Podcast:Flight of the Phoenix

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode nine of season two, "Flight of the Phoenix", I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and y'all are getting this podcast late because technology betrayed me at last. I did the podcast last week, turned it in and lo and behold; half the show was missing. So rather than try to salvage what I had, in interspersed comments, we're just going to start over.

"Flight of the Phoenix" began life very early in the season when we were talking about initial story ideas for this season, I had this sort of image of Tyrol going down into the hang- waking up in the middle of the night going down to the Hangar Deck, taking a big piece of tape laying out a pattern on the floor and deciding, 'I'm gonna build a Viper'. And it was just- it was something about it psychologically that I liked for the character. There was something about the series and the mythos of the show and how the fleet operates that I liked about dealing with y'know a bit of the reality of the situation that they are losing Vipers and losing pilots and none of these things are being replaced from home and they all have to make do with what they got. And so I really liked the notion of doing a show that was sort of centered around that concept, if not addressing all the needs of the fleet in all the many ways, let's just do a show that talks about the difficulty of doing one thing, of building one fighter.

And the idea kicked around for quite a while, I think the initial notion that I had was to do the entire show in the Hangar Deck- that you would never cut away. It was really a concept show where essentially you would do time laps- time dissolves or time cuts within the scene, you would stay in the Hangar Deck, never leave, and the idea was every single person on the show would come through the Hangar Deck at some point amd we would intersect with their stories only through the prism of the building of the Viper. One thing that happens when you take that approach, rather quickly is that the concept swamps everything else and you find yourself constantly trying to cram another story, another characterisation into what is, by its very nature, a fairly artificial construct. So eventually we just sort of shied away from that and realised that there were many stories that had to be told. There were a lot of other tales going on in this episode, a lot of other things that we wanted to touch on and it became way too cumbersome to try to do them all consistently within the 'building the Viper' scene. Much like we talked about last week in "Final Cut", the show about the documentary, initially the concept was to do an entire episode solely from the documentarian's point of view of a reporter stuck in the Ward Room in the first few episodes, and that became too cumbersome. You find that a lot, there's a lot of back-and-forth [between] TV writers that seem really provocative and interesting but on execution for one reason or another become awkward and difficult and you end up making choices and compromises to try and get the essence of the idea that you were going for and to present it in a format that works for the show. Which is essentially what happened to this episode in the end was I really liked doing the show, I just couldn't do it all in the Hangar Deck. I didn't want the concept to swamp what the show is.

This episode went through a lot of changes editorially, we had a lot of extra footage on this episode, some of which I'm sure you'll see in the deleted scenes. There were various ways of going about this episode, just this teaser alone with the intercuts that you've seen already between Helo at the card game and interspersed with Tyrol out on the Viper and Cally. There were various versions where we cut- we didn't show this party, the welcome back of Cally- in the episode it was something that was more implicit that she came back to work and there was a passing mention of the fact that she had finally served out her time in the brig. Then there was a version of this that played a lot more of that scene that you just saw where Tyrol comes in, there was a whole interplay between Cally and the other mech- the other knuckle draggers in there talking about the unfairness of what happened to her and they're toaster-bashing as it were.

This scene really was something that we had talked about in the writer's room for quite a while, even last season, it was just the notion of 'what's going to happen when these two guys meet?', what's going to finally take place when Helo and Tyrol get together?

I love the card game scene a lot, I really liked Racetrack, I'm really intrigued with the way Racetrack has become one of our members of our family. I've commented on this before, the way that many of the supporting players that came on just for a role here and a role there then expanded and have become part of the life-blood of the show. Racetrack was just going to be the temporary ECO in "Kobol's Last Gleaming" last year, Sharon needed to ride with somebody, let her ride with- well call her Racetrack, and now Racetrack is like a full blown character for us which I think is just great and it's a real salute to the quality of casting that we're able to do, the dynamics down on the show.

