Podcast:Act of Contrition

"'Act of Contrition' Commentary from Home Video Release" Podcast
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Transcribed by:	Whisper & Gemini LLMs
Verified by:	Joe Beaudoin Jr. (WIP)
Length of Podcast:	43:36
Speaker(s)
Ronald D. Moore	Ronald D. Moore
	Terry Dresbach
David Eick	David Eick
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Ronald D. Moore and David Eick discuss the creation of "Act of Contrition", the fourth episode of Season 1. They cover the episode's framing device of the Viper ejection sequence, the emotional weight of the hangar deck accident, and the decision to reveal Kara "Starbuck" Thrace's culpability in Zak Adama's death. The commentary explores the introduction of key characters like Dr. Cottle, the challenges of writing the Cylon-occupied Caprica storyline, the stylistic choices in cinematography and directing, and the powerful performances that define the episode's most pivotal scenes.

Ronald D. Moore: Okay, and here we are, "Act of Contrition," fresh off of the drinking experiment that was "Bastille Day."

David Eick: And do we have to introduce ourselves every time in case they just...

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, I guess. I'm Mark Stern.

David Eick: And I'm Bonnie Hammer.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, it's Ron and David with you once again. And thank you for listening to all these tracks in your DVD package, and please tell your friends to buy lots of sets.

David Eick: Do you get residuals for these because of the... or do you get boned because of the creative buy? I think I get boned.

Ronald D. Moore: No, I think the only thing I get are the WGA residual, which is virtually nothing.

David Eick: Yeah, I discovered the hard way on that NBC pilot deal that you don't get... Like, it doesn't matter.

Ronald D. Moore: No, they fixed all those ways of getting rich off of these things. Yeah, so we're doing this purely for the love. Just project.

David Eick: There's a lot of love in this room. I will say this episode is probably most of my friends' favorites. Like just my buddies, my college friends, my ex-girlfriends or whatever. This is the one that they singled out at the end of the season as their favorite.

Ronald D. Moore: This opening, this whole little thing, David and Bradley wrote the original draft of this. Thompson and Weddle, who were really good writers who I worked with on Deep Space Nine. And I was working on a rewrite and a draft. And I just sort of had this idea of the ejection sequence being something that we would use as a framing device. That is, it's something that we would open each act with and that eventually the show would catch up with the story at the end. And it was just very impressionistic. I didn't really know why or what it meant. I just had this notion of doing an ejection sequence from a Viper into an atmosphere. And I thought it was really kind of cool and started talking to Gary Hutzel, our visual effects supervisor about it very early.

David Eick: This whole little piece of business is sort of rooted in not a literal tradition, but sort of it's symbolic of various traditions that are in the military and in the Navy. You know, I posited this idea that there was, you know, the the 1,000th uh trap or landing of fly of one of the pilots would be something that they would celebrate. And there are all these little traditions that are celebrated on warships of people's accomplishments and they're all kind of silly in one way, shape or form. There used to be a tradition in the Navy and on ships when they would cross the equator was called crossing the line and they would have an elaborate ceremony where Neptune would show up and they would humiliate the people who had never crossed the equator in various ways and it you know, went back a couple of centuries. And this is sort of, you know, an homage to those sorts of things that to me just sort of gave life to the Galactica and spoke of this larger civilization that they were all part of that developed its own kind of odd little rituals and traditions.

Ronald D. Moore: And I think I only spent the first four drafts begging Ron not to do it.

David Eick: Yeah, and then you really want me to lose the Jody.

Ronald D. Moore: Well, I had the our military tech, Ron Blecker, came into me, came into my office looking green. He had just read the Jody and was all colors of upset about how it did not in any way reflect the nature of these things. He knew exactly what Ron was going for. This is not authentic and...

David Eick: And the truth was, the irony was I had taken an actual authentic Jody. It was an Air Force Jody that I'd looked up that was about um uh Warthog pilots, A-10 pilots and it you can find it. It's like, A-10 pilots flying high and there's this whole elaborate Jody about them blowing up things and killing people and I essentially took it and just reworked it, you know, into Raptors and Cylons and stuff like that.

David Eick: But this is uh now Rod Hardy, who is a friend of Michael Rymer, a fellow Aussie director and this was his first of uh so far three episodes that he did for us. He's a very talented director, lovely guy, pain in the ass, all the things you want a great director to be. And uh but the one thing that didn't work about the staging of that sequence was he put this scrawniest little guy in front.

Ronald D. Moore: I know.

David Eick: And the smallest guy's leading the jody. And so after all the arguing with Ron about the jodies in the first place, then I get in the editing room and I'm suffering this scene would not die. So, it's uh, it's gone down in infamy. It's the one aspect of this episode I'm not crazy about, but it does work. And of course, we end the teaser on killing all them anyway. So I guess it was all fine.

