Podcast:Sometimes a Great Notion

"Sometimes a Great Notion" Podcast
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Ronald D. Moore	Ronald D. Moore
	Terry Dresbach
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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name is Ronald D. Moore, and I am executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'm here to welcome you to the podcast for episode thirteen of the fourth season, or episode twelve, depending on how you wanna count these things. I think of it- this episode thirteen. This is "Sometimes a Great Notion". Our first episode back after the hiatus. The Scotch is not Scotch in a startling break with tradition. It is Woodford Reserve Bourbon, for no particular reason other than my whim. But the smoking lamp is lit, and the smokes are American Spirit. [lights cigarette] This podcast is being recorded in lovely Berkley, California with- at sunset with the sun dipping down the San Francisco skyline. Which I tell you just for historical purposes.

Ok. "Sometimes a Great Notion." This is a great episode. I think it is one of the strongest of the series. It's an incredibly dark episode. As you may have gathered. In some ways this is probably the darkest episode that we've done so far. [clears throat] Which is not to say things are going to be getting worse before they get better, but it's also not really saying this is the darkest episode [laughs] of our journey thus far. This episode began life as one of many in the fourth season during the writer's retreat. We talked about what was going to happen at the midseason break and as we covered in the last podcast, we wanted- I wanted the midseason break to be pretty startling and shocking and get us to Earth at a point where the audience was not expecting us to get there, namely in the middle of the season instead of waiting for the final episode, and the idea was to say to these people, and to the audience, "What happens when you take the fondest dream away from all these characters?" When you take away the thing that all- they've all been hoping to find and dreaming about and praying for and barely surviving incredible odds and nightmares over and over again and they finally get to Earth and it's not what they thought it would be and it's a disaster as well. [clears throat] What happens to you? And this episode is the first an- the first of the answers on- the first of the answers that we'll be providing for Galactica. Sorry. Small technical malfunction I had to deal with there. This episode written by David and Bradley, one of their best efforts, I think, I mean- in some ways it's probably the best one I think- they've done, and I don't think that takes anything away from all the many other episodes. But this is a really complex, intriguing piece and they did a tremendous job with this. There's really just kudos to go around to just about everyone involved with this particular episode. You can see just from the cast here in these opening shots in the tease, that they're already deep into their characters and deep into the story and the director, Michael Nankin, I think this is one of his finest efforts as well. This is just an extraordinary episode, I think, in the history of the series.

Like I said, we started talking about it during the writers' retreat in Tahoe, that summer, [clears throat] and we talked about, OK, what would be the first episode back, and how bad would it be? And my instinct was let's make it as bad as humanly possible. Let's just make it- I wanna see the ship fall apart. I want to see everything just fall to shit. That they get there- I mean, 'cause realistically speaking I thought it would be something of a cheat and just wrong if they got there, they found that Earth had been destroyed, and they just got back on the ships and carried on with a stip uffer- stiff upper lip- and just kept going, and said, "Ah, we'll find someplace else. It'll be fine." It felt like you had to do more than that. This is the culmination of a long journey for all these people and as they stand here on this beach they have no hopes. There's nothing- we're not giving them any comfort. We're not saying it's gonna be OK. We're just saying it's really bleak. It's really terrible. And it sucks. And I wanted them to deal with what happens when it sucks. And importantly- most importantly I wanted the people at the top to lose faith. Laura and Adama fall apart, because one of the things that we'd maintained over the course of this series was that no matter how bad the shit got, no matter how deep it got, you could always count on Laura and Adama, at least, to be there. That Laura was always gonna be steady, Laura was always gonna try to soldier on. Adama, literally, would soldier on. And that with mom and dad leading the way you would always get to a place where you could understand how people would survive. In the previous episode we saw Adama collapse, emotionally, at the revelation of Tigh as his- as a Cylon. His best friend turns out to be a Cylon. In this episode it's really- he hasn't quite dealt with that. He- got the uniform back on and he decided to go find paradise, to at least go see that the nightmare was over. But now the nightmare isn't over. And what does he do then?

Dualla. We talked about the fact that in the last run we were probably gonna lose some characters. That felt right for the show. It felt right for the style of the show, what we were telling, and we decided early on that Dualla was probably gonna die here.

