is on his side, Baltar replies (in an allusion of something [[The Hand of God (RDM)| Virtual Six once told him]]), "God is not on anyone's side." The Virtual Six and Virtual Baltar look on with a pleased expression.
* Baltar asks Cavil to take a leap of faith. Saul Tigh sweetens the pot by offering to reteach Cavil the secret of [[Resurrection (RDM)|resurrection]], this time in exchange not only for Hera's life but for permanent peace, where the Cylons leave humanity alone.
* Cavil agrees. He uses the Battlestar comm to order his forces to stand down and releases Hera. Admiral Adama orders stand-down as well.

===Act 6===

* Vipers and Raptors return to ''Galactica'' as the Raiders return to the Colony. Laura Roslin joins the admiral in CIC.
* The Five each know part of the secret to resurrection. They will combine their knowledge by connecting themselves through the water in Ander's tank. Ellen Tigh tells the others that the process will also share memories as well as data.
* But before they begin, [[Tory Foster]], visibly anxious, warns the others that they will see "certain things" of their bad behavior. She tries to prepare the others of what they will see of her. An impatient Cavil screams. "Hey! I don't mean to rush you, but you are keeping two civilizations waiting!"
* The Five dip their hands and make the connection. As the data flows to the Colony, Foster's visions of murdering [[Cally Tyrol]] in an effort to protect her secret of being a Cylon comes to the forefront, surprising the others of the Five, and angering [[Galen Tyrol]] immediately.
* Tyrol pulls his hand from the pool and wraps both hands tightly around Foster's neck in a death-grip, eventually snapping her neck.
* As Anders screams from the sudden disconnection, the Cylons in CIC believe they are deceived and open fire. The Colonials kill all but Cavil, who shouts an exasperated "[[Frak]]!" before putting his pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

* High above, as the Raiders begin attacking ''Galactica'' again, [[Racetrack]]'s damaged Raptor drifts, its crew lifeless. A rock strikes the ship, causing Racetrack's dead hand to strike the firing button to the Raptor's tactical nuclear missiles, launching them all straight at the Colony.
* The force of the explosions severely damage the Colony, pushing it towards the black hole, threatening to take ''Galactica'' with it.
* Adama orders Kara Thrace to make a [[blind jump]], but Thrace thinks about [[The Music|the music her father played]], the music that Hera wrote to her. Recalling the mathematical associations she tried to discern from the music, Thrace realizes the music works as a series of FTL coordinates.
* She punches in the coordinates into the [[Computers|navigation computer]] and jumps the ship.

* A flashback scene appears where Lee Adama and Kara Thrace talk about how she [[The Destiny|thinks about death]] every time she gets into a cockpit.

* ''Galactica'' completes the jump--but the strain of the last battle causes the battlestar's structure to ripple and twist as structural members tear and break. The ship will never jump again. Engines and life support are still online, but ''Galactica's'' backbone is broken.
* "Where have you taken us, Kara?" Roslin asks, as the scene changes to an exterior shot to show the battlestar flying over a gray, rocky moon.
* But is not just a moon...''Galactica'' has arrived at the ''moon of Earth''...another Earth, this one with the continent of Africa in prominent view.

===Act 7===
[[File:Battlestar Over Africa.jpg|thumb|right|200px|right|A crippled ''Galactica'' seen in orbit over the Sahara Desert.]]
* Twelve hours later, the Fleet jumps into the new Earth's orbit as ''Galactica'' passes by. A Raptor came to Hoshi to guide them to new Earth.
* Landing ship after landing ship leave for the new world, which unlike the old Earth, is clearly lush and full of life.
* On a green, rich savanna in Africa, Admiral Adama, Cottle, Saul Tigh, Hoshi, and Baltar look on, lying prone on their stomachs with binoculars at a tribe of early humans. Cottle confirms that the native humans are compatible with the Colonials genetically. Adama is astonished that humans just so happened to have evolved on this particular world.
* At a camp, as Lampkin starts making plans for the construction of a city, Lee Adama tells him to let humanity start all over again, leave their technology behind, which has almost always gotten them into trouble. Let the Colonials enter the new world with just their basic possessions.

* Admiral Adama maps out a plan to populate various continents and land masses, spreading out humanity and Cylon far and wide, distributing supplies to give all a good chance of survival. To Lampkin's surprise, the peoples of the Fleet take a liking to leaving technology behind.
* A [[Number Two]] tells Adama that the remaining Twos, Sixes, and Eights will stay on Earth as well, handing over the baseship to the Centurions, to give them their own freedom. When Lampkin questions if setting the Centurions free won't cause another holocaust hundreds of years from now, Ellen Tigh agrees it's a risk, but believes the cycle of death has been ended. Adama agrees.
* Adama tells that, after everyone is offloaded from the ships, the Fleet will reunite with ''Galactica'' a final time. Piloted by Samuel Anders, still in his tank in CIC, connected into the battlestar, he will fly all the ships on a final voyage into the Sun.

* Kara Thrace, eyes filled with tears, meets with Anders at his tank, kissing him goodbye for the last time, and leaving her [[dog tags]]. As she leaves, he mutters, "I'll see you on the other side."

===Act 8===

* Admiral William Adama descends into the hangar deck, wearing a [[flight suit]]. The deck is otherwise completely empty of anything, and anyone.
* He takes a seat in a [[Viper Mark II]]. Not just any Mark II...but the one that Galen Tyrol's team rebuilt for him as a retirement gift [[Miniseries, Night 1|so long ago]].
* As Adama's Viper launches, the scene shifts to six years prior, where Adama is taking a lie detector test for the prospective desk job. When the test administrator asks him test questions such as, "Are you a Cylon?" and "Have you ever stolen money from a cash drawer?" Adama is angered and leaves, saying, "I'd rather spend the rest of my career--what's left of it--on a broken old down ship, than to have someone sit here and question my word."
* Husker's Viper makes a final fly-by of the old battlestar, looking at her one last time before pointing his Viper towards Earth.
[[File:The fleet's end.jpg|thumb|180px|right|The [[fleet]] heading straight into the Sun.]]
* Samuel Anders' voice from the past talks of his days in sport, dreaming of perfection, and being linked to it, to creation, as Anders guides the Fleet, now united to the mathematical perfection he once spoke of through his duties as a Hybrid.
* As the [[Colonial_Anthem|Colonial Anthem]]--a version of the [[Original Series]] main theme--plays, the scene shows ''Galactica'' and the Fleet gathered a final time, heading away from Earth and towards the sun to its demise.

* Walking in the savannah, the Tighs speak with Galen Tyrol a final time. He has decided to go to the northern highlands of Earth (likely Scotland <ref>http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html</ref>). The scene shifts to the Tighs, partying back in Caprica City, once upon a time.

===Act 9===

* On the plains, Bill Adama sits with Laura Roslin, watching herds of gazelle. Her vision weakening, she tries to use her glasses with the binoculars. "A very beautiful world," she says. When she asks what the name of the planet is, Adama tells her it's Earth. He adds, "Earth is a dream," believing that their new home, a long-sought destination, deserves the name.
* Roslin's breathing becomes labored and shallow. Adama offers to give her a better look at the wildlife. He picks her up and carries her to a nearby Raptor.
* Lee Adama and Kara Thrace notice and meet Bill Adama there. The Adamas hug, and Bill Adama gives Thrace a final greeting of "[[Nothing but the rain]]" before he hugs and kisses her. Thrace and Lee wave goodbye to a smiling Roslin as the Raptor ascends.

* Lee realizes that his father isn't coming back. Kara Thrace tells Lee that she isn't coming back, either. "I just know that I am done here. I've completed my journey...and it feels good."

* A flashback scene, back in Thrace's apartment, where Thrace dares Lee to make love to her on her dining room table. But before they could do anything, the crash of a glass partially awakens Zak, causing the two to realize what they were doing. They shake hands and say goodbye.

* "Today is the first day of the rest of your life, Lee," Kara Thrace says. As Lee tells her of desire to explore and climb mountains, he turns to find that Kara Thrace has vanished, as if she were a ghost. "Goodbye, Kara," he says. "You won't be forgotten."
* A flashback scene shows the pigeon that would be trapped in Lee's apartment after his visit to Kara and Zak. It looks at Lee and flies out of the window and away.

* In another flashback from six years prior, Laura Roslin returns to stand by the side of the bed, thanks Sean Allison, but tells him that they will not meet this way again, and asks him to leave. As the man leaves, Roslin returns to her bathroom, lights a cigarette, then makes a phone call. She accepts the opportunity to work on Mayor [[Richard Adar]]'s campaign.

* Bill Adama's Raptor flies over flamingos. "So much..life," Laura Roslin says...her final words as she closes her eyes and quietly passes.
* Moments go by before Bill realizes that she is gone.
* In tears, Bill removes his wedding ring and places it on Laura's hand. "Right there...I'm going to build our cabin right there," he says, pointing to some hills.

===Act 10===

* A line of people walk into the wilderness, calm and ready to take on the world. Romo Lampkin appears to be in charge. Saul and Ellen Tigh bring up the rear.
* The Agathons walk as well, Helo using a makeshift crutch, talking of hunting and other pleasantries. Hera runs about in play, a smile on her face.

* Gaius Baltar and Caprica-Six look on at Hera playing as the Virtual Six and Baltar reappear. When Caprica-Six questions if the protection of Hera was all that God wanted of them, the Virtual Six replies, "God's plan is never complete." "Great..." Baltar replies sullenly.
* Virtual-Baltar counters, "I think it's safe to say that, from now on, your lives will be less...eventful."

* Another flashback to Caprica City. Baltar offers Caprica-Six an opportunity to "peek" into the [[Colonial Defense Mainframe]].

* When Baltar points to some land, he recalls his heritage, and [[Julius Baltar|his father]], and that he knows a bit about farming, to a bit of tears.

* Bill Adama sits, looking out into the hills and valley. "I laid out the cabin today. It's going to have an easterly view. You should see the light that we get here. When the sun comes from behind those mountains. It's almost heavenly. It reminds me of you."
* As he speaks, the camera pans up to show Adama, seated near the cairn he built for Laura Roslin's body.

* The scene turns to show Hera playing and looking upward. Scenes of wood and desert and sea pass by in a geologic montage to reveal an Earth city - New York City - 150,000 years later.

* As a fly-over of the city appears, a voice-over of Virtual-Six reads from a magazine article of the Tanzanian discovery of the bones of what scientists believe are the remains of the [[w:mitochondrial Eve|mitochondrial Eve]], the matrilineal common ancestor of mankind.

* As [[Ron D. Moore|a man reads]] about the scientific discovery, the Virtual Six and Baltar look over his shoulder at a magazine article of the news, and reveal what they know...the bones are that of Hera Agathon, born of a Cylon mother and a human father. No other people on the street appear to notice them.

* The two talk of the technology and decadence, of whether this Earth will repeat the mistakes of generations past and again become overwhelmed by their creations. The Six thinks not, believing it to be God's plan.

* "You know it doesn't like that name," Baltar says. Six only looks back in mild defiance. "Silly. Silly me," he replies as the two walk away into the metropolis.

* The episode concludes with scenes of robots, from toys to advanced automatons growing and evolving, as Jimi Hendrix's--Earth's popular version--of "[[The Music|All Along The Watchtower]]" plays, ending with an image of [http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news-10744-Robot+or+Human%3F+Here%27s+ACTROID.html an attractive-looking female automaton] gazing out over Times Square from a giant outdoor television screen as Six and Baltar walk off into the distance.

== Notes ==
:''See [[Daybreak, Part II/Notes]]''

== Analysis ==
===Who and what guided them===
*The coordinates that Thrace enters, 1123 / 6536 / 5321 correspond to the notation of the Final Four theme [http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/theme-watchtower.jpg]. The song is in a C# Phrygian scale (enharmonic with A major and F# minor). 1 represents C#, and each higher integer indicates the next note in the scale, such that

:1 = C#
:2 = D
:3 = E
:(4 = F#)
:5 = G#
:6 = A
:(7 = B)

:The linked graphic omits the first and last note of the theme, but both can be heard in the soundtrack during the jump montage. The second "five" (in the third chunk of four digits) corresponds to the tuplet G#/A/G#, effectively omitting the trill up to high A. Every note has the same duration except for the last two, which are twice the length of the others.
*The Virtual Beings are angels of 'God' who came to guide Baltar and Caprica Six in their destiny of protecting Hera.
*Kara Thrace is an angel who was sent back from the dead to guide humanity to a new home the coordinates of which were hidden in the Music.
*The final scenes of this episode, in fast-forwarding through time and attempting to set the entire work as a backstory, make the ending similar to that of the film [[Wikipedia:How the West Was Won (film)|How the West Was Won]].
* There are at least two distinct angels. They have known each other a long time and born witness to Kobol and the original Earth, as well as the Twelve Colonies and the new Earth. They can walk around and observe events even when no one else present can see them, though they may have the ability to appear to anyone they wish. In the final scene, a man walking by the Angel Six appears to check her out (though this may have been a simple acting goof or an actual pedestrian happening by).
* The constellation [[w:Ursa Major|Ursa Major]] (commonly known as the "Big Dipper") appears briefly in this episode. It makes only the second appearance of a recognizable star pattern in the series, the first being Orion in "[[The Ties That Bind]]" (Orion is also visible in this episode).
* Adama's statement that New Earth is "one million light years" from Kobol must be taken as exaggeration or an error. The Milky Way is 100 000 light years across, and earlier statements in the show indicate that it considerable time to travel much shorter distances.
** It's possible that Adama's "million light years" comment is meant metaphorically instead of literally, in essence saying the Colonials have come an unthinkable distance to reach their new home.
===The reproduction prospects of the races===
*It is possible that some Baseships of Ones, Fours, and Fives were not at [[The Colony]] when it was destroyed, given the fact that they were observed jumping in and out of the system by Racetrack and Skulls. However, as noted in the "Notes" section it is unlikely that the Cavil, Simon and Doral lines will continue without Cylon females. The [[Three]]s are extinct with the last copy [[D'Anna Biers]] herself dying on the original Earth; Boomer was killed in the Colony (and in any case couldn't single handedly save the lines even if she were alive); and the last Sixes and Eights staying with the humans on the second Earth. However, there is the possibility of having a few remaining human females from the survivors of the various Colonial worlds including [[Caprica]], if they still exist, being viable, so the lines could in theory continue. However, given the total lack of success in the forced breeding of Cylons and humans and the Cavil, Dorals and Simon's cynical view of love, an apparent requirement of conception between both Cylon-Cylon and Cylon-human combinations, with their hatred of humans it is unlikely. One final option could remain. The Final Five was able to download some of the Resurrection technology data to the Cavil Faction before Tyrol in his rage at Tory broke the connection. It is possible that the Cavil faction could extrapolate from the data they did get to recreate the technology, but only if it was transmitted to Baseships beyond the destroyed Colony. How long this could take or even if it is possible depends on how much and/or if the most critical and unique part of the technology was downloaded.
*On the second Earth Hera's mate that produced children was most likely human. Saul Tigh and the Leobens would be too old for her. While it was fairly common in ancient times for the men to be far older than their brides (particularly with royalty), for example with the female being as young as 12 and the male being say 60 to take an extreme. However, Colonial mores, which are much like our own in real life, would forbid the Leobens from sexual congress with Hera when she reach the accepted reproductive age. On the other hand there were many human children about her age and [[Boxey (RDM)|slightly older]] in the Fleet. She could had also had children with a human child unborn at the time of the landing on Second Earth, perhaps within five years to ten years of her age. It is possible that other hybrid children could had been born after the landing given that the Twos, Sixes, and Eights joined the humans. And it is possible that pure Cylon children could had been born to the age compatible Sixes, Eights, and Leobens but as noted in the series it is difficult if not impossible for a pure Cylon child to come to term making any pool of pure Cylon children that were successfully born-if any-very small. Cylon-Human mating with a human male with a Six or a Sharon is very possible with the example of Hera herself It is possible given the precedent of Karl and Sharon Agathon Giaus Baltar and Caprica Six could had had a child particularly since they truly love each other. It is a theoretical possibility that a Leoben could had taken a human wife (they are inclined to do so given one Leoben infatuation with Kara Thrace even before her specialness was known to them) In any case it Human-Cylon offspring are an much more likely than with a Cylon-Cylon birth, but it is still harder than with human-human pairings. This would make any children pool of those pairings, while much more likely and larger than Cylon-Cylon offspring, would still quite small number compared to pure human offspring frequency of birth. Therefore Hera's offspring is most likely with a human. To sum up: It is the most likely that her husband was pure human the next probably that she took as a husband another Cylon-human hybrid. Her producing children with a pure Cylon offspring is the least likely of the three since pure Cylons are the least likely to exist. Throw in the possibility is Hera mating with the New Earth native tribal human males then the likely hood of Hera having a child with a human is very great.
* The Final Five can be considered some of the ancestors of present-day humanity through their link with Athena and the other Eights, Twos, and Sixes although it is unlikely they have a direct genetic link to us due to their age, deceased status or self imposed isolation.
* Mitochondrial Eve, Hera, is the most recent matrilineal common ancestor for ''all'' people alive on Earth today. Like Hera, all people alive on Earth today carry some Cylon genes along with human genes--no one is one hundred percent "pure" human, as those who fled the Twelve Colonies were. Assuming that there are no "pure" humans living somewhere else in the universe today (descendants of the tiny number of survivors left behind in the Colonies), this means that humanity, as it was defined by people in the Twelve Colonies, has gone extinct.

===Miscellaneous===
*[[Ronald D. Moore]] appears as himself holding a ''National Geographic'' magazine in New York City.
*The shelters erected by the Colonials on Earth resemble [[Wikipedia:Quonset hut|Quonset huts]], World War II-era temporary structures.
*During the [[wikipedia:polygraph|polygraph]] examination for his post retirement job in the private sector he does not answer verbally to the control question "Are you a Cylon?" To the polygraph examiner it was a deliberately absurd question that everyone would know the answer of: No, to get a baseline reaction to truthful yes and no answers to better detect deception on pertinent questions. At the time the vast majority of the people of the 12 colonies did not know of the existence of humanoid Cylons. Not even the [[Armistice Officer]], the Colonial Representative to the [[Armistice Station]] that the Colonials sent to every year to open up formal diplomatic relations with the Cylons did not know. He expect a standard [[Cylon Centurion Model 0005|Model 0005 Centurion]]. He was shocked to have what we have come to know as a [[Six]] humanoid model approach him. However a young Lt. William "Husker" Adama saw in the Cylon experimental facility he crash landed in just minutes before the end of the [[First Cylon War]] in [[Razor]] people being experimented on and a vat similar to what would become Hybrid tanks and Resurrection pools. He undoubtedly reported what he saw to his superiors. He also had prior knowledge of the first Cylons through some knowledge of the research Graystone was working on which his own father was privy to. It was this inside knowledge that he had after deciding not to retire is why he was able to deduce the [[Two|Leoben]] model was a Cylon in the Miniseries at [[Ragnar Anchorage]]. To the polygraph examiner it was a nonsense question, but to Adama it was more than that, it was a very real one to Adama. Adama knows something the examiner doesn't. That is why he reacted and paused and didn't answer. If it was merely an absurd question to him it would had been like if he was asked if he was a shark or a frog.
* In another piece of irony in a program that is full of such, the two beings most directly responsible for the attack and destruction of the 12 Colonies, Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six, get to live on a lush green New Earth in love with each other.
* Even if humanity does repeat the Cycle, Lee Adama's plan would seem to have had some success, because it will have taken much, much longer to do so this time around.
* Ellen says that hopefully the Hybrids will ''still'' respond to Anders' commands. In other words, they would recognize him from the time the Final Five ran the Colony.
*Cavil's suicide, in the way it is framed and executed, closely mirrors the televised 1987 suicide of American politician [[w:Budd Dwyer|Budd Dwyer]].
* Adama's drunken moment, where he sits against a wall, vomits, and then looks up at the night sky, echoes [[w:Oscar Wilde|Oscar Wilde]]'s famous aphorism: ''We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.''
* Though it was never explicitly states in the Miniseries or after, it seems that TIgh was indeed planning to retire whenever Adama decided to leave the Colonial Military. The flashbacks in this episode to Saul and Ellen Tigh in the bar make it clear that Tigh is planning on following Adama out of the service. However Adama, as viewers come to see, decides ultimately to finish out his last years as the CO of ''Galactica'' despite reservations. Tigh obviously followed. This also sheds more light on Tigh's eventual estrangement from Ellen- which was where their relationship was at in the miniseries. The bitterness she doubtless felt at Tigh once again choosing Bill Adama over her was probably a factor in not only her noted loose behaviour, but their growing estrangement before the war.
*It is not entirely clear when in Adama's career he decided to pursue the idea of a civilian job as seen in both parts of "Daybreak". Dialogue during the lie detector test scene suggests Adama has been given his orders to command Galactica, but is considering resigning before taking up the post. However Adama notes in his initial interview with his prospective employer in the previous episode that he has already commanded two battlestars. One of these is obviously ''[[Valkyrie]]'', but it is not clear if Adama is already referring to Galactica as the second command (which could also suggest he is already commanding the ''Galactica'' at the time this flashback is set and is considering his resignation when on leave from that ship), or to another battlestar that Adama once commanded but has never been mentioned before.
* Chief Engineer Galen Tyrol's decision to travel to a highland area, which is implied to be Scotland, is a nod of the head to the Star Trek character 'Scottie', another famous Sci Fi Chief Engineer.
* The discovery of humans on the new Earth by the Galactica crew makes this, technically, the only epsiode of the reimagined series in which an "alien" race (non-Colonial-related) is actually featured.

== Questions ==

* Is the Adama family the origin of the name Adam for the mythical first man?
* What happened to the newly liberated Centurions? Are they still around in some form 150,000 years later?
* What happened to the Raiders?
* Why does God want the Cycle to be broken?
* Had things gone as planned, would Cavil have upheld his end of the bargain?
* What was the "similar incident" Skulls was starting to tell Racetrack about just before they were killed?
* Did Head Six and Head Baltar travel through time to the present day, or did they actually witness the 150,000 years that passed?

== Official Statements ==

== Noteworthy Dialogue ==
*''Virtual Baltar says the last line of the series as he walks down a street of modern day New York City with Virtual Six. Baltar questions what God wants to be really called:''
:'''Virtual Baltar''' (moving in closer to V-Six, whispers): "You know it doesn't like that name!"
:'''Virtual Six''' (Doesn't answer vocally but her expression says "C'mon! you know better than that!"): ...........
:'''Virtual Baltar''' (Seeing her reaction): "Silly Me.....silly, silly me".

*''The Galactica is about to jump to The Colony and into harms way:''
:'''Admiral Adama''': Just so there'll be no misunderstandings later... ''Galactica'' has seen a lot of history, gone through a lot of battles. This ''will'' be her last. She will not fail us if we do not fail her. If we succeed in our mission, ''Galactica'' will bring us home. If we don't... it doesn’t matter anyway.

*''Tory Foster is saying something to the other Final Five who are about to download the specifications of Resurrection technology, delaying things. Cavil is impatient and shouts from below up to the Five:''
:'''Cavil''':" HEY! I DON'T MEAN TO RUSH YOU BUT YOU ARE KEEPING TWO CIVILIZATIONS WAITING!

*''The Final Five are about to to stick their hand into Anders's hybrid tank and through that the [[datastream]] They are about to download the technical data of Resurrection to the Cavil Faction's Colony as agreed. As they do so their minds will essentially become one and they will all know each other's secrets whether they want to share or not. Tory Foster is unusually agitated and nervous:''
:'''Tory Foster''' (hesitantly with slight fear): "There are things that....that we've all done. Certain things that...people would be shocked.... to learn about."
:(Cavil impatiently shouts from below, Foster continues)
:'''Tory Foster''' (voice trembling slightly): Let's....Let's just all agree that no matter what we learn about each other...we're all Cylons and we're all capable of making mistakes."
:''(Those were her last words. Less than two minutes later, Tyrol learns of Tory murdering Cally and kills Tory by snapping her neck. She was being strangled to tightly to say anything else.)''

*''Cavil's last word before he commits suicide.''
:'''Cavil''': Frak!

*''Nuclear missiles has knocked the Colony falling into the Singularity and is dragging Galactica with it and Starbuck is frantically attempting to figure out the jump coordinates. This is a lyric from the song "All Along the Watchtower.''''
:'''Starbuck''': There must be some kind of way out of here.

*''Virtual Six and Virtual Baltar speculating if the cycle will continue.''
:'''Virtual Baltar''': All of this has happened before...
:'''Virtual Six''': But the question remains: does all of this have to happen again?

*''Sam Anders, essentially Galactica's Hybrid, says his last words to Kara Thrace after she leaves his side.''
:'''Samuel Anders''': See you on the other side

*''Baltar to Caprica Six on New Earth in unspoken reference about his father''
:'''Baltar''': "You know, I know about farming." (sobs)

*''Laura Roslin is speaking to Dr. Cottle about the state of her health which both know it is grave with only a few days to live. Also, she is about to essentially go into battle to retrieve Hera and the Doctor appears to be on the verge of choking up:''
:'''Laura Roslin''': Don't spoil your image, just light a cigarette and go and grumble."

*''Former Admiral of the Fleet William Adama is showing Laura their new home on New Earth in a Raptor. She sees a herd of gazelles stampeding at the sight of the Raptor over the lush and rich landscape and says her last words:''
:'''Roslin''': So much life...

*''William Adama is sitting on a high ridge overlooking what would later be called the African Savannah in spectacular view. Laura Roslin's grave is behind him close by and he talks to her spirit. It is his last statement in the series:''
:'''William Adama''': I laid out the cabin. It's gonna have an easternly view. You should see the light we get here. When the sun comes from behind the mountains, it's almost heavenly. Reminds me of you."

*''Boomer has just given over Hera to Athena, saving her life from Cavil and Simon dissection-and both redeeming herself and condemning herself to death''
:'''Boomer''' (to Athena): Tell the old man, I owed him one.
:'''Athena''' (angrily) Doesn't change anything you did though!
:'''Boomer''' (shakes her head slightly): No. We all make our choices. Today I made a choice. I think its my last one.
:'''Starbuck''': All right this is really touching. Now can we get the frak out of here!?!
:'''Boomer''' (to Starbuck): You should know that your Raptor been destroyed. You can't go back that way.
:(Athena passes Hera to Helo)
:'''Athena''': Yeah well, that is not the plan.
:'''Starbuck''' (sardonically): Can we ''not'' tell her the plan?
:'''Athena''': Right.
:''(Athena and Boomer look each other in the eye for a moment. Athena raises her weapon. Boomer does not try to flee, accepting, if not welcoming her fate. Athena fires. Boomer is dead before she hits the deck.)''

== Guest Stars ==
* [[Callum Keith Rennie]] as [[Number Two]]
* [[Kate Vernon]] as [[Ellen Tigh]]
* [[Rick Worthy]] as [[Number Four]]
* [[Mark Sheppard]] as [[Romo Lampkin]]
* [[Donnelly Rhodes]] as Dr. [[Sherman Cottle]]
* [[Matthew Bennett]] as [[Number Five]]
* [[Rekha Sharma]] as [[Tory Foster]]
* [[Kerry Norton]] as [[Layne Ishay]]
* [[Dean Stockwell]] as [[Number One]]
* [[Bodie Olmos]] as Lieutenant [[Brendan Costanza|Brenden "Hotdog" Costanza]]
* [[Leah Cairns]] as Lieutenant [[Margaret Edmondson|Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson]]
* [[Brad Dryborough]] as Lieutenant/Admiral [[Louis Hoshi]]
* [[Colin Lawrence]] as Ensign [[Hamish McCall|Hamish "Skulls" McCall]]
* [[Lara Gilchrist]] as [[Paulla Schaffer]]
* [[Colin Corrigan]] as Marine [[Allan Nowart]]
* [[Leela Savasta]] as [[Tracey Anne]]
* [[Darcy Laurie]] as [[Dealino]]
* [[Iliana Gomez-Martinez]] as [[Hera Agathon]]
* [[Tobias Mehler]] as [[Zak Adama]]
* [[Simone Bailly]] as [[Shona]]
* [[Kevin McNulty]] as [[Frank Porthos]]
* [[Richard Jollymore]] as Marine #1
* [[Anthony St. John]] as Marine #2
* [[Dan Payne]] as [[Sean Allison]]
* [[Holly Eglinton]] as Stripper
* [[Tiffany Lyndall-Knight]] as [[Hybrid]] (uncredited)
* [[Ronald D. Moore]] as Man at news stand (uncredited)

== References ==

<div style="font-size: 85%;"><references /></div>

{{Episode list (RDM season 4)}}

[[Category:Episodes written by Ronald D. Moore]]
[[Category:Episodes directed by Michael Rymer]]

Daybreak, Part I

2009-03-24T06:17:31Z

TypoFixer: Wordsmithing, removing unnecessary words

{{Episode Data
| image=FirstDaybreak.jpg
| title=Daybreak, Part I
| season= 4
| episode=19
| guests=
| writer= [[Ronald D. Moore]]
| story=
| director= [[Michael Rymer]]
| production=421
| rating=
| US airdate=March 13, 2009 <ref>http://tv.ign.com/articles/920/920164p1.html</ref>
| CAN airdate=March 13, 2009
| UK airdate=March 17, 2009
| dvd=
| population=39516
| oldpopulation=39521
| prev=[[Islanded In a Stream of Stars ]]
| next=[[Daybreak, Part II]]
| forumthread= 2994
}}

== Overview ==
:''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]] begins to be stripped of parts, and [[William Adama|Adama]] calls for volunteers for a final mission.''

== Summary ==

=== Act 1 ===
'''In [[Caprica City]]'''
*The Act opens with a montage, including a galaxy, a bird trapped in a skylight, water falling into a pool, and light over a planet. Establish a modern city: "Caprica City - Before the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|Fall]]".
*[[William Adama|Bill Adama]], wearing civilian clothes, converses with another gentleman in a shaded room. Adama talks about his combat experience, commanding billions of cubits of men and materials, but doesn't want to go through with something. The man responds that he's only asking for one hour of his time, and that "sometimes there are things that you gotta do."
*Across the city, Dr. [[Gaius Baltar]] speaks with [[Caprica-Six]] in a limo, talking briefly about having things done for you as opposed to being independent. Baltar and Caprica-Six begin fooling around in the limo, when a call comes through. Baltar is immediately shaken. He apologizes and asks the other person to wait for him. The other person sounds ready to leave, but Baltar tells the person on the other end to wait for him, or he will sue for abandonment.
*[[Laura Roslin]] sees out the last guest from her sister's baby shower. Laura and her two younger sisters sit on the couch, celebrating and laughing together.
*In an apartment kitchen, [[Kara Thrace]] contemplates something and prepares food when the doorbell rings. Kara is surprised, saying they're early, and greets [[Lee Adama]] at the door, carrying flowers. Kara invites him in and calls for Zak. [[Zak Adama]] comes out, greets his brother, and introduces Kara as his girlfriend.
*Baltar pleads with Nurse Barbara to stay with his father [[Julius Baltar|Julius]] at his apartment, after she is stabbed with a steak knife, but she refuses and leaves. Caprica-Six walks in, despite Baltar's instructions to stay in the car. Baltar starts berating his father over the fact that he's driven away three nurses, at great cost to him, while his father starts talking about Baltar's past. Baltar starts yelling and hitting his father, demanding that he shut up. Baltar then sends Caprica-Six away, saying he will be spending the rest of the evening with his father.
*At her apartment, Laura Roslin is informed by two Caprica City Police officers that the previous night, her father and sisters died in a car accident. The other driver survived, and was intoxicated at the time of the accident. Roslin, upset, calmly asks the officers to leave. She stands in her apartment, alone, thinking, and then walks to a park in her nightgown. She rests her feet in the fountain, and then wades in the water, and rests on a nearby rock, letting the splashing water wash over her. The drops of water falling into the pond match what was seen in the earlier montage.

'''Aboard [[Galactica|''Galactica'']]'''
*An IV drip, overlooking Laura Roslin resting in Sickbay.
*In the Hangar Bay, Lee Adama complains about the amount of materials the ship captains want from ''Galactica''. Lee signs a number of documents (and also sends some back for revision), when a deckhand argues over the fact that the magnetic accelerators are being stripped. While Lee points out that they can be used as autoloaders for the civilian ships, the deckhand says that "it's like tearing the old girl's heart out", as it's used in launching Vipers. Lee compromises that the accelerators will be last thing they remove from ''Galactica'', then they'll "turn out the lights, and let the old girl die in peace."

=== Act 2 ===
'''Aboard [[Galactica|''Galactica'']]'''
*As [[William Adama|Admiral Adama]] finishes packing the last of his belongings to be moved to the Cylon basestar, the hull rattles overhead.
*Paulla tells [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] that they now control a majority in at least half the ships in the fleet. While Paulla continues to cheer about their political power, Baltar is informed by [[Virtual Six]] that "humanity's final chapter is about to be written," with him as the author. Baltar turns back to Paulla, thinking back.
*In [[Sam Anders|Anders']] room, [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] sits with him, contemplating the notes she got from Hera ([[Someone to Watch Over Me]]). With equations and notes, Kara continues to ponder.
*In the CIC, Lt. [[Hoshi]] cleans up a spill, while Tigh announces that the Admiral will fly out the last Viper personally. He orders that the deck gang keep one launch tube intact and ready for remote activation. Tigh comments on Hoshi's inability to clean up the spill, saying "you won't make Admiral like that."
*In the brig, [[Karl Agathon|Helo]] and an imprisoned [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]] argue over the uniqueness of the Eights. Helo points out that Tyrol's relationship with Boomer, much like his with Athena's, are unique. Tyrol scoffs, calling himself a "frakkin' idiot" for not realizing that they're just machines, not people. The Eights are all the same "...because [[Final Five|''we'']] made them the same." Tyrol says that they can't be trusted, at which point, Helo ends the conversation abruptly.

'''In Caprica City'''
*As Baltar escorts a lovely young woman into his house, he walks in to find [[Caprica-Six]] there, sitting. Baltar shoos the young woman upstairs, while Baltar declares Caprica an intruder and orders her out. Caprica-Six mentions that she had Julius moved to the Regency, a full-time care facility. Caprica mentions that he loves his new arrangements, and that the last time she saw him, he seemed happy.

'''Inside [[The_Colony|the Colony]]'''
*Hera draws notes on a large paper, while [[Number One|Cavil]] points out that they're just "little dots." [[Number Four|Simon]] suggests that they feed Hera through tubes, while [[Sharon Valerii|Boomer]] insists that the girl just misses her mother. Cavil rejects this idea coldly, saying Hera is just a hybrid who holds the key to Cylon salvation, nothing more. Cavil leaves as Simon prepares a large needle with Hera and Boomer in view.