Ronald D. Moore: And the notion of having them all die in this fashion as opposed to like, you know, a hostile fire or some sort of, you know, Cylon encounter was also rooted in actual events. There were there was an incident on the USS Forrestal where an aircraft was being moved around on the flight deck and through an an accident, a piece of ordinance, a missile, fell to the flight deck, hit the deck and ignited and shot into...

David Eick: Really? Just like that?

Ronald D. Moore: Just like that.

David Eick: I thought that was all bullshit.

Ronald D. Moore: No, it's actually true. It it shot across the flight deck, hit other aircraft and caused an enormous fire that killed many, I don't remember how many people died in it, but several officers and men died aboard the Forrestal. And it was an object lesson that then they would show for, because I think this incident happened in the 60s, early 60s. And the Navy had videotape of it that was just recorded at the time. And when I was in Navy ROTC, it was one of the videos that they showed you. They showed you this as like a firefighting, look, this can happen to you on these ships. These are dangerous places. All kinds of accidents can happen if you're not paying attention. That's all it was. Somebody just wasn't paying attention and a missile fell and the next thing you know, all these all these men died. And I thought that that was important to sort of put in the audience's mind that it's not just the Cylons, you know.

David Eick: Well, the network didn't wasn't fond of it. I do remember that. There was a lot of discussion. In fact, we we...

Ronald D. Moore: It's my favorite network note, because the way we solved the note was instead of 30 guys dying, it was 19 guys dying.

David Eick: I know, it was really, it was really one of those discussions where they were saying, well, but you've got 30 guys dying. I mean, it's just so dark and so this and so that. Well, what if it's 20? Okay, that's better. Okay, that's not so dark. Okay, whatever.

David Eick: And the really interesting thing about this is that up until very, very late in post-production, in fact, one of the last decisions we made, which by the way, I just learned Rod was not happy about. In the script and all throughout production, these interludes that you'll soon see open every act of this this crash that's taking place with Kara Thrace in the middle of it had instead a person in a darkened helmet, and you didn't know it was Kara Thrace, you didn't know it was Starbuck until the very end when it's revealed that, oh my God, all this time it's been Starbuck. Well, we got to the episode and yeah, that was a great device on paper and we loved it all through production and it all made lots of sense, but it just never seemed like it was going to ever be quite as compelling as knowing that for some reason, Kara Thrace is going to be involved in this horrific, you know, crash. And it's her story. And I think because it became her story in some respects in post-production. It was always her story, but we really were able to focus it even more on her in post-production.

Ronald D. Moore: It did seem like sort of a pointless mystery at some point. It was like, why are we hiding her face again? Why are we hiding her face again?

David Eick: And I think Rod is still clinging to kind of the original idea, but I I really do stand by the idea that you you reveal that it's her. And again, you know, people, I mean Jerry Holtz, who's the artist behind the R&D TV logos at the end of this, was in tears at the end of this episode. Was so moved by it and said he hadn't seen science fiction that had had been this emotional since Blade Runner and so I think sometimes the pieces just fall into place really well.

Ronald D. Moore: It really does tap into, it's a very emotional episode and it taps right into this backstory that we dealt with in the miniseries that Kara had, you know, was directly responsible. Well, not directly, I mean she's fundamentally responsible for the death of Adama's son. And what was left kind of open in the miniseries was whether or not Adama was aware of that fact. I don't even know if you and I ever talked about the idea of whether he was aware of it or not ahead of time. It was certainly a mystery to Lee. Lee finds out for the first time in the miniseries. And this was a chance to really sort of touch into that because I like the idea that Adama treated her like his daughter and that they had from the get-go, one of the ideas, conceptually on the show was that Adama had a closer relationship with Kara, with this young pilot who in some ways maybe reminds him of himself or for whatever reason he's bonded with her while he has a very difficult, dysfunctional relationship with his own son. And that Kara in many ways is like Adama in that politically, Kara and Adama would both be Republicans and Lee would have been the Democrat. I mean if you had to put it in those terms, and I always liked that. And then to then really put that to the test to really say, okay, and what happens when Adama finds out? What when he finds out that she's the one that did that?

David Eick: I think we did... I remember pulling into a parking lot at CBS to go pitch something with Sean and you and I were on the phone talking about this very issue. And I was all distracted because I was thinking about Sean's pitch going, why are we having this conversation now? Haven't we figured... but it was about this issue. It was about does Adama know or was it a surprise to him? I do remember us talking about it.

