Podcast:Rapture

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Teaser

RDM: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and we're coming to you live this week from Berkeley, California, where the Mrs and I are relaxing and trying to take a little time off, but the podcast must be done and so here we are. I'm here with the lovely and talented Mrs Ron. Say hello, Mrs Ron.

Terry: Hello, Mrs Ron.

RDM: There you have it.

"Rapture" is part two of the two-parter that is the midseason cliffhanger, of course, of season three. As we go through this episode you'll— this will be err— we'll be talking about a lot of editing changes that happened along the way in this episode more so than story changes. The story and script of this episode didn't change radically through the process, there was a lot of polishing, a lot of narrowing down of scenes and choices, but actually, in comparison with a lot of the other scripts this season, the big— the fundamental storylines of Rapture remained pretty consistent throughout, but we were battling things like the ever-present problem of time, having too much story and trying to fit it all into the broadcast window, and also dealing with some of the arcane matters like act length as we went through.

There will be no smoking this week, the smoking lamp is out.

Terry: Yes, as Mrs Ron is here.

RDM: Yes, sad to say.

Terry: But there's ice in the glass.

RDM: But there's ice in the glass.

Terry: He bought scotch.

RDM: I bought scotch, we're cheaping out on the scotch though, this is Johnny Walker black, so it's a blend—

Terry: Well that's because we're out of town, we didn't want to take the good stuff on the airplane.

RDM: Yeah, where the bottle would open up in our luggage and pose a danger, because you can't have liquids on your airplane any more, of course.

Terry: But it wouldn't be a podcast without the scotch.

RDM: That's right. So anyway, here we are back at err— in the nuclear standoff section, which as I told you in the first part was originally slated to be a mid-episode climax, it was the mid-episode crisis in part one, and I shifted it to the end of part one to make it a cliffhanger because I thought it was a more effective cliffhanger than simply going out on the Anders-Lee standoff down on the algae planet. So this whole sequence was originally planned to cover the movement of Baltar and D'Anna from the Cylon baseship down to the algae planet surface in part one and would have occurred, I believe, at the end of act two or three in that episode. Then the first part was going to end pretty much down on the planet with Anders and Lee pointing guns at one another in early drafts, and then as we— as filmed it was just the Sergeant pointing a gun at Anders. But whole sequence, this whole bit of business aboard the Cylon baseship, all this stuff was slated to be in part one. But as I was looking over the two episodes, it just felt like we didn't really have the most dynamic cliffhanger that we'd ever had, so we— I opted to move that down the line, and actually as we— as I look to it later we eliminated another standoff, another nuclear countdown section that was supposed to be in this episode. This little bit here between Lee and Anders and the decision to go after Kara—

Terry: A hot Lee and Anders. Hot slaves.

RDM: The greased-up Roman gladiator look of (laughs) Lee and Anders I wi—

Terry: Is it supposed to be hot there?

RDM: I think it's supposed to be hot, I wish—

Terry: Or in that way they just want to see Lee and Anders greased up.

RDM: Well that's always fun, but I think it was supposed to be hot, see it's nice and bright and sunny outside, funny that they're not sweating as much outside as they are inside—

Terry: No, but there's a lot of fans who live for sweaty Lee and Anders.

RDM: The rescue mission of Dualla going after Kara did change a few times in the script, in the original it was not as it is now, getting inside the Raptor and taking off and making it back to orbit, it was actually Dualla having to carry Kara, physically, back across broken ground and rescue her, 'cause Kara— I think she had a severe wound, I believe it was her leg or something, and she was really hurt, and it was— we wanted Dualla to have to physically pick Kara up and carry her back, we thought that was kind of interesting, putting the two women—

Terry: And Dualla's three-feet pig and—

RDM: Yeah, that came up of course, the practicality of doing that. But also, the more to the point, what really came up, more than just the difficulties of executing the physical movement of it, was trying to limit the number of days on a location. As I told you before—

Terry: And that would've taken an extra 4, 5 days?

RDM: Well, it was just— we had— we were looking for ways of carrying down all the action on a location, 'cause we were— we sent the entire film unit up to Kamloops in Canada, which was an overnight trip, it was outside the zone, which is a union term, it's very far away from our studio—

Terry: It's a lot of trucks—

RDM: It's a lot of trucks—

Terry: —a lot of people, a lot of—

RDM: —and which all translates into a lot of money—

Terry: —a lot of money—

RDM: —so we were looking for ways to limit the number of days we would actually be out on Kamloops and how many people we had to take out there. You'll note that the entire Dualla-rescues-Kara sequence takes place almost exclusively inside the Raptor, which means that we could shoot it on the sound stages and fake the fact that they were on location.