=== Act 3 ===
'''Aboard [[Galactica|''Galactica'']]'''
*[[William Adama|Admiral Adama]] helps [[Hotdog]] (with child in tow) with some pictures that fell while they crossed paths. Hotdog says that he grabbed photos of pilots from the [[Memorial hallway]] to ensure they weren't "left behind", but mentions there are a lot of photos still on the walls. Adama glances at the photos, stopping at one of [[Sharon Agathon|Athena]] kissing [[Hera Agathon|Hera]] on the head. Adama then walks quickly out of the area, pauses, then walks back and takes the photo off the wall.
*On the Hangar Deck, Baltar pleads Lee Adama to listen to a proposal asking for representation within the new government. Despite Baltar's claims that it will be for thousands of people, Lee is dubious of Baltar's motives as he outed Kara's secret. Baltar contends that Lee is letting his feelings for Kara cloud the possibility of genuine conversation. Lee allows him five minutes to state his case and walks away, with Baltar quickly following.
*Admiral Adama looks over Kara's notes regarding the musical notes inside Anders' room. Kara admits she's reaching, looking for patterns and inspirations by assigning numbers to the notes, but is still unsure. Adama asks Kara about Baltar's declaration, which she confirms, and explains how she discovered and burned her remains on Earth. Kara is unsure of what she is, but Adama is sure that he thinks of her as a "daughter", and tells her not to forget it. Adama wants to ask Anders a question, to which Kara plugs him in. Anders shows signs of movement from his hands as power can be heard. Once powered up, Anders begins to speak in riddles, particularly about Kara. Kara dismisses the statements, and gives Adama the OK to ask his question. Adama decides to have Kara ask the question instead, although the actual question is not heard as the act ends.

'''In Caprica City'''
*In a tub, Anders responds to a reporter's questions about his possibilities for a championship despite his team being in a rebuilding year. The reporter asks if his career would be incomplete without the championship, to which Anders starts by giving some general, seemingly canned responses. Then, in a candid moment, Anders tells the reporter that the championship, statistics, even the games don't really matter to him, but rather the pursuit of the "perfection" of the moment.

=== Act 4 ===
'''Aboard [[Galactica|''Galactica'']]'''
*Inside a Hangar storage area, Baltar tries some pleasantries, but Lee cuts him off and asks for the point. Baltar begins by saying that once ''Galactica'' is gone, that a new life will have begun, to which Baltar believes a different philosophy is needed in the days ahead. Baltar pledges his support to help this new era, but only asks for his people to have a say in government. Lee scoffs at the idea, saying that all he's known of Baltar's actions, is that they have served him in some way, and are all suspect as a result. Lee declines Baltar's request for representation for his group, on the grounds that he can't be trusted. Baltar relents, then leaves.
*As Lee walks out of the storage room and Baltar converses with his followers, Admiral Adama enters, followed by Kara. The Admiral and Kara stretch a line of tape on the floor of the deck. Adama begins to speak to the crew in the Hangar Deck regarding the disappearance of Hera, and that originally a rescue was not practical, but was wrong.
*Across the ship, the crew begins to talk about the rescue plan...
**Hotdog talks with the pilots about where the Admiral got the information. The Admiral didn't say where, but Hotdog speculates that Anders gave the information as Kara was by the Admiral's side.
**Ishay and Cottle discuss the fact that until now, they weren't sure of where Hera was located, but that has apparently changed. Roslin overhears this with a concerned look.
**Tory and Ellen walk through the halls, saying that even with the location, it's not the same as being able to get her. Tory expresses her dislike of the rescue idea, but Ellen argues that Hera's importance is outside their understanding, and that they are all going with them. Tory thinks that Ellen is deciding for the group, but Ellen points out that Tory never liked being alone.
**Tory and Ellen pass Lee Adama, relaying instructions over the phone. Lee mentions that the mission is strictly voluntary, and that any man or woman over the age of 15 may join up, including the ones detained due to the mutiny.
**In the CIC, Colonel Tigh declares that all personnel must make their own choice in person and that the Admiral is waiting on the Hangar Deck. Tigh also gives last minute instructions regarding the watch and watchkeepers, then orders the crew to move. Tigh asks Hoshi what he's going to do, which Hoshi isn't sure about. Tigh mentions that he has "four minutes" to figure it out.
**In their quarters, Helo and Athena discuss the rescue. Helo is very enthusiastic about the attempt, while Athena is convinced Hera's mostly likely dead. Helo still believes that Hera is alive, they will get her back, and everything will be all right. While Athena is still not convinced, Helo says she's wrong and leaves.

'''In [[Caprica City]]'''
*Lee Adama staggers into his apartment, laughing about a "dare" that took place at Zak and Kara's place. As Lee knocks over some glasses, he spots a pigeon inside his apartment. Lee angrily tries to shoo the pigeon out with a broom, but after breaking more things, gives up in frustration.

=== Act 5 ===
'''In [[Caprica City]]'''
*[[Laura Roslin]] is on the phone with someone while dining alone, dismissing the fact that she is a recluse in the 3 months since her father and sisters' death. She is also adamant against joining Mayor Adar's campaign, saying she doesn't like politics. She makes a deal with the person, however, that she will go on a date with a man, Shawn Ellison, if they drop the idea of Roslin joining Adar's campaign.

'''Aboard [[Galactica|''Galactica'']]'''
*In Sickbay, Laura Roslin puts on her wig, getting ready to leave.
*Admiral Adama gives a final impassioned speech to the assembled crew on the Hangar Deck, saying they should not be obligated to join the mission. Adama has made a personal choice to undertake the mission. Should not enough people join the mission to crew Galactica, a Raptor assault will be lead by him in its place. Adama makes it clear that this mission will mostly likely be one-way, so emotion or sentiment should not be considered. Pointing to the line on the deck, Admiral Adama asks for volunteers to move to the Starboard side and those choosing to remain with the fleet to move to Port.
*The crew begins shifting between sides. During the exchange, Adama asks Dr. Cottle to remain with the fleet, but thanks him for the thought. When all the movement has settled, those among the volunteers include Lee Adama, Starbuck, Hotdog, the Final Five (save Anders), Caprica-Six, and a visibly weakened Laura Roslin. Baltar and his followers do not volunteer for the mission.
*Adama and a few others look over pictures taken by the Raptor, explaining that Anders has given them an accurate location of [[The Colony|the Colony]], but that it sits in orbit of a "naked singularity" (black hole). The only gravitationally stable entry point sits less than one click from the facility, "point-blank range," and that the facility's defenses will naturally be trained on that point. Looking at the pictures, the Admiral declares that they should "get to work".
*"To be continued..."

'''Outside [[The Colony|the Colony]]'''
*Raptor 279, piloted by Racetrack and Skulls, jump to the coordinates given by Anders. They complete the jump, only to be nearly hit by an asteroid. The two joke about going on the mission as opposed to being detained, when Skulls picks up readings of a naked singularity. As the Raptor slides towards the black hole, a DRAIDS contact is picked up, to both their amazement.

== Notes ==

* This episode is the first part of a three hour series finale<ref>http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/06/battlestars-fin.html</ref>.
* The episode does not have an opening teaser beyond the "Previously..." segment and a brief depiction of Galactica deckhands and several Baseship Number Eight pilots guiding passengers to ships and other ''Galactica'' bound ships from the Baseship. Nor does the opening credits include clips from the episode, the first time this has happened since the start of Season 3.
*We finally learn [[Sherman Cottle|Cottle]]'s first name: Sherman. Admiral Adama uses the name when telling him he's too valuable for the fleet to lose.
* [[Laura Roslin]] had two sisters (one pregnant), and that they and her father were killed in an automobile accident at some point before she was appointed as Secretary of Education under the Adar Administration.
* Baltar's father appears for the first time. Baltar's accent is confirmed to be an affectation, as previously revealed in [[Dirty Hands]].
*A couple of years before the Fall it seems that Lee Adama liked to get drunk and carouse. This is in stark contrast post Fall to his sober and controlled demeanor who looked on with disdain over Kara's, Colonel Tigh's and even his own father's drinking problems.
* Baltar specifically told [[Caprica Six]] he forgot her name, albeit it is possible that he has yet to learn it, despite having a relationship with her.
* Cultural oddity: keep an eye on the rear window of Baltar's limo for a recognizable Vancouver, B.C. street sign.
* After several episodes leaving the facts open to speculation, it is confirmed that the ''Galactica'' pilots that took part in the mutiny, such as [[Racetrack]], were incarcerated and not executed. Ronald D. Moore had previously said that Racetrack, [[Skulls]] and other mutiny participants were confined on the prison ship ''[[Astral Queen]]'' in his podcast for [[Deadlock]]. Also confirmed [[Galen Tyrol]] was imprisoned for his role in unwittingly helping Boomer to escape with Hera (a scene indicating this was filmed for "[[Islanded in a Stream of Stars]]" but cut from the televised version).
* For the first time in many episodes, the six surviving members of the [[Significant Seven]] appear in the same episode (although [[Leoben]] appears only in the opening recap). This was the first time appearance of a [[Doral]] or a [[Simon]] since [[The Hub]].
* In the flashback to Starbuck's apartment, the painting of the Eye of Jupiter can be seen behind her when she opens the door.
*As [[Hybrid]] [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] recites his seemingly random phrases to a listening Admiral Adama and Captain Thrace he says "Slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of perfection" This is a variation of a quote by [[Wikipedia:John Gillespie Magee, Jr|John Gillespie Magee, Jr.]] in his 1941 poem [[Wikipedia: High Flight|High Flight]]: "Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings..." [http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/highflig.htm] The poem goes on and concludes with "Put out my hand and touched the face of God." This was quoted by Ronald Reagan much closer to Ander's rendition on January 28, 1986 when addressing the nation after the Challenger disaster "We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."
*At the end of the episode, Lee Adama wears his old Major's [[Uniforms (RDM)#Regular uniform|uniform]] (with white piping), but without his [[Military Ranks (RDM)#Insignia|rank insignia]] or [[Insignia (RDM)#Pilot wings|pilot wings]].
* The known volunteers for the mission include Laura Roslin, Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, Athena, Helo, Caprica Six, the Final Five, Hoshi, Nurse Ishay, Hot Dog, Racetrack, and Skulls. Doc Cottle initially volunteers for the mission, but stays behind at Adama's request. Although Gaius Baltar does not volunteer, he seems to be highly conflicted with himself.

== Analysis ==
*Cavil plans to use Hera to find out how she was created in order to continue the Cylon species, presumably through normal reproduction.
**It also proves Cavil intends to dissect Hera to discover the secret of procreation, confirming both Starbuck's and Athena's worst fears.
*Roslin likely feels quite protective of Hera as despite being barely able to walk, she volunteers for the rescue mission (although her love for Adama likely also played a part in her decision).
*Cottle may be either the best doctor in the fleet or one of the only ones as Adama says he's too valuable for the fleet to lose on the rescue mission.
*Baltar seems conflicted when volunteers are called. This inner conflict stems from his earlier conversation with Lee Adama where he confessed that he had never done anything for purely selfless motivations with no gain for himself. He does not, however, cross the line and join the volunteers.
** If Baltar does join, then it would seem likely that all the elements are in place to fulfill the Opera House vision: Athena, Roslin, Caprica Six and Baltar will all be in pursuit of Hera.
** Baltar's Virtual Six has told him many times that he is supposed to be Hera's guardian and "father". It seems incongruous with his destiny for him not to join a mission to rescue Hera.
*It's clear that despite his controversial choices, Adama still commands a great deal of loyalty and respect from the crew. Much of the crew - or at least those that are on the hangar deck at the time - volunteers for the mission. At the very least, Adama has enough people with him to take ''Galactica'' into battle.
** It should be noted that although the non-volunteers appear to outnumber the volunteers at least two-to-one, many of the non-volunteers are civilians.
** It should also be noted that almost all the Marines volunteer for the mission.
** Also, it is likely Adama will have more volunteers than are visible on screen in the hangar deck scene. Certainly not all the crew of ''Galactica'' were on the hangar deck at the time given the size of the combined crew at this point. Doubtless some had to stay on duty (Colonel Tigh confirms this when he says in CIC that those on duty must report to Adama later to declare themselves) or were on the Cylon basestar or civilian ships helping offload Galactica's stripped parts. It was also probably impractical for the producers to muster some 3000 plus extras for this scene to show Galactica's full crew.
** Given that Adama had trouble manning ''Galactica'' during the occupation of [[New Caprica]], when the ship was stated as being at half strength, it is fair to assume the Admiral is going to need roughly half the original crew compliment to carry out this last combat mission - roughly 1300 people. As stated above, this many volunteers are not seen on screen, but given some crew could volunteer later, Adama might well muster about this number in the end.
*In the brig Tyrol tells Helo-who is surprisingly civil even sympathetic toward Tyrol given his hand in the abduction-that they are all the same referring to the Eights. He says it as a word of advice and warning. That they made them the same and therefore can only expect betrayal from Athena as what happened to Tyrol at the hands of Boomer. However, given the fact that he has no first hand knowledge of making the Eights and the other seven Cylon models and the psychic pain Galen suffered at the betrayal, his opinion most likely comes from deep, deep, abiding pain and not a intellectual analysis in his disregard of the individuality of Athena and the other Eights and particularly Athena's track record of loyalty. This also maybe a case of misery loves company and Tyrol, subconsciously or knowingly, wants to see Helo and Athena split up to allay his own feelings of being duped, by saying they are all a like and putting doubt in Helo's mind. Also, by claiming that Athena and the other Eights are just machines this could mitigate the guilt for his role in the abduction and possible death of Hera. If Athena is just a machine, then she cannot be hurt emotionally. She has no emotions, just a programmed facsimile. Tyrol wouldn't have to feel responsible for such pain he caused her since, as a machine, she can't really feel it, sparing '''''himself''''' a lot of pain and guilt.
*Tyrol is himself a Cylon machine, so his rant speaks of denial and projected self-hatred as well as bitterness.
*The finale appears to be taking a character-driven approach, devoting significant screen time to pivotal flashbacks for the central characters that relate to their current circumstances.
**We see the first time Starbuck and Apollo' met, with hints alluding to their future romantic relationship.
**Roslin deals with the sudden death of her sisters and father by wading into a fountain, which she uses to disguise the tears that she shed for the lost of her family. The gushing water cuts to a shot of her IV drip as she lies dying on Galactica.
**Baltar and Caprica-Six begin their relationship with an act of compassion on Six's part towards Baltar's father. Baltar's selfishness, a theme raised repeatedly in the episode, is contrasted with Caprica Six's seemingly genuine concern for [[Julius Baltar|Julius]].
*One of the shots in the opening sequence is of a sun rising over a blue planet: daybreak. The theme may symbolize an end to the fleet's long four years of gloom and darkness.
**In that image of the planet, Antarctica is clearly seen, specifically the Ronne Ice Shelf, Queen Maud Land, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Where southern South America and southern Africa would be, the surface is covered by clouds, and the location of southern Australia/New Zealand is too dark. Although not as recognizable as the image of North America in [[Crossroads, Part II]], it is clear that the planet shown here is our Earth.
***Despite the similarities, the sun and the stars are in the wrong position for this to be our Earth. More than likely, the planet being depicted is Caprica. Especially when the sequence is taken as a whole: The Galaxy, Sun rise over a planet, In orbit over the planet, then a helicopter like fly over of Caprica City heavily implies that was Caprica as the planet we saw.
*Hera is drawing "dots", as Cavil calls them, on the Colony. These are much more numerous than the simple line that she gave Starbuck, its at least a full page long. It seems to be an entire musical score. However, not knowing that they are music notes, Cavil doesn't see this.
*Someone left a picture of Athena about to kiss Hera on the head on the now abandoned memorial wall. It may have been Athena herself, who has given up on Hera's survival.
* Baltar's reaction to Lee's accusation that he has never done a selfless thing in his life shows how much the character of Baltar has grown, especially in the Fourth Season. Previously, whenever someone called Baltar's motives or attributes (especially his loyalty) into question, he reacted very passionately, and angrily, to defend himself (and often led to him being coaxed into doing what Virtual Six wanted, to the detriment of the humans in the fleet). On this occasion, however, Baltar not only does not even attempt to defend himself, he resignedly admits that he wouldn't trust him either (tacitly admitting both that Lee is correct in his assertion and that his self-serving actions have been extremely detrimental in the past). This change in attitude visibly surprises Lee who seems quite taken aback and appears to momentarily contemplate talking to Baltar again when he returns to the Hanger Deck.
* Adama's decision to rescue Hera was prompted by Constanza's remarks about saving the photos of his fallen comrades because he didn't want to leave them behind. It should not then be surprising to see that Constanza was one of the first pilots (not counting Lee Adama) to cross the line and join in the potential suicide mission with Adama.
* Anders' flashback of his life before the War contains an interesting aspect of Anders not seen before. Though he was implanted with memories of being a "jock", but when he candidly spoke to the sports reporter, he revealed a more intellectual and artistic side of himself. This may be a hint of his former personality (a scientist and musician) before Cavil blocked his memories.
* It is ironic that Anders' flashback finds him in a tub.
* In a humorous side commentary, Skulls points out that many of the dangerous or lethal Raptor missions are usually given to him and Racetrack. Historically, this has been true as the duo have been pivotal for discoveries such as New Caprica, receiving the first message from the Resistance, discovering that the Cylons were tracking the fleet to the Nebula, propulsion problems (exploding engine) due to contaminated jet fuel.
* Skull's comment of "The more things change the more they stay the same." is a different twist of quoting the Pythian Prophecy that "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." The phrase is a common proverb in English, indicating that surface changes only serve to reveal enduring underlying constants. It is derived from a French epigram by novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

== Questions ==
{{cleanup}}
=== Flashbacks ===
* To what is Adama's flashback conversation referring? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])
** Is the conversation related to what Tigh told Novacek of what happened to Adama after the failed recon mission in [[Hero]]?
* Who was the drunk driver that killed Roslin's sisters and father? Is he alive in the fleet today?
* Who is Sean Allison and why does his name sound familiar to Roslin? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])
* What is the time frame for the flashbacks, and is it the same for all characters?

===Mission to save Hera===
* How is [[Sam Anders]] able to provide the new location of [[the Colony]]? What transpired between him, Starbuck, and Adama?
* How many of the jailed mutineers volunteer to participate in the mission?
* As the episode began, ''Galactica'' was already being cannibalized for parts; does this mean it will be lacking vital components during the upcoming mission, or has Adama stopped the salvaging?
* Will Boomer help Hera escape? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])

===Cavil's Plan===
* Has Cavil given up on the idea of salvaging Resurrection Technology? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])

===Miscellaneous===
*With [[William Adama|Commander Adama]], [[Saul Tigh|XO Tigh]], [[Laura Roslin|President Roslin]] and [[Lee Adama|Vice-President Lee Adama]] all joining the Hera rescue mission, who will assume military and political leadership of the Fleet? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])
* With [[Hotdog]] being one of the volunteers, and especially being aware that he may not return alive, who will take care of Nicholas?
*With Tyrol on the rebound from Sharon Valerii, will Tory Foster and Tyrol renew their romance despite not having their original memories? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])
* At the very beginning of the episode, an image of the galaxy is displayed which includes several prominent stars in bright colors... is there a connection to Hera's multicolored "dots"? Do her notes represent stars, and will the sequence provide a map that leads to somewhere?
* Will the Cylon baseship remain with the civilian fleet or will they also join in on the rescue mission to save Hera? ([[Daybreak, Part II|Answer]])

== Official Statements ==
*''In his podcast for [[Islanded in a Stream of Stars]], Ronald D. Moore stated that there will be no independent podcast for Daybreak Part I. Instead a single podcast would be made for all three hours including the two hour series finale [[Daybreak Part II]] and posted at the scifi.com site.'' [http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast.php] (00':30")

== Noteworthy Dialogue ==
:"No one should feel obligated to join this mission in any way. This is a decision I have made for myself. If it turns out that there are not enough personnel to crew [[Galactica|''Galactica'']], I will lead a [[Raptor]] assault with anyone who is willing to join me. Let there be no illusions; this is likely to be a one-way trip! So don't volunteer out of sentiment or emotion. There is a line running down this deck. Volunteers, move to the starboard side; Everyone else, to the port. Make your choice!"
::--[[William_Adama|Admiral Adama's]] speech to the assembled crew.

:"You didn't think you were gonna to take off without me Admiral, did you?"
::--[[Laura Roslin]] volunteering for the rescue mission despite barely being able to walk.

:"Spins and turns, angles and curves. The shape of dreams, half remembered. Slip the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of perfection - a perfect face, perfect lace. Find the perfect world for the end of Kara Thrace. End of line."
::--[[Samuel Anders|Anders]]'s hybrid-speak when powered on to speak with [[Kara Thrace]] and [[William_Adama|Admiral Adama]].

:"She’s right, Gaius. The end times are approaching. Humanity’s final chapters are about to be written. And you - you will be its author."
::--[[Virtual Six]] to [[Gaius Baltar]].

== Guest Stars ==
* [[Rekha Sharma]] as [[Tory Foster]]
* [[Kate Vernon]] as [[Ellen Tigh]]
* [[Dean Stockwell]] as [[Number One]]
* [[Rick Worthy]] as [[Number Four]]
* [[Matthew Bennett]] as [[Number Five]]
* [[Donnelly Rhodes]] as Dr. [[Sherman Cottle]]
* [[Bodie Olmos]] as Lieutenant [[Brendan Costanza|Brenden "Hotdog" Costanza]]
* [[Kerry Norton]] as [[Layne Ishay]]
* [[Lara Gilchrist]] as [[Paulla Schaffer]]
* [[Leela Savasta]] as [[Tracy Anne]]
* [[Tobias Mehler]] as [[Zak Adama]]
* [[Leah Cairns]] as Lieutenant [[Margaret Edmondson|Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson]]
* [[Brad Dryborough]] as Lieutenant [[Louis Hoshi]]
* [[Colin Lawrence]] as Lieutenant [[Hamish McCall|Hamish "Skulls" McCall]]
* [[Colin Corrigan]] as Marine [[Allan Nowart]]
* [[Darcy Laurie]] as [[Dealino]]
* [[Finn R. Devitt]] as [[Nicholas Tyrol]]
* [[Iliana Gomez-Martinez]] as [[Hera Agathon]]
* [[Antony Holland]] as [[Julius Baltar]]
* [[Simone Bailly]] as [[Shona]]
* [[Elan Ross Gibson]] as Nurse [[Barbara]]
* [[France Perras]] as [[Sandra]]
* [[Sarah Deakins]] as [[Cheryl]]
* [[Tiffany Burns]] as Reporter [[Carolyn]]
* [[Kevin McNulty]] as [[Frank Porthos]]
* [[Stefanie Samuels]] as Police Officer
* [[Richard Jollymore]] as Marine #1
* [[Anthony St. John]] as Marine #2
* [[Leo Li Chiang]] as the [[tattooed pilot]] (uncredited)

== References ==
<div style="font-size:85%"><references/></div>

{{Episode list (RDM season 4)}}

[[Category:Episodes written by Ronald D. Moore]]
[[Category:Episodes directed by Michael Rymer]]

Number One

2008-04-15T03:24:36Z

TypoFixer: rile->role

{{Character Data
|photo=Pensieve One.jpg
|age=
|colony=
|birthname=
|callsign=
|seen= Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I
|death=
|parents=
|siblings=
|children=
|marital status=
|role= Cylon infiltrator, lay clergy
|rank=
|actor= [[Dean Stockwell]]
|cylon= y
|name= Cavil ?
}}
"'''Number One'''" is a [[humanoid Cylon]] who, prior to being discovered, posed as '''[[Religion in the Twelve Colonies#The Clergy|Brother Cavil]]''', a member of the Colonial clergy. However, contrary to his assumed role, he doesn't share the other Cylons' [[Cylon Religion|religious beliefs]] and frequently mocks them.

==''Galactica'' Copy==

On ''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]]'', the first viewed copy of Brother Cavil provides counsel for [[Galen Tyrol|Chief Tyrol]] after Tyrol's maddened attack against [[Cally Tyrol|Cally Henderson]]. Cavil identifies the source of Tyrol's anxiety as arising from the fear that he could be a [[Humanoid Cylon|Cylon sleeper agent]]. This Cavil seems to be personally very familiar with Tyrol and is apparently aware that Henderson harbors romantic feelings for him ([[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I]]). (Later analysis of Cavil's nature, from behavior in season 3 episodes, suggests that Cavil's comments were aimed to incite torment in Tyrol.)

A somewhat eccentric figure, Cavil is a surprisingly harsh critic of prayer for a Brother, but claims to have been preaching "longer than you [Tyrol] have been sucking down oxygen" ([[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I]]). This interesting claim, if true, implies that the [[humanoid Cylon]]s came into existence no later than approximately ten years after the end of the [[First Cylon War]] (assuming that Tyrol is approximately 30 years old). Cavil's remark, based on aired information and his true nature, is unlikely.

Despite his cynicism, Cavil prays with [[Laura Roslin]] for her re-election to the presidency to be successful. When Tyrol deduces the Caprica copy of him as a Cylon, Cavil is thrown in the brig along with his copy. He is later ejected through an airlock along with his copy (deleted scene). Due to the loss of the [[Resurrection Ship]], his death is presumed to be final ([[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II]]).

==Caprica Copy==
[[Image:Cyca2.jpg|left|thumb|Caprican Cavil]]
A second copy of this model emerges from the crew of resistance members rescued by the Caprica [[SAR]] team, telling them that the Cylons had left the Colonies. What he does not tell them — until Tyrol blew his cover upon his arrival at ''Galactica'' — is that he is a Cylon.

Due to this copy's discovery, the Fleet copy is arrested as well and thrown in ''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]]'''s brig. Laura Roslin orders them ejected into space after Caprica-Cavil informs her and Admiral Adama that the Cylons had made two mistakes: the attack on the Colonies and the pursuit of the [[the Fleet (RDM)|Fleet]] ([[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II]]). Due to the loss of the Resurrection Ship, his death is presumed to be final. Though their execution is not shown, a later conversation indicates that they were executed ([[List of Deleted Scenes (RDM)#Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II|deleted scene]]).

Like his Fleet counterpart, the Caprica copy also expresses doubt in the active involvement of divine forces in the real world, although he focuses his contempt on the Cylon religion. He says that "There is no [[God (RDM)|God]]", something that the Ones have been telling the other Cylons for years, though he acknowledges that God's existence or nonexistence can't actually be proven. Based on his conversation with the Fleet copy, this viewpoint appears to be shared between at least these two copies, and possibly across the entire model.

==New Caprica Copies==
[[Image:Brother Cavil Shades.jpg|thumb|right|A Cavil on New Caprica]]

At least two Ones are present in the invasion fleet on New Caprica, as seen in "[[Occupation]]" and "[[Precipice]]." They have some authority over humans in detainment, as [[Ellen Tigh]] is able to use sexual favors to bribe another into releasing [[Saul Tigh]]. This may have been a self-serving ruse, because after a second sexual encounter, One says to her of Saul, "When's his next meeting with the insurgents?" and "We know he's their leader - why do you think we let him out of detention?" Ellen replies, "I thought it was because of the 'twist'", referring to a sex act, and One says, "Oh, yes, that too."

Two copies are also involved in the Cylon leaders' discussions such as whether to kill [[Gaius Baltar]].

Another copy also acts as a type of liaison between the [[New Caprica Police|NCP]] and their Cylon masters. He gives [[Jammer]] the list of Colonials to detain, and later accompanies the NCP to the site of a mass execution of Colonial Detainees ([[Occupation]]).

The NCP liaison version is critically wounded during an attack by the Resistance movement. One is left with a bullet wound to the stomach and is left to die after the detainees are liberated. He resorts to suicide by severing his [[w:carotid artery|carotid artery]] with a spent casing. He [[Resurrection (RDM)|downloads]] into a new body for the third time; an experience that, as he explains, is similar to having a white hot poker slammed through his skull ([[Exodus, Part I]]).

Shortly before her death, [[Ellen Tigh]] descibes the One she seduced as the one "in charge" of the Detention Facility ([[Exodus, Part II]]).

==Basestar Command Copies==
[[Image:CavHap2.jpg|thumb||left|Cylon Diplomat]]
After the Cylon fleet arrives at the [[algae planet]], a Cylon negotiation team negotiates a meeting on ''Galactica'', which consists of [[Gaius Baltar]], [[Sharon Valerii|Boomer]], a [[Number Three]], and a Number One. The One ad-libs during the discussion, personally suggesting that the Cylons will hand over Baltar to the Colonials as part of the negotiation ("to sweeten the pot").

Later, a One (likely the same one) argues that they should destroy ''Galactica'' now and be rid of them for good. He thinks it does not matter if the Cylons find [[Earth (RDM)|Earth]] in five days or five thousand years, saying that they can last forever, whereas the Colonials can't. He then determines Admiral Adama's claim that he will nuke the temple is a bluff even as ''Galactica'' preps its missile launchers ([[The Eye of Jupiter]]).

Another copy greets Number Three when she resurrects on a Resurrection Ship and informs her of the decision to box her model. She replies that someday he will know the truth of the [[Final Five]] like she does just before he removes the device storing her consciousness. Other Cavils are shown boxing other Number Threes all over the room in the Resurrection Ship ([[Rapture]]).

In "[[Six of One]]" a Number One model, despite the egalitarian and democratic principles of Cylon command, exudes an definite sense of assumed authority. As of such, he appears to be the ''de facto'' leader of one side of the schism between the Cylons, composed of Ones, [[Four]]s, [[Five]]s, and [[Sharon Valerii]], opposed to the [[Number Two|Twos]], [[Number Six|Sixes]] and [[Number Eight|Eights]] loyal to [[Natalie]].
<div style="clear: both;"></div>

==Analysis==
Number Ones appear to be very radical thinkers, and demonstrate a unity among the model not seen in any other. Copies appear to have a well-developed sense of sardonic humor and are given to making jokes in even the most awkward, dangerous, and heightened circumstances ("[[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II]]", "[[Occupation]]", "[[Precipice]]"). They seem to have discovered many revelations that [[Caprica-Six]] realized through her "virtual" Baltar ([[Downloaded]]). Judging by this, the Ones were probably among the first to flock to Caprica-Six's banner.

In "[[Occupation]]" and "[[Precipice]]", the Ones are the most ''outwardly'' [[w:sadism|sadistic]] and cruel to humans, appearing to take pleasure (or at least a noticeable level of amusement) in their own acts of psychological and physical cruelty. The Ones like toying with the idea of liquidating the human population on New Caprica as a solution to the Resistance, to "perhaps a more manageable number. Say, less than a thousand."

Viewers can infer (correctly or not) from the New Caprica detention scene between a One and [[Saul Tigh]] that a One is significantly involved in the brutal, months-long interrogation (in response to Tigh's attacks against the Cylons). In conversation with the other Cylons, Ones are vocal and callous proponents of harsh measures against the [[New Caprica Resistance]] and are strong advocates of mass executions.

It is ironic that the first two known copies of this apparently [[w:Atheism|atheistic]] or [[w:Agnosticism|agnostic]] model pose as lay clergy. This may be an intentional mockery of religion on their part, or a mockery of the Ones by whomever assigned them their roles as infiltrators.

With the Cylons apparently occupying [[New Caprica]] at the end of the [[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II|episode]], it appears that the Ones on ''Galactica'' are either lying about the Cylon change of heart or the Cylon plans changed after the second Number One was captured on ''Galactica''.

In "[[Exodus, Part I]]", it is learned that at a Number One unit, the leader of the execution squad intercepted by the Resistance and who died there (his third death), experienced increasing head pain with each resurrection.

==Notes==

*Despite waging constant attacks against the Cylons for nine months, the [[Caprica Resistance]] seemingly had never before encountered the Number One model prior to their rescue.
*The word ''cavil'' is a noun and verb involving an irrelevant or trivial point made during an argument or discussion; synonyms include ''quibble'' and ''carp.'' (<span class="plainlinks">[http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cavil Dictionary Reference]</span>)
*Cavil's numerical designation isn't revealed until the episode "[[Six of One]]" in Season 4.

{{Characters}}

[[Category:A to Z]]
[[Category:Characters]]
[[Category:Characters (RDM)]]
[[Category:Recurring Guest Characters (RDM)]]
[[Category:Cylons]]
[[Category:Cylons (RDM)]]
[[Category:RDM]]

{{quality candidate}}

[[de:Cavil]]
[[fr:Cavil]]

Podcast:The Captain's Hand

2007-01-25T15:32:49Z

TypoFixer: Just typos

{{podcast|author=Steelviper|emailAuthor2=|suffix=|additionalCopyright=and Terry Dresbach}}

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_1of5.mp3 Teaser]==

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 17 of season 2. I'm [[Ronald D. Moore]], executive producer and developer of the new [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|''Battlestar Galactica'']], and this is for "[[The Captain's Hand|Captain's Hand]]," the podcast that was delayed from last week, so I'll be giving it to you this week. In fact I'll be doing two of them back to back tonight. I'll do "Captain's Hand" and then we'll go right into "[[Downloaded]]", on a [[Podcast:Downloaded|separate track]], of course. (Ron lights a cigarette)

Before we get going we should probably mention, right off the top, that let's have a little less of the whining, out there on the [http://mboard.scifi.com/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=BattlestarGalactica&page=0 bulletin boards], shall we, about the noises in the background here at the pod― at the podcast around the old Moore manse. You know folks, you just gotta be tough enough to listen to the podcast. These are imperfect conditions. We do this at my home, not in a nice, tidy, little studio. We do ever our best effort to keep it quite for y'all, but c'mon, enough with the whining, with the pewing― with the [[All the World's a Stage|mewling and puking]] out there. '''Be tough enough for the podcast.''' We drink, we smoke, we curse, we have a good time. Get with it― get with the program.

Ok. So here we are. [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. Teaser. There go the [[Raptor]]s off on a training mission. In early drafts of "Captain's Hand" this particular crisis happened much later in the show. It was one of the problems that we struggled with in the early drafts of the story was, what was the nature of the crisis, and when should it begin.

The whole notion of this episode revolved around the coninu― acknowledging and dealing with the continuing command problems aboard ''Pegasus'', which felt like a natural outgrowth of the idea that the ship, the [[Mercury class battlestar|Battlestar]] ''Pegasus'', that showed up was a― a deeply flawed, almost piratical ship, under the command of [[Helena Cain|Admiral Cain]]. Well, if Admiral Cain had run that ship the way that we saw her run that ship, one would assume that there would be a variety of problems that would definitely outlive her. And so we wanted to continue to play that as the season went on, and the first CO after Cain was obviously [[Jack Fisk|Commander Fisk]], who promptly got into the black mark― [[Black market (organization)|black market]] and got himself killed for the trouble. And then we moved on to [[Barry Garner|Commander Garner]], who in early drafts was always named Trammel. But legal, as legal often does, came back to us with some― some whining about the name Trammel, about it being too close to [http://www.soonerspectator.com/meetWriter.php?id=btramel somebody else's real name], and of course, we had to change it over to Garner at the last second. So there are many references that we all kept catching ourselves calling him Trammel. In fact, we named him Trammel in an earlier episode, in an offhand way. A line from [[William Adama|Adama]]. We had to go back and reloop that in [[Wikipedia:Automated Dialogue Replacement|ADR]] at the last second.