David Eick: Yeah, this is a very... this is a controversial episode for the network. Uh, we were coming off of... we had done "33," the first episode of season one, which was very well received but kind of dicey in terms of the heaviness and the death and the darkness of it. And it really kind of had a ripple effect through the development of the subsequent episodes because of the concern that we, Ron and I were, you know, out of our minds and trying to do, you know, Holocaust episodes every week. And this is an episode that starts off with the death of all these soldiers and that is driven by these memories of funerals and of the death of Zak Adama and of guilt and of all these themes that are just again, very dark, very heavy, very emotional, very sad. And we really uh struggled a lot to kind of keep this thing on the tracks and not let it become something treacly or let it become all about lessons. And I I would say it's got what is probably universally viewed as the best Edward James Olmos scene of the first 13 episodes.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, when he confronts her or when she... Yeah.

David Eick: You know, when the two of them when Kara, I call her Kara, you call her Kara, I've noticed. When Kara and Adama confront each other and it's it's really one of the more powerful moments in the first season, I think.

Ronald D. Moore: This is a very tricky sequence when you look at it because this was we were trying... this is flashback and flashback within flashback. And it was a real question whether we could pull this off. I remember it was, you know, even at script, we were going, okay, this is asking a lot. You're asking the audience to track this ceremony, to go back to the old ceremony. And then within that, you know, at the funeral, Starbuck's remembering other things and whose point of view is it? And you know... we had various sort of um ideas about shifting point of view between Adama and Starbuck and Lee, actually, as I recall. There were ways of like making you go, okay, now this is how Lee remembers the event, this is how Adama remembers the event, this is how Kara remembers it. And that's still kind of there. If you watch the cut carefully, you can kind of see that we are shifting point of view between the three of them. But what comes through, I think, most strongly is just Starbuck. You're kind of like with her the whole way and you're kind of feeling her emotion and her memory of the whole thing. And it and it still plays. You don't really have to track the three of them.

David Eick: You know, uh Eddie was very, very intent on carrying this water theme. You're drinking water not scotch here. They're drinking water. Eddie wanted to, you know, that water had become such a precious resource.

Ronald D. Moore: Which, you know, I mean God love it. Totally legitimate. We made a big, we made a whole episode about how.

David Eick: And he was like, okay fuckers, if you're gonna make an episode about water, then we're going to deal with the water. So you'll notice that throughout the first season, there are many times when Adama is pouring water. It's this precious thing, you know. He uses it as a, as a conversation piece, it's used as an offering, it's...

Ronald D. Moore: It's interesting. I think you kind of assume it's vodka because of the way they're playing it, but but it is supposed to be water. Yeah.

David Eick: And he's got, he really, as an actor, I think Eddie really likes Katie a great deal personally. And I think that he's, yeah, he sees in her, I think, the same sort of, you know, raw, not so raw, by the way, anymore. But the potential of, you know, are we working with, you know, Catherine Hepburn?

Ronald D. Moore: Oh, I know. I mean, I have, I've been on the soundstage with Eddie and just had sort of a sides with him now and again. And he'll come out of the scene with Katie and just go, you know, she's really something. She is going places.

David Eick: Yeah, please don't. Because you're going to ask for more money and we can't pay. God, she's not hearing any of this. But he's very enamored of her, and I think you can tell in these scenes there's this sort of sparkle in his eye when he deals with her, which, of course, really works within this story because she's about to completely break his heart.

Ronald D. Moore: Oh, yeah. I mean, he just walks so into it. It's beautifully done because Eddie is playing it really like he just loves her. He has complete faith in her. He's relaxed. She's not. And he's just, you know, it's making it so much worse. It's just making it so much worse for Starbuck.

David Eick: You know, it's interesting when you go back and look at these things because one of the hurdles we were constantly faced with on all these episodes is the directing choices. And we take the directing of the show very seriously and we assign accountability and responsibility to our directors that probably is much greater and more far-reaching than a lot of television shows. And by that I mean in casting, in how scenes are played, in staging, which believe it or not some producers will instruct directors how they're to shoot every scene. And as I mentioned on the previous episode, while I'm certainly guilty of asking directors to reference shots from films or to allow me to inspire them from movies that I think make points well in similar ways that we might be trying to do in an episode, our directors really do have a great deal of free reign, visual effects being one category in particular, where we really do ask them to conceive ideas, and then we will go about adjusting them as necessary, but allowing them to actually have a vision. Rod Hardy, who I mentioned, came back, has come back a couple of times. As you said, you're watching this, you're struck by just that scene we were just watching, how well composed it is, how graphic the shots are. He really understands the emotion of the story, which you find in episodic can be challenging. Some directors will come and you'll talk to them for hours and hours and hours. You'll get the dailies back and go, they completely, fundamentally misunderstood the point of the scene.

Ronald D. Moore: And I think what's also interesting watching these back-to-back is that the directors have a distinct look to them. I mean, this is not shot.

David Eick: Even within style, they have their own style.