These bits here, with Dualla on the telephone and with the Sergeant, were obviously on location and we wanted some of that to give you the feel that they were really out there, but we quickly realized that we couldn't do the whole thing, we had to bring them back to the studio.

This bit of business was always a little bit confusing, and we struggled a lot with it in the script and in editing, the fact that there is a standoff in orbit and D'Anna is able to successfully bluff her way into getting at least one Cylon raider down to the planet surface, even though Adama has threatened to nuke the site. She gambles that he wouldn't actually nuke the site over just one Raider, as opposed to the entire flight that goes through and he backs off and doesn't, so it's a successful ploy. I think that dramatically you kind of ride with us through this section, I think that you're willing to accept that she won the standoff, and that he split the baby a little bit and decided that it wasn't truly worth nuking the site over that one Raider. There is a more fundamental logical question of course, which is why the Raiders don't just jump down to the planet surface the way that we see Raiders jump in other circumstances. I don't have a good answer for that, except this worked better dramatically and that's what we did.

This section— I like this a lot, this little beat of Helo and Sharon, and cutting in on what they're gonna do about their baby, was always one of the more intriguing emotional storylines in the episode, and I liked coming into the situation and not really knowing what they were talking about and what was going on in their head. I think as scripted in the first drafts, this conversation was going to take place in a Raptor, that Sharon was going to try to steal a Raptor and go fly out of Galactica and go to the baseship to get her baby, and I called bullshit on that and said 'Well, y'know—' I think one of the tropes of doing science-fiction shows or shows about military life is that there's always this moment when the pilot, or some pilot, goes and steals a plane and flies it away, gets on the carrier deck and flies a stolen plane off, and I just never believed that, it's just so unbelievable, so I— we almost did it and I just pulled— she can't steal a Raptor, that's just crazy, so we opted not to go that route. And this is a more effective scene, I think, anyway—

Terry: Did Kara steal that airplane?

RDM: No.

Terry: No.

RDM: No. This I love, they're holding each other, they're crying, (Sharon says "I love you" in the background) "I love you", and watch the look on Helo's face here. And this is a great Rymer, see Rymer's really good at this, at staging, at— so that you're drawn into the emotional moment, you're not quite sure what's gonna happen— see, look at that look on Helo's face— and then 'Boom!'. And oh my God, he shot her. I love that.

Terry: That's just so hard.

RDM: That's so h— that's so bad, that's just like 'Wow!'. (Helo screams in the background) And then we did this— the anguish cry, that's a really power— I like that, that's one of the better teasers, I think, we did this season, in terms of what the tease-out is. 'Cause it's just— I think it real— it's a really shocking and heartfelt moment emotionally.

Terry: Oh, this makes you think about it, what if you gotta do something like that, it's just so— it's so utterly human—

RDM: Yeah, even though he knows she's gonna go download and be on the other side, but—

Terry: —what does it matter—

RDM: —what does it cost you, what does it mean to actually—

Terry: —to actually do that—

RDM: —to hold your wife in your arms and put the gun to her chest and pull the trigger—

Terry: —that's something you never think about.

RDM: No, I never think of that, honey.

Terry: (laughs)

RDM: Are you drifting off to sleep now?

Terry: No, no, I'm on the way.

RDM: Terry doesn't sleep very often when I'm around.

Terry: (laughs)

RDM: We don't know why. OK, that's the end of the tease.

Act 1

RDM: OK, and we're back. When I w— when I took a polish pass through these two episodes, one of the things I did on my pass was to—

Terry: Do people know what a polish pass is?

RDM: Essentially, there's a point in the development, the life, history of each script where usually the show runner takes a pass through the script, and it's the polish pass at the end, and sometimes I do it, and sometimes I don't, I'm happy not to do it—