I like this notion of― the beat that open this little section here with [[Lee Adama|Lee]] and [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]], that the pilots and the crew had private signals among themselves to "Stay clear of the quarters when I got a girl, or a man, or both inside." And that they had a private signal. You couldn't quite see it 'cause we had to cut the― clip off the head of that shot but when [[Tucker Clellan|Duck]] and the other pilot came up there was a pair of boots were hanging from the hatch, and they knew, as soon as they saw the pair of boots that that meant that somebody was in there and getting a little something. And that was what prompted them to bang on the door, and the gag was, "Oh. It's the [[Commander Air Group|CAG]]." And they kinda looked at each other and went away.

This sequence― this little scene here with Dualla and Lee, we played around with in editing quite a bit. There were some lines that were dropped that indicated that a longer passage of time between end of the last episode and this one, to give Dualla a little time to mourn, to give Lee a little time to recover, and move everything along the [[Timeline (RDM)|timeline]].

This storyline, the "B story" here, of [[Rya Kibby]] and her unwanted pregnancy, and then the abortion decision that [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] eventually comes to was actually a storyline that we had developed very early. We had started talking about this idea early in the first season as a― as a potentially interesting storyline for us 'cause it dealt with a practical issue of, "What are their policies, in [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], going to be in terms of birth control, in terms of abortion?" The population of the species was going to be― hang in the balance, and what would these people really do in these circumstances? And it was definitely an issue we wanted to deal with, and wanted to play, and wanted to see how the characters would react in this circumstance. I thought there was something interesting about Laura Roslin, whose politics on the surface seem probably moderate-to-liberal, Secretary of Education, and one of the ongoing threads of the entire series was watching as Laura is slowly changed by the responsibilities of being [[Government#Executive Branch|President]]. And this storyline was one of those key ideas that, like I said, we talked about early in the first season. And I was fascinated with the idea of this soft-ish appearing woman who's probably, presumably, has all the politically correct positions on these sorts of matters being forced to grapple with the real responsibilities of her― of her role. And I was always interested by playing against the expectations that, I've said this many times though, Laura would be the "dove", and Adama would be the "hawk", and that would always provide very predictable expected conflict between the two. And I always thought it was interesting to subvert that at every― at every turn and always put the characters in situations where they would have to grapple with them as human beings rather than as― as― as just as [[Wikipedia:Stalking horse|stalking horses]] for expected political positions.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Commander Garner arrives at ''Pegasus'' CIC.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Here comes [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001334/ John Heard], who I think is a great actor, in many, many things. I knew him, as soon as his name came up, I was "Oh, yeah! From '[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094737/ Big]'!" Which I think was a tremendous movie and a wonderful, wonderful, film and John had the quasi-villainous role in that episode― in that movie. And more recently I had known him from his work on "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141842/ Sopranos]" as the corrupt police lieutenant. I think John's a great actor and we were really, really happy to have him on the show. He fit in really well. He provided a different color, different flavor to the part and so― it's always nice to get "name" guest cast to come in and juice up the production a little bit here and there.

"Captain's Hand" is also a mix between a standalone episode and a more traditional continuing episode of ours. I think it successfully straddles the line in terms of continuing the ongoing storylines of Lee, and Dualla, and [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]], and Laura, and [[Kara Thrace|Kara]], and at the same time dealing with issues that are self-contained within one episode.

Oh, here comes the beep! Oh no! Cover your ears.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_2of5.mp3 Act 1]==

Ooh. That scary beep. Beep.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo arrives on the ''Pegasus'', joining Starbuck who is already aboard, and the two head to CIC.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Initially, in the early drafts of this in the story and in the first draft of the script [[Lee Adama|Lee]] came over by himself. It was more of a self-contained "Lee" show that really didn't involve [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] until a little bit later in the drama when she was pulled over to [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. The idea wa― ,in the initial drafts, was that Lee came aboard, and that the problem on board ''Pegasus'' was not― was not that discipline was too tough, it was that it was quite the opposite. It was that it was too lax. The idea was that Trammel was just a nice guy. Trammel was just everything that Lee thought his father should be. The idea was Lee comes on board this ship and Trammel's this perfectly nice guy who wants to be liked by his crew and wants to get along with everybody and just commanded with a very soft glove. And Lee found himself fulfilling the hard-ass role. He came over and yelled at guys and saw that fights were breaking out on the hangar day, nobody― hangar bay, nobody gave a shit about it. People talked back. People didn't carry out orders. There was a certain sense of "School's out on Peggy" since [[Helena Cain|Cain]] and [[Jack Fisk|Fisk]] had both been killed, and then they get this― this new commander in who hasn't had any experience commanding a ship and he just, more than anything else, wanted to be liked by the crew, because the crew had hated the previous two commanders. And then that was supposed to bring along its own problems. That grew less satisfying. As we played it out it was an odd fit because it never quite felt right that Lee was such a complete hard-ass with these guys and it cut against the grain, just, we were having trouble making that story work. So we kept working on, "What is the nature of [[Barry Garner|Garner]]'s problem? Is he too lax? Is he too friendly? Is he too much of a hard-ass? Is he crazy?" The version that we shot, the f― the draft, the filming draft is slightly different than the edited version, too. These early scenes were colored by the fact that― that [[CIC]] scene that we left a moment ago where Lee first came into Garner and found out that the [[Raptor]]s were missing, we played it where Garner immediately was on [[Hoshi]]'s ass about something. Hoshi was on the phone with somebody at [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']] and was not informing Garner in the way that Garner wanted to be informed. And he was riding his ass and sent him to his quarters and had him arrested and there was a sense of fear everywhere. That Garner was this crazed, despot. And we were taking direction from "Caine Mutiny", was sort of an archetype for the character at that point, and the idea that we were going to play, and you can still see parts of it are still here, was that Lee appreciated Garner. That Lee liked Garner. Respected him. Thought he was trying to make the best of a bad situation. He was― he was the third guy who had to command this ship, and he was trying to bring discipline back to a vessel that had had questionable discipline. It was a somewhat Kurtz-like regime under Cain and it then it was a more overtly piratical regime under Fisk and then Garner was trying to just straighten it all out. And the idea we were going to play was Lee was slow to see that― that Garner was deeply flawed as well. And that was an archetype that was borne out of "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046816/ Caine Mutiny]" which follows a very similar structure in that― that the [[Wikipedia:Captain Queeg|Queeg]]-

(''phone rings'') Now see there? Look! Oh my god! Run for the hills, my phone is ringing. The idea― (''phone rings'') I could unplug it. I could actually walk ov― hey! I'm going to walk right over there right now (''phone rings'') and I'm going to unplug it for― for all of you 'cause I don't want any of your precious little feelings to be hurt. (''phone rings'') Here I go. (''Ron's voice gets fainter as he walks away'') I'm walking over. I'm unplugging. I'm unplugging as we speak. And, it's now unplugged. You happy? Everybody happy now?

What we opted to do instead was― instead of going down the "Caine Mutiny" route so strongly was to dial-back Garner's early scenes. The Queeg character in "Caine Mutiny" was somebody that the Ensign Keith character, who's central to the book and the movie, comes aboard and likes Queeg at first 'cause Queeg seems like he's just trying to straighten out a very difficult ship and Keith, Ensign Keith, doesn't realize until fairly late in the drama that Queeg is crazy... that Queeg is paranoid and damaged and had been scarred by his― his experiences in the war. And we tried a similar archetype in this episode, but when it was all cut together the problem was that you saw the problem with Quee― with our Queeg, with Garner, just immediately. As soon as he started bitch-slapping Yoshi― Hoshi in that first scene, and you saw that he was a little bit nuts, you knew exactly everything that was gonna to happen in the show. You knew he'd be relieved. You just saw it. It's like, "Oh. It's so clearly the "Caine Mutiny," that it didn't work. So we cut back on all of the initial craziness, and now it's not quite as clear what's going up― going on with Garner.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Zarek suggests to Baltar that he should run for president.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This scene that's on camera right now, with Gar― with [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] and [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] was originally much later in this script. As shot, this scene didn't happen until [[Podcast:The Captain's Hand#Act 4|act four]], actually, I believe, or [[Podcast:The Captain's Hand#Act 3|act three]] possibly. And it happened only after [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] had made her religious proclaimatio― er, not her religious, her political proclamation to ban abortion, and that prompted Zarek to go to Baltar. And when I was watching it cut, it seemed like it happened way too late, and I thought it would be much more interesting if early in the show we got Baltar thinking about the presidency. I think it's much more effective, 'cause now, when Laura goes to ask him later about the demographics of [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] and is wrestling with the decision, the idea that Baltar might possibly run for the presidency is already in the character's mind and it's already in― in the audience's mind.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo arrives in the pilot ready room and berates Starbuck in front of the other pilots.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

The idea here of the Kara/Lee struggle/conflict, since she shot him, by accident, but she shot him in the last episode, felt like definitely something we wanted to follow up on, as part of the growing chasm between these two characters. You saw in "[[Scar]]" that they came close to actually sleeping together, in a moment, and that Kara reached out to him in desperation to try to forget about [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] and then― and then it all fell apart. And... there was something interesting about continuing to play these two becoming more and more estranged, especially since your expectation is that these two are going to end up together or there's some kind of romantic tension going on. Finding― I found it was much more interesting the further apart these two got. The more that their― their relationship became dysfunctional. (Ron lights a cigarette)

I love this [[Cottle]]/[[William Adama|Adama]] scene in sickbay. Cottle is, I've said this before, has developed into one of my favorite characters in the show. And I like this little scene, 'cause it says so much about the relationship between Adama and Cottle. This notion that Cottle was performing abortions throughout the Fleet, very quietly and with no questions asked, I thought was interesting. It again provided this backstage look at what was happening off-camera during all these episodes. That there was a life to the fleet. There were, like, people's lives were continuing on. Things were happening. And just because we didn't show them to you up in CIC didn't mean that things weren't happening below decks. Adama's― this little beat. This look on Adama's face. "She could apply for asawman― apply for asylum." And Adama just looks at Cottle. And then this look on Cottle face. "Up oh. I'll just walk over here. Excuse me," is just great. And then [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]]... Eddie just looks at [[Rya Kibby|her]], and he's hoping she's not gonna pick up on it, hoping she's not gonna say anything, she's... she said it. She said the magic words. Oh, great. No my day just got much, much longer.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_3of5.mp3 Act 2]==

Act― act of the second. I like all this political stuff. I― I think it's interesting to see the factionalization and almost tribalization within [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]]. That there are different cultures represented within the rag-tag fleet. That they have different points of view. And this idea, that P― [[Sarah Porter]] and [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)#Gemenon|the Gemonese]] were gonna come a-callin' because of their support to [[Laura Roslin|Laura]], when she needed it, when Laura rose up against [[William Adama|Adama]] way back when and declared herself a prophet earlier in the season. There was the implication then, [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] saw it coming, ironically enough. Zarek was the guy who looked down the road and said, "This is a mistake. This is going to come back to― to bite you in the ass." And that Zarek was right. That Zarek is a smart political animal. He knows how these things work. And Ba― and Zarek as the― as the secularist saw the dangers of this, saw that the religious people, the fundamentalist crowd, as it were, within the Fleet, were going to want something for their support and there was a political reality to that. And I thought there was something very interesting about seeing Laura caught in that vice, where she needed their― their support. She wanted their support. And then their support came at― at a price. And how does she reconcile those two ideas? And her first instinct is, "No, I'm not banning abortion. Fuck that. I'm― I'm― that's not who I'm about. That's not what I'm about." And then sh― there's this little scene. Adama sits down, and Laura knows, "Ok. What's up? What's on the Admiral's mind?" It's interesting just to see their body language and the nature of their relationship at this point, the way these two characters have changed over the course of― of almost two seasons now. They are more intimate with each other. They're easier with each other. Adama knows this is a political issue. It's kinda the first time Adama's stepping out of his role as military commander and actually injecting himself into a political idea, and bringing something to― to― to Laura's attention.

I like this line and I don't like this line that's coming up. "I have― I have fought for a woman's right to control her own body
her whole political life." It's true. It's a needed line. I was never happy with it in terms of the elegance of it. It's an inelegant line, 'cause the line that― the line that you wanna here is, "I fought for a woman's right to choose my whole political life." That's the more natural line. That's the line that you're ready to hear. And that's just one of those subjective calls where, in that particular case, the "right to choose" is such a specific contemporary reference to a contemporary political argument that I― I just pulled back from it and didn't feel like I really wanted to go there and wanted to change it slightly. And it's inconsistent. I play― sometimes I― I let them say things that are very contemporary and very familiar and other times they strike my ear oddly and I shift away from it. And there's really not any rhyme or reason for that except for my own sense of what sounds correct in the show and what does not. And ultimately that's my role. I have to― I have to play the show in the key I think it plays the best. It's― it's― it's music. And sometimes the music sounds right to me and sometimes the music doesn't sound right to me. And you need somebody― the showrunner's job is to essentially do that. It's to maintain the voice of the show, as it were. The show has a voice. And it's my voice. And I have to play questions like that as I hear them best.

This whole bit about the distress call fragment, and her <nowiki>[</nowiki>Starbuck<nowiki>]</nowiki> sussing it out and figuring out what it means was part of a larger ongoing plotline that we ultimately cut down for time. It was a lot more of [[Lee Adama|Lee]] trying different methods of tracking them down, different ide― "tech" ideas about where they could have been lost, looking through logs. It was just a lot more [[technobabble]]-type stuff. And it all just lays there and isn't that interesting, as usual.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo informs Garner of Starbuck's theory.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

I like the fact that [[Barry Garner|Garner]] doesn't really like [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]. And it's not in a [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] way. Tigh's conflict with Kara feels personal. Garner's conflict with her feels more professional. He just cannot believe this chick. He just cannot believe Kara's impudence, Kara's arrogance, Kara's insubordination. He doesn't like it. He― he won't put up with it. And he's just not going to listen to her. And, of course, it blinds him to what she has to say. "You're Adama's pet. Let him deal with you." That's one of my favorite lines in the show.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Brief establishing shot of ''Pegasus''.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

I like all these shots of the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']].

This scene of Kara doing push-ups is kind of a callback to the [[miniseries]] when Lee came in and she was in hack and she was in there doing push-ups, and then he came in. And this is kind of an echo of that scene, except in dif― in very different circumstances. And this time he comes in to find her and it's not such a happy reunion. He's got a chip on hi― as big a chip on his shoulder as she does on hers. I love the way [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]] is in this episode. Jamie― this is one of, I think, Jamie's best episodes. He just has this real interesting angst underneath all of his lines. You get the feeling the character's really in turmoil. He's really struggling with a lot of different things. He comes right back at her. Here it comes. Or, here we go. In some ways these two are happiest when they're scrapping at each other. I think in some ways whatever love they have, whatever relationship they have, is really born much more in these scenes of conflict than it ever is in any ex― outward acknowledgment or expression of affection for one another.

There's a lot of internal debate and external debate about this little sequence here. About Lee calling her on the fact that she shot him. The question was, "Does it make him look petulant?" My answer was, "No." It's honest. He's angry. He's struggling with something. I mean, she shot him. It's a pretty heavy thing, to be shot by your friend. Unless your friend's the [[Wikipedia:Dick Cheney#Hunting incident|Vice President]] or something, and then you get over it. But, if it's not the Vice President, and you're shot by your friend, then it's probably a pretty heavy thing that you have to carry the rest of your life.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The search for the missing Raptor.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This is all classic-type stuff. The [[Raptor]] out looking for the other Raptor. You'll notice that the [[Flight suit|helmets]] have changed, subtly, over the course of the year. We've added some lights. They fit the― the actors' heads a little more snugly. There's some― there's internal debate whether that was good and bad. The old helmets didn't fit quite well. They were always giving us sound trouble. They were hard to― to shoot in a lot of ways. They had different lighting problems. So we revamped the helmets and spent quite a bit. And it's interesting the way the helmets actually change the― the face of the characters. I'm always struck by when you put a character in one of those helmets in a cockpit, their face looks so different than it does when you take them out of the helmet. It really focuses the way your eye looks at them and sometimes you don't even recognize them. Like, in some ways, that character we just saw, the pilot of the Raptor, [[Steve Fleer|Red Devil]], is almost unrecognizable from the same character that was in the ready room and in the head earlier in the show. It is exact same actor, it's just, it shapes his face differently and you look at him differently. I've noticed that, particularly with Kara. Kara almost looks like a completely different person when― when she's in the cockpit than she does out of it.

That little bit there, I like. It's just a callback when Garner says, "I'm gonna get my men." That's a direct callback to Adama, said the exact same thing in "[[Resurrection Ship, Part I|Resurrection Ship]]" and "[[Pegasus (episode)|Pegasus]]". "I'm gonna get my men."

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_4of5.mp3 Act 3]==

This is definitely an irrational impulse on the part of [[Barry Garner|Garner]]. The― the idea that he wants to [[FTL|jump]] his whole ship to get his men is― is― it's a little bit crazy. It's― It's not the smartest move. Send the [[Raptor]]s out ahead of you. Go― that's what they're for. They're scouts. They go― they go find people. But Garner, on some level, is― is overcompensating for the fact that he's not a command officer. He's an engineer and he's trying to, on some level, demonstrate that he is up to the task by proving that he'll do anything to go get his men. This little conversation actually had more lines in it, which were kinda nice and I kinda regret dropping, where he kinda called [[William Adama|Adama]] on his shit too. He said, "You know, when [[Kara Thrace]] was missing you put the entire [[The Fleet (RDM)|Fleet]] at risk to go find her. Isn't that true?" And Adama said, "Your understanding of [[You Can't Go Home Again|that situation]] is correct, but my orders stand."

I'm really impressed with how big the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']] seems, even though we have very little, in terms of sets, for ''Pegasus''. There's― there's just the [[CIC]], a stretch of corridor, and a couple of multi-purpose roo― one multi-purpose room, and the― and the quarters. But we really do kinda convey that there's a whole ship involved there.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Roslin comes to Baltar for help.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Like I said earlier, this was going to be [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s first scene in the movie and this was his introduction and the whole idea of him running for [[Government#Executive Branch|President]] didn't come until after this. But now, just by shifting that scene earlier, you read all these expressions of Baltar and this whole attitude that he's copping with [[Laura Roslin|Laura]]. You read it as he's thinking about what [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] said, that maybe he should run for the Presidency. And it just informs this whole scene in a different way, 'cause you get the feeling that he's― he's looking at Laura going, "I could― I could probably beat you. Couldn't I? Why― Why can't I be President?" It's sitting at the back of his mind, and it's sitting in the audience's mind too.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The fleet listen to Roslin's radio address.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

And this was the key point. This was the key moment, the moment that we talked about quite a bit. That Laura would take this step. Laura would ban abortion in the Fleet. Laura would― would ultimately decide that the survival of the race, that their security, would outweigh their need for freedom. That it would curtail― she would curtail a freedom. She would start cutting back on th― the ways that they had lived their lives before [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|the attack]] and deal with the realities of the situation that they're in now. And she would do it because she thought it was the thing she had to do, not because she thought it was a good thing to do. She just thought it was necessary. I like the way that [[Mary McDonnell|Mary]] struggles with this. I think Mary had trouble grappling with this notion as well. This is a big thing, and she was like― we ta― I had a lot of conversations with Mary about this storyline, and about why she was doing what she was doing and her motivations for banning abortion and the reasons why she would be forced to this― to this position.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The ''Pegasus'' corridor is abuzz with crew running to their stations.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Again, I mean― we're conveying― there's not much ''Pegasus'' corridor but we're using every scrap of it in this sequence. And we're doubling it up. We're just shooting both ways and making it feel like it's a much longer corridor than it actually is. In the initial drafts [[Lee Adama|Lee]] was not in CIC. Lee did not take command of the ''Pegasus'' in this― in this way. He was actually going to go out with the fighter pilots. He was gonna be their [[Commander Air Group|CAG]] in― in an emergency situation 'cause I think [[Cole Taylor|Stinger]] had ended up in the brig, or something, and he was gonna― his key moment was going to be, during the battle, he was going to have to leave a bunch of his pilots behind. We opted not to do that because it felt to redolent of the same situation that [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] dealt with in the [[miniseries]], to leave men behind.

This little sequence right here, of each of them <nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo and Garner<nowiki>]</nowiki> trying to relieve the other one, and turning to the [[Colonial Marine Corps|Sergeant of the Guard]], it's a straight homage, or ripoff, depending on how you want to look at it, I think it's an homage to "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112740/ Crimson Tide]", which is something― a very effective sequence between [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000432/ Gene Hackman] and [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000243/ Denzel Washington]. It was fun to write this scene. But it's― it's also different in that Lee is the one taken away. Denzel Washington wins that argument on Crim― in "Crimson Tide", and Gene Hackman is― is taken below. In this situation, the marine, the Sergeant of the Guard, follows Garner's orders. And then we get to jump with the ''Pegasus''.

There's this [[Battle of the Binary Star System|huge, beautiful battle]] coming up here, which I don't have a lot to say about. This is the kind of thing that, I must say, a lot of other people in the show work very hard at. [[Gary Hutzel]], our visual effects supervisor who I've talked about many times on the show. Also the writers [[David Weddle]] and [[Bradley Thompson]] did a lot of work on this sequence. [[Mark Verheiden]] worked on this sequence. A lot of people work and spend a lot of time stroking out all the different pieces of the battle sequence. Right from the moment that the [[basestar (RDM)|basestar]]s jump in to the final denouement in how they ge― get away. I love that shot, 'cause I love that you're on the Raptor cockpit and then it drops down and you see the baseship behind it. A lot of these beats are things that are invented by the director, and by the visual effects team, and David and Bradley, who I― I bring in periodically to help with these kind of sequences.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_5of5.mp3 Act 4]==

I bring them in to help on these sequences a lot because this kind of stuff, I don't know, I don't get as much enjoyment out of writing it as I do the― the― the character stuff. I can do it and I― I did it in the miniseries. I've done it many times. I've written a lot of battle sequences of [[Memoryalpha:Star Trek: The Next Generation|Trek]] and― and so on. But they just don't in― interest me as much anymore. And I find that I'd rather hand them off to people who do still have the passion for it, and enjoy writing it, and enjoy working out all the different tactical maneuvers, and who's doing what, where. I did write that. (Laughs.) "On the left. On the right. And follow me. We're going straight up the gut." (Laughs.) It's a little p― it's pushing it a little bit. But it's― there's a rhythm to battle sequences where there's a certain familiarity. It's like playing the chorus in a song. There's a― there's a part of the audience that wants to enjoy the battle, and there's certain beats that you want to play, and there's certain expected rhythms of the battle, and every once and a while you want an identifiable, easy to hang on to idea that's not tech-talk that's, "You go left, and I― you go right, and we're going right up the gut." And it just co― it crystallizes what's going on in an interesting way. This beat here with [[Barry Garner|Garner]] deciding to go below and giving the command over to [[Lee Adama|Lee]], there was a line there that we cut, that I'm glad we cut, where Garner said, "I belong down there and you belong up here." We cut it because I felt that he hadn't really earned that. This beat with [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]], with Lee taking command, is one of my favorite moments in the development of the― of the Lee Adama character. That look― the look on his face when Garner gives him command and leaves, and he's standing there with his hands on the table and he looks around and he says, "I― I― I have the con. Okay." And he has to get his head in the game. He's been thinking that he's smarter than Garner. He's been working Garner and thinking that this guy doesn't know what the hell he's doing and then suddenly it's all on his shoulders, and this is his first time to― to con a ship in a― in a battle. And [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]] just completely sells you that idea with the look on his face. He's not like "Johnny to the rescue." It's almost like, "Oh, shit. I'm in command?" (Lights a cigarette.)

This sequence of Garner going down to the en― engineering spaces raises the question, "Why is Garner in command to begin with? He's the engineer." It seemed like, given the status of the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']] after the death of [[Jack Fisk|Fisk]] they really― [[William Adama|Adama]] needed a senior officer. He― he― he didn't want to turn the ship over to a young officer, someone with not a lot of experience. Garner was definitely a leader of men and women. He's someone who risen to a senior level. He was someone who was of a seniority in the ship, who had experience, had done his job very well, and it seemed like you could trust him to take over command of the ship. And in fact in― in― in naval vessels today being the engineering officer is often simply one aspect of an officer's career. He'll often come on board, be assigned as the engineering officer, on board― on board a combatant, as part of his experience of takin― of being a department head and running different departments on his way up the― the ladder to command a vessel. So it didn't seem unreasonable that Garner could be an engineer and then take over the command of the ship. The term "snipe" he uses, he ta― refers to himself as a "snipe" and the "snipes" in the engine room is something that I got from the [[Wikipedia:United States Navy|Navy]] when I was on the― the USS ''W. S. Simms'', the [[Wikipedia:Knox class frigate|Knox class frigate]] that I spent a summer cruise on when I was in ROTC, all the engineers were called "snipes." It was just an― an in-house reference to people that were in engineering. They were all "snipes."

Which also raises― there was a reference earlier in the show about "The Bucket" and "The Beast". I thought it was― there was something interesting about giving the― the ''Pegasus'' a nickname. Naval ships generally have a nicknames that their crew bestow upon them. When I was on the [[Wikipedia:USS Constellation (CV-64)|''Constellation'']], the carrier ''Constellation'', everyone called her the "Connie". The [[Wikipedia:USS Enterprise (CVN-65)|''Enterprise'']] is known as "The Big E". The easy one for was would have been calling the ''Pegasus'' the "Peggy", but somehow that seemed just too cute and I didn't want her being called the "Peggy", then well what do you call [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]? And it just seemed like the crews would start to give themselves nicknames and that "The Bucket" and "The Beast" would be the t― natural nicknames. We never use it again, interestingly enough. We just did it in this episode. You'll see we didn't really follow it up again. It was an idea that came and went, and it was chiefly because I was on the set watching some of the filming, on this episode, and [[Stephen McNutt|Steve McNutt]], our director of photography, was sitting there next to me. And Steve's a great guy, and I― I have very little to say to Steve usually because he does such a fine job. What the hell do I know about being a cinematographer? Steve has that wh― has that wired beyond belief. And speaks a technical lanuage far greater than mine. But there was a point, and Steve doesn't usually comment on the scripts, other than say he liked it, or this was cool, or this or that, and he gives little insights. He hated "Bucket and the Beast". He said, "What's this Bucket and the Beast crap?" And I looked at him like, "Huh?" He said, "Bucket and the Beast? I don't like that. ''Galactica'''s the ''Galactica''. We don't call it the― the― 'the Bucket'. I hate that." (Laughs.) I was so― I was so surprised. I was so just like, "Oh my god! Stev― Steve hates that." But, we'd already shot it and it was already in the script and it was too late to really go in and excise all those little references, but it sort of scalded me. I was sort of scalded by the fact that Steve hated it and I― I just rethought it and I never used it again, consciously or unconsciously. I just never used that again.

This thing with Garner and the sledge and the spanner, fixing the problem. Y'know what? It was like, I didn't want it to be one of these "[[Memoryalpha:Montgomery Scott|Scotty]] moments," I'm sorry. I just didn't want him pushing a lot of buttons and talking a lot of tech-talk, or [[Memoryalpha:Geordi La Forge|Geordi]], or name your favorite engineer from sci-fi who, from science fiction, who goes down and "Cross connect the dual plasma inter-relays. The duotronic processor is backed up. But wait! If only I can [[technobabble|tech]] the tech, maybe the tech will rise quickly." And I didn't want any of those sequences something― I wanted something more visceral, more physical, and I wanted him with a sledge hammer and just trying to turn a valve. There was something more interesting about that than rewiring things and doing all kinds of other― of other crap with him.

Oh, and see and now [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0237499/ my wife] is walking in handing me― handing me notes. (To Terry:) Yes dear?

Terry: Honey are you done with the podcast yet? The maid, the gardener, the dogs, and the kids are all waiting and I need to unmuzzle and untie the children.

RDM: No. The children can remain restrained until further notice.

Terry: (Sigh.)

RDM: And send the gardeners and the― and the maid upon their way. And release the hounds and chase them off the property as soon as possible.

Terry: Alright. Well let us know when you're done with your podcast.

RDM: I know.

Terry: I know it's the most important thing of all.

RDM: Yes it is. We don't want to disappoint the fans.

Okay, there they go. Upside-down into the lower bay of ''Pegasus'', which is something that I had been pressing to do for a long time. I― from the get-go when [[Gary Hutzel|Gary]] was first designing the ''Pegasus'' with flight decks I said, "Let's do one of the flight decks upside-down." He said, "Why?" I said, "'Cause it'll be '''cool'''!" And it's still one of the cool things I like. I just― I don't know. It's just one of those― it's the geek in me still loves the notion that there's these upside-down flight decks and so when we were editing it I wanted [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]'s fighter to come in upside-down and I flipped the shot of Kara in the cockpit to be upside-down for no reason at all except that I thought it was cool and hey― if you can't do things that you think are cool in a television show, why be a showrunner?

Lee― and so Lee Adama gets the ''Pegasu''― that little beat there with the― the watch came out of a discussion with [[Sergio Mimica-Gezzan|Sergio]], the director. He wanted something that was a signature of Garner's that Lee could pick up later and I said, "What if it's a watch? And it's a watch what's missing a strap? And he puts it in his pocket. And there was something about the guy who never replaced the strap." And it just became a signature in Garner's. We will continue this storyline. Lee will be the commander of the ''Pegasus'' for the rest of the season and into next year. And I think it's interesting because I think it's going to raise certain questions next year in terms of his relationship with his father, his relationship with [[The Fleet (RDM)|the fleet]], who he wants to be, what kind of a man he's going to be, his relationship with [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]]. It's an interesting way to shake up the expected architecture of the show, and I think that's one of the things that you have to be willing to do in a― in an ongoing series like this is to be willing to change, is be willing to evolve these characters and move them into other positions and play around with what their lives would really be. Because I think that's reality. I think given the situation that these people are in, and the things that they're struggling with, I think they would shift, they would change, they would then be forced into different positions and serve different roles at different times because that's what the situation required. And I think it's interesting because it― it breaks the format of television and the episodic television format re― it's like this dictum that "Everybody must be doing the same roles week in, week out. Everybody has to do the same thing. 'Cause that's what the audience wants to come back and see." And yeah, you want to, on one hand, you want to satisfy that longing of the audience, and on the other hand you want to break that. You want to, like, challenge the audience. You want to keep them guessing. You want to keep them interested. You want to keep the wondering what's going to happen next.

I like the fact that― that [[Rya Kibby|Rya]] had the abortion. She didn't have a last minute change of heart and say, "Oh I'm going to have the child after all." Which I think is the TV's typical way with copping-out with women that face these issues. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068103/ Maude] is, like, probably the last major character on television who actually '''had''' an abortion on― on― on TV and didn't by the end decide, "Well, I know that I believe in a woman's right to choose but I've decided not to." Which I just think is a total cop-out. I think that's a complete― it's― that's trying to have it both ways. That's trying to have your liberal point of view, and not actually bite the bullet and have the character actually go through with the procedure. Which is a difficult procedure, and carries a lot of heavy weight, and I think you have to give it it's weight and you have to play the reality of that. There was another little reference in there, a little line in there you― one could argue doesn't belong in ''Galactica'', which is a "pound of flesh" which, of course, as most people know, comes from "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/ Merchant of Venice]" is something [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000636/ Shakespeare] wrote and has become part of our lexicon. There's not another good phrase. That's one of those things that when [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] says, "You've had― you've gotten your pound of flesh, now― now I suggest you take it and get out― get the hell out of here." I played around with variations on the idea of, "What's a better way to say that?" and I― for lack of an imagination or whatever, there isn't a better phrase that I could think of. "A pound of flesh" says it all so I opted to keep it in.

And so Kara becomes the ''Galactica'' [[Commander Air Group|CAG]]. Again changing― changing up, moving people around, evolving them, moving them into different positions, and playing the reality of what would really happen to these people. I mean, do we really expect, could― could we really expect that these people would be happy doing the same roles for years, and years, and years? Wouldn't they need to assume greater responsibility? Wouldn't they be forced to assume greater responsibility? Wouldn't they― they― this fleet― the remnants of the human race require that if you could do s― more than you're doing now that you'd have to do more than you're doing now?

This is actually, this coming up was an ad lib that Jamie came up with in the table read. And the table read, of course, is when the entire cast gets together before the― the show and they read the script out loud and you hear it and tweak dialogue and hear what the actors play. Right here. "You have a brain?" is something he's just said at a table read and it cracked up the whole room and it was also just, it was inspire because it broke the ice and broke the tension, and yet it was still honest and true. And so we put it in the script. I think that's a valuable thing. You try to listen to your actors when they're playing the role. You try to, during the table read, you're listening to see, it's your one and only shot before you start shooting to see if the words you've written really do fit in their mouths. You've been trying, you try very hard to listen to the actors, at least I do, as you're writing the characters once the series is up on its feet 'cause the actors start knowing the characters better than you do. And the actors have their own diction, and own rhythm, and their own sense of what the character should and should not do. And if you're smart you― you pay attention to that, and in the table read the way they say the lines and the little things they add or subtract, or the lines they won't say, you generally try to listen to and try to accommodate them as best you can 'cause it just makes the show better. It doesn't always happen. There's sometimes they, they're human, sometimes they come up with lines that don't work or sometimes they don't want to say something and you fight with them about it. You― you have arguments, and you say, "Look. We feel very strongly that you gotta say this." or "You can't say that." And it's― and it's a discussion. But... I guess the point I'm trying to make is― is you gotta have that discussion. You've got to be willing to let them be participants in the process because it's― it's an extraordinarily collaborative medium. I mean I'm― I'm the showrunner and yet, like I said earlier, it's my voice and I'm trying to give it, the show, a consistent voice. But we're all pulling together and we're all creating this drama. They're creating it in front of the cameras and I'm creating it behind the cameras. And there has to be a fluid dialogue back and forth in order to realize the― the vision of what you want the show to be.

[[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s now officially running for [[Government#Executive_Branch|President]]. This will continue throughout the rest of the season. This will come into play big time in the [[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I|two-part finale]]. And this is going to lead us into some very, very interesting places. So that is the wrap-up for "[[The Captain's Hand|Captain's Hand]]." Thank you for joining us. And now, on to "[[Downloaded]]." Goodnight. And I'll talk to you soon.