Ronald D. Moore: And I think that's great. One of the really strong suits of the show is its ability to experiment, to give reign to the directors and the actors to really embrace the show and create something that they own and they're a part of. And each one of these episodes is like sort of a little individual movie in that they don't feel cookie cutter. And there's really no typical Battlestar Galacticaepisode. I mean, in style of storytelling or in character development or direction, they're all kind of unique pieces.

David Eick: No, we definitely have, I mean, as anyone who watches normal science fiction can tell, a style to the show. But in my experience, producers in television, which is a producer's medium, producers who try to impose on directors such limitations and such strict boundaries are really kind of only doing so to exercise their own ego. Because then what happens is they get the cuts, and then they're miserable and screaming and yelling and cursing the director because the cuts don't reflect what he does.

Ronald D. Moore: This isn't the way I told you to shoot them.

David Eick: And the truth is if you invite the director in as a partner, as a creative partner, and as Ron was just saying, give them some carte blanche creatively, visually, give them a set of boundaries, but that within those boundaries they can be creative. They can, I mean, Rod uses a lot more dolly shots, a lot more long lens shots, a lot more cranes than really we ever do elsewise. And I think it's unique. I mean, you watch Rod Hardy episodes of Battlestar Galactica, you can sort of tell they're Rod Hardy episodes of Battlestar Galactica. And not that, you know, I don't mean to be harping about Rod Hardy. Rod can't, you can't raise your price either, by the way. But by empowering them, you get better work is my point. You don't find yourself frustrated in the editing room nearly as much, I don't think, because you're looking at the work of somebody who, at every step in the process, has felt like a creative partner. And it's felt like he's been invited to be a part of the family. And the work's better.

Ronald D. Moore: And that makes our jobs easier. It does. It makes the job fun. Because then you sit in the editing room and you're really interested. I'm always interested to see the first cuts because they're always sort of a unique experience. It's never exactly the way that you thought it would be on the page. And that's exciting. It's like sitting down and watching a movie for the first time.

David Eick: Now, having said everything I just said, I have a pathological terror of watching first cuts.

Ronald D. Moore: You're terrified. I'm really excited.

David Eick: I can't bear it. I sit and look at the DVD sitting on my coffee table in my den for at least a day before I can put it in. It just sits there mocking me. Watch me. Watch me. I usually have to wait for Ron to see it first and tell me it's okay, and then I can put it in.

Ronald D. Moore: This was, you know, at this point in the season, I think we were still, in all honesty, I think we still weren't quite sure where this storyline was going. This was feeling our way through it. Okay, we've committed. We're going to do a story on Caprica every week. I felt in the first season that you could not skip one, that I thought the audience was just going to lose touch with this show, with this storyline, if we had not kept going there every week. But in the early episodes, it wasn't entirely clear what the point of this story was, in all honesty. So this one, I think, was a bit of shoe leather. This one's like, okay, they're going to go look around here for a while. They're going to find some supplies. But this is the one with the toaster, isn't it? Or is that the next one?

David Eick: No, that's the next one. That's the next one. I can always tell when Ron's groping these scenes, because if you look at the pages of the script, there are a lot of ellipsises, a lot of dot, dot, dots. Characters have extra long speeches.

Ronald D. Moore: Oh, yeah.

David Eick: And there's a lot of beginnings of sentences that end in ellipses and then rephrasing of the same idea that end in ellipses.

Ronald D. Moore: There's a lot of business. There's a lot of sort of, he discovers a book, he's fascinated by the book.

David Eick: And I always get those scenes on the paper and I'll look at him and go, okay, Ron isn't sure what the scene is about. I can tell he's roping for what the scene is about.

Ronald D. Moore: When I am uncertain what the scene is about, I just start playing around and they'll just start moving in directions. They pick up items, they talk about items, they digress into things about their backstories, and eventually maybe by the end of a three-page scene, you'll have found what the idea of the scene is, and then I'm just moving on, and then David later says, okay, I see you groping for this. But I think really the point of this scene is on page three. You could probably lose two pages out of this without it being too much trouble, and you go, oh, yeah, that's right, yeah, that is the point of the scene now.

David Eick: Well, the good thing about that for me was, having written my first episode in season two, I learned from that so well because every time I would try to start a scene, once I got to the bottom of the page one and realized I hadn't written anything yet, I was like, I now know. I now know exactly what's happening. Stop. So in a way, it's been very instructive for me because I can go, okay, now I know that if you get to that place, it means you're still not sure what the scene's about.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, because a lot of, I mean, it's interesting because, or it's sort of interesting. I mean, when you're writing TV and you're running the show or you're the head writer, there's just a lot of writing involved. There's a tremendous amount of sort of page output that you're concentrating on. You've got to get so many pages a day. You've got to like, I've got to get this rewrite of this script out by tomorrow. I've got to hit this mark. And as a result, you don't really have the luxury of whatever writer's block is, which is something that I hear that writers have. But I've worked in TV all my professional career and features. And you just don't have that luxury. So as a result, sometimes you're just forcing yourself to keep writing. You just keep going in the scene until you find what the scene is about. And you're hoping that you have enough time to go back and tighten it up. Or you get to the end of a script and you're hoping against hope that you have enough time to go back and take a polish through everything or take a good solid second draft as a writer. And sometimes you just don't. Sometimes you just have to get it out there and publish it and get it to the production team and let them prep it and let them move on.

