Podcast:The Road Less Traveled

Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 407, "The Road Less Traveled." I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'm here to welcome you to the podcast, as always. Let's see... the Scotch for this evening is Macallen Cask Strength. In other words, the strength of a cask, however strong that is. And the smokes are Marlboro lights. The smoking lamp is lit. I'm also doing this podcast outside this time. For no apparent reason, other than it allows me to keep the smoking lamp lit without any problem with leaving residue inside. And also just because I feel like it and what the fuck. It's my podcast, I can do whatever I want.

Ok. This was- 407 is the episode that began- it's clearly a two-parter episode. It wasn't always designed that way. When we started working on this episode we had broken all the other episodes earlier and the famous story document that I've been quoting in these podcasts doesn't have very much in the way of this particular po- this particular episode. I'll pull it up here real quick. To do a quick- do a quick recap of where it- what it said. "Episode five. Kara's Earth exploration mission goes badly." Yeah, you think? "Tensions mount between Kara and her volunteers. Kara's reliance on instinct, rather than a carefully planned course to Earth makes many uneasy, and they begin to wonder if she may be a Cylon agent. Anders, who volunteered despite objections from the other Final Four reveals he's here to protect Kara, not to become the husband again, but Kara, being Kara, objects, exacerbating the tension. Anders' sense of invincibility takes a hit when the mission encounters Heavy Raiders, which do not retreat this time. The rations- nearly destroy the battle and the ship in disrepair. Kara's dogged refusal to return to the fleet sparks a violent mutiny." And then it goes on. It talks a little bit about the [clears throat] Cylon story, and I can't really get into that, 'cause actually some of the Cylon story is used in a later episode, so I'll kinda skip over that. But that's really all that we had for this episode going in- the door. Then we sat down and actually broke it. I'd say that the biggest significant changes had to do with the fact that in the first draft we didn't have Helo over on the Demetrius. I've talked about this before. It was kind of a network note, which I thought ultimately was to the good, which was to give Helo a little something more to do. That we hadn't been using him that effectively, and it was their suggestion to bring him over to this episode- or- I'm sorry. It was their- suggestion to do something more with the character and so I decided, "Well, let's bring him over to the episode." His role in this show, as XO, is actually going to be- [coughs] Oh. I see how strong a cask is. Wow. That's quite a kick. I'd forgotten that. That's why I like it. His role as XO was gonna be taken up by Gaeta, which as events will eventually unfold, will be ironic indeed. Gaeta was gonna be the XO of this mission, and actually the confrontation was going to be between Kara and Athena. We had decided that Gaeta was probably not gonna back her play too much. He was gonna struggle to be Kara's XO aboard Demetrius but clearly there was already tensions built-in between him and Kara, dating back to "Collaborators" from last season. But we thought that it would it was gonna be more interesting, actually, if Athena was really the one who was leading the mutiny and leading the discontent against Kara. We thought there was something kinda cool to play with. The idea that the crew [exhales smoke] would accept Athena- or had accepted Athena, and would actually be willing to follow Athena and- had more faith in her, the Cylon, than they did in Kara, who they really didn't know who or what she was. In reality- there was something interesting playing of the idea that [clears throat] literally better the devil you know. They had lived and worked next to Athena for quite a while. They- she had been accepted as the crew. She'd had Adama's faith, and she'd never betrayed that faith. And that the crew at that point would be more than willing to accept her, and then not knowing what Kara was- where Kara could be a Cylon. Kara could be some- could be something else. Kara could be any number of things. But they had no idea what she really was. And that she was acting weird and crazy and taking them off into directions that they didn't really wanna go, and that eventually the crew would actually back Athena's play against Kara over anyone el- [clears throat] over Kara herself. Which I thought was kinda cool. And the en- the episode actually was going to end with I think Athena and Kara pointing guns at each other. I think Athena was going to attempt to relieve her of command. Kara was going to- was gonna fight against that and I think the cliffhanger act out was actually the two of them pointing guns at one another. [exhales smoke]