Podcast:The Captain's Hand

2007-01-25T15:26:58Z

TypoFixer: fix dashes and correct spelling of Roslin

{{podcast|author=Steelviper|emailAuthor2=|suffix=|additionalCopyright=and Terry Dresbach}}

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_1of5.mp3 Teaser]==

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 17 of season 2. I'm [[Ronald D. Moore]], executive producer and developer of the new [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|''Battlestar Galactica'']], and this is for "[[The Captain's Hand|Captain's Hand]]," the podcast that was delayed from last week, so I'll be giving it to you this week. In fact I'll be doing two of them back to back tonight. I'll do "Captain's Hand" and then we'll go right into "[[Downloaded]]", on a [[Podcast:Downloaded|separate track]], of course. (Ron lights a cigarette)

Before we get going we should probably mention, right off the top, that let's have a little less of the whining, out there on the [http://mboard.scifi.com/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=BattlestarGalactica&page=0 bulletin boards], shall we, about the noises in the background here at the pod― at the podcast around the old Moore manse. You know folks, you just gotta be tough enough to listen to the podcast. These are imperfect conditions. We do this at my home, not in a nice, tidy, little studio. We do ever our best effort to keep it quite for y'all, but c'mon, enough with the whining, with the pewing― with the [[All the World's a Stage|mewling and puking]] out there. '''Be tough enough for the podcast.''' We drink, we smoke, we curse, we have a good time. Get with it― get with the program.

Ok. So here we are. [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. Teaser. There go the [[Raptor]]s off on a training mission. In early drafts of "Captain's Hand" this particular crisis happened much later in the show. It was one of the problems that we struggled with in the early drafts of the story was, what was the nature of the crisis, and when should it begin.

The whole notion of this episode revolved around the coninu― acknowledging and dealing with the continuing command problems aboard ''Pegasus'', which felt like a natural outgrowth of the idea that the ship, the [[Mercury class battlestar|Battlestar]] ''Pegasus'', that showed up was a― a deeply flawed, almost piratical ship, under the command of [[Helena Cain|Admiral Cain]]. Well, if Admiral Cain had run that ship the way that we saw her run that ship, one would assume that there would be a variety of problems that would definitely outlive her. And so we wanted to continue to play that as the season went on, and the first CO after Cain was obviously [[Jack Fisk|Commander Fisk]], who promptly got into the black mark― [[Black market (organization)|black market]] and got himself killed for the trouble. And then we moved on to [[Barry Garner|Commander Garner]], who in early drafts was always named Trammel. But legal, as legal often does, came back to us with some― some whining about the name Trammel, about it being too close to [http://www.soonerspectator.com/meetWriter.php?id=btramel somebody else's real name], and of course, we had to change it over to Garner at the last second. So there are many references that we all kept catching ourselves calling him Trammel. In fact, we named him Trammel in an earlier episode, in an offhand way. A line from [[William Adama|Adama]]. We had to go back and reloop that in [[Wikipedia:Automated Dialogue Replacement|ADR]] at the last second.

I like this notion of― the beat that open this little section here with [[Lee Adama|Lee]] and [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]], that the pilots and the crew had private signals among themselves to "Stay clear of the quarters when I got a girl, or a man, or both inside." And that they had a private signal. You couldn't quite see it 'cause we had to cut the― clip off the head of that shot but when [[Tucker Clellan|Duck]] and the other pilot came up there was a pair of boots were hanging from the hatch, and they knew, as soon as they saw the pair of boots that that meant that somebody was in there and getting a little something. And that was what prompted them to bang on the door, and the gag was, "Oh. It's the [[Commander Air Group|CAG]]." And they kinda looked at each other and went away.

This sequence― this little scene here with Dualla and Lee, we played around with in editing quite a bit. There were some lines that were dropped that indicated that a longer passage of time between end of the last episode and this one, to give Dualla a little time to mourn, to give Lee a little time to recover, and move everything along the [[Timeline (RDM)|timeline]].

This storyline, the "B story" here, of [[Rya Kibby]] and her unwanted pregnancy, and then the abortion decision that [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] eventually comes to was actually a storyline that we had developed very early. We had started talking about this idea early in the first season as a― as a potentially interesting storyline for us 'cause it dealt with a practical issue of, "What are their policies, in [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], going to be in terms of birth control, in terms of abortion?" The population of the species was going to be― hang in the balance, and what would these people really do in these circumstances? And it was definitely an issue we wanted to deal with, and wanted to play, and wanted to see how the characters would react in this circumstance. I thought there was something interesting about Laura Roslin, whose politics on the surface seem probably moderate-to-liberal, Secretary of Education, and one of the ongoing threads of the entire series was watching as Laura is slowly changed by the repsonsibilities of being [[Government#Executive Branch|President]]. And this storyline was one of those key ideas that, like I said, we talked about early in the first season. And I was fascinated with the idea of this soft-ish appearing woman who's probably, presumably, has all the politically correct positions on these sorts of matters being forced to grapple with the real responsibilities of her― of her role. And I was always interested by playing against the expectations that, I've said this many times though, Laura would be the "dove", and Adama would be the "hawk", and that would always provide very predictable expected conflict between the two. And I always thought it was interesting to subvert that at every― at every turn and always put the characters in situations where they would have to grapple with them as human beings rather than as― as― as just as [[Wikipedia:Stalking horse|stalking horses]] for expected political positions.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Commander Garner arrives at ''Pegasus'' CIC.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Here comes [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001334/ John Heard], who I think is a great actor, in many, many things. I knew him, as soon as his name came up, I was "Oh, yeah! From '[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094737/ Big]'!" Which I think was a tremendous movie and a wonderful, wonderful, film and John had the quasi-villainous role in that episode― in that movie. And more recently I had known him from his work on "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141842/ Sopranos]" as the corrupt police lieutenant. I think John's a great actor and we were really, really happy to have him on the show. He fit in really well. He provided a different color, different flavor to the part and so― it's always nice to get "name" guest cast to come in and juice up the production a little bit here and there.

"Captain's Hand" is also a mix between a standalone episode and a more traditional continuing episode of ours. I think it successfully straddles the line in terms of continuing the ongoing storylines of Lee, and Dualla, and [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]], and Laura, and [[Kara Thrace|Kara]], and at the same time dealing with issues that are self-contained within one episode.

Oh, here comes the beep! Oh no! Cover your ears.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_2of5.mp3 Act 1]==

Ooh. That scary beep. Beep.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo arrives on the ''Pegasus'', joining Starbuck who is already aboard, and the two head to CIC.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Initially, in the early drafts of this in the story and in the first draft of the script [[Lee Adama|Lee]] came over by himself. It was more of a self-contained "Lee" show that really didn't involve [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] until a little bit later in the drama when she was pulled over to [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. The idea wa― ,in the initial drafts, was that Lee came aboard, and that the problem onboard ''Pegasus'' was not― was not that discipline was too tough, it was that it was quite the opposite. It was that it was too lax. The idea was that Trammel was just a nice guy. Trammel was just everything that Lee thought his father should be. The idea was Lee comes on board this ship and Trammel's this perfectly nice guy who wants to be liked by his crew and wants to get along with everybody and just commanded with a very soft glove. And Lee found himself fulfilling the hardass role. He came over and yelled at guys and saw that fights were breaking out on the hangar day, nobody― hangar bay, nobody gave a shit about it. People talked back. People didn't carry out orders. There was a certain sense of "School's out on Peggy" since [[Helena Cain|Cain]] and [[Jack Fisk|Fisk]] had both been killed, and then they get this― this new commander in who hasn't had any experience commanding a ship and he just, more than anything else, wanted to be liked by the crew, because the crew had hated the previous two commanders. And then that was supposed to bring along its own problems. That grew less satisfying. As we played it out it was an odd fit because it never quite felt right that Lee was such a complete hardass with these guys and it cut against the grain, just, we were having trouble making that story work. So we kept working on, "What is the nature of [[Barry Garner|Garner]]'s problem? Is he too lax? Is he too friendly? Is he too much of a hardass? Is he crazy?" The version that we shot, the f― the draft, the filming draft is slightly different than the edited version, too. These early scenes were colored by the fact that― that [[CIC]] scene that we left a moment ago where Lee first came into Garner and found out that the [[Raptor]]s were missing, we played it where Garner immediately was on [[Hoshi]]'s ass about something. Hoshi was on the phone with somebody at [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']] and was not informing Garner in the way that Garner wanted to be informed. And he was riding his ass and sent him to his quarters and had him arrested and there was a sense of fear everywhere. That Garner was this crazed, despot. And we were taking direction from "Caine Mutiny", was sort of an archetype for the character at that point, and the idea that we were going to play, and you can still see parts of it are still here, was that Lee appreciated Garner. That Lee liked Garner. Respected him. Thought he was trying to make the best of a bad situation. He was― he was the third guy who had to command this ship, and he was trying to bring discipline back to a vessel that had had questionable discipline. It was a somewhat Kurtz-like regime under Cain and it then it was a more overtly piratical regime under Fisk and then Garner was trying to just straighten it all out. And the idea we were going to play was Lee was slow to see that― that Garner was deeply flawed as well. And that was an archetype that was borne out of "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046816/ Caine Mutiny]" which follows a very similar structure in that― that the [[Wikipedia:Captain Queeg|Queeg]]-

(''phone rings'') Now see there? Look! Oh my god! Run for the hills, my phone is ringing. The idea― (''phone rings'') I could unplug it. I could actually walk ov― hey! I'm going to walk right over there right now (''phone rings'') and I'm going to unplug it for― for all of you 'cause I don't want any of your precious little feelings to be hurt. (''phone rings'') Here I go. (''Ron's voice gets fainter as he walks away'') I'm walking over. I'm unplugging. I'm unplugging as we speak. And, it's now unplugged. You happy? Everybody happy now?

What we opted to do instead was― instead of going down the "Caine Mutiny" route so strongly was to dial-back Garner's early scenes. The Queeg character in "Caine Mutiny" was somebody that the Ensign Keith character, who's central to the book and the movie, comes aboard and likes Queeg at first 'cause Queeg seems like he's just trying to straighten out a very difficult ship and Keith, Ensign Keith, doesn't realize until fairly late in the drama that Queeg is crazy... that Queeg is paranoid and damaged and had been scarred by his― his experiences in the war. And we tried a similar archetype in this episode, but when it was all cut together the problem was that you saw the problem with Quee― with our Queeg, with Garner, just immediately. As soon as he started bitchslapping Yoshi― Hoshi in that first scene, and you saw that he was a little bit nuts, you knew exactly everything that was gonna to happen in the show. You knew he'd be relieved. You just saw it. It's like, "Oh. It's so clearly the "Caine Mutiny," that it didn't work. So we cut back on all of the initial craziness, and now it's not quite as clear what's going up― going on with Garner.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Zarek suggests to Baltar that he should run for president.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This scene that's on camera right now, with Gar― with [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] and [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] was originally much later in this script. As shot, this scene didn't happen until [[Podcast:The Captain's Hand#Act 4|act four]], actually, I believe, or [[Podcast:The Captain's Hand#Act 3|act three]] possibly. And it happened only after [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] had made her religious proclaimatio― er, not her religious, her political proclaimation to ban abortion, and that prompted Zarek to go to Baltar. And when I was watching it cut, it seemed like it happened way too late, and I thought it would be much more interesting if early in the show we got Baltar thinking about the presidency. I think it's much more effective, 'cause now, when Laura goes to ask him later about the demographics of [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] and is wrestling with the decision, the idea that Baltar might possibly run for the presidency is already in the character's mind and it's already in― in the audience's mind.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo arrives in the pilot ready room and berates Starbuck in front of the other pilots.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

The idea here of the Kara/Lee struggle/conflict, since she shot him, by accident, but she shot him in the last episode, felt like definitely something we wanted to follow up on, as part of the growing chasm between these two characters. You saw in "[[Scar]]" that they came close to actually sleeping together, in a moment, and that Kara reached out to him in desperation to try to forget about [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] and then― and then it all fell apart. And... there was something interesting about continuing to play these two becoming more and more estranged, especially since your expectation is that these two are going to end up together or there's some kind of romantic tension going on. Finding― I found it was much more interesting the further apart these two got. The more that their― their relationship became dysfunctional. (Ron lights a cigarette)

I love this [[Cottle]]/[[William Adama|Adama]] scene in sickbay. Cottle is, I've said this before, has developed into one of my favorite characters in the show. And I like this little scene, 'cause it says so much about the relationship between Adama and Cottle. This notion that Cottle was performing abortions throughout the Fleet, very quietly and with no questions asked, I thought was interesting. It again provided this backstage look at what was happening off-camera during all these episodes. That there was a life to the fleet. There were, like, people's lives were continuing on. Things were happening. And just because we didn't show them to you up in CIC didn't mean that things weren't happening below decks. Adama's― this little beat. This look on Adama's face. "She could apply for asawman― apply for asylum." And Adama just looks at Cottle. And then this look on Cottle face. "Up oh. I'll just walk over here. Excuse me," is just great. And then [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]]... Eddie just looks at [[Rya Kibby|her]], and he's hoping she's not gonna pick up on it, hoping she's not gonna say anything, she's... she said it. She said the magic words. Oh, great. No my day just got much, much longer.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_3of5.mp3 Act 2]==

Act― act of the second. I like all this political stuff. I― I think it's interesting to see the factionaliztion and almost tribalization within [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]]. That there are different cultures represented within the rag-tag fleet. That they have different points of view. And this idea, that P― [[Sarah Porter]] and [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)#Gemenon|the Gemonese]] were gonna come a'callin because of their support to [[Laura Roslin|Laura]], when she needed it, when Laura rose up against [[William Adama|Adama]] way back when and declared herself a prophet earlier in the season. There was the implication then, [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] saw it coming, ironically enough. Zarek was the guy who looked down the road and said, "This is a mistake. This is going to come back to― to bite you in the ass." And that Zarek was right. That Zarek is a smart political animal. He knows how these things work. And Ba― and Zarek as the― as the secularist saw the dangers of this, saw that the religious people, the fundamentalist crowd, as it were, within the Fleet, were going to want something for their support and there was a political reality to that. And I thought there was something very interesting about seeing Laura caught in that vice, where she needed their― their support. She wanted their support. And then their support came at― at a price. And how does she reconcile those two ideas? And her first instinct is, "No, I'm not banning abortion. Fuck that. I'm― I'm― that's not who I'm about. That's not what I'm about." And then sh― there's this little scene. Adama sits down, and Laura knows, "Ok. What's up? What's on the Admiral's mind?" It's interesting just to see their body language and the nature of their relationship at this point, the way these two characters have changed over the course of― of almost two seasons now. They are more intimate with each other. They're easier with each other. Adama knows this is a political issue. It's kinda the first time Adama's stepping out of his role as military commander and actually injecting himself into a political idea, and bringing something to― to― to Laura's attention.

I like this line and I don't like this line that's coming up. "I have― I have fought for a woman's right to control her own body
her whole political life." It's true. It's a needed line. I was never happy with it in terms of the elegance of it. It's an inelegant line, 'cause the line that― the line that you wanna here is, "I fought for a woman's right to choose my whole political life." That's the more natural line. That's the line that you're ready to hear. And that's just one of those subjective calls where, in that particular case, the "right to choose" is such a specific contemporary reference to a contemporary political argument that I― I just pulled back from it and didn't feel like I really wanted to go there and wanted to change it slightly. And it's inconsistent. I play― sometimes I― I let them say things that are very contemporary and very familiar and other times they strike my ear oddly and I shift away from it. And there's really not any rhyme or reason for that except for my own sense of what sounds correct in the show and what does not. And ultimately that's my role. I have to― I have to play the show in the key I think it plays the best. It's― it's― it's music. And sometimes the music sounds right to me and sometimes the music doesn't sound right to me. And you need somebody― the showrunner's job is to essentially do that. It's to maintain the voice of the show, as it were. The show has a voice. And it's my voice. And I have to play questions like that as I hear them best.

This whole bit about the distress call fragment, and her <nowiki>[</nowiki>Starbuck<nowiki>]</nowiki> sussing it out and figuring out what it means was part of a larger ongoing plotline that we ultimately cut down for time. It was a lot more of [[Lee Adama|Lee]] trying different methods of tracking them down, different ide― "tech" ideas about where they could have been lost, looking through logs. It was just a lot more [[technobabble]]-type stuff. And it all just lays there and isn't that interesting, as usual.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo informs Garner of Starbuck's theory.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

I like the fact that [[Barry Garner|Garner]] doesn't really like [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]. And it's not in a [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] way. Tigh's conflict with Kara feels personal. Garner's conflict with her feels more professional. He just cannot believe this chick. He just cannot believe Kara's impudence, Kara's arrogance, Kara's insubordincation. He doesn't like it. He― he won't put up with it. And he's just not going to listen to her. And, of course, it blinds him to what she has to say. "You're Adama's pet. Let him deal with you." That's one of my favorite lines in the show.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Brief establishing shot of ''Pegasus''.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

I like all these shots of the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']].

This scene of Kara doing pushups is kind of a callback to the [[miniseries]] when Lee came in and she was in hack and she was in there doing pushups, and then he came in. And this is kind of an echo of that scene, except in dif― in very different circumstances. And this time he comes in to find her and it's not such a happy reunion. He's got a chip on hi― as big a chip on his shoulder as she does on hers. I love the way [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]] is in this episode. Jamie― this is one of, I think, Jamie's best episodes. He just has this real interesting angst underneath all of his lines. You get the feeling the character's really in turmoil. He's really struggling with a lot of different things. He comes right back at her. Here it comes. Or, here we go. In some ways these two are happiest when they're scrapping at each other. I think in some ways whatever love they have, whatever relationship they have, is really born much more in these scenes of conflict than it ever is in any ex― outward acknowledgement or expression of affection for one another.

There's a lot of internal debate and external debate about this little sequence here. About Lee calling her on the fact that she shot him. The question was, "Does it make him look petulant?" My answer was, "No." It's honest. He's angry. He's struggling with something. I mean, she shot him. It's a pretty heavy thing, to be shot by your friend. Unless your friend's the [[Wikipedia:Dick Cheney#Hunting incident|Vice President]] or something, and then you get over it. But, if it's not the Vice President, and you're shot by your friend, then it's probably a pretty heavy thing that you have to carry the rest of your life.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The search for the missing Raptor.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This is all classic-type stuff. The [[Raptor]] out looking for the other Raptor. You'll notice that the [[Flight suit|helmets]] have changed, subtly, over the course of the year. We've added some lights. They fit the― the actors' heads a little more snugly. There's some― there's internal debate whether that was good and bad. The old helmets didn't fit quite well. They were always giving us sound trouble. They were hard to― to shoot in a lot of ways. They had different lighting problems. So we revamped the helmets and spent quite a bit. And it's interesting the way the helmets actually change the― the face of the characters. I'm always struck by when you put a character in one of those helmets in a cockpit, their face looks so different than it does when you take them out of the helmet. It really focuses the way your eye looks at them and sometimes you don't even recognize them. Like, in some ways, that character we just saw, the pilot of the Raptor, [[Steve Fleer|Red Devil]], is almost unrecognizable from the same character that was in the ready room and in the head earlier in the show. It is exact same actor, it's just, it shapes his face differently and you look at him differently. I've noticed that, particularly with Kara. Kara almost looks like a completely different person when― when she's in the cockpit than she does out of it.

That little bit there, I like. It's just a callback when Garner says, "I'm gonna get my men." That's a direct callback to Adama, said the exact same thing in "[[Resurrection Ship, Part I|Resurrection Ship]]" and "[[Pegasus (episode)|Pegasus]]". "I'm gonna get my men."

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_4of5.mp3 Act 3]==

This is definitely an irrational impulse on the part of [[Barry Garner|Garner]]. The― the idea that he wants to [[FTL|jump]] his whole ship to get his men is― is― it's a little bit crazy. It's― It's not the smartest move. Send the [[Raptor]]s out ahead of you. Go― that's what they're for. They're scouts. They go― they go find people. But Garner, on some level, is― is overcompensating for the fact that he's not a command officer. He's an engineer and he's trying to, on some level, demonstrate that he is up to the task by proving that he'll do anything to go get his men. This little conversation actually had more lines in it, which were kinda nice and I kinda regret dropping, where he kinda called [[William Adama|Adama]] on his shit too. He said, "You know, when [[Kara Thrace]] was missing you put the entire [[The Fleet (RDM)|Fleet]] at risk to go find her. Isn't that true?" And Adama said, "Your understanding of [[You Can't Go Home Again|that situation]] is correct, but my orders stand."

I'm really impressed with how big the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']] seems, even though we have very little, in terms of sets, for ''Pegasus''. There's― there's just the [[CIC]], a stretch of corridor, and a couple of multi-purpose roo― one multi-purpose room, and the― and the quarters. But we really do kinda convey that there's a whole ship involved there.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Roslin comes to Baltar for help.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Like I said earlier, this was going to be [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s first scene in the movie and this was his introduction and the whole idea of him running for [[Government#Executive Branch|President]] didn't come until after this. But now, just by shifting that scene earlier, you read all these expressions of Baltar and this whole attitude that he's copping with [[Laura Roslin|Laura]]. You read it as he's thinking about what [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] said, that maybe he should run for the Presidency. And it just informs this whole scene in a different way, 'cause you get the feeling that he's― he's looking at Laura going, "I could― I could probably beat you. Couldn't I? Why― Why can't I be President?" It's sitting at the back of his mind, and it's sitting in the audience's mind too.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The fleet listen to Roslin's radio address.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

And this was the key point. This was the key moment, the moment that we talked about quite a bit. That Laura would take this step. Laura would ban abortion in the Fleet. Laura would― would ultimately decide that the survival of the race, that their security, would outweigh their need for freedom. That it would curtail― she would curtail a freedom. She would start cutting back on th― the ways that they had lived their lives before [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|the attack]] and deal with the realities of the situation that they're in now. And she would do it because she thought it was the thing she had to do, not because she thought it was a good thing to do. She just thought it was necessary. I like the way that [[Mary McDonnell|Mary]] struggles with this. I think Mary had trouble grappling with this notion as well. This is a big thing, and she was like― we ta― I had a lot of conversations with Mary about this storyline, and about why she was doing what she was doing and her motivations for banning abortion and the reasons why she would be forced to this― to this position.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The ''Pegasus'' corridor is abuzz with crew running to their stations.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Again, I mean― we're conveying― there's not much ''Pegasus'' corridor but we're using every scrap of it in this sequence. And we're doubling it up. We're just shooting both ways and making it feel like it's a much longer corridor than it actually is. In the initial drafts [[Lee Adama|Lee]] was not in CIC. Lee did not take command of the ''Pegasus'' in this― in this way. He was actually going to go out with the fighter pilots. He was gonna be their [[Commander Air Group|CAG]] in― in an emergency situation 'cause I think [[Cole Taylor|Stinger]] had ended up in the brig, or something, and he was gonna― his key moment was going to be, during the battle, he was going to have to leave a bunch of his pilots behind. We opted not to do that because it felt to redolent of the same situation that [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] dealt with in the [[miniseries]], to leave men behind.

This little sequence right here, of each of them <nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo and Garner<nowiki>]</nowiki> trying to relieve the other one, and turning to the [[Colonial Marine Corps|Sergeant of the Guard]], it's a straight homage, or ripoff, depending on how you want to look at it, I think it's an homage to "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112740/ Crimson Tide]", which is something― a very effective sequence between [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000432/ Gene Hackman] and [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000243/ Denzel Washington]. It was fun to write this scene. But it's― it's also different in that Lee is the one taken away. Denzel Washington wins that argument on Crim― in "Crimson Tide", and Gene Hackman is― is taken below. In this situation, the marine, the Sergeant of the Guard, follows Garner's orders. And then we get to jump with the ''Pegasus''.

There's this [[Battle of the Binary Star System|huge, beautiful battle]] coming up here, which I don't have a lot to say about. This is the kind of thing that, I must say, a lot of other people in the show work very hard at. [[Gary Hutzel]], our visual effects supervisor who I've talked about many times on the show. Also the writers [[David Weddle]] and [[Bradley Thompson]] did a lot of work on this sequence. [[Mark Verheiden]] worked on this sequence. A lot of people work and spend a lot of time stroking out all the different pieces of the battle sequence. Right from the moment that the [[basestar (RDM)|basestar]]s jump in to the final denouement in how they ge― get away. I love that shot, 'cause I love that you're on the Raptor cockpit and then it drops down and you see the baseship behind it. A lot of these beats are things that are invented by the director, and by the visual effects team, and David and Bradley, who I― I bring in periodically to help with these kind of sequences.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_5of5.mp3 Act 4]==

I bring them in to help on these sequences a lot because this kind of stuff, I don't know, I don't get as much enjoyment out of writing it as I do the― the― the character stuff. I can do it and I― I did it in the miniseries. I've done it many times. I've written a lot of battle sequences of [[Memoryalpha:Star Trek: The Next Generation|Trek]] and― and so on. But they just don't in― interest me as much anymore. And I find that I'd rather hand them off to people who do still have the passion for it, and enjoy writing it, and enjoy working out all the different tactical maneuvers, and who's doing what, where. I did write that. (Laughs.) "On the left. On the right. And follow me. We're going straight up the gut." (Laughs.) It's a little p― it's pushing it a little bit. But it's― there's a rhythm to battle sequences where there's a certain familiarity. It's like playing the chorus in a song. There's a― there's a part of the audience that wants to enjoy the battle, and there's certain beats that you want to play, and there's certain expected rhythms of the battle, and every once and a while you want an identifiable, easy to hang on to idea that's not tech-talk that's, "You go left, and I― you go right, and we're going right up the gut." And it just co― it crystalizes what's going on in an interesting way. This beat here with [[Barry Garner|Garner]] deciding to go below and giving the command over to [[Lee Adama|Lee]], there was a line there that we cut, that I'm glad we cut, where Garner said, "I belong down there and you belong up here." We cut it because I felt that he hadn't really earned that. This beat with [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]], with Lee taking command, is one of my favorite moments in the development of the― of the Lee Adama character. That look― the look on his face when Garner gives him command and leaves, and he's standing there with his hands on the table and he looks around and he says, "I― I― I have the con. Okay." And he has to get his head in the game. He's been thinking that he's smarter than Garner. He's been working Garner and thinking that this guy doesn't know what the hell he's doing and then suddenly it's all on his shoulders, and this is his first time to― to con a ship in a― in a battle. And [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]] just completely sells you that idea with the look on his face. He's not like "Johnny to the rescue." It's almost like, "Oh, shit. I'm in command?" (Lights a cigarette.)

This sequence of Garner going down to the en― engineering spaces raises the question, "Why is Garner in command to begin with? He's the engineer." It seemed like, given the status of the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']] after the death of [[Jack Fisk|Fisk]] they really― [[William Adama|Adama]] needed a senior officer. He― he― he didn't want to turn the ship over to a young officer, someone with not a lot of experience. Garner was definitely a leader of men and women. He's someone who risen to a senior level. He was someone who was of a seniority in the ship, who had experience, had done his job very well, and it seemed like you could trust him to take over command of the ship. And in fact in― in― in naval vessels today being the engineering officer is often simply one aspect of an officer's career. He'll often come onboard, be assigned as the engineering officer, onboard― onboard a combatant, as part of his experience of takin― of being a department head and running different departments on his way up the― the ladder to command a vessel. So it didn't seem unreasonable that Garner could be an engineer and then take over the command of the ship. The term "snipe" he uses, he ta― refers to himself as a "snipe" and the "snipes" in the engine room is something that I got from the [[Wikipedia:United States Navy|Navy]] when I was on the― the USS ''W. S. Simms'', the [[Wikipedia:Knox class frigate|Knox class frigate]] that I spent a summer cruise on when I was in ROTC, all the engineers were called "snipes." It was just an― an in-house reference to people that were in engineering. They were all "snipes."

Which also raises― there was a reference earlier in the show about "The Bucket" and "The Beast". I thought it was― there was something interesting about giving the― the ''Pegasus'' a nickname. Naval ships generally have a nicknames that their crew bestow upon them. When I was on the [[Wikipedia:USS Constellation (CV-64)|''Constellation'']], the carrier ''Constellation'', everyone called her the "Connie". The [[Wikipedia:USS Enterprise (CVN-65)|''Enterprise'']] is known as "The Big E". The easy one for was would have been calling the ''Pegasus'' the "Peggy", but somehow that seemed just too cute and I didn't want her being called the "Peggy", then well what do you call [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]? And it just seemed like the crews would start to give themselves nicknames and that "The Bucket" and "The Beast" would be the t― natural nicknames. We never use it again, interestingly enough. We just did it in this episode. You'll see we didn't really follow it up again. It was an idea that came and went, and it was chiefly because I was on the set watching some of the filming, on this episode, and [[Stephen McNutt|Steve McNutt]], our director of photography, was sitting there next to me. And Steve's a great guy, and I― I have very little to say to Steve usually because he does such a fine job. What the hell do I know about being a cinematographer? Steve has that wh― has that wired beyond belief. And speaks a technical lanuage far greater than mine. But there was a point, and Steve doesn't usually comment on the scripts, other than say he liked it, or this was cool, or this or that, and he gives little insights. He hated "Bucket and the Beast". He said, "What's this Bucket and the Beast crap?" And I looked at him like, "Huh?" He said, "Bucket and the Beast? I don't like that. ''Galactica'''s the ''Galactica''. We don't call it the― the― 'the Bucket'. I hate that." (Laughs.) I was so― I was so surprised. I was so just like, "Oh my god! Stev― Steve hates that." But, we'd already shot it and it was already in the script and it was too late to really go in and excise all those little references, but it sort of scalded me. I was sort of scalded by the fact that Steve hated it and I― I just rethought it and I never used it again, conciously or unconciously. I just never used that again.

This thing with Garner and the sledge and the spanner, fixing the problem. Y'know what? It was like, I didn't want it to be one of these "[[Memoryalpha:Montgomery Scott|Scotty]] moments," I'm sorry. I just didn't want him pushing a lot of buttons and talking a lot of tech-talk, or [[Memoryalpha:Geordi La Forge|Geordi]], or name your favorite engineer from sci-fi who, from science fiction, who goes down and "Cross connect the dual plasma inter-relays. The duotronic processor is backed up. But wait! If only I can [[technobabble|tech]] the tech, maybe the tech will rise quickly." And I didn't want any of those sequences something― I wanted something more visceral, more physical, and I wanted him with a sledge hammer and just trying to turn a valve. There was something more interesting about that than rewiring things and doing all kinds of other― of other crap with him.

Oh, and see and now [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0237499/ my wife] is walking in handing me― handing me notes. (To Terry:) Yes dear?

Terry: Honey are you done with the podcast yet? The maid, the gardner, the dogs, and the kids are all waiting and I need to unmuzzle and untie the children.

RDM: No. The children can remain restrained until further notice.

Terry: (Sigh.)

RDM: And send the gardners and the― and the maid upon their way. And release the hounds and chase them off the property as soon as possible.

Terry: Alright. Well let us know when you're done with your podcast.

RDM: I know.

Terry: I know it's the most important thing of all.

RDM: Yes it is. We don't want to disappoint the fans.

Okay, there they go. Upside-down into the lower bay of ''Pegasus'', which is something that I had been pressing to do for a long time. I― from the get-go when [[Gary Hutzel|Gary]] was first designing the ''Pegasus'' with flight decks I said, "Let's do one of the flight decks upside-down." He said, "Why?" I said, "'Cause it'll be '''cool'''!" And it's still one of the cool things I like. I just― I don't know. It's just one of those― it's the geek in me still loves the notion that there's these upside-down flight decks and so when we were editing it I wanted [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]'s fighter to come in upside-down and I flipped the shot of Kara in the cockpit to be upside-down for no reason at all except that I thought it was cool and hey― if you can't do things that you think are cool in a television show, why be a showrunner?

Lee― and so Lee Adama gets the ''Pegasu''― that little beat there with the― the watch came out of a discussion with [[Sergio Mimica-Gezzan|Sergio]], the director. He wanted something that was a signature of Garner's that Lee could pick up later and I said, "What if it's a watch? And it's a watch what's missing a strap? And he puts it in his pocket. And there was something about the guy who never replaced the strap." And it just became a signature in Garner's. We will continue this storyline. Lee will be the commander of the ''Pegasus'' for the rest of the season and into next year. And I think it's interesting because I think it's going to raise certain questions next year in terms of his relationship with his father, his relationship with [[The Fleet (RDM)|the fleet]], who he wants to be, what kind of a man he's going to be, his relationship with [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]]. It's an interesting way to shake up the expected architecture of the show, and I think that's one of the things that you have to be willing to do in a― in an ongoing series like this is to be willing to change, is be willing to evolve these characters and move them into other positions and play around with what their lives would really be. Because I think that's reality. I think given the situation that these people are in, and the things that they're struggling with, I think they would shift, they would change, they would then be forced into different positions and serve different roles at different times because that's what the situation required. And I think it's interesting because it― it breaks the format of television and the episodic television format re― it's like this dictum that "Everybody must be doing the same roles week in, week out. Everybody has to do the same thing. 'Cause that's what the audience wants to come back and see." And yeah, you want to, on one hand, you want to satisfy that longing of the audience, and on the other hand you want to break that. You want to, like, challenge the audience. You want to keep them guessing. You want to keep them interested. You want to keep the wondering what's going to happen next.

I like the fact that― that [[Rya Kibby|Rya]] had the abortion. She didn't have a last minute change of heart and say, "Oh I'm going to have the child after all." Which I think is the tv's typical way with copping-out with women that face these issues. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068103/ Maude] is, like, probably the last major character on television who actually '''had''' an abortion on― on― on tv and didn't by the end decide, "Well, I know that I believe in a woman's right to choose but I've decided not to." Which I just think is a total cop-out. I think that's a complete― it's― that's trying to have it both ways. That's trying to have your liberal point of view, and not actually bite the bullet and have the character actually go through with the procedure. Which is a difficult procedure, and carries a lot of heavy weight, and I think you have to give it it's weight and you have to play the reality of that. There was another little reference in there, a little line in there you― one could argue doesn't belong in ''Galactica'', which is a "pound of flesh" which, of course, as most people know, comes from "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/ Merchant of Venice]" is something [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000636/ Shakespeare] wrote and has become part of our lexicon. There's not another good phrase. That's one of those things that when [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] says, "You've had― you've gotten your pound of flesh, now― now I suggest you take it and get out― get the hell out of here." I played around with variations on the idea of, "What's a better way to say that?" and I― for lack of an imagination or whatever, there isn't a better phrase that I could think of. "A pound of flesh" says it all so I opted to keep it in.

And so Kara becomes the ''Galactica'' [[Commander Air Group|CAG]]. Again changing― changing up, moving people around, evolving them, moving them into different positions, and playing the reality of what would really happen to these people. I mean, do we really expect, could― could we really expect that these people would be happy doing the same roles for years, and years, and years? Wouldn't they need to assume greater responsibility? Wouldn't they be forced to assume greater responsibility? Wouldn't they― they― this fleet― the remnants of the human race require that if you could do s― more than you're doing now that you'd have to do more than you're doing now?