Terry: —a polish pass, meaning he re—

RDM: —I polish it, and I polished this one at the end, and one thing I did was to shift this scene from a scene in CIC I think it was, where they were confronting Helo and being very angry with him, to putting it in the room, with her body still being taken and the blood on the walls, and the— y'know, they were still very much in the moment. And you do that because it also brings the audience very much in the moment of what had just happened, I mean you're in the moment of the killing, and I thought that was a much more powerful place to play the scene. I like this ep— this scene a lot in terms of performance, I like— y'know, Helo's restrain— barely restrained anger, I like the fact that we're finally confronting Laura with what she did, y'know Laura's— there's a beat here where— coming up where Laura says 'Well, you've put us all at jeopardy, I hope you know what you're doing, and then he gets up and starts advancing on her, and there's a great little beat coming up where he's advancing on the President and Adama just reaches out his hand (laughs) and pulls him back like 'Jesus, Helo, easy there, buddy', 'cause Helo's a very big guy. It's right here, it's like— there he goes, he stands up and he just starts walking over to the President, like 'you know what, lady, for somebody, those (multiple words unintelligible due to laughing)', and there— and then Adama just steps in. I like that a lot, and I really like Mary here, on this reverse, the look on Mary's face as Helo is nailing her, and the fact that she has to accept that and has to acknowledge that that's true. It's something— y'know I think it was very important to Mary and to Grace and to Tahmoh that this thing ultimately did get paid off, that we did play the moment when Laura had to face what she had done, with one of them in the room in a very real sense. (RDM is silent for 10 seconds, the episode can be heard playing in the background, Roslin says "All we can do is hope that your wife is worthy of the unconditional trust—")

RDM: The Sharon storyline did go through a lot of change, in that in the early drafts of the script we had a lot more that we were gonna play on the Cylon baseship with Sharon and Caprica-Six and Boomer over there, dealing with Hera and there was a whole substory about, and I thi— and I alluded to this last week, which was that Boomer— y'know the Sharon that was originally on Galactica and assassinated by Cally, and has been there ever since— Boomer had been caring for Hera and trying to be a mother, and had been rejected by the child and had trouble dealing with the child, and was building up this profound resentment because she had tried to have a baby, presumably with Tyrol, had never been able to, and then the other Sharon had been able to have a baby with Helo almost immediately, and what did that say about her and the Cylons' beliefs, that the child was only conceived because of God's true love, so on some level that meant that she and Tyrol did not have God's true love, which, combined with the fact that the child was not responding to her, was gonna build this incredible resentment on her part, and also Caprica-Six's fascination with Hera and constantly coming into the nurse room, trying to also be a surrogate mother to Hera, and it was this whole complicated battle of the duelling mothers over there, that we never really— it was compl— it was hard to follow, and ultimately it got cut from the scripts.

This storyline down on the planet surface, of the military tactics of defending the fixed position, David and Bradley spent a great deal of time and effort in the script, working all this out. Both of them are well-versed in military tactics—

Terry: I'm sorry that the women aren't sweaty.

RDM: (laughs)

Terry: I'm sorry.

RDM: Well, the women aren't in love with each other, like the guys are. But David and Bradley spent a lot of time working through the tactics of how to defend the fixed position in the terrain, in fact they flew up to the location and spent a lot of hours at the ter— at the location, (gunshots in the background, Dualla shouts: "Sniper!") working out exactly where people were— y'know where the Cylons were coming, where they would set up the gun emplacements, where the mortars would be, and it was really fascinating, Brad in particular knows a lot about small-unit tactics, and— y'know it was (more gunfire in the background)— it was (unintelligible) making all those beats play—

Terry: Is he Bradley?

RDM: Bradley. Problem was, as we get into the editing room you start looking to the footage and unfortunately you can't make head or tails of the terrain half the time, because then— it all looks the same on camera. And so (unintelligible) that effort unfortunately just never got to pay off.

Now this sequence here, with Tyrol looking at the temple is completely made up in the editing room. This is not a real scene. Cally walks up and hands him the phone, this is a classic Hitchcockian moment where you have a problem in the story and you're trying to fill it in, and what you do is you create a phone call. Hitchcock, I think, always said that if you ever run into trouble you basically just— as long as you have a scene with the characters on the phone, you can have them say anything that you want, and that's what we did here. All this footage is stolen from much later in the story, at the point— at the cli— the plot-twist, the climax of the episode, where Tyrol gets the phone call from Lee and is told to blow up the temple. And we stole all that coverage to create a beat early in the show, just to remind you that Tyrol was still in the temple, and that there was this thing called the Eye of Zeus, and that Lee was concerned about how long it was gonna take them to discover it, and even Lee's side of that conversation was stolen from way through the episode. None of it was scripted or structured, but there was a strong feeling as you looked at the cut, that we had forgotten who Tyrol wa— where Tyrol was, what he was doing, what the Eye of Zeus is, so it was actually David Eick's idea, which is a very smart— to create that little sequence out of found footage that we weren't using in the other coverage.