Here back on Galactica in Baltar's lair there's all these little trappings that we've come to now associate with Baltar's lair. I should make one comment about this set. This is kind of a cool set. This is supposed to be down in the bowels of Galactica someplace and we built this on the stage. This is actually on stage, just right around the corner from the CIC. If you go out that door where the stairways are leading up to, there's a hatch there and that co- that hatch connects to the corridor that then wraps around CIC. Even though we play them as very, very different areas of the ship. One of the things I learned when I directed my episode this season was just how much everyone hates this set. [laughs] Not the design of the set, or the way it looks, but it's not a great place to shoot, unfortunately, because of the way it's designed and set up. It's just difficult to get lighting in and out and when you're changing lighting in between setups when you're moving a camera you oftentimes have to redo the lighting and there really aren't many points of access into the set, and as a result it slows everything down. Not to mention the fact that it's always crowded with people and that people are- the more people we have, the more complicated the coverage is, the more difficult the camera angles become, and as a result this set is one of the least popular sets among- it used to be Colonial One. They used to all hate Colonial One, because you would go into Colonial One and bang your head, and everybody was banging their head and people were like bitching and moaning about it all the time and it was just a nightm- it was also a difficult place to light and shoot in, but eventually they got over that. And now it's like, "Oh, yeah. Nobody minds shooting in Colonial One. They all hate Baltar's lair more than anything else on this ship."

Anyway. Once we brought Helo over to Demetrius the question became, "What is Helo's role?" If he's gonna be the XO, 'cause he's senior, what do we play him as? And I really took inspiration here from The Caine Mutiny. The Caine Mutiny I really like as a movie. It's been one of those films that's talked about quite a lot in writers' rooms over the years. Especially on all the ship shows that I've done and various mutinies and various ideas of what sparks mutinies and- we even discussed Caine Mutiny during the- during the "Captain's Hand" episode when Lee was the XO to the commander of the Pegasus. Whether- how far we were gonna go along the lines of a mutiny there. The role of Helo- Helo's role is modeled very much on the role of the XO on the Caine, and for those of you who haven't seen the film- oh, I'm blanking on his name. He's one of the great old actors who plays the XO to Humphrey Bogart's captain. I should, like, look it up on imdb or something. But I'll let you do that. That'll be some of your fun homework is to figure out by yourself who played that role. In any case, his role was about a good officer who sees the problems of his commanding officer and is trying to keep his- he acknowledges and knows that his commander is screwed up but he's trying to be the loyal officer, even though bit by bit he's drawn into the circle of mutiny, and ultimately it's the XO who has to make the final play against Humphrey Bogart in the middle of the typhoon, and we sorta liked- I sorta liked that arc. I thought that arc works really well, and so Helo's arc is modeled very much on that idea. He's watching the crew of the Demetrius bit by bit come up against the commander, questioning her more and more. The commander's doing more and more questionable things. Helo's trying to back her as long as he possibly can, and eventually he just can't back her any more.

Originally in this little tease open here with the Heavy Raider, Helo actually fired on the Heavy Raider, and Kara told him to stop firing. [clears throat] Chewed him out and I think she actually confronted him pretty severely. Got in his face when they came back aboard Demetrius. I kinda pulled back on that 'cause I kept feeling like, "Well, but-" It's one of those things that's kinda always tricky. There's a certain convention that when you shoot at ships and hit them, they blow up, unless for reasons of the plot you don't want them to blow up, in which case you fire at them and they're only wounded, or they're only damaged rather, and then you get away with it. And it's always kind of a- it's a bit of a device as far as I'm concerned. And so I'm certainly not above using it, and I have definitely used it in the show before, but this time out it just felt wrong. It felt that the rhythm and pace of what we were doing here that you wanted Kara and Hotdog to come right up on the Heavy Raider but not fire on it. Play the mystery of it. Play the damage of it. And have them get in close, ready to fire at a moment's notice, but never quite firing on it. Right here where Leoben is talking to Kara over the wireless. We actually shot footage of Leoben saying the lines, but I opted to cut them out because they were- we don't have an interior to the Cylon Heavy Raider. That's one of the things that's plagued us over the years is everyone once and a while we'll write a scene where we have an interior set for the Cylon Heavy Raider where somebody's being transported here or there or everywhere, and you wanna cut to the inside and see them in there, but we don't have a set like that. And every time it comes up we're talk about building the interior of it and then the cost estimates come in and I always blanch and I always say, "Ok. Fuck it. We're not gonna build the Heavy Raider interior." So, as a result, we never have it, and part of me wishes that we had built the fucking thing back in, what, season two, when it first- when we first wanted to and then we would have had it sittin' around, but- you just never quite- I never quite found the episode that I felt justified taking that kind of budget hit on.

That's the end of the tease.