This is actually, this coming up was an adlib that Jamie came up with in the table read. And the table read, of course, is when the entire cast gets together before the― the show and they read the script out loud and you hear it and tweak dialogue and hear what the actors play. Right here. "You have a brain?" is something he's just said at a table read and it cracked up the whole room and it was also just, it was inspire because it broke the ice and broke the tension, and yet it was still honest and true. And so we put it in the script. I think that's a valuable thing. You try to listen to your actors when they're playing the role. You try to, during the table read, you're listening to see, it's your one and only shot before you start shooting to see if the words you've written really do fit in their mouths. You've been trying, you try very hard to listen to the actors, at least I do, as you're writing the characters once the series is up on its feet 'cause the actors start knowing the characters better than you do. And the actors have their own diction, and own rhythm, and their own sense of what the character should and should not do. And if you're smart you― you pay attention to that, and in the table read the way they say the lines and the little things they add or subtract, or the lines they won't say, you generally try to listen to and try to accomodate them as best you can 'cause it just makes the show better. It doesn't always happen. There's sometimes they, they're human, sometimes they come up with lines that don't work or sometimes they don't want to say something and you fight with them about it. You― you have arguments, and you say, "Look. We feel very strongly that you gotta say this." or "You can't say that." And it's― and it's a discussion. But... I guess the point I'm trying to make is― is you gotta have that discussion. You've got to be willing to let them be participants in the process beacause it's― it's an extraordinarily collaborative medium. I mean I'm― I'm the showrunner and yet, like I said earlier, it's my voice and I'm trying to give it, the show, a consistent voice. But we're all pulling together and we're all creating this drama. They're creating it in front of the cameras and I'm creating it behind the cameras. And there has to be a fluid dialogue back and forth in order to realize the― the vision of what you want the show to be.

[[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s now officially running for [[Government#Executive_Branch|President]]. This will continue throughout the rest of the season. This will come into play bigtime in the [[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I|two-part finale]]. And this is going to lead us into some very, very interesting places. So that is the wrapup for "[[The Captain's Hand|Captain's Hand]]." Thank you for joining us. And now, on to "[[Downloaded]]." Goodnight. And I'll talk to you soon.

Podcast:Hero

2007-01-25T06:06:39Z

TypoFixer: typos, dashes, add context to some RDM statements

{{podcast|author=Steelviper|emailAuthor2=|suffix=|additionalCopyright=}}
== Teaser ==
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm [[Ronald D. Moore]], executive producer and developer of [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|the new ''Battlestar Galactica'']], here to welcome you to the podcast for what we affectionately call episode seven, "[[Hero]]". And there won't be any Scotch today. It's a little too early in the day, even for a hardcore like me. (Lights a cigarette.) The smokes are [[w:Nat Sherman|Shermans]]. Trying a little somethin' different. So[mething] actually my wife recommended from back in her smoking days. She no longer imbi— partakes of the tobacco leaf. But I do on occasion. I don't smoke nearly as much as all of you think I do.

Anyway. Episode seven, "Hero". This one was a little bit more of a one-off than what we typically do. A little bit more of a single, self contained story carrying us through the whole episode. We felt at the beginning of the season we had arced out the entire [[New Caprica]] storyline that took us through to "[[Exodus, Part II|Exodus]]" and then into "[[Collaborators]]", and then we had this two-part episode that developed that was about the [[Lymphocytic encephalitis|infected]] [[Basestar (RDM)|baseship]] and the consequences of that, culminating in the decision of whether or not the people on [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']] were going to use the biological weapon. And then after that we wanted to do a series of a little bit more contained episodes that weren't quite as serialized, didn't have as many long-running storylines as we had been playing for a while. And so one of the first ones that came up was this story, "Hero". This is written by [[David Eick]], my producing partner. And the origins of this, though, actually go back a little bit further than [[Season 3 (2006-07)|this season]]. This was initially a concept that was pitched during the [[Season 2 (2005-06)|second season]] by [[David Weddle]]. I believe this is his idea. It might have been him and [[Bradley Thompson|his partner]], right? I remember David mentioning it in the room, had this idea that they would discover something about [[William Adama|Adama]]. That Adama would— had been holding a secret that essentially he was holding the idea that— holding secret the idea that he had participating in a [[w:Black op|black op]] mission before the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|Cylon attack]]. And that he would secretly blame himself, on some level, for helping to prompt the Cylon attack on [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)|the Colonies]] itself. Which is a pretty big idea, and it took a lot of discussion. We were like, "Ok. What does that mean in concrete terms?" I liked the idea that there were black ops operations going on amid the Colonials before the Cylon attack. After all, forty y— our backstory is that there's forty years between the last Cylon— the first [[Cylon War]] and the attack on the Colonies. And it seemed plausible that the [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|Colonial Fleet]] had been doing something during that whole time and it was curious to see what was going on the other side of the [[Armistice Line]].

This little opening sequence here with [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] and the picture [painting of President Baltar], which we just went past in ''[[Colonial One]]'', like I've said before, I want that picture for my own. That'll have a point of pride in my own home someday of [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]. And I think David knew that, and I think that's why he wrote in that little piece about putting Baltar's picture over the toilet. I don't think it was so much a slam against [[James Callis|James]] and the— or the character as it was tweaking me that my coveted picture was going above the toilet.

Anyway. This sequence— this concept, that Adama was holding a secret all these t— all this time was a pretty interesting and provocative one within the writing staff, and I liked it, but we d— it didn't seem to find a place in the second season and we— it kicked around in our list of suggested stories as we were approaching the seventh— the third season, getting way ahead of myself now. So for the seventh episode David was going to write one and we wanted it to be a stand— a somewhat standalone episode that wouldn't require too much heavy lifting on the part of the audience in terms of backstory and what have you. So this seemed like a good opportunity to get into that and— I think it— I'm trying to remember where the idea of a prisoner having escaped came up. I think it came up in the room but I could be wrong. David Eick might have had that idea on his own, but I think it was something that came out of story discussions about what would prompt this secret of Adama's— prompt the revelation of the secret of Adama's. After all, he'd been holding onto this secret for a while. And there was something interesting about saying, "Okay. When the Cylon attack happened during the Colonies, was there a part of Adama that was starting to go, 'Did we bring this on somehow?' Did something that he was personally involved with have the potential to have brought on the attack?"

Now, to be fair, we never really wanted to say that Adama was directly responsible for the attack on the Colonies. And indeed the episode doesn't really say that. The question is, "Does he feel responsible? Does, in his mind, does he still harbor some lingering doubt that perhaps the events that he were [sic] involved with had some unexpected blowback that resulted in the attack on the Colonies?" But I wanted to make it clear, and I think it was important to all of us that it not really be so simple, that one black ops recon mission behind Cylon lines could've really brought about the cataclysm. That clearly the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] had been working on it for a very, very long time. They had agents in place. They had sleeper cells, etc., etc. They were working Baltar for years. So even though Adama felt like he's— his hands weren't entirely clean and we could believe that as a character he felt personally responsible, the show goes out of its way to make sure that that direct connection is never actually made.

This sequence [the arrival of the [[Cylon Raider (RDM)|Cylon Raider]]] was cut down quite a bit. There was a longer section here. This is the [[Cylon Raider (RDM)|Cylon Raider]] aboard ''Galactica'' now. This had a little more bells and whistles attached to it. There was more of a protocols being barked about. Going through the various steps that they took to safeguard the ship, and so on. The chase was actually even longer. The chase in space, of [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] and [[Louanne Katraine|Kat]] escorting the Raider in. Or getting the Raider to the ''Galactica''. Its maneuverings and all that. There was a longer VFX sequence that ultimately was a little bit confusing in terms of where they were, spatially, in regards to ''Galactica'', you got a little confused in some of the screen directions, and also we were just fighting time as always, as you hear my refrain in these sections, time is always a really difficult thing.

Now this episode is the first episode of this season I didn't personally take a pass at through my typewriter, as it were. After writing the first two and rewriting the subsequent four or five, depending on how you count, I was getting to what we in writing business call [[w:Burnout (psychology)|burnout]]. (Chuckles.) I was getting really toasty and tired and at a certain p— I th— in some part— in some ways the flaws in episodes five and six can be attributed to my own fatigue, at a certain point. I don't really know how guys like [[w:Aaron Sorkin|Aaron Sorkin]] and [[w:David E. Kelley|David Kelley]] do it, where they literally write every single word of every single episode and do it, like, over and over again and do it brilliantly. I find that I can do, like, five... five in a row before I st— I'm really starting to get tired and you're just like putting words down on the page. And you're just trying to get through the day and get your pages out because the show doesn't stop. That's one of the challenges of being showrunner in television is that ultimately you're responsible for all the episodes and you feel the obligation as you're going through them to make each one of those best you— they can be and because you are the creator and the head writer they all have to have a certain voice. They're— you're try— all the writers on the staff are trying to capture your voice for the show. And so as you're rewriting it you're bringing it closer to what you think your voice is for the show. But at a certain point you star— it becomes [[w:Diminishing returns|diminishing returns]]. It becomes— your fatigue level, or at least my fatigue level, is starting to overwhelm the fact that it's my "voice". Ok, we're out of the tease.


== Act 1 ==

So, this one [[David Eick|David]] did solo and I really didn't rewrite any of it. I gave extensive notes, of course, and so did the studio, and the network, and the director's notes, and so on. So it wasn't like there was just one draft here. But David carried the burden on this particular episode. There's only one scene that I took a pass on. We'll get to that later.

This little bit [flashback to military meeting] was interesting in that it was our first glimpse inside [[Fleet Headquarters|Colonial Fleet Headquarters]]. It's not much of a set. It's a very constricted set because at this point we were now all in the cost saving portion of our season, trying desperately to contain costs, keep the story small and producable so that we could start saving money per episode to make up for the vast cost overruns that we'd incurred at the beginning of the season.

This was a nice little bit for [[Cottle]] to come back and do. It seemed realistic that the first thing that he would be doing would be down in [[sickbay]] doing a physical. I love the fact that Cottle offers him a cigarette. (Laughs.)

There were various versions of [[Laura Roslin|Laura]]'s involvement in the storyline. In early drafts, Laura started to smell a rat pretty early in the show. Probably at the same point, structurally, as she does now, when she's in the scene coming up with Laura— with [[William Adama|Adama]] and [[Tory Foster|Tory]] and [[Daniel Novacek|Novacek]]. But afte— [Quick shot of ''Galactica's'' damaged landing bay.] Oh there's a great visual effects still showing some of the damage from the [[New Caprica]] storyline. This little scene— anyway. Laura, in early drafts, started to smell a rat, realizes something was wrong. Adama wouldn't tell her. And so what she did was to enlist [[Lee Adama|Lee]]. She got Lee to do some digging and try to find out what the secret was that Adama was trying to hide. And in those early drafts, what he had was, he had actual audio tapes of the encounter— of the mission. There were secret tapes that were somewhere in the— ''[[Galactica (RDM)|Galactica]]'s'' audio archives that we were saying. There was an actual room with audio archives on analog tapes, in keeping with the fact that the ''Galactica'' computers are not nearly as powerful as our— as many modern day computers are, and they're not networked, etc. So there were actual tape banks down below some place that mission tapes were kept in, and there was a secret one that had the exchanges between Adama and Bulldog aboard the ''[[Valkyrie]]''. Now some of the— we started running into all kinds of problems with that particular storyline. I had trouble believing that the audio tapes of Adama aboard the Valkyrie— he had kept, versus destroying, and that he had kept them and transferred them to ''Galactica'' where they could be found. And Lee was going to find them and play them back and confront his father with the truth and his father was going to be very upset and angry. I think in one draft Adama even hauled off and smack— and hit Lee, for the first time, which was what's— gonna be a— an amazing moment but, didn't feel like we had really earned it legitimately, so we started backing off the idea of the tapes. There was something provocative about hearing the tapes. It was the scene at the beginning of [[w:Apocalypse Now|''Apocalypse Now'']] where they're playing the tapes of Colonel Kurtz, or it was like the conversation. Here's a tape of something from the past and it gave Lee a real drive in the show to find out what was going on. I'll come back to that later.

This scene, the flashback scene aboard the [[Basestar (RDM)|Cylon baseship]]. Virtually all the dialogue here, interestingly enough, is improvised by [[Lucy Lawless]]. The scene was supposed to be really [[w:MOS (film)|MOS]], silent, and it was really just her pacing around talking to him in the cage and you weren't gonna really s— hear anything. But on the day Lucy went into character and started improvving all this stuff, all this— I think she and the director worked out this thing with the rattling the bars of the cage, but all of her dialogue is actually something that Lucy improvved. And it's great. And we weren't gonna even use it but it was so good that we decided to really use it in the show. And it's really another testament to the contribution of the cast and the actors. The cast are the actors, of course. Of the cast to the show. They really provide a great deal of texture and a great deal of import to their characters and to the scenes and, in this particular case, actually wrote the scene herself. So it's really a testament to Lucy's ability and her identification with the character and her understanding of the world and understanding of what this show is about that she was able to just improv all that off the top of her head.

Like I said, the storyline with Laura was going to be Laura realizing that something was amiss. That Laura— there was something— there was a secret Adama was keeping from her and she was gonna get Lee to ferret it out. And when Lee ferreted out the information and found the tapes of his father and confronted him with them, that was when Adama actually resigned. Adama was gonna actually resign command of [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], turn command of the Fleet over to Lee. And it's only after they discover what— that Bulldog's mission— that he was intentionally let go by the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] and ordered that he— in order for him to come to ''Galactica'' and disrupt everything and screw with the command and really cause chaos that they pulled back from— that Adama pulled back and was convinced to maintain his command of the Fleet. Like I said, the audio tapes were problematic and hard to believe. And then we just started, for time and space, we started realizing that didn't have really time to do this whole Lee investigative story and that the investigative story was not nearly as interesting as the personal story was. Which is often the case, I find in this show, that ofttimes we concoct these intricate plots and a lot of moving parts to get you to the fourth act and then as you're working through the scripts, as you're working through the drafts, you discover that, or I discover, that the thing that is really interesting to me are all the character moments and how it impacts on the people and I end up cutting plot and simplifying plot to focus on the characters. Which is generally the opposite of how TV is done. I mean, there's an old axiom in television that when you're long the first thing you cut is comedy, the second thing you cut is character, and then, only then, do you start cutting into plot. I often go the opposite. I prefer to hang onto character at all costs and humor is something that we're usually have very, very little of so typically we want to hang onto the little tiny comedic moments whenever and wherever they are. And so I'm loathe to c— but I'm loathe to cut character, ever, so ofttimes I will sacrifice plot for character because, in just my personal view, character is what it's all about and it's all about these people and that's why you're tuning in, week after week, is to see what happens to these people and that the plot mechanics are never quite as interesting as the character dynamics and watching what happens to them.

I like this little exchange with Laura and Adama at the end of their scene because she knows somethin's up. He's not giving it to her and she's willing to give him the space. That sh— the [[Government_of_the_Twelve_Colonies#Executive_Branch_2|President]] is not pressing, is not pushing, is not pushing him to the wall.

This little moment here, after she's gone. Man alone in his cabin, and uncharacteristic outburst of violence. Knocking over the chair.

And then cutting from there to [[Number Three|D'anna]] just randomly walking the corridors. For just a bare moment I think you do wonder what's going on and is she clearly on ''Galactica''. It's obviously a dream sequence, at a certain point. And I think the trick is always to play with the audience's expectation in a dream sequence. Is it a dream, or is it not? And the closer to reality you can make the sequence, the more believable that it is that perhaps it is something real and you're getting a lot of mileage out of just wondering which is which. As a nice touch, the door there saying, "End of line." Which of course is something the [[Hybrid]] says over on the Cylon baseship all the time. {{podcastref|endofline|00:16:56}} "End of line," by the way, as an aside, in terms of the Hybrid, is a callback to [[w:Tron (film)|''Tron'']], of all things. ''Tron'' the f— the largely forgotten computer animated movie from [[w:The Walt Disney Company|Disney]] that was done in the 80's. It's [[w:Master Control Program (Tron)|Master Command Program]] always had "End of line" as a end of a sentence and I always liked the rhythm of that and the computer voice of that, "End of line." And so I gave it to the Hybrid.

This little bit here with D'anna waking up with [[Number Six|Six]] and [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]. I had to keep like arguing internally with various people, including David, about the fact that that was worth doing, because I like the fact that we just jump ahead in their relationship. That after last week you saw that D'anna— that Baltar had made a breakthrough with D'anna in the torture sequence. And I thought it was perfectly acceptable to jump ahead in that narrative and just say, "Ok. You know what? In between episodes, essentially, he's— he has now started an affair with D'anna and Six." The Cylons having no real problem with those sorts of relationships. One imagines that there's probably all kinds of interesting things going on with all the various Cylons in many combinations and many numbers of partners, so they wouldn't really have a problem with sharing a bed with a man and a woman as well.

The [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] relat— we're in the Tigh scene now. The Tigh-Adama relationship also went through various changes. I'd say the biggest thing that changed overall is as the Lee story receded, as Lee's investigation went away, the thing that really started to come to the fore was the fact that this was— this episode was also going to be the show that rehabilitated Tigh. That got Tigh to earn his place back in [[CIC]]. That by saving Adama at the end he would have essentially turned a corner and started the road back to being the man we all know and love. Some of us love. I love. And so scenes like this started take on a greater and greater importance because this show is— generally TV shows are never about the guest star, really. Good TV shows. Guest stars are usually just catalysts and methods of triggering greater events for the main cast. And so I wanted Bulldog to really be a catalyst for a story about Tigh and Adama.


== Act 2 ==

I love the pitted and scarred exterior shots of [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']].

[[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] still torn up about the death of [[Ellen Tigh]]. I think this is something that haunts the man in a way that few other actions that he's taken really ever have. I miss Ellen. I miss [[Kate Vernon]]. I miss that part of the show very much. I don't really regret what happened. I don't regret making the decision to have him kill her. I just regret not having her in the show anymore. Not having that spark of life that was so unlike any of the other characters in the show and what it said— this other side of Colonel Tigh. Tigh tell— in editing I played around with— Generally in editing I go in and play with story structure. I've said this before that I tend to think of editing as— you go into your editing bay to do your second draft of the script, and that's again what I did here. I played around with the sequence of events. I believe that in script order this scene took place much later, after we had already revealed the secret to the audience of what they're— the guys are talking about, and [[William Adama|Adama]] had already confessed what was going on to [[Lee Adama|Lee]], and then later you cut down to Tigh and [[Daniel Novacek|Bulldog]]. And I swapped the order around and intercut the two scenes because I felt like once you heard the secret from Adama, once he had told you what had really happened, there was really very little investment in hearing Tigh say it again. Hearing Novacek find out the truth of what we just found out. And by intercutting the two scenes you provide more urgency and tension by saying that events are happening quickly. People are finding out things simultaneously. Bulldog feels a little bit more dangerous because you don't know what he's gonna do. Adama's just coming to come to grips with himself. And it's also a way of spreadi— of parceling out the information so that you can hear it in one fell swoop between these two scenes as opposed to hear it once and then hear it again later.

There were questions in term of the backstory that we had to wrestle through a lot. Things like, "Why the ''[[Valkyrie]]''?" Why the ''Valkyrie'' came about because if it had been on ''Galactica'', it seemed to fight a couple of things. One was that if the mission had taken place aboard ''Galactica'' that tended to undercut the idea that it was a museum ship on its way out and it certainly wouldn't have been involved in [[w:Black Ops|black ops]] operations. It also meant that virtually everyone else aboard the ship would know who this guy was. He would have many friends and contacts and would— it wouldn't just be Tigh and Adama. [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]] and [[Karl Agathon|Helo]], everyone one else would have an investment in this guy and his story. And it really wouldn't be the closely guarded secret of Adama's anymore. So we came up with this idea of the ''Valkyrie''. Just saying that Adama had been on an another [[battlestar]] before ''Galactica''), which made sense. I mean, why not? The man had had a long career. And also as we developed it, it also felt like that was the reason, that the black ops operation was the reason why Adama was kicked to the curb and given command of this old [[The Bucket|bucket]] that was going into retirement and so was he. It was— it provided a little bit of backstory and a little reasoning for some of the events we had already established. 'Cause I think one of the mysteries of the show, well, not reall— Not really a mystery but it's just a blank that had not been filled in was the question of why Adama was on his way out. Why was he on this old battlewagon in the first place? Here's a guy that, by all accounts was respected throughout [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], had been a veteran of the [[Cylon War|First War]] and yet had never risen above the [[Military Ranks (RDM)|rank]] of Commander before his retirement, and was in fact, commanding a ship of misfits and a broken down old bucket. And this explained why we got there. And for me that was a valuable thing in the life of the show. 'Cause it starts to fill in a greater picture of what was happening on day of the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|attack]]. You understand why Adama was in the position where he was.

Now this particular scene. This particular scene actually has more to it. We got into the editing room and I started to have second thoughts about some things we had done in the script and I argued very strongly with [[David Eick|David]] about cutting the moment where Adama actually resigned his command. The end of the scene was Adama officially resigning his command and gave up command of [[the Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] to Lee. Literally stepped aside. When I saw it I felt like it just wasn't ring— it just didn't ring true. I just called bullshit on it. It was like, given everything that he'd gone through and everything that had happened in show and the man had never quit. I believe that this had a huge impact on him. That this was a heavy burden that he'd been carrying for lo these many years, but I didn't believe that he actually would resign his command. So I pressed David pretty hard to not go there.

{{podcastref|pegasusredress|24:49}}All these little flashback sequences to the interior of the ''Valkyrie'' is essen— the interior of the ''Valkyrie'' is essentially a redress of the leftover pieces of [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. This is— you can tell by the shape and some of the background pieces there that that's the ''Pegasus'' [[CIC]] that's simply lit in different way so that it feels a little different than ''Pegasus''. {{podcastref|stealthredress|25:14}}The [[Stealthstar|stealth ship]] is a redress of the— of [[Blackbird|our own stealth ship]] that we did in last years "[[Flight of the Phoenix]]".

The backstory itself. You can argue that there's certain things that we did in the backstory in the missio— the stealth mission that don't quite add up that I never f— we never quite licked. Part of it is just the physics of space— or the the size of space. As [[w:Rick Berman|Rick Berman]] used to always tell us, "Space is big." And the idea that there's an actual line out there, the [[Armistice Line]] and that Bulldog was just on— a couple of klicks on the other side of the line and would get caught, I think we're pushing the boundaries a little bit. I don't think we're breaking them, but I think it's pushing believability. After all, space is so vast. One would imagine that the Armistice Line, if there is such a line in space would cover such an enormous amount of space, it's hard to believe that he gets only a couple of klicks on the other side before he's caught, and also that he could see anything from just a couple klicks on the other side. So that's a bit of a stretch. But that— but it worked best for this story to have him literally saying, "I'm over the line," and then have events happen rather than get into long technical explanations of where he is and where he's not.

A lot of the backstory, in terms of his mission, was influenced by the [[w:U-2 Crisis of 1960|U-2 incident]] with [[w:Gary Powers|Gary Powers]] in the 1950s where Gary Powers was on a secret mission over the [[w:Soviet Union|Soviet Union]], flying for the [[w:Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], I believe, and was shot down by the Soviets and there was— everyone d— the [[w:United States|US]] denied up and down that it was happening, and then of course the Soviets produced the pilot and that put the lie to what [[w:Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] had been telling the world and became a huge international incident.

We played a lot with what the backstory actually was. At some point it was gonna be more about the [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)#Tauron|Taurons]] which— who we were setting up as a troublesome colony within the [[Government of the Twelve Colonies|federal system]] of [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)|the Colonies]] and that the idea that ''Galactica'' had been sent out to deal with the Taurons and while they were dealing with the Taurons they were taking a— there was an incident around a world that the Taurons were doing some illegal mining and they sent ''Galactica'' out there to pull them off the planet to force them to leave. And while they were there they were gonna take advantage of the fact that they were near the Cylon border, the Armistice Line, and in some versions of the script the mining was actually taking place on the other side of the Armistice Line and the planet was clearly in Cylon territory and that ''Galactica'' was being sent there to pull them out before the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] found them. And then they were gonna take advantage of the situation and do the recon mission anyway. All of that became wildly complicated so we stripped down the story, and stripped it down, stripped it down, to just make it very simple.

Again, the idea that Adama feels personally responsible for the attack on the Colonies is an interesting one. That it tapped into his own deep-seated insecurities about his life as a military officer and some of the decisions he's been forced to make down through the years. And that, "What was the responsibility of the Colonials for what happened to them?" That had Adama done something, he could plausibly look back and say, "Maybe I had a hand in the attack as well."

Lee's def— Lee trying to get Adama to take himself off the hook, this also had an additional line in it someplace about Lee saying that, "Maybe this is what they wanted." That, "Maybe the Admiralty wanted to provoke an attack to start a war," was a line that was scripted and shot and I felt, as I was watching it in editing that it was too much. It felt like too big of a conspiracy and I didn't believe it. I didn't believe that the Admiralty was deliberately setting up a war between the Colonials and the Cylons.


== Act 3 ==

The idea was that the Cylon— I objected to the idea of [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|the Admiralty]] deliberately trying to stoke a war, 'cause I don't think that's what Admiralties do. I don't think that they set up these vast conspiracies in order to deliberately provoke an attack, and that seemed like a wrong thing to say about the [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|Colonial Fleet]] and about just generally the way the military operates in a democracy. I don't buy that line of reasoning. And generals and soldiers and sailors are usually are the ones that are the most reluctant to start wars. They're usually looking for ways for— to avoid wars and would— are not usually looking for ways to gin up a war. This, despite the way Hollywood typically portrays them. So I had to cut that line 'cause i felt like that was stepping across a line for us.

This little sequence and storyline about [[Number Three|D'Anna]] discovering that there is something between life and death was a really interesting one. This will— sets up even— sets up a storyline that will continue to play over the course of the next handful of episodes as D'anna starts to realize that there's more to the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] than she's ever been aware of, and that the other Cylons are aware of, and this will lead to a fairly big thing by the end of the [[Season 3 (2006-07)|season]]. {{podcastref|fivecylons|30:51}}The notion that there are five Cylon— the final five Cylons and who are they and that perhaps by dying over and over again, which is what she starts to do, she starts to essentially commit suicide by [[Cylon Centurion|Centurion]] and in various other ways because she's desperate to experience the [[Resurrection (RDM)|downloading process]]. And during that download she glimpses something, as you saw. She glimpses something that, in a set and in a place that we've been before. And I'll leave it to you sharp eyed viewers to tell me [[Opera House|exactly where]] that set was where she saw the five figures. And I'm sure you can.

Meanwhile, back aboard [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]... This is [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] looking at gun camera footage from the chase and starting to realize something's not right. This is a classic bit of plot that the investigator blowing up frames and studying trajectories starts to realize that something is amiss. This was always in the draft that they realize that the Cylons had let that [[Cylon Raider (RDM)|Raider]] go, and what could be the motives for that. The question was really about when these investigative beats play. {{podcastref|seamus|32:06}}I think there was an additional scene with Kara as sh— and she went and confronted [[Daniel Novacek|Novacek]], who in early drafts was named Seamus, by the way.

All that stuff with Novacek doing push-ups and stuff, this is all stuff in [[David Eick|David]]'s original first draft. I think he liked this motif of the workout and the callback to his time in the cell. In some ways I think it's an homage on David's part to scenes from [[w:Cape Fear (1991 film)|''Cape Fear'']] with [[w:Robert De Niro|Robert De Niro]] working out in— alone in his cell.

It's at this point, where you starting— the intercutting is starting to develop more pace and threat because eve-, again, events are happening simultaneously. As [[William Adama|Adama]] is going to see Novacek, Kara is going to talk to [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]]. It wasn't really scripted like this, but we cut it up like this to create urgency. In the first cut of the show it worked pretty well but it— there were long stretches and seemed like the plot was taking a little bit too long to get going, and by cutting these scenes in this way, by saying that they're all happening simultaneously, gives you a little bit more drive going through the show.

The relationship with— between Kara and Tigh... Actually next week's episode was— had a bit of business in it that subsequently got cut that explained why these two are actually much friendlier towards each other than they used to be a year and a half ago. Unfortunately that got cut from next week's episode. We'll talk about that in more depth, but essentially we're taking as read that the relationship between Kara and Tigh is much closer and much friendlier than it was, certainly was, in [[miniseries|the pilot]] and in subsequent episodes.

And this is Novacek beating the crap out of Adama. That is a redress, I believe, of Tigh's quarters, where Novacek is staying, because we don't really have guest quarters in ''Galactica''.

We played around with this act break quite a bit. At what point do we go out of the act? There was— we cut it several times with him just hitting him, going out there. Other times going out with the pipe on his neck as the act break. There were other versions of the cut that had— that pushed this scene entirely into [[Podcast:Hero#Act 4|act four]]. And other sequences— other attempts that moved it completely into act three. Essentially it's an arbitrary decision if you're looking at this on DVD because you watch it all as one solid story, but constructing the act breaks and the timing of it consumes an inordinate amount of outta time in the editing bay, 'cause you're trying to balance out the length of the acts so that the commercials don't seem like they're falling on top of you and you have one act that's fifteen minutes and one act that's four minutes, for example. But as a result, sometimes you're shifting pieces around in editorial just to balance out the acts, and because of the conventions of television each act break has to end on a moment of jeopardy or a moment of tension, and you're always hunting through the show to find those moments of tension to get to your act break.

Now the version that we've gone for here. You could've gotten out of this act almost at any earlier point. You could've gotten out at any of those moments. When Tigh came in with the gun, you coulda gone out when Novacek hit him with the pipe. In this version we opted to push all the way through the scene because it felt like, or David certainly felt like, ta— cutting this scene in half over the act break dissipated some of the tension and by the time you came back that you had— you were away from the moment too long, and he really wanted to keep it all contained and really play it all through and understand what had really happened. I think it's questionable, just in terms of storytelling. There's a part of me that still feels like the show is over at the end of this act. And my TV instincts tell me that we should've gone out an earlier moment of tension, but I think that by keeping it, this scene, together and playing it all through you certainly get the dramatic impact much greater. You're in the scene a little bit more and you're watching to see what's gonna happen next as opposed to just chopping it up.

This was the scene that I took a pass at, that I alluded to earlier. It is really the scene where everyone talks about what's really going on and where you take Tigh all the way across to the point where he not only is there and saves Adama, but is essentially on the road back. This is the key moment here where it's Saul realizing that he wants to come back. That when the chips were down he came and saved his— saved Adama. And that the scene shifts from the scene about Adama and Novacek, it shifts to a scene about Adama and Tigh. Now— and that's the act four— that's the act three break.


== Act 4 ==

So here at the top of act four the show dramatically is over. The rest of act four is essentially a wrap-up. That little insert of him submitting his resignation to [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] was shot after the fact. That was a pickup line that we went back and got later. Because of the way we had reconstructed the acts this no longer had a proper run up to it. The resignation is now a new idea in this scene. It used to be something, like I said, was in the [[Lee Adama|Lee]] scene and we didn't ha— there was no discussion of him resigning in the script as shot. So later, we had to go back and pickup that little moment, all the up to the point where [[William Adama|Adama]] sits down was all a pickup scene shot later.

And here we have Laura essentially providing the rationale for why it's not Adama's fault. Why it's not Adama's— really wasn't his responsibility for the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|events that occurred]]. And unfortunately this scene still has the line. We cut it earlier, but the scene here has Laura voicing the line about whether [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|the Admiralty]] wanted the war. I think we went back and forth in that editing. I think [[David Eick|David]] ultimately wanted it in and I let this one stay in after having cut the earlier one, and probably should have forced the issue and cut that one as well.

"Forty-five years of courageous service" as opposed to forty years. I think in the script and as shot we kept saying forty years for some reason and kept not going back and forgetting to fix it. And we had to— it wasn't until we were in editorial that we had to reali— that we realized that we never got around to actually fixing that [[Continuity errors (RDM)|continuity problem]] and I had to loop in lines and reshoot the insert on the card and to make sur— to make it clear that it's forty-five years of service.

And also, this is an idea we've used in the show before, that there's something about these people that've done things and have to go out and their punishment is to put on a brave front for their men and for the people that serve for them. A similar thing was done with [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]]... when was that? The point when [[James Lyman|Jammer]]— when Jammer went to [[brig|jail]] instead of Tyrol. I guess that's back in [[Season 1 (2004-05)|season one]] and Adama's line to him was about having to go out and his punishment would be to stand on the deck every day and know that an innocent man was in jail and it was his fault. And yet he was gonna have to continue on, and that the guilt of that would be his punishment. And here is the same idea that Adama's penance for his own interior guilt was really going to be that he's gonna have to stand up in front of all these people and get a [[Medal of Distinction|medal]] and pretend that he's a hero, even though in his own eyes he doesn't think he's a hero.

This little sequence here on the [[hangar deck]], I was actually here for this shooting, which was— that's something of a rarity in [[Season 3 (2006-07)|season three]]. I'm standing off to camera left during this closeup of Adama. I watched them do all this take. It was also great to be on the set because literally the entire cast was here for this scene so it was cool to be there and see them all sitting there in their flip-flops and sneakers, 'cause that's what they're generally wearing instead of their combat boots during that scene.

I ha— I kept pushing. Had to have a wrap up to [[Daniel Novacek|Novacek]]. This kept getting dropped from the cut. I kept putting it back in. You had to wrap up what was gonna happen to Novacek, where he was gonna go, and presumably he's going off to some other ship in [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] to rest and relax and try to rehabilitate, recuperate. That after his experience it seemed unlikely they would put him right back in a cockpit again, and yet we— he's obviously a guest star and a noted actor, expensive guest star and he wasn't gonna become part of the regular family, so you wouldn't— we had to send him somewhere so that you wouldn't expecting to see him in the [[Pilot ready rooms|ready room]] next week.

Actually, the ship he's going to is where we sent [[Boxey (RDM)|Boxey]], so I think he and Boxey are gonna go and have a very special relationship on their own.

This last little bit with [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] is just the first— him on the road back. He's got the [[Uniforms (RDM)|uniform jacket]] on again. He comes to see his old friend. He's not— he's been pretty anti-social, just hiding out, burrowed in his quarters for many episodes. And this his where his road to recovery officially starts. At the end of earlier drafts, Adama— there was a point where Adama was actually going to give the medal to Saul in the ceremony. It was like a twist where when she gives him the medal he says, "I can't take it, but there's someone— there is someone here who's earned it." And he calls up Tigh and they give him the medal and everyone cheers. And that seemed— it seemed a little melodramatic and also didn't know that Tigh had really earned the medal in any real way or that Adama would give it to him, or that Tigh would accept it. And it seemed like what was important was the connection between the two men and the personal relationship between the two men. And so as we were working through the drafts I gave the note to just have Tigh come in and start talking about [[Ellen Tigh|Ellen]]. That, essentially, that was the big thing. That he had never told Adama what had happened down on that planet and what was the— at the core of everything that was going on with him ever since he got back from [[New Caprica]]. So that's why this scene exists is to reunite the two friends in a real way and let him talk about it. And I still like the fact that Tigh comes and asks for a drink, and Adama doesn't judge him about it. He just says, "Me too." And is gonna drink with him, knowing that this is Tigh's problem and accepting that it's Tigh's problem and it's something that the two of them are gonna do together while they sit and talk about the things that neither of them has spoken about.

