Podcast:Crossroads, Part I

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Teaser

RDM: Hello and welcome to the podcast I'nm Ronald D. Moore developer and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica and I'm joined here by my lovely wife, the lovely and talented Mrs. Ron. Say, "Hello," Mrs. Ron.

Terry: Hello Mrs. Ron

RDM: And we're here to discuss part one of the season finale, Crossroads Part I, which we call episode 18 around these parts.

Terry: I'm here again because Ron is now doing these in bed at 11 o'clock at night-

RDM: Yes-

Terry: In a state of exhaustion. And uh-So-

RDM: I hope-

Terry: I'm-I'll probably be pretty quiet too.

RDM: The smoking lamp is again out, but the scoth is Urgegragor 10 from-single malt from the Highlands.

Terry: There has been a question as to what is your favorite Scotch.

RDM: That's a hard question to answer, Talisker is one of my favorites. Jeru, that new one I got from that professor at USC. This new one came from John Hodgman who was here last night.

Terry: Mr. PC.

RDM: Mr. PC from the Apple commercials.

Terry: Ok, let's get into it. This is Crossroads Part I. In case you're wondering, no we did not forget to put the pre-cap on that says, "The Cylons Were Created By Man," etc. etc. Truth is we were pressed for time on these last two and we asked for special dispensation to do away with the pre-cap, as we call it, and also with the main title. So-to give us-in order to give us more time to tell the story and really play this for all it's worth. This sequence back at the opera house which we've seen before, the Kobol Opera house, was a very late edition to the script. I took a pass at the finale fairly late in the process, while we were in prep. I added this section and some other pieces that we'll talk about as they come along.

Terry: This is so spooky.

RDM: It's very spooky. It's very, "Don't Look Now," the Nicolas Roeg picture in a lot of these shots and very creepy and very effective. I like a lot of this a lot. Originally, we had always known that we wanted to do the trial of Gaius Baltar this season. It had originally was going to take place around episode 12 or 13 after the escape from the algae planet. Then as time went on we started talking about what the season finale was going to be and I started to getting more and more in love with the idea that the finale was going to be the trial of Gaius Baltar. That took a little bit of salesmanship actually with the network. The network was not entirely that we would-that a trial episode was really the best way to end the season. But I was really sold on it and then went back to the writers room and said "Ok, we really have to deliver because they're definitely skeptical this time about our ability to pull this off." So as-so we developed this long art that was going to culminate in this long art that was going to culminate in the trial, that I talked about before. With the Sagittarons becoming a problem in the fleet that's where the Helo, The Woman King episode originated to introduce the Sagittarons. We had more storylines with them as a sort of sub-group within the twelve colonies. And how they were sort of the ouitcasts of the bunch the the other colo-tribes sort of take advantage of them. It was included in this intialy drafts of these two episodes and it was going to play a key part in the trial. It wa-the plot was esentialy that as bit by bit the defense team, Baltar's defense team kicked the-the legs out from under the prosecution's case as it was presented there came a point where Lee, who at that point was going to be the sole attorney for Baltar, Lee was going to come into possession of a video tape that was sold to him by somebody on the black market and the video tape was going to have on it actually video footage of Baltar executing colonists on New Caprica. And it was him, it was there's Baltar pulling the trigger and he's killing people. It just had him dead to rights, and that's where this episode whas going to end: with Lee coming into possession of this video tape and deciding what was he going to do? The second part of the episode-the second part of Crossroads was going to deal with the dupe video tape getting into the backstory on New Caprica. <4:05>

Act 1

RDM: Act one. OK. This storyline here of the Raptor going back to drag the trail, lookin' for the Cylons, was something that was in early drafts as we started to re- We knew that we wanted to bring the Cylon threat back into the show, here in the last two episodes. We had been away from it for a while and we stayed away from it deliberately so that we could bring them back in a big way towards the end. And this notion that they had been following along for quite some time and that Galactica was taking precautions, just in case they were, but- and would leave this trailing Raptor behind to sit and wait and see if the Cylons would show up at their old position, and that this time Adama decides to leave a Raptor for a longer period of time was something that was always in the story from the early get-go.