Ronald D. Moore: This is the first appearance of Dr. Cottle, which became one of my favorite characters. There he is with the cigarette. I love this more than I can tell you. this notion when we, I mean, we didn't have a doctor in the miniseries. We'd gotten until episode four before we had to have a doctor, but you felt like you had to deal with Laura's cancer, and, okay, we've got to do something on that storyline. And I really did not want to do the touchy-feely doctor. I wanted to go as far away from Dr. McCoy and all the sort of, you know, avuncular, but lovably crusty sort of doctors that are on these shows and movies as you could. So I wanted the doctor that came in and lit a cigarette with the cancer patient and refuses to put it out when she asks him to,

David Eick: which is really what kicks it over the side.

Ronald D. Moore: It's one thing that he's smoking, but when she says, do you mind? And he says, yeah, I do. And he just keeps smoking. That, to me, I was like, okay, I love this character. I want to see this guy as much as we can.

David Eick: And he's great.

Ronald D. Moore: This is really good because he's not just a jerk. I mean, he really does have a humanity to him. And even though he's kind of been a bastard in the scene and pushes her, I mean, at the end, he tells her that she, you know...

David Eick: You know, he was a finalist for TIE.

Ronald D. Moore: Oh, that's right. He was one of the finalists for TIE.

David Eick: He and two other guys, including the guy that got the role, Michael Hogan, were finalists for TIE.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, when he says prayer, you know, it's something you should really consider. And the look on Mary's face. I mean, it's affecting because he is such a prick. And then you go, wow, if he thinks that it's bad, then it must be really bad.

David Eick: This is one of the first times in the new season that we demonstrated hostility or tension between these two characters.

Ronald D. Moore: If you go back and look at that carefully, too, you'll see that Lee really is wearing the bruises from Bastille Day on his face. He's still scarred up and scraped. And, you know, normally you would just paper that over. You would just say, oh, you know, the bruises are gone. We don't want to see him bruised next week.

David Eick: This young actress playing Kat, who was just on the right there a second ago, has proven to be, and there's Bodie Olmos, Eddie's son, in the center there, who's Hot Dog, who's also become a recurring character.

Ronald D. Moore: Well, those three in the front, I mean, Chuckles, Hot Dog, and Kat, they all became pilots to us. I mean, and I don't think we really had any expectation of that. The idea was we were going to do the Nuggets, the new pilots, was just going to be its own kind of story. And maybe you might see one of these guys again later. And what started happening is the writers just started putting them in, like, almost every scene that we dealt with the pilots. So these became, like, our recognizable faces.

David Eick: Kat is quite a find. She is someone we're now talking about and have already built into a much more prominent character. She's just a really, really talented actor. and she's someone who, in a different way than Katie, a very different way from Katie, just exemplifies that sort of masculine fortitude, despite being a woman that is required to be a pilot like this. And one of the upcoming episodes, we're actually going to deal with the tension between Kara, Thrace, and Kat in terms of, you know, which one of them is sort of...

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, what happens when your protege starts out distancing you? Right. You know, what happens when, yeah, you train this young pilot, and it's great that she's a hot shot and all that, and then, well, wait a minute, what if she starts being better than you are? Yeah.

Ronald D. Moore: This is another great little sequence in visual effects. I mean, it's really cool that it's just a training mission. It's not, you know, a major combat role. But, you know, landing on the deck of Galacticais a tricky thing. And, you know, I mean, you can argue that, okay, it's space. Maybe they could do this different ways and it shouldn't be dangerous. but it's more really about the truth of being a combat pilot and the tricky things that it is to be a carrier pilot specifically. And I've been on a carrier and watched them do flight operations, and it is a remarkable skill that a pilot can land their craft on a moving carrier deck over and over again. And it's just such an important part of the job that I really wanted it to be part of their job as well.

David Eick: I like it because we turned the alligator legs of the original Battlestar Galacticastructure into having a practical value, which are these landing pods. In the original Battlestar Galactica, I think they were just designed, they looked like skis.

Ronald D. Moore: I think they did launch out of them as well, but they didn't, and they had a landing bay, but it was very different than ours. It didn't go through the whole tube.