In any case back to Helo and Tyrol, we talked at length what they would do when these two finally got together, and you start with the most obvious idea is- the one that we ended up with which is that they fight. You started with that- you start saying 'okay let's not do that, let's try something else, what else would they do?'. We talked about versions where they saw each other in the Rec Room or at some social situation, eyed each other, there was a hard look and not much more, there was a point where Tyrol came and sat down with Helo and said some things that were completely off-point, just man-talk about something else but there was a mutually understood feeling of what was really going on. We tried versions of that but none of them were really that satisfying because on some level you knew that the thing that was most in character for these two men based on the people that we had seen them be, him down on Caprica and Tyrol dealing with people on Galactica and Kobol, that there's a lot of rage and a lot of frustration and a lot of self-hatred and ambiguity in both these men over the choices that they've made, over the people that they've chosen to send- give their hearts to and the fact that they've now come face-to-face with the representational other of themselves. How could you not wanna beat the crap out of him?

The moment of him reaching for the wrench is really interesting and telling about just how far the rage has built in these men. Actually I got a note from one of the writers of this episode, Bradley Thompson and his partner David Weddle who wrote this episode, and they objected to that moment and I must say in their defence I completely understand why they object to that moment because it really says something pretty bad about Tyrol, which is why I like it of course. I like the fact that Tyrol for a moment lost himself in that- he's been drinking, he lost himself- he picked up that wrench and for a moment really thought about caving in Helo's skull with it. And there's a seduction to that and there's a pull to that and it's an emotion that I think that the character would genuinely feel in those circumstances. There's a truth to it, ultimately that's why we went with the fight, there's a truth to it, I just believe it, I believe that that's what those two men would do.

The virus story that runs throughout this show- well we're about to hit the teaser out- so the virus story that runs throughout this show is something that we laid in and started talking about back when we did "Scattered". When we did Scattered we were talking about the virus at the end of the show and as soon as we worked out that technically, we wanted there to to be a threat to Galactica if these computers were networked. What would the threat be? Why are they so worried about it again? Oh yeah, it's that Cylons can get inside their computers and if they're in their networked they can get into all the computers simultaneously. So we wanted to get out of that situation in "Scattered" and then come back to this at about the point where the audience had stopped thinking about it, that there had been a Cylon access point into the Galactica's computers, so it seemed like a nice time to do the call-back all the way back to show one.

Act 1

So by doing the virus program at this point in the show it was interesting because it felt like it was an opportunity to essentially really knit together some of the continuity, that we'd gotten comfortable to the point where we could make a call back all the way to nine episodes ago, back to "Scattered", to deal with this little tech gag which I think is kinda nice. The notion being that once they had accessed the computers the Cylons lay in dormant viruses in all the computers that then calculate and think and learn the systems and eventually make the move to take over the ship and to allow a Cylon attack.

This was a great little beat that was in all the drafts, Gaeta losing his cool in the CIC, which is so shocking that every head- I love the fact that every single head turns in CIC when Gaeta raises his voice, we've had people shot in here for Christ's sakes! But if Mr. Gaeta raises his voice everybody looks around like, 'Jesus! What the hell could have caused that? Not Gaeta! Not Felix?!' Felix... I wonder if Alessandro has any feelings about me naming him Felix in the last episode?

I like that little piece of computer gear there 'cos I think that's it's neat that it looks very military issue in a big padded comtainer like that.

This is a trucated version of a much longer sequence, there was another beat of the computer virus going haywire here and at the beginning of this scene Chief Tyrol- one of Chief Tyrol's people Seelix, there she is, is working on- she was actually working on an engine and what happened was the engine started up by itself, in another manifestation of the virus and that occurred in that whole little sequence that we just jumped over. By the time Lee starts talking to Tyrol there at the end, this incident I'm talking about now had already occurred which was that Seelix was working on the engine, she stepped away and suddenly the engine had a cold start- just a self-inititiated start-up protocol all by itself triggered by the stand-alone computer or the standing computer and it almost killed some people, it was very dangerous and very scary and the whole nine yards.