When I saw the first cut of this episode, which I really liked, I responded very strongly to the first cut of the show, this was how Andy, the editor, and Michael Rymer chose to open the show. You open straight into the courtroom with the opening statements, which I thought was really interest- an interesting journey. But ultimately because the episodes were also extraordinarily long, they were like ten and, I think, twenty minutes over, respectively, there was a lot of reshuffling that had to be done in the structure, and some things had to go to make room for others, and as a result the teaser reverted back to the way the teaser was actually and structured initially and the opening arguments moved back to the top of act one. There is a significant lift here in her speech. She talks about loss and numbers and how they count up the people that live instead of the people that are dead, because of their particular situation, which I thought was a really intriguing idea that was in Taylor's script, but initially she wrote the number of the entire Twelve Colonies up on that whiteboard in the background, which was like fif- I can't remember what the number was. I'll probably get it wrong if I quote it. But I think it was like fifty-one billion, or something. And she had this big number, and then from that there was a series of subtractions of people lost in the initial attack and the people lost down through the years, all the way down to New Caprica. And it was a chain of reasoning that led her all the way to the crimes of Gaius Baltar, which was very effective, but it just took too long to get there. And in fact, we had to digitally remove the original numbers from the top of that chart, because the old numbers were up there as well, and so we had to go in and ask Gary Hutzel and- Gary Hutzel and friends, our new variety show, to remove the old numbers from the board. Cassidy, the prosecutor, in the sh- in early script and definitely in the story, was a man, was an older man. A bit of a professor. But as we got close to casting the part we started to feel that we hadn't had another strong female character in the show in a while and we wanted to bring another voice into the courtroom and make the opponent a woman. Which I thought was a good choice.

This beat- you'll notice that Laura is gone from the courtroom there. There was a sequence that was cut where Laura- you saw Laura get up and have to leave the courtroom at a certain point, and she goes into the officer's head by herself, and she's in there splashing water on her face 'cause she's not feeling well, so it was another clue in her storyline, what's going on with Laura. And while she's in there, Sharon comes out of one of the stalls and they have a moment together where Sharon- in my dra- when I took a pass at it, I had Sharon actually confront her and say something to her, 'cause she had never been in a room with Laura since the dis- since she learned that Laura had stolen her baby. And I had her say something like, "Just remember that a Cylon let you walk out of here alive," or something, and then she walked out. And everybody thought that was cr- too much and that Laura- that it was too dangerous, and it was too overt, and so I back- but there was a scene shot where Laura was in the bathroom and she and Sharon just looked at each other. And it was a lovely scene, and it'll probably end up in the deleted scenes on the DVD or on the website, because Mary did this great thing of leaning her head against the faucet. The coolness of the metal cooling her forehead, and Sharon came out, and they looked at each other just for a moment, and it was meant to evoke the idea that they reco- they had seen each other in the dream sequence, but weren't ready to really verbally acknowledge that to one another.

This opening statement by Romo Lampkin- a lot of this courtroom stuff, especially here in the early going, is pretty much as Michael Taylor wrote it. I didn't really mess with a lot of this. I made trims and s- minor polishes here and there. But this pretty much all of his work. In the early script, well, in the early story, of course, Lampkin had died in the episode before, and Lee was carrying the whole case. And then as we went into subsequent revisions, Lee's role helping Lampkin kept getting smaller and smaller, because the closer we got to actually shooting the show I started feeling that you had- the believability factor became more and more important and focusing on that element more, and felt right that Lampkin is the lawyer, and that Lee's helping him. Lee's not really expected to make arguments, to cross-examine witnesses, to do any of that stuff. He's just the guy at the table helping Lampkin, and that they're only c- eventually you'll get to a place where he had a significant contribution, but not at the beginning.

There's that- there's Laura. She actually coming back from the officer's head, there.

Mark Sheppard tells me a story that- I don't think Mary liked the fact that he kept- turning on her before she sat down, and she wanted to get all the way down to her seat and Mark, every time she was about to get to her seat he'd whirl around and catch her in it, and it was pissing her off, but it just helped her irritation in the scene a little bit.