David Eick: Yeah, the holes, the whole, the fact that it's a tube, and I've always gotten such a kick out of the idea that it's treated like that. It, in one visual image, reinforces the relationship of this thing to an actual aircraft carrier, which has an open end on both sides, obviously, just to kind of give you some root.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, because the metaphor is that it's a carrier. And I think at every turn, we try to emphasize that point, from the decor to just the background there on the wall is the communications device, which has a handle, a handset with a cord. It looks a lot like what they have on real Navy ships. And it just roots you in what this is supposed to be. It's not, again, it's going back to what we said earlier. It's not a made-up fantasy world entirely. there are things within it that you can get your arms around and say, okay, this is a carrier. It's like an aircraft carrier. It's a squadron. The terminology is the same. There's a CAG, commander of an air group. You know, there's all the sort of nomenclature is similar. The tasks that they have to do is similar. And it just, it's familiar. You don't have to sort of keep thinking about, oh yeah, it's science fiction. And what does that mean again? And what do they call that thing that they land on? It doesn't matter. It's a, it's, they come and they land on it.

David Eick: In terms of taking this out of the traditional trappings of space opera, you look at the lighting here, which is done by Steve McNutt, and Joel Ransom had done the photography in our miniseries with quite an unusual approach to the genre himself, where we really blew out the whites and crushed the blacks, and we went for this incredibly contrasty look. It was all shot on film, so it had a grainy quality that we also pushed. And then when it came to the series, the one-hour series, we elected to do something kind of experimental. We didn't have Joel anymore, who had gone off to do bigger things. And so, Steve McNutt was a guy I worked with on a show called American Gothic, and he had since become something of a black belt in a new medium that's called high def. And we're shooting this show on tape, basically. I mean, what you're seeing right now is...

Ronald D. Moore: It's all videotape.

David Eick: ...is a very rich breed of videotape. And Steve took the principle that we had kind of developed with Joel, that Reimer and I had, through much experimentation and trial and error, developed with Joel, and then taken it in a slightly different direction, which is actually darker. I mean, the image itself is darker than in the miniseries. It's more shadowy. The mid-tones are a bit richer. And in the process, I think he's maintained the principle of the miniseries, and yet there is this very, very apparent departure from what I gather, because I don't watch them a lot, but from what I kind of understand generally is the aesthetic approach to Star Treks and Stargates. And not to denigrate them, not to wash them all together as though they all have the same look, because obviously I understand that they don't. But there is just, I guess you could say, a more fantastical...

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, it's not like this. It's less driven by source. It's much more of a flat sort of general wash through the shows. I mean, there was some lovely cinematography on Star Trek. And Marvin Rush was our DP on a couple of the series. It did some really interesting things, but it really didn't have this kind of look to it. I mean, this just feels more like a... And a lot of that is just the intent. You know, the Enterprise was never intended to feel like a real place in a way. It was a hyper-real environment. It was a notion of the future that was idealized or romanticized, and you kind of went with that. This is trying to be something different. This is, okay, here's a real place. These people really inhabit a ship that they live in. in the Enterprise, you know, the hallways were always clean, you know, there was never really sloppy books everywhere, and people, you know, just sort of walked around very upright, and there was a certain way of walking, you know. When you were in Starfleet, there was the Starfleet walk, you know, in essence. If you watch any of the shows, watch the extras in the background, they have the Starfleet walk, you know. This show, it's more human. It's just more, it's less controlled. It's a much sort of, you know, anything can happen kind of environment, And the cinematography kind of reflects that. There's much more accident of shadow. There's less sort of fetishism about composing certain angles. And, you know, it just feels looser.

David Eick: This is different, because this is the shot on screen right now. It's the flashback with Zach and Kara. But this is intentionally dreamlike. This is a memory. This takes you out of sort of the day-to-day reality.

David Eick: And certainly Rod Hardy was more interested, I think, in these more sort of beautified, composed shots than he was in the documentary style. And so at any point, he had an opportunity in this episode, which features a lot of flashbacks, a lot of memories, a lot of those things. He was so thrilled to be able to dive into that because I think it's probably more his taste.

Ronald D. Moore: This is the scene. I mean, this is this is one of the best scenes of the entire first season.

David Eick: It really is. I mean would that we were able to match this in any season. I really think this is, you know, I'm loath to pat ourselves on the back too much and certainly we spend a lot more time talking about how we not screw up Battlestar Galacticathan we do talking about how great we think Battlestar Galacticais. But this would be one of the scenes and certainly one of the key moments in the run of the first season that I've gone back to a number of times in watching it and in my head thinking about whatever episode we're in the middle of doing. Gee, are we ever going to get back to this place? Because it's certainly kind of transcendent in a way and very much an example of two incredibly talented people really on their A-game, great chemistry, magnificent material to work with first of all.

Ronald D. Moore: Just believe in it.

David Eick: Yeah, and a director who understood the point of the scene.

Ronald D. Moore: It's just all there. It's really just all there in their faces.

David Eick: This was one time only subject matter. It's like, okay, we're gonna do the episode where...