And that's "[[Hero]]". That's episode seven. I think it's an interesting episode. I think it's a little more conventional than many of the episodes that we typically do. I think that at the end of the day it's the kind of episode that is a solid single, for us. It accomplishes everything it sets out to accomplish. It's a standalone episode so new viewers are not lost in the giant backstory. And I think it provides an interesting bit of texture and background to Adama and [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]— Adama and Tigh. So thank you for listening, that's the end of the podcast, and I will talk to you again for "[[Unfinished Business]]", episode eight, which is one of my personal favorites of the season and of the series. So take care, good night, and good luck.

Podcast:Hero

2007-01-24T17:27:54Z

TypoFixer: Fix typos

{{podcast|author=Steelviper|emailAuthor2=|suffix=|additionalCopyright=}}
== Teaser ==
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm [[Ronald D. Moore]], executive producer and developer of [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|the new ''Battlestar Galactica'']], here t o welcome you to the podcast for what we affectionately call episode seven, "[[Hero]]". And there won't be any Scotch today. It's a little too early in the day, even for a hardcore like me. (Lights a cigarette.) The smokes are [[w:Nat Sherman|Shermans]]. Trying a little somethin' different. So actually my wife recommended from back in her smoking days. She no longer imbi- partakes of the tobacco leaf. But I do on occasion. I don't smoke nearly as much as all of you think I do.

Anyway. Episode seven, "Hero". This one was a little bit more of a one-off than what we typically do. A little bit more of a single, self contained story carrying us through the whole episode. We felt at the beginning of the season we had arced out the entire [[New Caprica]] storyline that took us through to "[[Exodus, Part II|Exodus]]" and then into "[[Collaborators]]", and then we had this two-part episode that developed that was about the [[Lymphocytic encephalitis|infected]] [[Basestar (RDM)|baseship]] and the consequences of that, culminating in the decision of whether or not the people on [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']] were going to use the biological weapon. And then after that we wanted to do a series of a little bit more contained episodes that weren't quite as serialized, didn't have as many long-running storylines as we had been playing for a while. And so one of the first ones that came up was this story, "Hero". This is written by [[David Eick]], my producing partner. And the origins of this, though, actually go back a little bit further than [[Season 3 (2006-07)|this season]]. This was initially a concept that was pitched during the [[Season 2 (2005-06)|second season]] by [[David Weddle]]. I believe this is his idea. It might have been him and [[Bradley Thompson|his partner]], right? I remember David mentioning it in the room, had this idea that they would discover something about [[William Adama|Adama]]. That Adama would- had been holding a secret that essentially he was holding the idea that- holding secret the idea that he had participating in a [[w:Black op|black op]] mission before the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|Cylon attack]]. And that he would secretly blame himself, on some level, for helping to prompt the Cylon attack on [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)|the Colonies]] itself. Which is a pretty big idea, and it took a lot of discussion. We were like, "Ok. What does that mean in concrete terms?" I liked the idea that there were black ops operations going on amid the Colonials before the Cylon attack. After all, forty y- our backstory is that there's forty years between the last Cylon- the first [[Cylon War]] and the attack on the Colonies. And it seemed plausible that the [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|Colonial Fleet]] had been doing something during that whole time and it was curious to see what was going on the other side of the [[Armistice Line]].

This little opening sequence here with [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] and the picture, which we just went past in ''[[Colonial One]]'', like I've said before, I want that picture for my own. That'll have a point of pride in my own home someday of [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]. And I think David knew that, and I think that's why he wrote in that little piece about putting Baltar's picture over the toilet. I don't think it was so much a slam against [[James Callis|James]] and the- or the character as it was tweaking me that my coveted picture was going above the toilet.

Anyway. This sequence- this concept, that Adama was holding a secret all these t- all this time was a pretty interesting and provocative one within the writing staff, and I liked it, but we d- it didn't seem to find a place in the second season and we- it kicked around in our list of suggested stories as we were approaching the seventh- the third season, getting way ahead of myself now. So for the seventh episode David was going to write one and we wanted it to be a stand- a somewhat standalone episode that wouldn't require too much heavy lifting on the part of the audience in terms of backstory and what have you. So this seemed like a good opportunity to get into that and- I think it- I'm trying to remember where the idea of a prisoner having escaped came up. I think it came up in the room but I could be wrong. David Eick might have had that idea on his own, but I think it was something that came out of story discussions about what would prompt this secret of Adama's- prompt the revelation of the secret of Adama's. After all, he'd been holding onto this secret for a while. And there was something interesting about saying, "Ok. When the Cylon attack happened during the Colonies, was there a part of Adama that was starting to go, 'Did we bring this on somehow?' Did something that he was personally involved with have the potential to have brought on the attack?"

Now. To be fair, we never really wanted to say that Adama was directly responsible for the attack on the colonies. And indeed the episode doesn't really say that. The question is, "Does he feel responsible? Does, in his mind, does he still harbor some lingering doubt that perhaps the events that he were involved with had some unexpected blowback that resulted in the attack on the Colonies?" But I wanted to make it clear, and I think it was important to all of us that it not really be so simple. That one black ops recon mission behind Cylon lines could've really brought about the cataclysm. That clearly the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] had been working on it for a very, very long time. They had agents in place. They had sleeper cells, etc., etc. They were working Baltar for years. So even though Adama felt like he's- his hands weren't entirely clean and we could believe that as a character he felt personally responsible, the show goes out of its way to make sure that that direct connection is never actually made.

This sequence was cut down quite a bit. There was a longer section here. This is the [[Cylon Raider (RDM)|Cylon Raider]] aboard ''Galactica'' now. This had a little more bells and whistles attached to it. There was more of a protocols being barked about. Going through the various steps that they took to safeguard the ship, and so on. The chase was actually even longer. The chase in space, of [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] and [[Louanne Katraine|Kat]] escorting the Raider in. Or getting the Raider to the ''Galactica''. It's maneuverings and all that. There was a longer VFX sequence that ultimately was a little bit confusing in terms of where they were, spatially, in regards to ''Galactica'', you got a little confused in some of the screen directions, and also we were just fighting time as always, as you hear my refrain in these sections, time is always a really difficult thing.

Now this episode is the first episode of this season I didn't personally take a pass at through my typewriter, as it were. After writing the first two and rewriting the subsequent four or five, depending on how you count, I was getting to what we in writing business call [[w:Burnout (psychology)|burnout]]. (Chuckles.) I was getting really toasty and tired and at a certain p- I th- in some part- in some ways the flaws in episodes five and six can be attributed to my own fatigue, at a certain point. I don't really know how guys like [[w:Aaron Sorkin|Aaron Sorkin]] and [[w:David E. Kelley|David Kelley]] do it, where they literally write every single word of every single episode and do it, like, over and over again and do it brilliantly. I find that I can do, like, five... five in a row before I st- I'm really starting to get tired and you're just like putting words down on the page. And you're just trying to get through the day and get your pages out because the show doesn't stop. That's one of the challenges of being showrunner in television is that ultimately you're responsible for all the episodes and you feel the obligation as you're going through them to make each one of those best you- they can be and because you are the creator and the head writer they all have to have a certain voice. They're- you're try- all the writers on the staff are trying to capture your voice for the show. And so as you're rewriting it you're bringing it closer to what you think your voice is for the show. But at a certain point you star- it becomes [[w:Diminishing returns|diminishing returns]]. It becomes- your fatigue level, or at least my fatigue level, is starting to overwhelm the fact that it's my "voice". Ok, we're out of the tease.


== Act 1 ==

So, this one [[David Eick|David]] did solo and I really didn't rewrite any of it. I gave extensive notes, of course, and so did the studio, and the network, and the director's notes, and so on. So it wasn't like there was just one draft here. But David carried the burden on this particular episode. There's only one scene that I took a pass on. We'll get to that later.

This little bit was interesting in that it was our first glimpse inside [[Fleet Headquarters|Colonial Fleet Headquarters]]. It's not much of a set. It's a very constricted set because at this point we were now all in the cost saving portion of our season, trying desperately to contain costs, keep the story small and producable so that we could start saving money per episode to make up for the vast cost overruns that we'd incurred at the beginning of the season.

This was a nice little bit for [[Cottle]] to come back and do. It seemed realistic that the first thing that he would be doing would be down in [[sickbay]] doing a physical. I love the fact that Cottle offers him a cigarette. (Laughs.)

There were various versions of [[Laura Roslin|Laura]]'s involvement in the storyline. In early drafts, Laura started to smell a rat pretty early in the show. Probably at the same point, structurally, as she does now, when she's in the scene coming up with Laura- with [[William Adama|Adama]] and [[Tory Foster|Tory]] and [[Daniel Novacek|Novacek]]. But afte- Oh there's a great visual effects still showing some of the damage from the [[New Caprica]] storyline. This little scene- anyway. Laura, in early drafts, started to smell a rat, realizes something was wrong. Adama wouldn't tell her. And so what she did was to enlist [[Lee Adama|Lee]]. She got Lee to do some digging and try to find out what the secret was that Adama was trying to hide. And in those early drafts, what he had was, he had actual audio tapes of the encounter- of the mission. There were secret tapes that were somewhere in the- [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]'s audio archives that we were saying. There was an actual room with audio archives on analog tapes, in keeping with the fact that the ''Galactica'' computers are not nearly as powerful as our- as many modern day computers are, and they're not networked, etc. So there were actual tape banks down below some place that mission tapes were kept in, and there was a secret one that had the exchanges between Adama and Bulldog aboard the ''[[Valkyrie]]''. Now some of the- we started running into all kinds of problems with that particular storyline. I had trouble believing that the audio tapes of Adama aboard the Valkyrie- he had kept, versus destroying, and that he had kept them and transferred them to ''Galactica'' where they could be found. And Lee was going to find them and play them back and confront his father with the truth and his father was going to be very upset and angry. I think in one draft Adama even hauled off and smack- and hit Lee, for the first time, which was what's- gonna be a- an amazing moment but, didn't feel like we had really earned it legitimately, so we started backing off the idea of the tapes. There was something provocative about hearing the tapes. It was the scene at the beginning of [[w:Apocalypse Now|''Apocalypse Now'']] where they're playing the tapes of Colonel Kurtz, or it was like the conversation. Here's a tape of something from the past and it gave Lee a real drive in the show to find out what was going on. I'll come back to that later.

This scene, the flashback scene aboard the [[Basestar (RDM)|Cylon baseship]]. Virtually all the dialogue here, interestingly enough, is improvised by [[Lucy Lawless]]. The scene was supposed to be really [[w:MOS (film)|MOS]], silent, and it was really just her pacing around talking to him in the cage and you weren't gonna really s- hear anything. But on the day Lucy went into character and started improvving all this stuff, all this- I think she and the director worked out this thing with the rattling the bars of the cage, but all of her dialog is actually something that Lucy improvved. And it's great. And we weren't gonna even use it but it was so good that we decided to really use it in the show. And it's really another testament to the contribution of the cast and the actors. The cast are the actors, of course. Of the cast to the show. They really provide a great deal of texture and a great deal of import to their characters and to the scenes and, in this particular case, actually wrote the scene herself. So it's really a testament to Lucy's ability and her identification with the character and her understanding of the world and understanding of what this show is about that she was able to just improv all that off the top of her head.

Like I said, the storyline with Laura was going to be Laura realizing that something was amiss. That Laura- there was something- there was a secret Adama was keeping from her and she was gonna get Lee to ferret it out. And when Lee ferreted out the information and found the tapes of his father and confronted him with them, that was when Adama actually resigned. Adama was gonna actually resign command of [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], turn command of the Fleet over to Lee. And it's only after they discover what- that Bulldog's mission- that he was intentionally let go by the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] and ordered that he- in order for him to come to ''Galactica'' and disrupt everything and screw with the command and really cause chaos that they pulled back from- that Adama pulled back and was convinced to maintain his command of the Fleet. Like I said, the audio tapes were problematic and hard to believe. And then we just started, for time and space, we started realizing that didn't have really time to do this whole Lee investigative story and that the investigative story was not nearly as interesting as the personal story was. Which is often the case, I find in this show, that ofttimes we concoct these intricate plots and a lot of moving parts to get you to the fourth act and then as you're working through the scripts, as you're working through the drafts, you discover that, or I discover, that the thing that is really interesting to me are all the character moments and how it impacts on the people and I end up cutting plot and simplifying plot to focus on the characters. Which is generally the opposite of how TV is done. I mean, there's an old axiom in television that when you're long the first thing you cut is comedy, the second thing you cut is character, and then, only then, do you start cutting into plot. I often go the opposite. I prefer to hang onto character at all costs and humor is something that we're usually have very, very little of so typically we want to hang onto the little tiny comedic moments whenever and wherever they are. And so I'm loathe to c- but I'm loathe to cut character, ever, so ofttimes I will sacrifice plot for character because, in just my personal view, character is what it's all about and it's all about these people and that's why you're tuning in, week after week, is to see what happens to these people and that the plot mechanics are never quite as interesting as the character dynamics and watching what happens to them.

I like this little exchange with Laura and Adama at the end of their scene because she knows somethin's up. He's not giving it to her and she's willing to give him the space. That sh- the [[Government_of_the_Twelve_Colonies#Executive_Branch_2|President]] is not pressing, is not pushing, is not pushing him to the wall.

This little moment here, after she's gone. Man alone in his cabin, and uncharacteristic outburst of violence. Knocking over the chair.

And then cutting from there to [[Number Three|D'anna]] just randomly walking the corridors. For just a bare moment I think you do wonder what's going on and is she clearly on ''Galactica''. It's obviously a dream sequence, at a certain point. And I think the trick is always to play with the audience's expectation in a dream sequence. Is it a dream, or is it not? And the closer to reality you can make the sequence, the more believable that it is that perhaps it is something real and you're getting a lot of mileage out of just wondering which is which. As a nice touch, the door there saying, "End of line." Which of course is something the [[Hybrid]] says over on the Cylon baseship all the time. {{podcastref|endofline|00:16:56}} "End of line," by the way, as an aside, in terms of the Hybrid, is a callback to [[w:Tron (film)|''Tron'']], of all things. ''Tron'' the f- the largely forgotten computer animated movie from [[w:The Walt Disney Company|Disney]] that was done in the 80's. It's [[w:Master Control Program (Tron)|Master Command Program]] always had "End of line" as a end of a sentence and I always liked the rhythm of that and the computer voice of that, "End of line." And so I gave it to the Hybrid.

This little bit here with D'anna waking up with [[Number Six|Six]] and [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]. I had to keep like arguing internally with various people, including David, about the fact that that was worth doing, because I like the fact that we just jump ahead in their relationship. That after last week you saw that D'anna- that Baltar had made a breakthrough with D'anna in the torture sequence. And I thought it was perfectly acceptable to jump ahead in that narrative and just say, "Ok. You know what? In between episodes, essentially, he's- he has now started an affair with D'anna and Six." The Cylons having no real problem with those sorts of relationships. One imagines that there's probably all kinds of interesting things going on with all the various Cylons in many combinations and many numbers of partners, so they wouldn't really have a problem with sharing a bed with a man and a woman as well.

The [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] relat- we're in the Tigh scene now. The Tigh-Adama relationship also went through various changes. I'd say the biggest thing that changed overall is as the Lee story receded, as Lee's investigation went away, the thing that really started to come to the fore was the fact that this was- this episode was also going to be the show that rehabilitated Tigh. That got Tigh to earn his place back in [[CIC]]. That by saving Adama at the end he would have essentially turned a corner and started the road back to being the man we all know and love. Some of us love. I love. And so scenes like this started take on a greater and greater importance because this show is- generally TV shows are never about the guest star, really. Good TV shows. Guest stars are usually just catalysts and methods of triggering greater events for the main cast. And so I wanted Bulldog to really be a catalyst for a story about Tigh and Adama.


== Act 2 ==

I love the pitted and scarred exterior shots of [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']].

[[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] still torn up about the death of [[Ellen Tigh]]. I think this is something that haunts the man in a way that few other actions that he's taken really ever have. I miss Ellen. I miss [[Kate Vernon]]. I miss that part of the show very much. I don't really regret what happened. I don't regret making the decision to have him kill her. I just regret not having her in the show anymore. Not having that spark of life that was so unlike any of the other characters in the show and what it said- this other side of Colonel Tigh. Tigh tell- in editing I played around with- Generally in editing I go in and play with story structure. I've said this before that I tend to think of editing as- you go into your editing bay to do your second draft of the script, and that's again what I did here. I played around with the sequence of events. I believe that in script order this scene took place much later, after we had already revealed the secret to the audience of what they're- the guys are talking about, and [[William Adama|Adama]] had already confessed what was going on to [[Lee Adama|Lee]], and then later you cut down to Tigh and [[Daniel Novacek|Bulldog]]. And I swapped the order around and intercut the two scenes because I felt like once you heard the secret from Adama, once he had told you what had really happened, there was really very little investment in hearing Tigh say it again. Hearing Novacek find out the truth of what we just found out. And by intercutting the two scenes you provide more urgency and tension by saying that events are happening quickly. People are finding out things simultaneously. Bulldog feels a little bit more dangerous because you don't know what he's gonna do. Adama's just coming to come to grips with himself. And it's also a way of spreadi- of parceling out the information so that you can hear it in one fell swoop between these two scenes as opposed to hear it once and then hear it again later.

There were questions in term of the backstory that we had to wrestle through a lot. Things like, "Why the ''[[Valkyrie]]''?" Why the ''Valkyrie'' came about because if it had been on ''Galactica'', it seemed to fight a couple of things. One was that if the mission had taken place aboard ''Galactica'' that tended to undercut the idea that it was a museum ship on its way out and it certainly wouldn't have been involved in [[w:Black Ops|black ops]] operations. It also meant that virtually everyone else aboard the ship would know who this guy was. He would have many friends and contacts and would- it wouldn't just be Tigh and Adama. [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]] and [[Karl Agathon|Helo]], everyone one else would have an investment in this guy and his story. And it really wouldn't be the closely guarded secret of Adama's anymore. So we came up with this idea of the ''Valkyrie''. Just saying that Adama had been on an another [[battlestar]] before ''Galactica''), which made sense. I mean, why not? The man had had a long career. And also as we developed it, it also felt like that was the reason, that the black ops operation was the reason why Adama was kicked to the curb and given command of this old [[The Bucket|bucket]] that was going into retirement and so was he. It was- it provided a little bit of backstory and a little reasoning for some of the events we had already established. 'Cause I think one of the mysteries of the show, well, not reall- Not really a mystery but it's just a blank that had not been filled in was the question of why Adama was on his way out. Why was he on this old battlewagon in the first place? Here's a guy that, by all accounts was respected throughout [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], had been a veteran of the [[Cylon War|First War]] and yet had never risen above the [[Military Ranks (RDM)|rank]] of Commander before his retirement, and was in fact, commanding a ship of misfits and a broken down old bucket. And this explained why we got there. And for me that was a valuable thing in the life of the show. 'Cause it starts to fill in a greater picture of what was happening on day of the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|attack]]. You understand why Adama was in the position where he was.

Now this particular scene. This particular scene actually has more to it. We got into the editing room and I started to have second thoughts about some things we had done in the script and I argued very strongly with [[David Eick|David]] about cutting the moment where Adama actually resigned his command. The end of the scene was Adama officially resigning his command and gave up command of [[the Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] to Lee. Literally stepped aside. When I saw it I felt like it just wasn't ring- it just didn't ring true. I just called bullshit on it. It was like, given everything that he'd gone through and everything that had happened in show and the man had never quit. I believe that this had a huge impact on him. That this was a heavy burden that he'd been carrying for lo these many years, but I didn't believe that he actually would resign his command. So I pressed David pretty hard to not go there.

{{podcastref|pegasusredress|24:49}}All these little flashback sequences to the interior of the ''Valkyrie'' is essen- the interior of the ''Valkyrie'' is essentially a redress of the leftover pieces of [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. This is- you can tell by the shape and some of the background pieces there that that's the ''Pegasus'' [[CIC]] that's simply lit in different way so that it feels a little different than ''Pegasus''. {{podcastref|stealthredress|25:14}}The [[Stealthstar|stealth ship]] is a redress of the- of [[Blackbird|our own stealth ship]] that we did in last years "[[Flight of the Phoenix]]".

The backstory itself. You can argue that there's certain things that we did in the backstory in the missio- the stealth mission that don't quite add up that I never f- we never quite licked. Part of it is just the physics of space- or the the size of space. As [[w:Rick Berman|Rick Berman]] used to always tell us, "Space is big." And the idea that there's an actual line out there, the [[Armistice Line]] and that Bulldog was just on- a couple of klicks on the other side of the line and would get caught, I think we're pushing the boundaries a little bit. I don't think we're breaking them, but I think it's pushing believability. After all, space is so vast. One would imagine that the Armistice Line, if there is such a line in space would cover such an enormous amount of space, it's hard to believe that he gets only a couple of klicks on the other side before he's caught, and also that he could see anything from just a couple klicks on the other side. So that's a bit of a stretch. But that- but it worked best for this story to have him literally saying, "I'm over the line," and then have events happen rather than get into long technical explanations of where he is and where he's not.

A lot of the backstory, in terms of his mission, was influenced by the [[w:U-2 Crisis of 1960|U-2 incident]] with [[w:Gary Powers|Gary Powers]] in the 1950s where Gary Powers was on a secret mission over the [[w:Soviet Union|Soviet Union]], flying for the [[w:Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], I believe, and was shot down by the Soviets and there was- everyone d- the [[w:United States|US]] denied up and down that it was happening, and then of course the Soviets produced the pilot and that put the lie to what [[w:Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] had been telling the world and became a huge international incident.

We played a lot with what the backstory actually was. At some point it was gonna be more about the [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)#Tauron|Taurons]] which- who we were setting up as a troublesome colony within the [[Government of the Twelve Colonies|federal system]] of [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)|the Colonies]] and that the idea that ''Galactica'' had been sent out to deal with the Taurons and while they were dealing with the Taurons they were taking a- there was an incident around a world that the Taurons were doing some illegal mining and they sent ''Galactica'' out there to pull them off the planet to force them to leave. And while they were there they were gonna take advantage of the fact that they were near the Cylon border, the Armistice Line, and in some versions of the script the mining was actually taking place on the other side of the Armistice Line and the planet was clearly in Cylon territory and that ''Galactica'' was being sent there to pull them out before the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] found them. And then they were gonna take advantage of the situation and do the recon mission anyway. All of that became wildly complicated so we stripped down the story, and stripped it down, stripped it down, to just make it very simple.

Again, the idea that Adama feels personally responsible for the attack on the Colonies is an interesting one. That it tapped into his own deep-seeded insecurities about his life as a military officer and some of the decisions he's been forced to make down through the years. And that, "What was the responsibility of the Colonials for what happened to them?" That had Adama done something, he could plausibly look back and say, "Maybe I had a hand in the attack as well."

Lee's def- Lee trying to get Adama to take himself off the hook, this also had an additional line in it someplace about Lee saying that, "Maybe this is what they wanted." That, "Maybe the Admiralty wanted to provoke an attack to start a war," was a line that was scripted and shot and I felt, as I was watching it in editing that it was too much. It felt like too big of a conspiracy and I didn't believe it. I didn't believe that the Admiralty was deliberately setting up a war between the Colonials and the Cylons.


== Act 3 ==

The idea was that the Cylon- I objected to the idea of [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|the Admiralty]] deliberately trying to stoke a war, 'cause I don't think that's what Admiralties do. I don't think that they set up these vast conspiracies in order to deliberately provoke an attack, and that seemed like a wrong thing to say about the [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|Colonial Fleet]] and about just generally the way the military operates in a democracy. I don't buy that line of reasoning. And generals and soldiers and sailors are usually are the ones that are the most reluctant to start wars. They're usually looking for ways for- to avoid wars and would- are not usually looking for ways to gin up a war. This, despite the way Hollywood typically portrays them. So I had to cut that line 'cause i felt like that was stepping across a line for us.

This little sequence and storyline about [[Number Three|D'Anna]] discovering that there is something between life and death was a really interesting one. This will- sets up even- sets up a storyline that will continue to play over the course of the next handful of episodes as D'anna starts to realize that there's more to the [[Cylons (RDM)|Cylons]] than she's ever been aware of, and that the other Cylons are aware of, and this will lead to a fairly big thing by the end of the [[Season 3 (2006-07)|season]]. {{podcastref|fivecylons|30:51}}The notion that there are five Cylon- the final five Cylons and who are they and that perhaps by dying over and over again, which is what she starts to do, she starts to essentially commit suicide by [[Cylon Centurion|Centurion]] and in various other ways because she's desperate to experience the [[Resurrection (RDM)|downloading process]]. And during that download she glimpses something, as you saw. She glimpses something that, in a set and in a place that we've been before. And I'll leave it to you sharp eyed viewers to tell me [[Opera House|exactly where]] that set was where she saw the five figures. And I'm sure you can.

Meanwhile, back aboard [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]... This is [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] looking at gun camera footage from the chase and starting to realize something's not right. This is a classic bit of plot that the investigator blowing up frames and studying trajectories starts to realize that something is amiss. This was always in the draft that they realize that the Cylons had let that [[Cylon Raider (RDM)|Raider]] go, and what could be the motives for that. The question was really about when these investigative beats play. {{podcastref|seamus|32:06}}I think there was an additional scene with Kara as sh- and she went and confronted [[Daniel Novacek|Novacek]], who in early drafts was named Seamus, by the way.

All that stuff with Novacek doing push-ups and stuff, this is all stuff in [[David Eick|David]]'s original first draft. I think he liked this motif of the workout and the callback to his time in the cell. In some ways I think it's an homage on David's part to scenes from [[w:Cape Fear (1991 film)|''Cape Fear'']] with [[w:Robert De Niro|Robert De Niro]] working out in- alone in his cell.

It's at this point, where you starting- the intercutting is starting to develop more pace and threat because eve-, again, events are happening simultaneously. As [[William Adama|Adama]] is going to see Novacek, Kara is going to talk to [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]]. It wasn't really scripted like this, but we cut it up like this to create urgency. In the first cut of the show it worked pretty well but it- there were long stretches and seemed like the plot was taking a little bit too long to get going, and by cutting these scenes in this way, by saying that they're all happening simultaneously, gives you a little bit more drive going through the show.

The relationship with- between Kara and Tigh... Actually next week's episode was- had a bit of business in it that subsequently got cut that explained why these two are actually much friendlier towards each other than they used to be a year and a half ago. Unfortunately that got cut from next week's episode. We'll talk about that in more depth, but essentially we're taking as read that the relationship between Kara and Tigh is much closer and much friendlier than it was, certainly was, in [[miniseries|the pilot]] and in subsequent episodes.

And this is Novacek beating the crap out of Adama. That is a redress, I believe, of Tigh's quarters, where Novacek is staying, because we don't really have guest quarters in ''Galactica''.

We played around with this act break quite a bit. At what point do we go out of the act? There was- we cut it several times with him just hitting him, going out there. Other times going out with the pipe on his neck as the act break. There were other versions of the cut that had- that pushed this scene entirely into [[Podcast:Hero#Act 4|act four]]. And other sequences- other attempts that moved it completely into act three. Essentially it's an arbitrary decision if you're looking at this on DVD because you watch it all as one solid story, but constructing the act breaks and the timing of it consumes an inordinate amount of outta time in the editing bay, 'cause you're trying to balance out the length of the acts so that the commercials don't seem like they're falling on top of you and you have one act that's fifteen minutes and one act that's four minutes, for example. But as a result, sometimes you're shifting pieces around in editorial just to balance out the acts, and because of the conventions of television each act break has to end on a moment of jeopardy or a moment of tension, and you're always hunting through the show to find those moments of tension to get to your act break.

Now the version that we've gone for here. You could've gotten out of this act almost at any earlier point. You could've gotten out at any of those moments. When Tigh came in with the gun, you coulda gone out when Novacek hit him with the pipe. In this version we opted to push all the way through the scene because it felt like, or David certainly felt like, ta- cutting this scene in half over the act break dissipated some of the tension and by the time you came back that you had- you were away from the moment too long, and he really wanted to keep it all contained and really play it all through and understand what had really happened. I think it's questionable, just in terms of storytelling. There's a part of me that still feels like the show is over at the end of this act. And my TV instincts tell me that we should've gone out an earlier moment of tension, but I think that by keeping it, this scene, together and playing it all through you certainly get the dramatic impact much greater. You're in the scene a little bit more and you're watching to see what's gonna happen next as opposed to just chopping it up.

This was the scene that I took a pass at, that I alluded to earlier. It is really the scene where everyone talks about what's really going on and where you take Tigh all the way across to the point where he not only is there and saves Adama, but is essentially on the road back. This is the key moment here where it's Saul realizing that he wants to come back. That when the chips were down he came and saved his- saved Adama. And that the scene shifts from the scene about Adama and Novacek, it shifts to a scene about Adama and Tigh. Now- and that's the act four- that's the act three break.


== Act 4 ==

So here at the top of act four the show dramatically is over. The rest of act four is essentially a wrap-up. That little insert of him submitting his resignation to [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] was shot after the fact. That was a pickup line that we went back and got later. Because of the way we had reconstructed the acts this no longer had a proper run up to it. The resignation is now a new idea in this scene. It used to be something, like I said, was in the [[Lee Adama|Lee]] scene and we didn't ha- there was no discussion of him resigning in the script as shot. So later, we had to go back and pickup that little moment, all the up to the point where [[William Adama|Adama]] sits down was all a pickup scene shot later.

And here we have Laura essentially providing the rationale for why it's not Adama's fault. Why it's not Adama's- really wasn't his responsibility for the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|events that occurred]]. And unfortunately this scene still has the line. We cut it earlier, but the scene here has Laura voicing the line about whether [[Colonial Fleet (RDM)|the Admiralty]] wanted the war. I think we went back and forth in that editing. I think [[David Eick|David]] ultimately wanted it in and I let this one stay in after having cut the earlier one, and probably should have forced the issue and cut that one as well.

"Forty-five years of courageous service" as opposed to forty years. I think in the script and as shot we kept saying forty years for some reason and kept not going back and forgetting to fix it. And we had to- it wasn't until we were in editorial that we had to reali- that we realized that we never got around to actually fixing that [[Continuity errors (RDM)|continuity problem]] and I had to loop in lines and reshoot the insert on the card and to make sur- to make it clear that it's forty-five years of service.

And also, this is an idea we've used in the show before, that there's something about these people that've done things and have to go out and their punishment is to put on a brave front for their men and for the people that serve for them. A similar thing was done with [[Galen Tyrol|Tyrol]]... when was that? The point when [[James Lyman|Jammer]]- when Jammer went to [[brig|jail]] instead of Tyrol. I guess that's back in [[Season 1 (2004-05)|season one]] and Adama's line to him was about having to go out and his punishment would be to stand on the deck every day and know that an innocent man was in jail and it was his fault. And yet he was gonna have to continue on, and that the guilt of that would be his punishment. And here is the same idea that Adama's penance for his own interior guilt was really going to be that he's gonna have to stand up in front of all these people and get a [[Medal of Distinction|medal]] and pretend that he's a hero, even though in his own eyes he doesn't think he's a hero.

This little sequence here on the [[hangar deck]], I was actually here for this shooting, which was- that's something of a rarity in [[Season 3 (2006-07)|season three]]. I'm standing off to camera left during this closeup of Adama. I watched them do all this take. It was also great to be on the set because literally the entire cast was here for this scene so it was cool to be there and see them all sitting there in their flip-flops and sneakers, 'cause that's what they're generally wearing instead of their combat boots during that scene.

I ha- I kept pushing. Had to have a wrap up to [[Daniel Novacek|Novacek]]. This kept getting dropped from the cut. I kept putting it back in. You had to wrap up what was gonna happen to Novacek, where he was gonna go, and presumably he's going off to some other ship in [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] to rest and relax and try to rehabilitate, recuperate. That after his experience it seemed unlikely they would put him right back in a cockpit again, and yet we- he's obviously a guest star and a noted actor, expensive guest star and he wasn't gonna become part of the regular family, so you wouldn't- we had to send him somewhere so that you wouldn't expecting to see him in the [[Pilot ready rooms|ready room]] next week.

Actually, the ship he's going to is where we sent [[Boxey (RDM)|Boxey]], so I think he and Boxey are gonna go and have a very special relationship on their own.

This last little bit with [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] is just the first- him on the road back. He's got the [[Uniforms (RDM)|uniform jacket]] on again. He comes to see his old friend. He's not- he's been pretty anti-social, just hiding out, burrowed in his quarters for many episodes. And this his where his road to recovery officially starts. At the end of earlier drafts, Adama- there was a point where Adama was actually going to give the medal to Saul in the ceremony. It was like a twist where when she gives him the medal he says, "I can't take it, but there's someone- there is someone here who's earned it." And he calls up Tigh and they give him the medal and everyone cheers. And that seemed- it seemed a little melodramatic and also didn't know that Tigh had really earned the medal in any real way or that Adama would give it to him, or that Tigh would accept it. And it seemed like what was important was the connection between the two men and the personal relationship between the two men. And so as we were working through the drafts I gave the note to just have Tigh come in and start talking about [[Ellen Tigh|Ellen]]. That, essentially, that was the big thing. That he had never told Adama what had happened down on that planet and what was the- at the core of everything that was going on with him ever since he got back from [[New Caprica]]. So that's why this scene exists is to reunite the two friends in a real way and let him talk about it. And I still like the fact that Tigh comes and asks for a drink, and Adama doesn't judge him about it. He just says, "Me too." And is gonna drink with him, knowing that this is Tigh's problem and accepting that it's Tigh's problem and it's something that the two of them are gonna do together while they sit and talk about the things that neither of them has spoken about.

And that's "[[Hero]]". That's episode seven. I think it's an interesting episode. I think it's a little more conventional than many of the episodes that we typically do. I think that at the end of the day it's the kind of episode that is a solid single, for us. It accomplishes everything it sets out to accomplish. It's a standalone episode so new viewers are not lost in the giant backstory. And I think it provides an interesting bit of texture and background to Adama and [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]- Adama and Tigh. So thank you for listening, that's the end of the podcast, and I will talk to you again for "[[Unfinished Business]]", episode eight, which is one of my personal favorites of the season and of the series. So take care, good night, and good luck.

