Podcast:Epiphanies

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Teaser

Hello, my name is Ronald D. Moore and welcome to the podcast for episode thirteen "Epiphanies". I'm the executive producer and creator of the- or developer of the new Battlestar Galactica.

"Epiphanies" essentially is our biggest Laura Roslin show to date. We'd been talking about doing an episode like this since way back in the first season. A lot of the roots of this episode come out of things that were in the backstory of the character ever since the mini-series, namely we wanted to deal with things like who she was before the attack, what her life was like and getting a glimpse into what she was like as Secretary of Education before she became President.

Some of the elements in this episode were actually, I think, suggested by Mary McDonnell. In early conversations with Mary on the script of the mini-series she started talking about President Adar, there was a line in the mini-series where she said- she was talking about how she got into politics and how she didn't really wanna be a politician but she had worked for Adar and that he was the kind of man that you just couldn't say no to. And Mary took that to mean that he was a Clinton-esque figure that you couldn't say no to, and of course being a Clinton-esque figure it also raised the possibilty that perhaps there was something more between the two of them than just the professional relationship. And that stuck in everybody's heads and whenever we would talk about Adar throughout the course of the first season, we always jokingly talked about the fact that she had an affair with him and then it became something more than a joke and we started to seriously consider the possibilty that maybe she had had an affair with the President. And that that would be an interesting insight into the character of Laura Roslin, and I'll talk more about that as we go along.

This opening sequence is meant to convey the notion that she's dying obviously, she's coming into Galactica and she's flashing back to what is essentially her last day on Caprica. This is the day that she found out that she had cancer, this is the day of the attack, all this is sort of- all these flashbacks are gonna be things that we never showed you in the mini-series and in fact, in truth, we didn't really think about them during the mini-series. When the mini-series was shot and edited together the implication was that she left directly from the doctor's office that you saw a few moments ago and went out and got on the transport that becomes Colonial One and then took off. But there's no reason to assume that she didn't have time to do anything else, so as we were constructing this episode it all seemed to be about the last day on Caprica and we went at the episode from that angle and then there was a continuity error that I realised much, much later, that I'll get to later that changed those plans. But the inital impulse was, okay, lets play this sequence as Laura is dying and she's thinking back to the day when it all began, when she learned that she first had cancer and when the Presidency fell on her head and everything began and ended on that particular day.

It seemed right at this point in the life of the series to finally do the episode that really dealt with her illness, that really dealt with the fact that Laura had been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer and that the President was slipping away from us. It had been alluded to all throughout the first season, this season we have been very direct about it, we had said that she wasn't gonna make it, the doctor had given her a very short term- a very short time in which to live and then indeed in the last weeks episode- at the end of the episode you saw her having trouble just getting up and physically walking out of Colonial One after her meeting with Adama. And it just felt like this had been simmering along for a long time and that we had to deal with it at some point, we had to really face the fact, as do all the characters, that Laura had what was a terminal illness and that it had to come to some kind of a head.

Act 1

The other story that's strong in this episode is the story of the Cylon sympathisers and the resistance movement within the fleet. This was an interesting notion that was posited in the writer's room that Galactica's been out on the run for a long time, they've had a lot of people in all these ships and we hadn't played anything that really dealt with various factionalisation among the people or different points of view or people who might have believed for one reason or another that the military was wrong, that they had all been betrayed and that maybe they had made bad decisions, that maybe there was a way for them to get along with their enemy. So we went at this from the approach of- okay, well let's go with a radicalised element of that, of the peace movement as it were and say that, essentially, they're starting to sabotage the fleet itself. Thay're starting to get into places and do things to actively promote an agenda that is designed to force the Colonial government and the military to stop what they're doing, to stop making this all about war and to try and deal with their enemy, to try to negotiate with them, to try to achieve some kind of peace.

What was interesting to me was, there's- it's so antithetical to this kind of show, to do this story- to make the peaceniks as it were- to make the the peace movement the antagonists, to make them the villains. I mean a lot of the show feels very liberal in its output, there's a lot of political statements within the show that deal with the War on Terror that you could take to mean as criticisms of the Right. And- but the show is not mean't to be a polemic, the show is not a direct allegory to all the events that take place in the United States. And within the world of Galactica it felt like the people that were advocating a peaceful resolution to the Cylon conflict and were actively trying to stop the military from achieving their goal would be the antagonists and it was interesting to spin the expectations of the show and the political structure of the show in such a way that I think I you come out of this episode wondering, what is the point of view of the show, what is the show really trying to say, what does it think in terms of its politics? And the answer is, the show is fairly agnostic, the show usually tilts you in one direction or another but it's mean't to make you think, it's mean't to make you question things, it's mean't to keep you off-balance and unsettled more than anything else and this is a good example of playing different political parts of the spectrum throughout this episode.

And finally we get to meet President Adar. It's surprising how little things like that giant seal behind the President's desk quickly and easily convey the notion of this being the equivalent of the Oval Office. That you didn't need a big matte shot, for instance, of the President's grand palace or whatever, he's just come in the room, there's the big seal, here's the man, it reads much, much quicker than a lot of belaboured set-up to who the guy is and what he's doing.