This scene we're looking at now, with D'Anna and Baltar talking is actually the second scene that occurred down at the planet surface. There is also a scene that was cut, whe— which had Baltar, Cavil, Leoben and D'Anna all standing on a ridge and talking in general terms about the difficulties of assaulting the position on the temple, establishing that they didn't wanna just nuke the temple, they didn't wanna come in and strafe it and blow it up, they had to be careful, they had to assault it from certain angles, because they were worried about destroying the very thing that they were there coming after. Ultimately, I felt that that scene wasn't as important as this scene was, 'cause this is about the emotional context of Baltar and D'Anna, 'cause we're nearing the climax of their story together.

Now this, as you can see— they're looking— this is all very specific stuff, they're looking on— they're— our guys are on a ridge, he's— Anders is laying the wire for a Claymore somewhere else. There was a whole section in the script which I really regret has not been able to do it because of time considerations, where essentially, they had taken the tylium from— some of the fuel that was existing on the planet, and they had filled tylium in these trenches, and when the Cylons approached they were gonna light the tylium on fire, which was gonna create this really intense fire and stop the Cylons and make them easier to pick them off, and there was all these great tactics that the boys came up with that ultimately we were unable to do. And even here, see, here you have a tough time understanding the terrain, and this is all very carefully choreographed stuff, they laid out elaborate positions, where everybody was, what the angle of approach was, where the ambush would be, where the fall-back positions were, but as you're looking at the footage it's really hard on camera to tell one position from the other. So it happened in the editing base, we just kept working these scenes just to make them work dynamically and make them fun to watch, and all the geography got tossed out the window and all these guys are looking in the wrong directions from where they actually are, none of it really lines up with— if you went out and walked the actual location, none of this would make sense, y'know the— we're cutting this in such a way and from different angles that you could not possibly line all this stuff up, this is all just— this is the difference between camera and theory. The camera changes the terrain, it changes the perspective, it just shifts everything.

Act 2

Terry: You can see it's really, really cold outside, that's why they're not sweaty outside, and it's hot inside because they've got fires within to keep them warm, it's too heated.

RDM: Yeah, it's something like that.

Terry: Yeah.

RDM: There wa— this is all a lot of stuff done— y'know Gary Hutzel and his crack of the effects guys with the Cylons, and—

Terry: (faintly) Unbelievable.

RDM: —we worked a lot with what they were going to do, and— y'know the Cylons have a lot more personality, I think, in these little bits you can see them looking, being careful, they're wary, they're trying to get to their targets, they're not just mindless robots. Gary's team has really started to be able to give them a great deal more personality, as it were, than the Centurions have really had previously.

Terry: This is not a final cut we're watching.

RDM: No, we're watching a temporary visual effects here, actually. But they're still very dynamic—

Terry: Yeah, they really have changed since the last time I saw them.

RDM: Yeah. This beat of losing Hillard was a little longer, a little bit more elaborate in the early cuts, there was a little more dialogue with Anders, talking about what this guy meant to him and so on, but it seemed to slow down the action, and you get the emotional (unintelligible) pretty quickly, so we opted to get out of this little sequence and move on quickly. All the— again, this whole section, all the ground fights went through a lot of editing changes, there were several different ground fights in a lot of different set-ups and payoffs for what was happening that got shifted multiple times in the editing room, and this cut that's coming up, where we're about to go back to the Kara-Dualla scene, did not occur here. Because what happened was, in the original cut, was Anders and Lee kept— he says "have you heard from Kara?", Lee says "No", and that conversation kept going, where essentially they talked about— y'know Anders talked about Kara, what she meant to him, his knowledge of the person that she was, more— it was more of the love aspect of the show, the romantic triangle, and it felt forced when we were watching it, it felt like you didn't need it and went without saying. This, again, here we're inside the Raptor with Kara, this is all back on the sound stage, which is why that window in the back is mysteriously opaque (laughs) it's really— that is not a promised moment, it's just this opaque window that you can't see through, and you're not quite sure why, it's supposed to (unintelligible).

This beat here with Kara pointing the gun, 'cause of her burned hands— and I love the burned hands and Kara's reaction to it— that beat with Kara pointing the gun at who's gonna come out the door used to be an act-out, and then at the top of the next act Dualla came in and we relieved the tension, but it was a phony act-out, so we just made it one sequence. In early drafts, like I said, it was a different injury, between the two I think her leg was damaged, but as we got deeper into the script, we (unintelligible) in love with this idea of these deeply burned hands, which I think was something that Brad came up with, as that would really— if your hands are so horribly burned—

Terry: —incapacitated—

RDM: —and so hurt, you— she's just incapacitated, she's a pilot, she can't fly the plane physically. And that was about the point where we started thinking that we'd like to play the beat of Dualla having to fly the plane out of here.