Podcast:The Captain's Hand

2007-01-24T08:52:44Z

TypoFixer: Add brief scene set-ups to set context when RDM says "this" or "here"

{{podcast|author=Steelviper|emailAuthor2=|suffix=|additionalCopyright=and Terry Dresbach}}

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_1of5.mp3 Teaser]==

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 17 of season 2. I'm [[Ronald D. Moore]], executive producer and developer of the new [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|''Battlestar Galactica'']], and this is for "[[The Captain's Hand|Captain's Hand]]," the podcast that was delayed from last week, so I'll be giving it to you this week. In fact I'll be doing two of them back to back tonight. I'll do "Captain's Hand" and then we'll go right into "[[Downloaded]]", on a [[Podcast:Downloaded|separate track]], of course. (Ron lights a cigarette)

Before we get going we should probably mention, right off the top, that let's have a little less of the whining, out there on the [http://mboard.scifi.com/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=BattlestarGalactica&page=0 bulletin boards], shall we, about the noises in the background here at the pod- at the podcast around the old Moore manse. You know folks, you just gotta be tough enough to listen to the podcast. These are imperfect conditions. We do this at my home, not in a nice, tidy, little studio. We do ever our best effort to keep it quite for y'all, but c'mon, enough with the whining, with the pewing- with the [[All the World's a Stage|mewling and puking]] out there. '''Be tough enough for the podcast.''' We drink, we smoke, we curse, we have a good time. Get with it- get with the program.

Ok. So here we are. [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. Teaser. There go the [[Raptor]]s off on a training mission. In early drafts of "Captain's Hand" this particular crisis happened much later in the show. It was one of the problems that we struggled with in the early drafts of the story was, what was the nature of the crisis, and when should it begin.

The whole notion of this episode revolved around the coninu- acknowledging and dealing with the continuing command problems aboard ''Pegasus'', which felt like a natural outgrowth of the idea that the ship, the [[Mercury class battlestar|Battlestar]] ''Pegasus'', that showed up was a- a deeply flawed, almost piratical ship, under the command of [[Helena Cain|Admiral Cain]]. Well, if Admiral Cain had run that ship the way that we saw her run that ship, one would assume that there would be a variety of problems that would definitely outlive her. And so we wanted to continue to play that as the season went on, and the first CO after Cain was obviously [[Jack Fisk|Commander Fisk]], who promptly got into the black mark- [[Black market (organization)|black market]] and got himself killed for the trouble. And then we moved on to [[Barry Garner|Commander Garner]], who in early drafts was always named Trammel. But legal, as legal often does, came back to us with some- some whining about the name Trammel, about it being too close to [http://www.soonerspectator.com/meetWriter.php?id=btramel somebody else's real name], and of course, we had to change it over to Garner at the last second. So there are many references that we all kept catching ourselves calling him Trammel. In fact, we named him Trammel in an earlier episode, in an offhand way. A line from [[William Adama|Adama]]. We had to go back and reloop that in [[Wikipedia:Automated Dialogue Replacement|ADR]] at the last second.

I like this notion of- the beat that open this little section here with [[Lee Adama|Lee]] and [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]], that the pilots and the crew had private signals among themselves to "Stay clear of the quarters when I got a girl, or a man, or both inside." And that they had a private signal. You couldn't quite see it 'cause we had to cut the- clip off the head of that shot but when [[Tucker Clellan|Duck]] and the other pilot came up there was a pair of boots were hanging from the hatch, and they knew, as soon as they saw the pair of boots that that meant that somebody was in there and getting a little something. And that was what prompted them to bang on the door, and the gag was, "Oh. It's the [[Commander Air Group|CAG]]." And they kinda looked at each other and went away.

This sequence- this little scene here with Dualla and Lee, we played around with in editing quite a bit. There were some lines that were dropped that indicated that a longer passage of time between end of the last episode and this one, to give Dualla a little time to mourn, to give Lee a little time to recover, and move everything along the [[Timeline (RDM)|timeline]].

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Tyrol inspects a container.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This storyline, the "B story" here, of [[Rya Kibby]] and her unwanted pregnancy, and then the abortion decision that [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] eventually comes to was actually a storyline that we had developed very early. We had started talking about this idea early in the first season as a- as a potentially interesting storyline for us 'cause it dealt with a practical issue of, "What are their policies, in [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]], going to be in terms of birth control, in terms of abortion?" The population of the species was going to be- hang in the balance, and what would these people really do in these circumstances? And it was definitely an issue we wanted to deal with, and wanted to play, and wanted to see how the characters would react in this circumstance. I thought there was something interesting about Laura Roslin, whose politics on the surface seem probably moderate-to-liberal, Secretary of Education, and one of the ongoing threads of the entire series was watching as Laura is slowly changed by the repsonsibilities of being [[Government#Executive Branch|President]]. And this storyline was one of those key ideas that, like I said, we talked about early in the first season. And I was fascinated with the idea of this soft-ish appearing woman who's probably, presumably, has all the politically correct positions on these sorts of matters being forced to grapple with the real responsibilities of her- of her role. And I was always interested by playing against the expectations that, I've said this many times though, Laura would be the "dove", and Adama would be the "hawk", and that would always provide very predictable expected conflict between the two. And I always thought it was interesting to subvert that at every- at every turn and always put the characters in situations where they would have to grapple with them as human beings rather than as- as- as just as [[Wikipedia:Stalking horse|stalking horses]] for expected political positions.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Commander Garner arrives at ''Pegasus'' CIC.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Here comes [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001334/ John Heard], who I think is a great actor, in many, many things. I knew him, as soon as his name came up, I was "Oh, yeah! From '[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094737/ Big]'!" Which I think was a tremendous movie and a wonderful, wonderful, film and John had the quasi-villainous role in that episode- in that movie. And more recently I had known him from his work on "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141842/ Sopranos]" as the corrupt police lieutenant. I think John's a great actor and we were really, really happy to have him on the show. He fit in really well. He provided a different color, different flavor to the part and so- it's always nice to get "name" guest cast to come in and juice up the production a little bit here and there.

"Captain's Hand" is also a mix between a standalone episode and a more traditional continuing episode of ours. I think it successfully straddles the line in terms of continuing the ongoing storylines of Lee, and Dualla, and [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]], and Laura, and [[Kara Thrace|Kara]], and at the same time dealing with issues that are self-contained within one episode.

Oh, here comes the beep! Oh no! Cover your ears.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_2of5.mp3 Act 1]==

Ooh. That scary beep. Beep.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo arrives on the ''Pegasus'', joining Starbuck who is already aboard, and the two head to CIC.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Initially, in the early drafts of this in the story and in the first draft of the script [[Lee Adama|Lee]] came over by himself. It was more of a self-contained "Lee" show that really didn't involve [[Kara Thrace|Kara]] until a little bit later in the drama when she was pulled over to [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']]. The idea wa- ,in the initial drafts, was that Lee came aboard, and that the problem onboard ''Pegasus'' was not- was not that discipline was too tough, it was that it was quite the opposite. It was that it was too lax. The idea was that Trammel was just a nice guy. Trammel was just everything that Lee thought his father should be. The idea was Lee comes on board this ship and Trammel's this perfectly nice guy who wants to be liked by his crew and wants to get along with everybody and just commanded with a very soft glove. And Lee found himself fulfilling the hardass role. He came over and yelled at guys and saw that fights were breaking out on the hangar day, nobody- hangar bay, nobody gave a shit about it. People talked back. People didn't carry out orders. There was a certain sense of "School's out on Peggy" since [[Helena Cain|Cain]] and [[Jack Fisk|Fisk]] had both been killed, and then they get this- this new commander in who hasn't had any experience commanding a ship and he just, more than anything else, wanted to be liked by the crew, because the crew had hated the previous two commanders. And then that was supposed to bring along its own problems. That grew less satisfying. As we played it out it was an odd fit because it never quite felt right that Lee was such a complete hardass with these guys and it cut against the grain, just, we were having trouble making that story work. So we kept working on, "What is the nature of [[Barry Garner|Garner]]'s problem? Is he too lax? Is he too friendly? Is he too much of a hardass? Is he crazy?" The version that we shot, the f- the draft, the filming draft is slightly different than the edited version, too. These early scenes were colored by the fact that- that [[CIC]] scene that we left a moment ago where Lee first came into Garner and found out that the [[Raptor]]s were missing, we played it where Garner immediately was on [[Hoshi]]'s ass about something. Hoshi was on the phone with somebody at [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']] and was not informing Garner in the way that Garner wanted to be informed. And he was riding his ass and sent him to his quarters and had him arrested and there was a sense of fear everywhere. That Garner was this crazed, despot. And we were taking direction from "Caine Mutiny", was sort of an archetype for the character at that point, and the idea that we were going to play, and you can still see parts of it are still here, was that Lee appreciated Garner. That Lee liked Garner. Respected him. Thought he was trying to make the best of a bad situation. He was- he was the third guy who had to command this ship, and he was trying to bring discipline back to a vessel that had had questionable discipline. It was a somewhat Kurtz-like regime under Cain and it then it was a more overtly piratical regime under Fisk and then Garner was trying to just straighten it all out. And the idea we were going to play was Lee was slow to see that- that Garner was deeply flawed as well. And that was an archetype that was borne out of "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046816/ Caine Mutiny]" which follows a very similar structure in that- that the [[Wikipedia:Captain Queeg|Queeg]]-

(''phone rings'') Now see there? Look! Oh my god! Run for the hills, my phone is ringing. The idea- (''phone rings'') I could unplug it. I could actually walk ov- hey! I'm going to walk right over there right now (''phone rings'') and I'm going to unplug it for- for all of you 'cause I don't want any of your precious little feelings to be hurt. (''phone rings'') Here I go. (''Ron's voice gets fainter as he walks away'') I'm walking over. I'm unplugging. I'm unplugging as we speak. And, it's now unplugged. You happy? Everybody happy now?

What we opted to do instead was- instead of going down the "Caine Mutiny" route so strongly was to dial-back Garner's early scenes. The Queeg character in "Caine Mutiny" was somebody that the Ensign Keith character, who's central to the book and the movie, comes aboard and likes Queeg at first 'cause Queeg seems like he's just trying to straighten out a very difficult ship and Keith, Ensign Keith, doesn't realize until fairly late in the drama that Queeg is crazy... that Queeg is paranoid and damaged and had been scarred by his- his experiences in the war. And we tried a similar archetype in this episode, but when it was all cut together the problem was that you saw the problem with Quee- with our Queeg, with Garner, just immediately. As soon as he started bitchslapping Yoshi- Hoshi in that first scene, and you saw that he was a little bit nuts, you knew exactly everything that was gonna to happen in the show. You knew he'd be relieved. You just saw it. It's like, "Oh. It's so clearly the "Caine Mutiny," that it didn't work. So we cut back on all of the initial craziness, and now it's not quite as clear what's going up- going on with Garner.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Zarek suggests to Baltar that he should run for president.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This scene that's on camera right now, with Gar- with [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]] and [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] was originally much later in this script. As shot, this scene didn't happen until [[Podcast:The Captain's Hand#Act 4|act four]], actually, I believe, or [[Podcast:The Captain's Hand#Act 3|act three]] possibly. And it happened only after [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] had made her religious proclaimatio- er, not her religious, her political proclaimation to ban abortion, and that prompted Zarek to go to Baltar. And when I was watching it cut, it seemed like it happened way too late, and I thought it would be much more interesting if early in the show we got Baltar thinking about the presidency. I think it's much more effective, 'cause now, when Laura goes to ask him later about the demographics of [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]] and is wrestling with the decision, the idea that Baltar might possibly run for the presidency is already in the character's mind and it's already in- in the audience's mind.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo arrives in the pilot ready room and berates Starbuck in front of the other pilots.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

The idea here of the Kara/Lee struggle/conflict, since she shot him, by accident, but she shot him in the last episode, felt like definitely something we wanted to follow up on, as part of the growing chasm between these two characters. You saw in "[[Scar]]" that they came close to actually sleeping together, in a moment, and that Kara reached out to him in desperation to try to forget about [[Samuel Anders|Anders]] and then- and then it all fell apart. And... there was something interesting about continuing to play these two becoming more and more estranged, especially since your expectation is that these two are going to end up together or there's some kind of romantic tension going on. Finding- I found it was much more interesting the further apart these two got. The more that their- their relationship became dysfunctional. (Ron lights a cigarette)

I love this [[Cottle]]/[[William Adama|Adama]] scene in sickbay. Cottle is, I've said this before, has developed into one of my favorite characters in the show. And I like this little scene, 'cause it says so much about the relationship between Adama and Cottle. This notion that Cottle was performing abortions throughout the Fleet, very quietly and with no questions asked, I thought was interesting. It again provided this backstage look at what was happening off-camera during all these episodes. That there was a life to the fleet. There were, like, people's lives were continuing on. Things were happening. And just because we didn't show them to you up in CIC didn't mean that things weren't happening below decks. Adama's- this little beat. This look on Adama's face. "She could apply for asawman- apply for asylum." And Adama just looks at Cottle. And then this look on Cottle face. "Up oh. I'll just walk over here. Excuse me," is just great. And then [[Edward James Olmos|Eddie]]... Eddie just looks at [[Rya Kibby|her]], and he's hoping she's not gonna pick up on it, hoping she's not gonna say anything, she's... she said it. She said the magic words. Oh, great. No my day just got much, much longer.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_3of5.mp3 Act 2]==

Act- act of the second. I like all this political stuff. I- I think it's interesting to see the factionaliztion and almost tribalization within [[The Fleet (RDM)|the Fleet]]. That there are different cultures represented within the rag-tag fleet. That they have different points of view. And this idea, that P- [[Sarah Porter]] and [[The Twelve Colonies (RDM)#Gemenon|the Gemonese]] were gonna come a'callin because of their support to [[Laura Roslin|Laura]], when she needed it, when Laura rose up against [[William Adama|Adama]] way back when and declared herself a prophet earlier in the season. There was the implication then, [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] saw it coming, ironically enough. Zarek was the guy who looked down the road and said, "This is a mistake. This is going to come back to- to bite you in the ass." And that Zarek was right. That Zarek is a smart political animal. He knows how these things work. And Ba- and Zarek as the- as the secularist saw the dangers of this, saw that the religious people, the fundamentalist crowd, as it were, within the Fleet, were going to want something for their support and there was a political reality to that. And I thought there was something very interesting about seeing Laura caught in that vice, where she needed their- their support. She wanted their support. And then their support came at- at a price. And how does she reconcile those two ideas? And her first instinct is, "No, I'm not banning abortion. Fuck that. I'm- I'm- that's not who I'm about. That's not what I'm about." And then sh- there's this little scene. Adama sits down, and Laura knows, "Ok. What's up? What's on the Admiral's mind?" It's interesting just to see their body language and the nature of their relationship at this point, the way these two characters have changed over the course of- of almost two seasons now. They are more intimate with each other. They're easier with each other. Adama knows this is a political issue. It's kinda the first time Adama's stepping out of his role as military commander and actually injecting himself into a political idea, and bringing something to- to- to Laura's attention.

I like this line and I don't like this line that's coming up. "I have- I have fought for a woman's right to control her own body
her whole political life." It's true. It's a needed line. I was never happy with it in terms of the elegance of it. It's an inelegant line, 'cause the line that- the line that you wanna here is, "I fought for a woman's right to choose my whole political life." That's the more natural line. That's the line that you're ready to hear. And that's just one of those subjective calls where, in that particular case, the "right to choose" is such a specific contemporary reference to a contemporary political argument that I- I just pulled back from it and didn't feel like I really wanted to go there and wanted to change it slightly. And it's inconsistent. I play- sometimes I- I let them say things that are very contemporary and very familiar and other times they strike my ear oddly and I shift away from it. And there's really not any rhyme or reason for that except for my own sense of what sounds correct in the show and what does not. And ultimately that's my role. I have to- I have to play the show in the key I think it plays the best. It's- it's- it's music. And sometimes the music sounds right to me and sometimes the music doesn't sound right to me. And you need somebody- the showrunner's job is to essentially do that. It's to maintain the voice of the show, as it were. The show has a voice. And it's my voice. And I have to play questions like that as I hear them best.

This whole bit about the distress call fragment, and her <nowiki>[</nowiki>Starbuck<nowiki>]</nowiki> sussing it out and figuring out what it means was part of a larger ongoing plotline that we ultimately cut down for time. It was a lot more of [[Lee Adama|Lee]] trying different methods of tracking them down, different ide- "tech" ideas about where they could have been lost, looking through logs. It was just a lot more [[technobabble]]-type stuff. And it all just lays there and isn't that interesting, as usual.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo informs Garner of Starbuck's theory.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

I like the fact that [[Barry Garner|Garner]] doesn't really like [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]. And it's not in a [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] way. Tigh's conflict with Kara feels personal. Garner's conflict with her feels more professional. He just cannot believe this chick. He just cannot believe Kara's impudence, Kara's arrogance, Kara's insubordincation. He doesn't like it. He- he won't put up with it. And he's just not going to listen to her. And, of course, it blinds him to what she has to say. "You're Adama's pet. Let him deal with you." That's one of my favorite lines in the show.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Brief establishing shot of ''Pegasus''.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

I like all these shots of the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']].

This scene of Kara doing pushups is kind of a callback to the [[miniseries]] when Lee came in and she was in hack and she was in there doing pushups, and then he came in. And this is kind of an echo of that scene, except in dif- in very different circumstances. And this time he comes in to find her and it's not such a happy reunion. He's got a chip on hi- as big a chip on his shoulder as she does on hers. I love the way [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]] is in this episode. Jamie- this is one of, I think, Jamie's best episodes. He just has this real interesting angst underneath all of his lines. You get the feeling the character's really in turmoil. He's really struggling with a lot of different things. He comes right back at her. Here it comes. Or, here we go. In some ways these two are happiest when they're scrapping at each other. I think in some ways whatever love they have, whatever relationship they have, is really born much more in these scenes of conflict than it ever is in any ex- outward acknowledgement or expression of affection for one another.

There's a lot of internal debate and external debate about this little sequence here. About Lee calling her on the fact that she shot him. The question was, "Does it make him look petulant?" My answer was, "No." It's honest. He's angry. He's struggling with something. I mean, she shot him. It's a pretty heavy thing, to be shot by your friend. Unless your friend's the [[Wikipedia:Dick Cheney#Hunting incident|Vice President]] or something, and then you get over it. But, if it's not the Vice President, and you're shot by your friend, then it's probably a pretty heavy thing that you have to carry the rest of your life.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The search for the missing Raptor.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

This is all classic-type stuff. The [[Raptor]] out looking for the other Raptor. You'll notice that the [[Flight suit|helmets]] have changed, subtly, over the course of the year. We've added some lights. They fit the- the actors' heads a little more snugly. There's some- there's internal debate whether that was good and bad. The old helmets didn't fit quite well. They were always giving us sound trouble. They were hard to- to shoot in a lot of ways. They had different lighting problems. So we revamped the helmets and spent quite a bit. And it's interesting the way the helmets actually change the- the face of the characters. I'm always struck by when you put a character in one of those helmets in a cockpit, their face looks so different than it does when you take them out of the helmet. It really focuses the way your eye looks at them and sometimes you don't even recognize them. Like, in some ways, that character we just saw, the pilot of the Raptor, [[Steve Fleer|Red Devil]], is almost unrecognizable from the same character that was in the ready room and in the head earlier in the show. It is exact same actor, it's just, it shapes his face differently and you look at him differently. I've noticed that, particularly with Kara. Kara almost looks like a completely different person when- when she's in the cockpit than she does out of it.

That little bit there, I like. It's just a callback when Garner says, "I'm gonna get my men." That's a direct callback to Adama, said the exact same thing in "[[Resurrection Ship, Part I|Resurrection Ship]]" and "[[Pegasus (episode)|Pegasus]]". "I'm gonna get my men."

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_4of5.mp3 Act 3]==

This is definitely an irrational impulse on the part of [[Barry Garner|Garner]]. The- the idea that he wants to [[FTL|jump]] his whole ship to get his men is- is- it's a little bit crazy. It's- It's not the smartest move. Send the [[Raptor]]s out ahead of you. Go- that's what they're for. They're scouts. They go- they go find people. But Garner, on some level, is- is overcompensating for the fact that he's not a command officer. He's an engineer and he's trying to, on some level, demonstrate that he is up to the task by proving that he'll do anything to go get his men. This little conversation actually had more lines in it, which were kinda nice and I kinda regret dropping, where he kinda called [[William Adama|Adama]] on his shit too. He said, "You know, when [[Kara Thrace]] was missing you put the entire [[The Fleet (RDM)|Fleet]] at risk to go find her. Isn't that true?" And Adama said, "Your understanding of [[You Can't Go Home Again|that situation]] is correct, but my orders stand."

I'm really impressed with how big the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']] seems, even though we have very little, in terms of sets, for ''Pegasus''. There's- there's just the [[CIC]], a stretch of corridor, and a couple of multi-purpose roo- one multi-purpose room, and the- and the quarters. But we really do kinda convey that there's a whole ship involved there.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>Roslyn comes to Baltar for help.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Like I said earlier, this was going to be [[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s first scene in the movie and this was his introduction and the whole idea of him running for [[Government#Executive Branch|President]] didn't come until after this. But now, just by shifting that scene earlier, you read all these expressions of Baltar and this whole attitude that he's copping with [[Laura Roslin|Laura]]. You read it as he's thinking about what [[Tom Zarek|Zarek]] said, that maybe he should run for the Presidency. And it just informs this whole scene in a different way, 'cause you get the feeling that he's- he's looking at Laura going, "I could- I could probably beat you. Couldn't I? Why- Why can't I be President?" It's sitting at the back of his mind, and it's sitting in the audience's mind too.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The fleet listen to Roslyn's radio address.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

And this was the key point. This was the key moment, the moment that we talked about quite a bit. That Laura would take this step. Laura would ban abortion in the Fleet. Laura would- would ultimately decide that the survival of the race, that their security, would outweigh their need for freedom. That it would curtail- she would curtail a freedom. She would start cutting back on th- the ways that they had lived their lives before [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies|the attack]] and deal with the realities of the situation that they're in now. And she would do it because she thought it was the thing she had to do, not because she thought it was a good thing to do. She just thought it was necessary. I like the way that [[Mary McDonnell|Mary]] struggles with this. I think Mary had trouble grappling with this notion as well. This is a big thing, and she was like- we ta- I had a lot of conversations with Mary about this storyline, and about why she was doing what she was doing and her motivations for banning abortion and the reasons why she would be forced to this- to this position.

:<nowiki>[</nowiki>The ''Pegasus'' corridor is abuzz with crew running to their stations.<nowiki>]</nowiki>

Again, I mean- we're conveying- there's not much ''Pegasus'' corridor but we're using every scrap of it in this sequence. And we're doubling it up. We're just shooting both ways and making it feel like it's a much longer corridor than it actually is. In the initial drafts [[Lee Adama|Lee]] was not in CIC. Lee did not take command of the ''Pegasus'' in this- in this way. He was actually going to go out with the fighter pilots. He was gonna be their [[Commander Air Group|CAG]] in- in an emergency situation 'cause I think [[Cole Taylor|Stinger]] had ended up in the brig, or something, and he was gonna- his key moment was going to be, during the battle, he was going to have to leave a bunch of his pilots behind. We opted not to do that because it felt to redolent of the same situation that [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]] dealt with in the [[miniseries]], to leave men behind.

This little sequence right here, of each of them <nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollo and Garner<nowiki>]</nowiki> trying to relieve the other one, and turning to the [[Colonial Marine Corps|Sergeant of the Guard]], it's a straight homage, or ripoff, depending on how you want to look at it, I think it's an homage to "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112740/ Crimson Tide]", which is something- a very effective sequence between [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000432/ Gene Hackman] and [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000243/ Denzel Washington]. It was fun to write this scene. But it's- it's also different in that Lee is the one taken away. Denzel Washington wins that argument on Crim- in "Crimson Tide", and Gene Hackman is- is taken below. In this situation, the marine, the Sergeant of the Guard, follows Garner's orders. And then we get to jump with the ''Pegasus''.

There's this [[Battle of the Binary Star System|huge, beautiful battle]] coming up here, which I don't have a lot to say about. This is the kind of thing that, I must say, a lot of other people in the show work very hard at. [[Gary Hutzel]], our visual effects supervisor who I've talked about many times on the show. Also the writers [[David Weddle]] and [[Bradley Thompson]] did a lot of work on this sequence. [[Mark Verheiden]] worked on this sequence. A lot of people work and spend a lot of time stroking out all the different pieces of the battle sequence. Right from the moment that the [[basestar (RDM)|basestar]]s jump in to the final denouement in how they ge- get away. I love that shot, 'cause I love that you're on the Raptor cockpit and then it drops down and you see the baseship behind it. A lot of these beats are things that are invented by the director, and by the visual effects team, and David and Bradley, who I- I bring in periodically to help with these kind of sequences.

==[http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/mp3/217/bsg_ep217_5of5.mp3 Act 4]==

I bring them in to help on these sequences a lot because this kind of stuff, I don't know, I don't get as much enjoyment out of writing it as I do the- the- the character stuff. I can do it and I- I did it in the miniseries. I've done it many times. I've written a lot of battle sequences of [[Memoryalpha:Star Trek: The Next Generation|Trek]] and- and so on. But they just don't in- interest me as much anymore. And I find that I'd rather hand them off to people who do still have the passion for it, and enjoy writing it, and enjoy working out all the different tactical maneuvers, and who's doing what, where. I did write that. (Laughs.) "On the left. On the right. And follow me. We're going straight up the gut." (Laughs.) It's a little p- it's pushing it a little bit. But it's- there's a rhythm to battle sequences where there's a certain familiarity. It's like playing the chorus in a song. There's a- there's a part of the audience that wants to enjoy the battle, and there's certain beats that you want to play, and there's certain expected rhythms of the battle, and every once and a while you want an identifiable, easy to hang on to idea that's not tech-talk that's, "You go left, and I- you go right, and we're going right up the gut." And it just co- it crystalizes what's going on in an interesting way. This beat here with [[Barry Garner|Garner]] deciding to go below and giving the command over to [[Lee Adama|Lee]], there was a line there that we cut, that I'm glad we cut, where Garner said, "I belong down there and you belong up here." We cut it because I felt that he hadn't really earned that. This beat with [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]], with Lee taking command, is one of my favorite moments in the development of the- of the Lee Adama character. That look- the look on his face when Garner gives him command and leaves, and he's standing there with his hands on the table and he looks around and he says, "I- I- I have the con. Okay." And he has to get his head in the game. He's been thinking that he's smarter than Garner. He's been working Garner and thinking that this guy doesn't know what the hell he's doing and then suddenly it's all on his shoulders, and this is his first time to- to con a ship in a- in a battle. And [[Jamie Bamber|Jamie]] just completely sells you that idea with the look on his face. He's not like "Johnny to the rescue." It's almost like, "Oh, shit. I'm in command?" (Lights a cigarette.)

This sequence of Garner going down to the en- engineering spaces raises the question, "Why is Garner in command to begin with? He's the engineer." It seemed like, given the status of the [[Pegasus (RDM)|''Pegasus'']] after the death of [[Jack Fisk|Fisk]] they really- [[William Adama|Adama]] needed a senior officer. He- he- he didn't want to turn the ship over to a young officer, someone with not a lot of experience. Garner was definitely a leader of men and women. He's someone who risen to a senior level. He was someone who was of a seniority in the ship, who had experience, had done his job very well, and it seemed like you could trust him to take over command of the ship. And in fact in- in- in naval vessels today being the engineering officer is often simply one aspect of an officer's career. He'll often come onboard, be assigned as the engineering officer, onboard- onboard a combatant, as part of his experience of takin- of being a department head and running different departments on his way up the- the ladder to command a vessel. So it didn't seem unreasonable that Garner could be an engineer and then take over the command of the ship. The term "snipe" he uses, he ta- refers to himself as a "snipe" and the "snipes" in the engine room is something that I got from the [[Wikipedia:United States Navy|Navy]] when I was on the- the USS ''W. S. Simms'', the [[Wikipedia:Knox class frigate|Knox class frigate]] that I spent a summer cruise on when I was in ROTC, all the engineers were called "snipes." It was just an- an in-house reference to people that were in engineering. They were all "snipes."

Which also raises- there was a reference earlier in the show about "The Bucket" and "The Beast". I thought it was- there was something interesting about giving the- the ''Pegasus'' a nickname. Naval ships generally have a nicknames that their crew bestow upon them. When I was on the [[Wikipedia:USS Constellation (CV-64)|''Constellation'']], the carrier ''Constellation'', everyone called her the "Connie". The [[Wikipedia:USS Enterprise (CVN-65)|''Enterprise'']] is known as "The Big E". The easy one for was would have been calling the ''Pegasus'' the "Peggy", but somehow that seemed just too cute and I didn't want her being called the "Peggy", then well what do you call [[Galactica (RDM)|''Galactica'']]? And it just seemed like the crews would start to give themselves nicknames and that "The Bucket" and "The Beast" would be the t- natural nicknames. We never use it again, interestingly enough. We just did it in this episode. You'll see we didn't really follow it up again. It was an idea that came and went, and it was chiefly because I was on the set watching some of the filming, on this episode, and [[Stephen McNutt|Steve McNutt]], our director of photography, was sitting there next to me. And Steve's a great guy, and I- I have very little to say to Steve usually because he does such a fine job. What the hell do I know about being a cinematographer? Steve has that wh- has that wired beyond belief. And speaks a technical lanuage far greater than mine. But there was a point, and Steve doesn't usually comment on the scripts, other than say he liked it, or this was cool, or this or that, and he gives little insights. He hated "Bucket and the Beast". He said, "What's this Bucket and the Beast crap?" And I looked at him like, "Huh?" He said, "Bucket and the Beast? I don't like that. ''Galactica'''s the ''Galactica''. We don't call it the- the- 'the Bucket'. I hate that." (Laughs.) I was so- I was so surprised. I was so just like, "Oh my god! Stev- Steve hates that." But, we'd already shot it and it was already in the script and it was too late to really go in and excise all those little references, but it sort of scalded me. I was sort of scalded by the fact that Steve hated it and I- I just rethought it and I never used it again, conciously or unconciously. I just never used that again.

This thing with Garner and the sledge and the spanner, fixing the problem. Y'know what? It was like, I didn't want it to be one of these "[[Memoryalpha:Montgomery Scott|Scotty]] moments," I'm sorry. I just didn't want him pushing a lot of buttons and talking a lot of tech-talk, or [[Memoryalpha:Geordi La Forge|Geordi]], or name your favorite engineer from sci-fi who, from science fiction, who goes down and "Cross connect the dual plasma inter-relays. The duotronic processor is backed up. But wait! If only I can [[technobabble|tech]] the tech, maybe the tech will rise quickly." And I didn't want any of those sequences something- I wanted something more visceral, more physical, and I wanted him with a sledge hammer and just trying to turn a valve. There was something more interesting about that than rewiring things and doing all kinds of other- of other crap with him.

Oh, and see and now [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0237499/ my wife] is walking in handing me- handing me notes. (To Terry:) Yes dear?

Terry: Honey are you done with the podcast yet? The maid, the gardner, the dogs, and the kids are all waiting and I need to unmuzzle and untie the children.

RDM: No. The children can remain restrained until further notice.

Terry: (Sigh.)

RDM: And send the gardners and the- and the maid upon their way. And release the hounds and chase them off the property as soon as possible.

Terry: Alright. Well let us know when you're done with your podcast.

RDM: I know.

Terry: I know it's the most important thing of all.

RDM: Yes it is. We don't want to disappoint the fans.

Okay, there they go. Upside-down into the lower bay of ''Pegasus'', which is something that I had been pressing to do for a long time. I- from the get-go when [[Gary Hutzel|Gary]] was first designing the ''Pegasus'' with flight decks I said, "Let's do one of the flight decks upside-down." He said, "Why?" I said, "'Cause it'll be '''cool'''!" And it's still one of the cool things I like. I just- I don't know. It's just one of those- it's the geek in me still loves the notion that there's these upside-down flight decks and so when we were editing it I wanted [[Kara Thrace|Kara]]'s fighter to come in upside-down and I flipped the shot of Kara in the cockpit to be upside-down for no reason at all except that I thought it was cool and hey- if you can't do things that you think are cool in a television show, why be a showrunner?

Lee- and so Lee Adama gets the ''Pegasu''- that little beat there with the- the watch came out of a discussion with [[Sergio Mimica-Gezzan|Sergio]], the director. He wanted something that was a signature of Garner's that Lee could pick up later and I said, "What if it's a watch? And it's a watch what's missing a strap? And he puts it in his pocket. And there was something about the guy who never replaced the strap." And it just became a signature in Garner's. We will continue this storyline. Lee will be the commander of the ''Pegasus'' for the rest of the season and into next year. And I think it's interesting because I think it's going to raise certain questions next year in terms of his relationship with his father, his relationship with [[The Fleet (RDM)|the fleet]], who he wants to be, what kind of a man he's going to be, his relationship with [[Anastasia Dualla|Dualla]]. It's an interesting way to shake up the expected architecture of the show, and I think that's one of the things that you have to be willing to do in a- in an ongoing series like this is to be willing to change, is be willing to evolve these characters and move them into other positions and play around with what their lives would really be. Because I think that's reality. I think given the situation that these people are in, and the things that they're struggling with, I think they would shift, they would change, they would then be forced into different positions and serve different roles at different times because that's what the situation required. And I think it's interesting because it- it breaks the format of television and the episodic television format re- it's like this dictum that "Everybody must be doing the same roles week in, week out. Everybody has to do the same thing. 'Cause that's what the audience wants to come back and see." And yeah, you want to, on one hand, you want to satisfy that longing of the audience, and on the other hand you want to break that. You want to, like, challenge the audience. You want to keep them guessing. You want to keep them interested. You want to keep the wondering what's going to happen next.

I like the fact that- that [[Rya Kibby|Rya]] had the abortion. She didn't have a last minute change of heart and say, "Oh I'm going to have the child after all." Which I think is the tv's typical way with copping-out with women that face these issues. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068103/ Maude] is, like, probably the last major character on television who actually '''had''' an abortion on- on- on tv and didn't by the end decide, "Well, I know that I believe in a woman's right to choose but I've decided not to." Which I just think is a total cop-out. I think that's a complete- it's- that's trying to have it both ways. That's trying to have your liberal point of view, and not actually bite the bullet and have the character actually go through with the procedure. Which is a difficult procedure, and carries a lot of heavy weight, and I think you have to give it it's weight and you have to play the reality of that. There was another little reference in there, a little line in there you- one could argue doesn't belong in ''Galactica'', which is a "pound of flesh" which, of course, as most people know, comes from "[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/ Merchant of Venice]" is something [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000636/ Shakespeare] wrote and has become part of our lexicon. There's not another good phrase. That's one of those things that when [[Laura Roslin|Laura]] says, "You've had- you've gotten your pound of flesh, now- now I suggest you take it and get out- get the hell out of here." I played around with variations on the idea of, "What's a better way to say that?" and I- for lack of an imagination or whatever, there isn't a better phrase that I could think of. "A pound of flesh" says it all so I opted to keep it in.