Ronald D. Moore: You can only find this out once.

David Eick: Yeah, exactly. In a way, you know, I guess maybe the lesson is that because we have planted the seed in the miniseries to say, okay, there was this death, there was this, and so what's the mystery about the death and what can we discover about the death? And maybe the way to get back to this kind of thing is to start thinking in terms of, because, you know, we haven't really broken the back 10 yet, I mean, other than the first couple, is to start thinking in terms of what other secrets are there. You've been talking about Lee and his his, you know, former love and and that kind of thing, but maybe by planting a few more of those seeds, I guess that's what Lost is doing. I don't really know.

Ronald D. Moore: Well, I mean, in a way, what's Adama's secret? I mean, that's an interesting question. What is the thing that makes him tick in a way? We've delved into Ty's background much more so in the second season. There's a whole Ty arc that opened the second season, and you hear more about who he is and what kind of man he is, what he went through in the first war. But who's Adama? We even have a Laura Roslin episode. We delve into her backstory and who she was on the day of the attack and things about her that the audience didn't know and I think we'll be surprised to learn. But Adama's like the big mystery figure. In fact, in some ways, he's such an interesting cipher. You don't want to know too much about him. But there should be some surprising things about who this guy was. Just the little texture that we threw in in a later episode of Litmus, which told you that he's not the latest in a chain of military commanders stretching back generation to generation. His father was a civil liberties lawyer. I mean, that alone surprises you.

David Eick: In the miniseries script, in a scene that was shot but not included in the final cut, Adama is destroying all the ordnance from Galactica. It's in a ceremonial move that represents the retirement of a Battlestar. They destroy all their weaponry because it's dangerous stuff. And so there's this glorious moment where he sends it all out into space and it blows up and the visual effects never worked anyway. But he begins the scene saying, my father always said that a Battlestar was like a... And the clear implication was that his father was a commander of the Battlestar.

Ronald D. Moore: That's right. I forgot about that.

David Eick: And the fact that that, and the only reason, I remember the first time I read your first draft of the Bible, and you went into Adama's father. Initially, I was like, wait a minute. He can't be a lawyer. But then I, well, hold on. The world hasn't seen that scene.

Ronald D. Moore: That's right. We cut that scene. I forgot about that. Yeah, there's times you just make these, this is.

David Eick: And usually Eddie is pretty...

Ronald D. Moore: Eddie's pretty on that stuff.

David Eick: Yeah, I'm surprised he didn't catch that one.

Ronald D. Moore: Because there are little throwaways of dialogue sometimes in a scene that then you're later going, "Oh man, that's locked me into something here."

David Eick: And you know, it's interesting because Eddie was so stoic. You know, he plays this role. And I was saying to Ron after the end of it...

Ronald D. Moore: Look at him. I mean, it's like he's just about to blow her across that room.

David Eick: And he's, you forget because we've done, you know, the miniseries in three episodes. When she grabs the hand, that kills me.

Ronald D. Moore: I know, it's like, oh, fuck.

David Eick: That's so great. Her impulses are so impeccable. But when we were talking after the first season about how the man, Eddie Olmos, is so great at playing this stoic character, and I'd said to Ron, I'd seen Stand and Deliver, which I'd seen before, but hadn't seen since we started doing the show, and he's completely different. This is Gary Hutzel kind of on his game in an unbelievable way. But Eddie is so versatile and so capable of levels of complexity and intensity that we really hadn't seen a lot of, except for these precious moments when you go and you look at the show and you realize it's really kind of this arc he's playing himself. He so resists going for what he calls result acting. He won't go there. He won't go into a place where you're trying to get a specific emotional beat and he's got to deliver it like the milkman. He just doesn't do that, which is incredibly beneficial to the show. But you look at a scene like that, and you're like, okay, you know, don't underestimate in any way the man.

Ronald D. Moore: Oh yeah, don't mess with this guy.

David Eick: This is a very interesting set here. This is what we call the junior officers' quarters and I'm really glad that we made this sort of choice to put them in bunks and imply that these guys all have to kind of bunk together even though it seems like there's a lot of room in these ships and they're still pretty cramped and hard to deal with. But last weekend I was in San Francisco and the USS Hornet, a carrier, is tied up at Alameda Point and I went on it and was wandering around the ship and just sort of getting off on the whole thing 'cause that's what I like to do. And they had some of the pilot staterooms were open and they are so small. I mean it's they're like closets and they're bunk beds and I mean they're like the size of that bathroom over there. I mean they're like two bunks, one on top of each other, a desk the size of this little ottoman which is about two by two and a little tiny sink and a mirror and two narrow lockers and you can barely turn around in here. And this was where the pilots, you know, the sort of, you know, the guys that are really, you know, living it large on an aircraft carrier got to live and they lived in these...