This scene right here with Laura returning to Galactica is one of my favorites. I really like this scene. The- looks on everyone's faces. The way Mary plays it as she gets off the raptor and looks at them and literally doesn't know what to say. Laura's always been able to say something. She's always been able to rally the troops somehow. And this time she really can't. And the way Michael Nankin directed this scene, it really conveys all of it with precious little dialogue. There's just this sense of hopelessness. There's this sense of they really are lost, and you can see people's faces and them starting to lose face- lose faith by the second as this- scene plays itself out. This shot coming up with Laura coming through the crowd here- she starts to head in one direction and then she loses her way and then goes back the other direction and- I wasn't there during the shooting but what I was told was that actually on the set that day she, Mary, actually walked in the wrong direction [chuckles]

Act 1

What I- just picking up on that thought, the idea was that Laura had- Mary had lost her way on the set physically. Like, she had gone the wrong direction. The camera just followed her and that- so that moment of her being lost was genuine, but then Michael like- Michael Nankin liked it so much that when they did the reverse, that is, when they put the camera on the other side, they just decided to run with that idea that she was lost and had to backtrack her way through. So that's why you see that reversal.

This little story with Leoben and Kara is just to keep the Kara mystery going, to make this discovery of her body and her viper and to start to get to the realization that actually the events the audience saw in the third season when Kara's viper was destroyed and she died, actually that did happen. It wasn't a fantasy a time glitch. That really happened and here's the physical evidence to prove it. So what does this person, what does Kara Thrace, think about that when she gets there?

This scene with Dualla coming into Helo and Athena's quarters with Hera is a great moment that was almost cut. I think Michael Nankin almost cut it at one point and then I put it back in or I might be misremembering the editorial process on this. I know there was some discussion of cutting and possibly a network note but I liked it, and I liked it right here, because it's so out of context that amid all this despair and blekakness there is this family and they do have to try to raise this little girl and they're gonna try to play with her and they're gonna try to keep their lives going, and God knows what they say once they're on the outside of that door. But my favorite part of the scene here, is what Dualla says when they leave. The way she just talks in that way that adults sometimes talk to little kids who don't understand. [begins sing-song voice] As long as I say anything in this really nice sing-song voice you won't understand that the apocalypse have- has come and all of us are going to die. [ends sing-song voice]

So- [chuckles] this scene out on the beach was always in the script. Actually, as I reviewed the script and the story document earlier today, I discovered to much my great pleasure that actually this story didn't change very much at all. The- all these story arcs and scenes were in the original story outline that David and Bradley wrote. It was pretty much as the story was broken and the script was pretty much locked in at a fairly early point. All this backstory about Earth and the thirteen colonies and the Cylons and the humans and the Twelve Tribes, and Kobol, and all that, was the subject of incredible discussion. We talked a lot at the writers' retreat and over the course of the season about exactly what was the backstory. How does this all add up? How does this all make sense? We worked it through in several different iterations. The notion- many of the notions in here are not fully explained yet, because that comes later in the last few episodes. But this fundamental idea that there was, once upon a time, there was a place called Kobol, where the gods and men lived together. And man, on the planet of Kobol, stole fire from the gods, in some sense. It's the classic story. They stole fire from the gods and that fire was the knowledge of life, and how to create life, and they created their own Cylons. And it was that creation, and the destruction of their- of paradise that was the end of Kobol. And twelve colonies- twelve tribes went that way, and the thirteenth tribe, the thirteenth tribe of Cylons now, went the other way. And they found and settled a planet that they called Earth. And that at some point the people on Earth, the Cylons on Earth, repeated the pattern and destroyed themselves as well. So this is- feeds into the overall, "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again" mythology of the show.

There was one structural change that occurred actually in post-production on this. The script was written with a complicated flashback structure which I really liked. This- the flashback structure was- that it was all gonna be framed by the Adama-Tigh conversation. That you would open with Adama coming into Tigh's quarters with the booze and the gun and say, "You wanna talk, Cylon? Let's talk. Have a seat. Sit down." And that you- we were gonna essentially tell all these stories were gonna be interspersed throughout the- what am I trying to say? I'm not doing this podcast very well. All of this material was gonna be essentially flashback material. That the show was bookended and framed by the conversation between Tigh and Adama and that you would keep coming back to Tigh and Adama all the way through. Michael Nankin dispensed with that structure in his cut, and when I got the director's cut he had discarded the flashback structure and had just ironed everything out and made it chronological. And as soon as I saw it- it just- it worked perfectly and I was more than happy to go with that version and never look back. I don't think we ever- I don't think we ever cut a version using it as a framing device. There- maybe the editors assembly did that- probably did, but by the time I saw it that was already long gone. And I think stronger for it. Sometimes I think my instinct as a storyteller is to try to do the razzle-dazzle too much. Every once and a while

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