Let me digress for a moment and get back to that shot, this shot of Cally and Jammer and the whole deck gang all coming in in the morning was one of my favourites of the entire show, there was something great about that shot that conveys this idea of morning, of the team getting together just before they go into work and it's a really nice texture that the director really brought to the show. I think the director of this show really found the voice of what the series is about and really connected with it almost immediately in his footage and I think that this is one of our- really one of our better episodes in terms of how it looks and feels and it's- this show really gives you the texture and the feeling of how it looks and feels on Galactica for this episode and what it's really like to live in this world.

Now I know I lost track of what I was saying a moment ago but this is the cursed broadcast - cursed podcast - so just get used to it.

There was another version of this scene that I cut, where Tyrol just says we're going to build a Viper and you go out on the looks of all the guys faces and then the next cut in the story is they're building the Viper and I skipped over this whole intermediary section where Tyrol is doing his thing and then the guys one by one come over to work with him.

This scene with Laura and Cottle- there actually is quite a bit of dialogue in this scene but the director and the editor both decided to cut this scene silently and play all these emotional beats. Mary is phenomenal in this, I think this is one of her better performances, I love that move which is not scripted, the glasses, the look on his face. You know this entire story- you can tell this entire story visually here it's just- not much dialogue is necessary for you to understand completely what is going on here and it was just a very- it was a really good instinct on the part of Michael Nankin the director and Jacques Gravett who cut this show. You gotta love it when Cottle- Doc. Cottle is feeling bad for ya. When Cottle isn't messing with you and smoking at you and being a prick it must be bad. That look on Mary's face just chills me, absolutely chills me.

You gotta like the fact that they put the faces of the Cylons on their targets, there's something so- just great about that. It was some touch that the guys put in the script that I loved as soon as I saw it, I kind of always thought that somebody was gonna make us take it out, I figured the network would make us take that part out.

This whole thing, her talking about why were you so hard on the Chief is kind of a widow, which means it's a holdover from an earlier draft. Not really a draft in this case but the full scene that I was referring to earlier where the engine started up by itself, the end of that scene- or not the end- after the engine started up Tyrol just went at Seelix, just totally just went at her and was really scary and was just like 'What the hell Seelix, how sloppy are you?' because she had allowed this engine start-up and then Lee started yelling at him and it got ugly before it finally settled down at the end. So that's what Kara's referring to, which is a bit of a widow and it doesn't quite sink into the sequence anymore but I kept it in, we all kept it in, because the rhythm of this particular scene depends on it. There's a slow, growing, strangeness happening in the room, I mean you've seen the dials so you know something's wrong but you keep getting lost into this conversation, watching the action and wondering what's up with them. There she could just be screwing with him and then you've got that shot, which I think is wonderful, just the look on Hotdog's face while this is all going on. And this is the effects of hypoxia, this is what really happens to you. There's a lot of footage in various documentaries of pilots or pilot candidates being put into pressurised chambers where they have oxygen masks and they slowly bleed the oxygen out of the room and they're given various tasks to do, to deal a deck of cards, to talk, to do various things. And you just watch the footage of these people slowly losing it, some of them started giggling, some of them completely checked out of it, others get all panicky, there's a lot of different reactions to the onset of hypoxia. Which really gave us the chance to play the scene in a really disturbing key, this look on Kara's face just, man, that laugh and look at that- that profile shot of Kara at the end is just great.

Act 2

Now we're back in the firing range. A lot of this was scripted; getting the gun, getting the ammo, the bullet ricochets, all of it was choreographed in conjuntion with the director and the actors on the set. But I think a lot of the credit for this sequence goes to Katee and Jamie who I think play this just beautifully, it's like I completely- I'm just there with them in the room. The way he moves toward this table I'm particularly fond of, his reaching up, this from the back, groping up there, getting the box, the box basically almost falls on his head there on the set, he just keeps going, it missed his nose by like a millimeter. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I think the notion that Starbuck and Apollo did this together is something the actors came up with, I think it was gonna be Katee and I think they talked or they were working on the scene and liked the idea of him steadying her hand to shoot out the window. I think that was something that they came up with which I think is a stroke of genius which I think is really nice.