Back to the Cylon baseship. Again, this sequence moved around in the cut quite a bit, and what— we used to follow hard on the heels of the earlier scene with Sharon waking up in the Resurrection Ship and then we cut directly here, and we separated that, and just— back and forth and back and forth, in the rhythms of the acts. Essentially the problem that you face with a lot of these kinds of sequences, in terms of where they fall in the acts, is that you don't want the acts to be much more— much shorter than, say, six minutes, in the current scheme of television. If you get an act that's less than six minutes, the audience starts feeling like they're just watching endless commercials, like you're no sooner in the show, then boom, another commercials slaps you in the face, and there's also a theory that— you're trying very hard to make the teaser and act 1 and 2 as long as possible, because the idea is you hook the audience into watching the show, and you keep 'em in, keep 'em in, keep 'em in, then they get to a commercial break, then along-long-long-long-long, it's all to keep them from turning the channel, so you'll note in— as you're watching on air that the early acts are all long, and then the latter acts are all short. But that doesn't always flow with how the story's supposed to go, and much less so, sometimes, when you're in the editing room, so you end up making a lot of difficult choices of sliding things around just to plump out the early acts and to carve down later acts, and this is an example, this was— y'know the whole Hera sequence kept moving around just to make the act links correct, which is sort of— besides, if you're listening to this commentary on DVD, you don't care about the act breaks, it's— so you're sort of— on one hand, I spent a l— a great deal of time and effort in editing trying to make these act links come out correctly and to try to get the proper act-out of maximum suspense for the broadcast version of the show, but when you're watching it later on DVD, in the archival version, you don't care. It's like no one— if you're watching this on DVD, the act break doesn't matter to you, you're watching the episode through as a piece, but you'll note that the rhythms of television force these artificial climaxes at the end of all these acts, and fade into black, where— in many ways, if you just play this straight through, it's a much more effective piece.

This was another controversial scene, of course, the threat to baby Hera, which prompted yet another round of arguments with the network, that we were threatening the life of a ch—

Terry: Because of what?

RDM: Because we were threatening the life of a child, and how much— y'know, the infamous moment when Six killed the baby in the Miniseries, and the f— and some of the audience freaking out because of we're about to kill the baby, and the baby-killing show and all that stuff.

Terry: It's pretty obvious that (unintelligible) more upset about— this wasn't done the rough I saw.

RDM: This wasn't— yeah, probably not. And then she's snapping her neck, and how much of that do you show on camera, and this is one of those graphic content thing that eats up a great deal of time—

Terry: It's really extraordinary, considering the graphic content, that there is out there.

RDM: Oh yes. (laughs) Let's turn the channel over to Dexter for a moment, shall we?

OK, how does Caprica-Six get Sharon and Hera off the baseship and back to Galactica and into the Raptor, without anybody catching her? Well, you'll just have to figure that out at home, that's one of the deep dark secrets of the show that will only be revealed in Season 7. No, I don't know, and I didn't really care, I didn't think it really mattered. I think for that part you just gotta to go with the flow, and she can get her off— you just accept she can get her off the ship, because the dramatic end of that commercial—

Terry: Well, because they're Cylons!

RDM: They're Cylons, and it doesn't really matter. Oh, that's great, them running down the hill, all this— this battle sequence—

Terry: It feels like the first time they've— I don't now, maybe just—

RDM: See, there's Cally running up to Tyrol with the phone, again. It's almost the same shot as we used earlier in the show, and he's phone again, this is the exact same scene that we stole to manufacture that beat from earlier on.

Terry: No, I was gonna say— the Cylons, as— have we seen as much of the Cylons as we are right now? It feels to me like I'm seeing way more of them—

RDM: No, you haven't seen as much. I mean this episode has a surprising number of shots, there's a lot of visual effects shots—

Terry: Yeah, and I feel like I get a much greater idea of how they function.

RDM: A lot of that goes to Gary Hutzel, I have to say, I mean we script a certain number of shots and we argue about price and all that, and then you get the editing room, and Gar— it's— it doesn't come from us crazy producers, like 'We need more visual effects shots',