Ronald D. Moore: And how long would they spend in those, in that space?

David Eick: Months. Months and months at sea. Yeah, they'd be on deployment on this. This was this was a ship that dated back to World War II and had gone through various um overhauls and conversions and served in Vietnam and was retired I think in the late '70s or something like that.

Ronald D. Moore: This is in San Francisco or...

David Eick: It's in San Francisco, it's tied up in Alameda. But this is this is a... It's a museum. It's it's what Galactica was going to become. It's a museum ship. It's like...

Ronald D. Moore: Is there a gift shop?

David Eick: There's a gift shop on the hangar deck. And they have like, you know, aircraft that used to serve are like roped off with little... It's exactly what was going to become of Galactica, you know. It's really interesting. I hadn't seen it before I wrote the miniseries, but I kind of knew what those ships were like. And you'd walk through and there was like guided tours and the flight deck was really torn up and needed to be restored and there were areas you couldn't even go in. It's it's really interesting.

Ronald D. Moore: We should go because we're going, you know, we're going up there, I think I told you at the end of September.

David Eick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's worth the trip. It's really interesting. It's kind of run down. It's not really gleaming and sparkling by any means, but it gives you a real strong feel for, oh man, do you really want to be in this ship in bad weather and in the middle of the night and putting your flight gear on and you can barely move around in here and then go up to this flight deck and the aircraft are quite large and scary and noisy and climb up there and then shoot off the end of this deck, which seems way too small to either land or get launched off of. Yeah, it's amazing.

David Eick: This is the best visual effects of the season. Because we were because of the The Right Stuff,' which was the movie we were quoting in this episode. The ejection sequence is a quote from 'The Right Stuff.' But uh these are the best visual effects we've ever done because we entered an atmosphere, which is different from space, so it represented all these new challenges to us. And as you'll see as the episode wraps up here, Gary Hutzel and the team at Zoic really just pushed all sorts of envelopes in different directions that we never thought we could do with this. We just thought we were going to have to shoot some of this practically. We were going to have to, I mean, there's a lot of...

Ronald D. Moore: They fell in love... I mean, this is the kind of show that then the animators and artists at Zoic and the other companies just they kind of fall in love with certain episodes and then they start delivering extra shots because they want to, you know, not even that they're budgeted in. They just start giving you freebies because they so enjoy the work.

David Eick: What's interesting is in all those sorts of wider shots is that's all CGI. The pilots within the cockpits are not live-action actors. They're also CGI. In fact, there's a point in the ejection sequence when the figure of Kara getting thrown out of the viper is all CGI as well.

Ronald D. Moore: And you get pretty tight on her, too. Yeah.

David Eick: The original idea was that at that shot, when her face was obscured all the way through, it wasn't until that moment that she kind of comes into the camera that you would realize that it was Starbuck.

Ronald D. Moore: Because that was the justification that the power went out and that's why you couldn't see her face.

David Eick: This was in Ron's script or David and Bradley's script had the the lateral spin, which I never really knew what it meant until I saw this.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah.

David Eick: Oh, okay. A lateral spin. The wing goes. It's a great shot.

Ronald D. Moore: That's awesome, man. And she's like in a complete panic.

David Eick: Right. Yeah, you see her face is kind of dirty.

Ronald D. Moore: And her face is dirty. And the reflection in the mask is some of the best visual effects, really.

David Eick: And she's trying to grab the handle.

Ronald D. Moore: She's reaching, it's still Katie. Now it's CGI. It's totally CGI. All the debris, the smoke, the clouds. The original idea was that at that shot, when her face was obscured all the way through, it wasn't until that moment that she kind of comes into the camera that you would realize that it was Starbuck.

David Eick: We're going to keep playing this until we get to the end because this was Jerry's favorite episode. I'll use this time to talk about Jerry. Jerry and I concocted this idea that Ron kind of went along with and didn't really know what the hell I was talking about, which was a way to do a logo for our production company, which we sort of just anointed for the purposes of this show R&D TV, a play on research and development. And my high school friend Jerry, who was a great mimic all through high school and has become something of a talented artist of many different media, was exchanging emails with me and I suggested that he depict animated versions of Ron and I solving arguments because the nature of producing a television show is of course to argue. In as violent and bloody and graphic a way as possible and let that be the logo. So I grabbed a digital camera. I think uh Bradley actually came over to do some shots, took shots of me and Ron in various profiles. Ron's still like just, you know, talking about some episode all throughout it.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah, we were just having a story meeting or something.

David Eick: Yeah, and you know, and then it resulted in what you're about to see. And it's not even my voice. It's not even your voice. I mean people say, 'Oh my god, you did such a great job.'

Ronald D. Moore: We should bleep out the...

David Eick: Yeah. The reality.

Ronald D. Moore: Yeah.

David Eick: See you next time.