Again, you can see that Laura's in the same outfit that she wore on the day of the mini-series and that we're all kinda playing in that same key, that we're- all the flashbacks were originaly mean't to be on the same day.

Now, this whole notion, was always in the original story; that Laura, as she approches the end of her life, was realising that she has to make certain decisions now because she was going to be gone and that whatever they were left with- whatever she left them in the fleet with after she was dead was gonna be what they'd have to live with. And Laura's decision here to abort the Cylon baby is a pretty tough decision but I think she felt, rightly so, that she could not leave this decision in the hands of President Gaius Baltar and so she just moved to the end. She's realised, 'Time is short, I've gotta make this call, I won't take the risk, I'm gonna do this while I still can'. It's a tough-minded decision, it's certainly in line with all the other decisions that Laura has made and I think it speaks to the larger character movement of Laura Roslin since we saw her in the mini-series; that she was the Secretary of Education, a somewhat apolitical job if anything at that level can ever be apolitical, and yet she was then thrust into this position where she had literally the fate of the human race on her shoulders. And I always thought that that experience of taking a person who had never had ambitions to become President, who had no greater ambitions on power, who had a series of fairly safe beliefs, a fairly locked in political ideology of her own that we assume is something along the liberal end of the spectrum, put her into the Presidency, put all these decisions on her desk and force her to deal with the consequences of her actions and say, 'Oh by the way if you make a mistake the whole human race might be wiped out'. That that would change that person and that that person would start to make tougher and tougher decisions and some of those decisions might be questionable and she might start making choices that she would have been appalled at only a short times before. And certainly just aborting this child is one of them but it's a logical extension of where she's been, once she starts chucking people out of airlocks because she decides that that's how you deal with Cylons, this is simply the next step along that road.

That's one of the nicer transitions that Rod Hardy came up with to suddenly posit; here's Six. You'll notice that there's a little line here about a few weeks have passed, he hasn't seen her since- one of the things we were dealing with in the aftermath of the Pegasus / Resurrection trilogy, was he connects with Gina over on Pegasus and then there was a draft of the script of Resurrection Ship where as he embraced Gina- something we ultimately didn't do- but he was going to embrace Gina at the end of that scene and Six was going to literally vanish in front of our eyes- something we've never done, she always disappears and appears in the cuts. And we were going to have her literally disappear and she was going to stay away from Baltar, she was not going to appear to him for many- several episodes and what happened is, as we got into breaking those stories and working on those subsequent scripts frankly I found Baltar less interesting without Six. She was such a part of his psychological make-up, the two characters were so firmly entrenched in my mind, and in the audience's mind I believe, that it was awkward and strange to write a Baltar without a Six. Even though you had Gina right in front of him, even though she was a living breathing... well, Cylon, but she was a person in all but name. Even with her right in front of him you missed, I missed, this interaction, the imp on his shoulder, the demon who tortures him and loves him alternately and so much of his psychology was wrapped up in her that we just decided it wasn't really working very well and so we went back in and put Six back into these episodes. But there was some awkwardness, I mean we'd set certain things in motion with Gina that then had to be moved over to the side, and then this little sequence of her appearing to him and hadn't seen him- establishing he hadn't seen her in a while was something that had to be slipped into dialogue at the last moment. This too is a nice little transition that Rod came up with, to leave him holding his own tie in front of people in the corridor and James does such great work with that sort of stuff.

This is a nice, powerful, very small scene of Adama telling Helo that his child is going to be aborted but it has one of my favourite moments, in the season actually- is a very small beat coming up here, there's a beat at the end of the sequence and Adama says, 'Dismissed' and Helo, for just a moment, brings himself up to attention and you can see the look on his face transitions from anger and rebellion into respect and then he moves out. And it's not grudging respect and it's not arrogant and it's not all, 'I'll see you in hell Adama', it's just- it's honest and it's a very subtle thing that the actor pulls off here and I just wanted to bring it to your attention. Because it's little textures and pieces like that that really flesh out all these characters in ways that you can't really anticipate on the page and you would fail if you tried and you really are relying on the actor's instincts and it's right here- well not quite here. You can see the anger and emotion on his face, spits that in Adama's face, 'Dismissed', comes to attention, honest respect, walks out the door. That's great, that is a great, great moment.

Now we're into the whole- the plot about the sabotage, it's happening. Some of the inspiration for this comes out of things in World War Two and other conflicts where there were- there was forced labour that the Nazi's used during the Second World War and there were people who working within the amunition factories of Nazi Germany that managed to sabotage shells and managed to do things that would not get caught in the manufacturing process that then, ultimately, would blow up on the battlefield much, much later.

This is an interesting thing, this is a behind-the-scenes sort of shot as it were; where did they get their ammunition from? Well they muct be making it somewhere and this is where they make it. There was a lot of discussion on a technical level about what are the bullets that we shoot out? Do they have powder? Are they rail guns? A lot of that got tedius and difficult to deal with because we kept wanting to make this work and we opted to not talk about it directly. The visual, where he breaks open that shell casing in the earlier part, it leads you to believe that they're traditional powder and lead projectiles, we never talk about it, you are free to believe what you wanna believe about the weapons of Galactica and how they work. Which I think is always the better way to go; to preserve the dramatic aspects of the scenes and move the tech stuff off-camera as best you can.