And so Kara becomes the ''Galactica'' [[Commander Air Group|CAG]]. Again changing- changing up, moving people around, evolving them, moving them into different positions, and playing the reality of what would really happen to these people. I mean, do we really expect, could- could we really expect that these people would be happy doing the same roles for years, and years, and years? Wouldn't they need to assume greater responsibility? Wouldn't they be forced to assume greater responsibility? Wouldn't they- they- this fleet- the remnants of the human race require that if you could do s- more than you're doing now that you'd have to do more than you're doing now?

This is actually, this coming up was an adlib that Jamie came up with in the table read. And the table read, of course, is when the entire cast gets together before the- the show and they read the script out loud and you hear it and tweak dialogue and hear what the actors play. Right here. "You have a brain?" is something he's just said at a table read and it cracked up the whole room and it was also just, it was inspire because it broke the ice and broke the tension, and yet it was still honest and true. And so we put it in the script. I think that's a valuable thing. You try to listen to your actors when they're playing the role. You try to, during the table read, you're listening to see, it's your one and only shot before you start shooting to see if the words you've written really do fit in their mouths. You've been trying, you try very hard to listen to the actors, at least I do, as you're writing the characters once the series is up on its feet 'cause the actors start knowing the characters better than you do. And the actors have their own diction, and own rhythm, and their own sense of what the character should and should not do. And if you're smart you- you pay attention to that, and in the table read the way they say the lines and the little things they add or subtract, or the lines they won't say, you generally try to listen to and try to accomodate them as best you can 'cause it just makes the show better. It doesn't always happen. There's sometimes they, they're human, sometimes they come up with lines that don't work or sometimes they don't want to say something and you fight with them about it. You- you have arguments, and you say, "Look. We feel very strongly that you gotta say this." or "You can't say that." And it's- and it's a discussion. But... I guess the point I'm trying to make is- is you gotta have that discussion. You've got to be willing to let them be participants in the process beacause it's- it's an extraordinarily collaborative medium. I mean I'm- I'm the showrunner and yet, like I said earlier, it's my voice and I'm trying to give it, the show, a consistent voice. But we're all pulling together and we're all creating this drama. They're creating it in front of the cameras and I'm creating it behind the cameras. And there has to be a fluid dialogue back and forth in order to realize the- the vision of what you want the show to be.

[[Gaius Baltar|Baltar]]'s now officially running for [[Government#Executive_Branch|President]]. This will continue throughout the rest of the season. This will come into play bigtime in the [[Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I|two-part finale]]. And this is going to lead us into some very, very interesting places. So that is the wrapup for "[[The Captain's Hand|Captain's Hand]]." Thank you for joining us. And now, on to "[[Downloaded]]." Goodnight. And I'll talk to you soon.

Scar

2006-02-05T03:19:23Z

TypoFixer: Other typos; Napoleonic wars were not 17th century

: ''This article deals with the episode. For information on the ace Cylon Raider, see "[[Scar (fightercraft)]]"''

{{Episode Data|
Image = [[Image:Scar.png|300px]]
| Title= Scar
| Series= [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|The Re-imagined Series]]
| Season= [[Season 2 (2005-06)|2]]
| Episode= 15
| Guests=
| Writer= David Weddle and Bradley Thompson
| Story=
| Director= Michael Nankin
| Production=
| Rating=
| US Airdate=February 3 2006
| UK Airdate=
| DVD=
| Population= 49,593
| Prev= [[Black Market]]
| Next= [[Sacrifice]]
}}




== Overview ==

: ''An ace Cylon Raider, nicknamed "[[Scar (fightercraft)|Scar]]" by the [[Viper (RDM)|Viper]] pilots, has been causing problems for the Fleet. [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] and [[Louanne Katraine|Kat]] compete to hunt it down while Starbuck pines for [[Samuel Anders|"a dead guy"]].''

== Summary ==

* Several [[Viper (RDM)|Viper]] pilots have been killed while guarding the ''[[Majahual]]'', an ore mining ship located on top of metal ore-rich asteroid. The Fleet's goal is to gather sufficient ore there to create two new squadrons of Vipers.
* With the [[Resurrection Ship]] destroyed as well as most of the nearest Cylon fleet, the Cylons are far less brazen in attacks, sending only a few Raiders to harass the mining operation.
* ''Galactica'' stays behind to guard the mining operation with their [[CAP]], while ''[[Pegasus]]'' stays with the civilian fleet at a remote location.
* There is too much debris in the system to use [[DRADIS]] to quickly sight and kill the Raiders. [[Combat Air Patrol]]s are needed instead, using their [[Mark One Eyeball]] to find the Raiders.
* One particular Raider, known as "[[Scar]]" is the cause of the pilot deaths.
* [[Kat]], now a seasoned and very talented pilot, challenges [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] over the "Top Gun" beer stein, which Thrace has held for many days, with the downing of Scar.
* Thrace's depression over the inability to convince Admiral [[William Adama|Adama]] and President [[Laura Roslin|Roslin]] to return to Caprica to rescue [[Samuel Anders]] and his [[resistance (movement)|resistance]] causes her to drink excessively and behave very rashly. To surpress her feelings on the inability to fulfill her promise, Thrace begins to tell herself that Anders is dead.
*Thrace turns to [[Sharon Valerii]] for advice regarding Scar. Valerii explains that Raiders can reincarnate as well, and with the [[Resurrection Ship]] destroyed, Scar will do anything to survive.
*Valerii also mentions that "he probably hates you (Thrace) as much as you hate him", as well as asking "how many of us" ''[sic]'' did Scar kill. In an unguarded moment, Valerii and Thrace reminisce over old times, but when Valerii reaches to touch Thrace in friendship, [[marines]] on guard make it clear that it is not permitted. As a distraught Thrace leaves, Sharon tells her to be careful.
* When a rookie pilot from ''Pegasus'', [[Brent Baxton|BB]], is killed, Kat berates Starbuck for giving him "textbook" advice. Later, Kat berates a hungover Starbuck again for being late to lead her own pilot's briefing as well as assigning [[Joseph Clark|Jo-Jo]] in her place on CAP, which leads to his death at the hands of Scar.
* Thrace and [[Lee Adama]] talk over drinks, when Thrace propositions Adama for a "quick lay." The two pilots attack each other, clothes flying, but Thrace is too aggressive, which turns Adama's desire almost completely off. He asks her what was wrong, and she admits that her feelings for Samuel Anders are very confused. When Adama tells her that its the "living guys" she can't deal with, Thrace is so confused that she slaps Adama, then kisses him for his thoughtfulness in reminding her that he is her friend before she leaves his quarters.
* Starbuck is on patrol with Kat as her wingman when they spot a Raider. Both chase the Raider, but Scar is using that second Raider as a decoy and tries to ambush them from behind.
* Starbuck's instincts tell her to check their "six" (rear), which successfully locates Scar but leaves her Viper with moderate damage when Scar scores hits on her Viper.
*Starbuck leads Scar into a canyon on an asteroid, then does a quick 180 degree flip, and they fly at each other in a game of chicken, as Kat shouts over [[wireless]] that Scar is a machine and won't break off. Starbuck realizes this; she is making a suicide run, as her mind begins to drift out of focus as she thinks of Anders.
* At the last moment, Starbuck breaks off, and Scar begins to chase her. Starbuck instructs Kat to ambush him from behind as Starbuck lures him into Kat's killzone, in a similar ambush that he attempted on them. The ambush is successful, with Kat winning her challenge over Starbuck.
* Starbuck fills the "Top Gun" beer stein for Kat, then praises the memory of the many pilots lost to Scar and past battles. Admiral Adama and Colonel [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]], both laudable Viper pilots themselves in the [[Cylon War]], attend the celebration. Admiral Adama ends the tribute with "[[So say we all]]".
* Training with Helo in the gym, Starbuck says that she could have killed Scar, but she would have killed herself in the process. Helo tells her that backing off and letting her wingman get the kill was the right thing to do. Helo notes that Starbuck didn't make the suicide run, because she has something to live for now in Anders.

== Questions ==


*Is Scar a reincarnation of the Cylon Raider that Starbuck captures in [[You Can't Go Home Again]]?
*The Fleet has obtained enough metal ore to (eventually) construct two new squadrons of Vipers: will they be Mark II's, or Mark VII's?
**It is likely that the ''Pegasus'' production facilities will create Mark VIIs, as the ''Pegasus'' is a more modern Battlestar than the ''Galactica'' (which does not have these facilities). Since the Mark IIs are outdated models that were only on ''Galactica'' for museum purposes, the blueprints and equipment molds in the production facilites are most likely not set to produce equipment for the older Vipers.
*Did Starbuck and Apollo actually "have sexual intercourse" briefly and then stop, or did they never actually get that far?
*With Thrace serving on ''Galactica'', who is instructing nuggets on ''Pegasus''?
*If Raiders reincarnate so that Cylon forces can benefit from their learned experience, why don't Centurions? (It was noted that Centurions cannot reincarnate in RDM's blog on [http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/archives/2006/01/#a000114 January 20, 2006]).
**The three basic Cylon models represent something of a spectrum of advancement: from their original, purely mechanical form (the Centurions), to the almost-entirely "organic" forms (the humanoid Cylons). The Raiders are described (podcast, "[[Six Degrees of Separation]]") as supposed to be "in the gap" between [[Number Six]] and a Centurion. Centurions cannot resurrect, and they also contain none of the more advanced bio-mechanical technology the Cylons have developed (as demonstrated by destroyed Centurions, etc). Raiders, on the other hand, ''do'' contain "bio-mechanical" technology, albeit not as advanced as that used in the humanoid Cylons. Perhaps the resurrection technology is based on that bio-mechanical "wetware".
**It is possible that Centurions are not reincarnated, as so relatively few were lost in the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies]], that to reincarnate any lost to resistance attacks may not be cost-effective when compared against the need to have experienced fightercraft against ''Galactica's'' battlegroup.

== Analysis ==
*The title "Scar" refers to the "ace" Cylon Raider this episode centers around. While all Cylon Raiders appear visually identical, this particular unit has extensive hull damage, whether from asteroid impacts, scoring from near-misses or other debris, giving it a weathered, craggy look - essentially, "battle scars".
*Many of the pilots Starbuck toasts are minor and recurring characters who have died in previous episodes. In the order she lists them:
**[[Dwight Saunders|Flat Top]] - killed in deck accident in "[[Act of Contrition]]", along with twelve others.
**[[Perry|Chuckles]] - killed in action during the [[Battle for the Tylium Asteroid]] in "[[The Hand of God]]".
**[["Jolly" Anders|Jolly]] - killed in action in the [[Miniseries]], along with nineteen others.
**[[Crashdown]] - shot by Dr. Gaius Baltar in "[[Fragged]]".
**[[Flyboy]] - killed in action by a Cylon Centurion in [[Valley of Darkness]].
**[[Stepchild]] - killed in action during the [[Battle for the Tylium Asteroid]] in "[[The Hand of God]]".
**[[Fireball]] - killed in action during the [[Battle for the Tylium Asteroid]] in "[[The Hand of God]]".
*Among those not mentioned were Capt. [[Jackson Spencer|Jackson "Ripper" Spencer]], KIA in the [[Miniseries]], and [[Karma]], KIA in "[[Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I]]".
**This may be truthfully reflecting Starbuck's earlier comment that she can't remember the names of all of the pilots that have died.

*During the "previously on Battlestar Galactica" intro, a clip of a scene which has never actually aired before in any episode was played. Judging by Adama's rank insignia, it appears to be from the time when he was still a Commander. In the scene, Starbuck argues to Adama and Roslin that they must mount a rescue operation to save the Caprica Resistance, but Adama and Roslin are in agreement that it is impossible and tell her they can't. What episode this was originally meant for is unknown:
**'''Thrace: '''The Resistance base camp is here (''points at a map'') 300 klicks north of the only Cylon airbase in the area...
**'''Roslin: ''' I respect what you're trying to do here, however...
**'''Thrace: ''' We have a ''duty'' to the people we left behind.
**'''Adama: ''' We understand that.
**'''Thrace: ''' We ''have to'' find a way to Jump back to Caprica, and go get them--
**'''Adama: '''--Kara!
* This episode was the third of the most recent four episodes to begin ''[[Wikipedia:In medias res|in medias res]]'', after [[Resurrection Ship, Part II]] and [[Black Market]]. Though the technique was used well in this episode -- aside from the use of the same endpoint, with Starbuck and Scar charging toward each other, for both acts III and IV -- its apparent prevelance in the series here detracts from the episode. (However, [[RDM|RDM's]] [[podcast]] for "[[Black Market]]" indicates that beginning that episode with Lee's confrontation with [[Phelan]] was not part of the original script and was done as an act of "desperation".)
**This episode's use of the flashbacks, going back and forth between past and current events, resembled "[[Act of Contrition]]" than either of the Season Two episodes mentioned above.
**While the openings of "[[Resurrection Ship, Part II]]" and "[[Black Market]]" were a quick teaser from the end of the episode, jumping back to the beginning (to "hook" the audience), this entire episode was structured around such flashbacks. RDM stated that the flashbacks in the other episodes were done to get the audience's attention, (as stated above, "Black Market" wasn't even supposed to have this). "[[Epiphanies]]" also had flashbacks, but these were not ''in media res'' flashfowards to later events, but straightfoward flashbacks.
*Regular series writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson seem more responsible than anyone else for expanding the minor pilot characters as the series has progressed. They wrote "[[Act of Contrition]]", in which the nuggets were introduced, then "[[The Hand of God]]", which was the second time they all appeared (and when Chuckles died). Kat and Hot Dog then reappeared in "Scattered" and "Valley of Darkness", which Weddle and Thompson also wrote. Kat got more character development than ever before in "Flight of the Phoenix", their most recent entry before this episode.

== Notes ==

*As most of this episode is told in flashback, the survivor count is a little confusing. The episode begins with Kat and Starbuck's final mission against Scar, then flashes back to 4 days earlier, within the teaser. The survivor count is then shown to be 4 less than last weeks. Does this include the pilots killed by Scar? (because most of what we seen in the episode happens in the "past"?)
**At least three people died onscreen in Black Market (Fisk, Phelan, and Fisk's killer), and there was more than 1 pilot killed by Scar, so presumably the survivor count is for the "96 hours previously" section.
*As the episode begins, mining ship ''[[Majahual]]'' has been conducting operations in a thick asteroid field for 29 days.
*Kat is now qualified to fly Viper Mk. VIIs.
*New nuggets are still being trained and added to the fleet's ranks. Kat's assertion that "no replacements are coming" in "[[Final Cut]]" appears to no longer be relevant with the arrival of ''Pegasus'' and her resources.
**It was mentioned in "[[Act of Contrition]]" that ''Galactica'' didn't have any flight training simulators and so preferred to train pilots that had prior flight experience. With the arrival of Pegasus it is likely that the fleet now has Viper flight simulators and so pilots can now be trained more easily.
*Nuggets enter the [[Colonial Fleet]] at the rank of Ensign after completing flight training.
*Pilot training apparently takes place on ''Pegasus'', with recruits being assigned to ''Galactica'' afterward.
**This is probably a result of the circumstances imposed by ''Majahual's'' extended mining operation. ''Pegasus'' is outside of the combat zone, guarding the civilians, while Galactica was constantly on guard for attack. Logically, trainee pilots would not be deployed to the combat zone until after they got their wings. Now that they have finished mining and have moved on, training may continue on both.
*Kara Thrace retains the rank of captain, but is now serving as a pilot on ''Galactica'' under CAG Lee Adama.
*The Fleet has found an asteroid containing large supplies of vital metals needed to build completely new Vipers in earnest (instead of making do with what spare parts they have). The Fleet has obtained a large enough supply of metals to create two entire squadrons of Vipers. (It has never been definatively stated how many Vipers are in a "squadron", but based on non-official concept outlines various interviews, it is probably 20.)
**''Pegasus'' has Viper production facilities, one of her more modern capabilities that ''Galactica'' lacks. During the episode, the ''Pegasus'' production team finishes its first combat-ready Viper.
*Anders appears in flashbacks (re-used footage) in this episode.
*[[Gaius Baltar]] and [[Number Six]] do not appear in this episode.
*Chief Tyrol appears very briefly in this episode. Cally is mentioned, but does not appear.
*Lt. [[Gaeta]] and [[Dualla]] appear in this episode, seen in CIC, but have no speaking lines.
*Starbuck and Kat use the word [[frak|motherfrakker]] in this episode, its second use since it was introduced in "[[Valley of Darkness]]"
*In the podcast, it is revealed that a scene was cut of the pilots auctioning off Riley's possessions, a tradition from the British Navy during the Napoleonic War Era. This auction, RDM explains, was a tribute to the fallen, as well as serving the practical purpose of recycling resources. There would be a shot of Apollo holding up Riley's "skin" magazine and taking bids, etc. This "skin" magazine can be briefly seen when Starbuck is packing it into a box of Riley's personal effects. (Its name appears to be "[[Nympho]]".) During the following scene when they're talking about Scar in the pilot's loungeroom ("88 hours ago"), if you look closely in the background, you can see [[Brendan Constanza|Hot Dog]] reading it, presumably having won the auction.
*Lee Adama doesn't fly in this episode, and is never seen in a flight suit. A lot of the day-to-day work of being the CAG, such as assigning and briefing pilots, falls to Starbuck.

== Noteworthy Dialogue ==
*''After Starbuck pours Kat a drink in her new Galactica Top Gun mug, she raises a toast to nearly every pilot that has died since the re-imagined series began:''
:'''Starbuck:''' To BB, Jo-Jo, Reilly, Beano, Dipper, [[Dwight Saunders|Flat Top]], [[Perry|Chuckles]], [["Jolly" Anders|Jolly]], [[Crashdown]], Sheppard, Dash, [[Flyboy]], [[Stepchild]], Puppet, [[Fireball]]...(''stops, crying'')
:'''Apollo:''' To all of 'em.
:'''Admiral Adama:''' So say we all.
:'''Crew:''' So say we all!.
:'''Starbuck:''' So say we all.

== Official Statements ==

*According to an interview on Subject2Discussion.com on January 3rd, 2006, along with "Home" (Parts [[Home, Part I|One]] and [[Home, Part II|Two]]), this is one of Katee Sackhoff's favorite episodes.

== Statistics ==





{{Episode List}}

[[Category:A to Z]]
[[Category:Episode Guide (RDM)]]
[[Category:RDM]]

Scar

2006-02-05T03:13:14Z

TypoFixer: Typos, plus clarification on the history of the auction

: ''This article deals with the episode. For information on the ace Cylon Raider, see "[[Scar (fightercraft)]]"''

{{Episode Data|
Image = [[Image:Scar.png|300px]]
| Title= Scar
| Series= [[Battlestar Galactica (RDM)|The Re-imagined Series]]
| Season= [[Season 2 (2005-06)|2]]
| Episode= 15
| Guests=
| Writer= David Weddle and Bradley Thompson
| Story=
| Director= Michael Nankin
| Production=
| Rating=
| US Airdate=February 3 2006
| UK Airdate=
| DVD=
| Population= 49,593
| Prev= [[Black Market]]
| Next= [[Sacrifice]]
}}




== Overview ==

: ''An ace Cylon Raider, nicknamed "[[Scar (fightercraft)|Scar]]" by the [[Viper (RDM)|Viper]] pilots, has been causing problems for the Fleet. [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] and [[Louanne Katraine|Kat]] compete to hunt it down while Starbuck pines for [[Samuel Anders|"a dead guy"]].''

== Summary ==

* Several [[Viper (RDM)|Viper]] pilots have been killed while guarding the ''[[Majahual]]'', an ore mining ship located on top of metal ore-rich asteroid. The Fleet's goal is to gather sufficient ore there to create two new squadrons of Vipers.
* With the [[Resurrection Ship]] destroyed as well as most of the nearest Cylon fleet, the Cylons are far less brazen in attacks, sending only a few Raiders to harass the mining operation.
* ''Galactica'' stays behind to guard the mining operation with their [[CAP]], while ''[[Pegasus]]'' stays with the civilian fleet at a remote location.
* There is too much debris in the system to use [[DRADIS]] to quickly sight and kill the Raiders. [[Combat Air Patrol]]s are needed instead, using their [[Mark One Eyeball]] to find the Raiders.
* One particular Raider, known as "[[Scar]]" is the cause of the pilot deaths.
* [[Kat]], now a seasoned and very talented pilot, challenges [[Kara Thrace|Starbuck]] over the "Top Gun" beer stein, which Thrace has held for many days, with the downing of Scar.
* Thrace's depression over the inability to convince Admiral [[William Adama|Adama]] and President [[Laura Roslin|Roslin]] to return to Caprica to rescue [[Samuel Anders]] and his [[resistance (movement)|resistance]] causes her to drink excessively and behave very rashly. To surpress her feelings on the inability to fulfill her promise, Thrace begins to tell herself that Anders is dead.
*Thrace turns to [[Sharon Valerii]] for advice regarding Scar. Valerii explains that Raiders can reincarnate as well, and with the [[Resurrection Ship]] destroyed, Scar will do anything to survive.
*Valerii also mentions that "he probably hates you (Thrace) as much as you hate him", as well as asking "how many of us" ''[sic]'' did Scar kill. In an unguarded moment, Valerii and Thrace reminisce over old times, but when Valerii reaches to touch Thrace in friendship, [[marines]] on guard make it clear that it is not permitted. As a distraught Thrace leaves, Sharon tells her to be careful.
* When a rookie pilot from ''Pegasus'', [[Brent Baxton|BB]], is killed, Kat berates Starbuck for giving him "textbook" advice. Later, Kat berates a hungover Starbuck again for being late to lead her own pilot's briefing as well as assigning [[Joseph Clark|Jo-Jo]] in her place on CAP, which leads to his death at the hands of Scar.
* Thrace and [[Lee Adama]] talk over drinks, when Thrace propositions Adama for a "quick lay." The two pilots attack each other, clothes flying, but Thrace is too aggressive, which turns Adama's desire almost completely off. He asks her what was wrong, and she admits that her feelings for Samuel Anders are very confused. When Adama tells her that its the "living guys" she can't deal with, Thrace is so confused that she slaps Adama, then kisses him for his thoughtfulness in reminding her that he is her friend before she leaves his quarters.
* Starbuck is on patrol with Kat as her wingman when they spot a Raider. Both chase the Raider, but Scar is using that second Raider as a decoy and tries to ambush them from behind.
* Starbuck's instincts tell her to check their "six" (rear), which successfully locates Scar but leaves her Viper with moderate damage when Scar scores hits on her Viper.
*Starbuck leads Scar into a canyon on an asteroid, then does a quick 180 degree flip, and they fly at each other in a game of chicken, as Kat shouts over [[wireless]] that Scar is a machine and won't break off. Starbuck realizes this; she is making a suicide run, as her mind begins to drift out of focus as she thinks of Anders.
* At the last moment, Starbuck breaks off, and Scar begins to chase her. Starbuck instructs Kat to ambush him from behind as Starbuck lures him into Kat's killzone, in a similar ambush that he attempted on them. The ambush is successful, with Kat winning her challenge over Starbuck.
* Starbuck fills the "Top Gun" beer stein for Kat, then praises the memory of the many pilots lost to Scar and past battles. Admiral Adama and Colonel [[Saul Tigh|Tigh]], both laudable Viper pilots themselves in the [[Cylon War]], attend the celebration. Admiral Adama ends the tribute with "[[So say we all]]".
* Training with Helo in the gym, Starbuck says that she could have killed Scar, but she would have killed herself in the process. Helo tells her that backing off and letting her wingman get the kill was the right thing to do. Helo notes that Starbuck didn't make the suicide run, because she has something to live for now in Anders.

== Questions ==


*Is Scar a reincarnation of the Cylon Raider that Starbuck captures in [[You Can't Go Home Again]]?
*The Fleet has obtained enough metal ore to (eventually) construct two new squadrons of Vipers: will they be Mark II's, or Mark VII's?
**It is likely that the ''Pegasus'' production facilities will create Mark VIIs, as the ''Pegasus'' is a more modern Battlestar than the ''Galactica'' (which does not have these facilities). Since the Mark IIs are outdated models that were only on ''Galactica'' for museum purposes, the blueprints and equipment molds in the production facilites are most likely not set to produce equipment for the older Vipers.
*Did Starbuck and Apollo actually "have sexual intercourse" briefly and then stop, or did they never actually get that far?
*With Thrace serving on ''Galactica'', who is instructing nuggets on ''Pegasus''?
*If Raiders reincarnate so that Cylon forces can benefit from their learned experience, why don't Centurions? (It was noted that Centurions cannot reincarnate in RDM's blog on [http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/archives/2006/01/#a000114 January 20, 2006]).
**The three basic Cylon models represent something of a spectrum of advancement: from their original, purely mechanical form (the Centurions), to the almost-entirely "organic" forms (the humanoid Cylons). The Raiders are described (podcast, "[[Six Degrees of Separation]]") as supposed to be "in the gap" between [[Number Six]] and a Centurion. Centurions cannot resurrect, and they also contain none of the more advanced bio-mechanical technology the Cylons have developed (as demonstrated by destroyed Centurions, etc). Raiders, on the other hand, ''do'' contain "bio-mechanical" technology, albeit not as advanced as that used in the humanoid Cylons. Perhaps the resurrection technology is based on that bio-mechanical "wetware".
**It is possible that Centurions are not reincarnated, as so relatively few were lost in the [[Fall of the Twelve Colonies]], that to reincarnate any lost to resistance attacks may not be cost-effective when compared against the need to have experienced fightercraft against ''Galactica's'' battlegroup.

== Analysis ==
*The title "Scar" refers to the "ace" Cylon Raider this episode centers around. While all Cylon Raiders appear visually identical, this particular unit has extensive hull damage, whether from asteroid impacts, scoring from near-misses or other debris, giving it a weathered, craggy look - essentially, "battle scars".
*Many of the pilots Starbuck toasts are minor and recurring characters who have died in previous episodes. In the order she lists them:
**[[Dwight Saunders|Flat Top]] - killed in deck accident in "[[Act of Contrition]]", along with twelve others.
**[[Perry|Chuckles]] - killed in action during the [[Battle for the Tylium Asteroid]] in "[[The Hand of God]]".
**[["Jolly" Anders|Jolly]] - killed in action in the [[Miniseries]], along with nineteen others.
**[[Crashdown]] - shot by Dr. Gaius Baltar in "[[Fragged]]".
**[[Flyboy]] - killed in action by a Cylon Centurion in [[Valley of Darkness]].
**[[Stepchild]] - killed in action during the [[Battle for the Tylium Asteroid]] in "[[The Hand of God]]".
**[[Fireball]] - killed in action during the [[Battle for the Tylium Asteroid]] in "[[The Hand of God]]".
*Among those not mentioned were Capt. [[Jackson Spencer|Jackson "Ripper" Spencer]], KIA in the [[Miniseries]], and [[Karma]], KIA in "[[Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I]]".
**This may be truthfully reflecting Starbuck's earlier comment that she can't remember the names of all of the pilots that have died.

*During the "previously on Battlestar Galactica" intro, a clip of a scene which has never actually aired before in any episode was played. Judging by Adama's rank insignia, it appears to be from the time when he was still a Commander. In the scene, Starbuck argues to Adama and Roslin that they must mount a rescue operation to save the Caprica Resistance, but Adama and Roslin are in agreement that it is impossible and tell her they can't. What episode this was originally meant for is unknown:
**'''Thrace: '''The Resistance base camp is here (''points at a map'') 300 klicks north of the only Cylon airbase in the area...
**'''Roslin: ''' I respect what you're trying to do here, however...
**'''Thrace: ''' We have a ''duty'' to the people we left behind.
**'''Adama: ''' We understand that.
**'''Thrace: ''' We ''have to'' find a way to Jump back to Caprica, and go get them--
**'''Adama: '''--Kara!
* This episode was the third of the most recent four episodes to begin ''[[Wikipedia:In medias res|in medias res]]'', after [[Resurrection Ship, Part II]] and [[Black Market]]. Though the technique was used well in this episode -- aside from the use of the same endpoint, with Starbuck and Scar charging toward each other, for both acts III and IV -- its apparent prevelance in the series here detracts from the episode. (However, [[RDM|RDM's]] [[podcast]] for "[[Black Market]]" indicates that beginning that episode with Lee's confrontation with [[Phelan]] was not part of the original script and was done as an act of "desperation".)
**This episode's use of the flashbacks, going back and forth between past and current events, resembled "[[Act of Contrition]]" than either of the Season Two episodes mentioned above.
**While the openings of "[[Resurrection Ship, Part II]]" and "[[Black Market]]" were a quick teaser from the end of the episode, jumping back to the beginning (to "hook" the audience), this entire episode was structured around such flashbacks. RDM stated that the flashbacks in the other episodes were done to get the audience's attention, (as stated above, "Black Market" wasn't even supposed to have this). "[[Epiphanies]]" also had flashbacks, but these were not ''in media res'' flashfowards to later events, but straightfoward flashbacks.
*Regular series writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson seem more responsible than anyone else for expanding the minor pilot characters as the series has progressed. They wrote "[[Act of Contrition]]", in which the nuggets were introduced, then "[[The Hand of God]]", which was the second time they all appeared (and when Chuckles died). Kat and Hot Dog then reappeared in "Scattered" and "Valley of Darkness", which Weddle and Thompson also wrote. Kat got more character development than ever before in "Flight of the Phoenix", their most recent entry before this episode.

== Notes ==

*As most of this episode is told in flashback, the survivor count is a little confusing. The episode begins with Kat and Starbuck's final mission against Scar, then flashes back to 4 days earlier, within the teaser. The survivor count is then shown to be 4 less than last weeks. Does this include the pilots killed by Scar? (because most of what we seen in the episode happens in the "past"?)
**At least three people died onscreen in Black Market (Fisk, Phelan, and Fisk's killer), and there was more than 1 pilot killed by Scar, so presumably the survivor count is for the "96 hours previously" section.
*As the episode begins, mining ship ''[[Majahual]]'' has been conducting operations in a thick asteroid field for 29 days.
*Kat is now qualified to fly Viper Mk. VIIs.
*New nuggets are still being trained and added to the fleet's ranks. Kat's assertion that "no replacements are coming" in "[[Final Cut]]" appears to no longer be relevant with the arrival of ''Pegasus'' and her resources.
**It was mentioned in "[[Act of Contrition]]" that ''Galactica'' didn't have any flight training simulators and so preferred to train pilots that had prior flight experience. With the arrival of Pegasus it is likely that the fleet now has Viper flight simulators and so pilots can now be trained more easily.
*Nuggets enter the [[Colonial Fleet]] at the rank of Ensign after completing flight training.
*Pilot training apparently takes place on ''Pegasus'', with recruits being assigned to ''Galactica'' afterward.
**This is probably a result of the circumstances imposed by ''Majahual's'' extended mining operation. ''Pegasus'' is outside of the combat zone, guarding the civilians, while Galactica was constantly on guard for attack. Logically, trainee pilots would not be deployed to the combat zone until after they got their wings. Now that they have finished mining and have moved on, training may continue on both.
*Kara Thrace retains the rank of captain, but is now serving as a pilot on ''Galactica'' under CAG Lee Adama.
*The Fleet has found an asteroid containing large supplies of vital metals needed to build completely new Vipers in earnest (instead of making do with what spare parts they have). The Fleet has obtained a large enough supply of metals to create two entire squadrons of Vipers. (It has never been definatively stated how many Vipers are in a "squadron", but based on non-official concept outlines various interviews, it is probably 20.)
**''Pegasus'' has Viper production facilities, one of her more modern capabilities that ''Galactica'' lacks. During the episode, the ''Pegasus'' production team finishes its first combat-ready Viper.
*Anders appears in flashbacks (re-used footage) in this episode.
*[[Gaius Baltar]] and [[Number Six]] do not appear in this episode.
*Chief Tyrol appears very briefly in this episode. Cally is mentioned, but does not appear.
*Lt. [[Gaeta]] and [[Dualla]] appear in this episode, seen in CIC, but have no speaking lines.
*Starbuck and Kat use the word [[frak|motherfrakker]] in this episode, its second use since it was introduced in "[[Valley of Darkness]]"
*In the podcast, it is revealed that a scene was cut of the pilots auctioning off Riley's possessions; this was to be analagous to corresponding behavior on old 17th century vessels. This auction, RDM explains, was a tribute to the fallen, as well as serving the practical purpose of recycling resources. There would be a shot of Apollo holding up Riley's "skin" magazine and taking bids, etc. This "skin" magazine can be briefly seen when Starbuck is packing it into a box of Riley's personal effects (it's name appears to be "[[Nympho]]"). During the following scene when they're talking about Scar in the pilot's loungeroom ("88 hours ago"), if you look closely in the background, you can see [[Brendan Constanza|Hot Dog]] reading it, as he is supposed to have won the auction.
*Lee Adama doesn't fly in this episode, and is never seen in a flight suit. A lot of the day-to-day work of being the CAG, such as assigning and briefing pilots, falls to Starbuck.

== Noteworthy Dialogue ==
*''After Starbuck pours Kat a drink in her new Galactica Top Gun mug, she raises a toast to nearly every pilot that has died since the re-imagined series began:''
:'''Starbuck:''' To BB, Jo-Jo, Reilly, Beano, Dipper, [[Dwight Saunders|Flat Top]], [[Perry|Chuckles]], [["Jolly" Anders|Jolly]], [[Crashdown]], Sheppard, Dash, [[Flyboy]], [[Stepchild]], Puppet, [[Fireball]]...(''stops, crying'')
:'''Apollo:''' To all of 'em.
:'''Admiral Adama:''' So say we all.
:'''Crew:''' So say we all!.
:'''Starbuck:''' So say we all.

== Official Statements ==

*According to an interview on Subject2Discussion.com on January 3rd, 2006, along with "Home" (Parts [[Home, Part I|One]] and [[Home, Part II|Two]]), this is one of Katee Sackhoff's favorite episodes.

== Statistics ==





{{Episode List}}

[[Category:A to Z]]
[[Category:Episode Guide (RDM)]]
[[Category:RDM]]

Battlestar Wiki:Welcome, newcomers

2005-08-28T21:46:17Z

TypoFixer: Battletsar -> Battlestar

'''Battlestar Wiki''' is an [[Wikipedia:encyclopedia|encyclopedia]], [[Wikipedia:dictionary|dictionary]] episode guide and written ''[[Wikipedia:Collaborative writing|collaboratively]]'' by its readers. The site is a [[Wikipedia:Wiki|Wiki]], meaning that anyone, including ''you'', can edit almost any article right now by clicking on the '''[[#Editing|edit this page]]''' link that appears at the top of the page.

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