And now we're in this. The technobabble on the show is a constant source of- I wanna say frustration- but it's more a sense of obligation- which makes it frustrating. It is a science fiction series, there's a lot of space hardware involved, there are certain sci-fi concepts, if you're gonna deal with a computer virus you're obligated at some point to have to do this scene where they talk about what the problem is, it's identified and varying solutions are posited. Then usually the way you write the scene is there's no way to deal with this problem except the one possible outside crazy chance that they all inevitably take. That is the rhythm of writing one of these scenes. In this particular scene, it follows the usual pattern of things, the Commander asking his people for the varying options, what's the toughest option that you can usually ask for. The nice thing here is of course that the deal with- this moment- essentially the nice thing here is when he says 'I got a Cylon expert on board' and the scene is basically led to the point where we slap Baltar and that's the joke... and out. And actually that scene kept going where Baltar tried to revisit the issue with Adama saying 'Hey, wait a minute I really think I should go down there' and Adama says 'no, no, no, we got this all under control you just don't worry about it, just don't worry about it' and Baltar goes and sits at the foot of the stairs and has a conversation with Six. It was all nice stuff, I particularly liked Baltar's conversation with Six 'cos the way Nankin shot it you looked up she was sitting up on the stairs in CIC and he shot her through some sort of translucent material and it was really interesting cinematically. But ultimately again this was one of those really long shows and a lot of choices had to be made.

Through the varying cuts the one thing that we kept coming back to was this story, the story of the gathering of the family to accomplish one task that they set out- and the father figure coming and seeing it. It all kept circling back to tell the story about the family... tell the story about the family. And you had to give a certain amount of screentime to the virus because you have to do that for plot reasons and so what ends up happening is you end up cutting things like the Baltar/Six conversation.

There were varying versions where this scene was cut, it's really interesting the editing process, I've spoken about it before on these podcasts but quite often the editing process is just more fascinating in some ways than the script process because it really is. You're dealing with a given amount of material, there's lots of different ways you can emphasise different elements of it. This scene for example, we actually discussed at one point taking this scene out and opening the next episode with it because we, as I'll talk about in episode ten, with "Pegasus"- there was a point where we were going to make "Pegasus" a ninety minute episode and we were looking for ways to link that after that link because it wasn't intended to be that long but we had a very long cut and we thought that we could expand it slightly to get up to the ninety minute running time and one of the ways we thought about doing that was to open "Pegasus" with this scene. To open cold with Lee and Dualla in this combat thing and establish that relationship a little bit more for the audience, to show that there was something going on, and then get into the "Pegasus" show. We did try a version of that, we watched a version and it was okay but it kinda stuck out as a- it had nothing to do with the show, it really does beloing here, so the fact that we had to go for the hour version meant that this got to stay in "Flight of the Phoenix" which is where it belongs.

And we had been talking about doing this triangle with Lee/Billy/Dualla, the triangle was something we talked about doing for most of the season. I mean we talked about- probably when we were working on one or two is when the notion of putting them together came up and it was "Resistance"- we were shooting "Resistance" I remember when we decided to definitively to do it. Because in "Resistance" there's that whole little subplot of Lee and Dualla, her coming and being the one who would walk with him down the corridor in the morning and give him a report- idle conversation back-and-forth between two somewhat intimates. And what I liked about extending that as a relationship is there's a certain logic to them, there's a certain emotional truth to the idea that Dualla is the voice that the pilots always hear, that was something that we said back in "Tigh me up, Tigh me down". She said there's a special relationship between her and the pilots, they look on her very fondly, I think they're a bit protective of her. She probably talks to Lee more than the other pilots, he's the CAG, there's probably a lot of wireless communication back-and-forth between Lee and Dualla just on a day-to-day basis and it sort of stood to reason that there could be a relationship between those two, because again within the reality of the show there's nobody else, their world is not getting any bigger. There are fifty thousand people, period, and the people on Galactica live in their own sort of hermetically sealed world to a large extent.