Podcast:Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I

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Teaser

RDM: Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 19, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part One". I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and this is the podcast, so, as always, no whining. We're joined this week by my- by- back by popular demand, my wife, who made a guest shot appearance not too long ago, Terry Dresbach is here. Say "Hello" Terry.

Terry: Hello.

RDM: That's about the extent of her commentary.

Terry: (laughs.)

RDM: No, I'm sure she will chime in whenever appropriate. "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part One", as the name implies, is the first of the two-part finale for season two. Yes, Terry?

Terry: Why don't you tell them what room you're in?

RDM: Oh. I'm in my office at home.

Terry: Which is about ten feet by ten feet.

RDM: (Unintelligble.)

Terry: We just bought this house in August. And we just moved in so we have boxes all over the place, still. And there's a rug, and a desk, and two leather armchairs, and a couple of french doors, and the d- the porch where Ron paces and smokes all those cigarettes. Which he can't do while I'm in the room.

RDM: Yeah, so there'll be no smoking tonight. The smoking lamp is out.

Terry: Yeah, the smoking thing has got to go. Yeah, and he's got his little tv screen, and his dvd player, and this little, tiny silver box that's about four inches by three inches with which he records these high-tech podcasts. So I just wanted you guys to have the lay of the land. The kids are sleeping about ten yards down the hall, the dogs are sleeping outside the door.

RDM: And it's l-

Terry: Maid's gone home.

RDM: Maid's gone home, and it's late. And there probably won't be any garbage truck this time of night.

Terry: Although I called them and asked them to stop driving down our street.

RDM: Yes, I'm hoping- I'm still hoping for an appearance, and anyway, here's (swirls ice and scotch in glass) the scotch. "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part One". The finale for any season is always something that takes a great deal of time thought and energy. It's also something that usually develops fairly late in the season. We almost never know what the finale to a season is before you get into the back- back half of the season. And sometimes not until you're- up until the l- very last minute. Case in point, the f- the grand finale of Star Trek: The Generation, "All Good Things...", was an episode that we wrote, like, at the very last minute in the month before production.

Terry: Which is how all television shows work.

RDM: Yeah. This one, we started discussing about midway through the back ten. The concepts of this episode all came out of continuing plotlines that we had established over the course of the first two years. First and foremost is the election. Ever since "Bastille Day", in fact, when Lee confronted Tom Zarek and gave Zarek a pass on- after the hostage situation came, and said, "Well, you're right. We do have a democracy and we are going to have an election," and confronted Laura with this fact, we had essentially been promising the audience that at some point, I think nine months from that point, we were going to have a presidential election. Then various political storylines have swirled around it ever since. We'd always talked about the fact that we would do the election this year, but "in what context, and how, and who's going to when, and why, and what will the issues be?" was something that was always floating around the office but never had a real satisfying resolution. Mostly because elections, by their very nature, are not that dramatic, really, on tv and film. It's a lot of politicing, and speechmaking, and addressing crowds, and people with picket signs, "I like Laura! I like Laura!", and those things weren't that interesting. And you had to find a really compelling issue that the election could swirl ar- center on, and that all the events could swirl around and make it work. So once we came up with idea of finding an alternate planet, I realized that that was the thing we should marry. That the election should basically swirl around the idea of finding a new planet that had the potential for permanent settlement, and whether or not the rag tag fleet would settle on this planet as being the defining issue of the election. And that if not for that issue, Laura Roslin would have won, going away. And because they find the planet, and because Baltar starts to advocate that position, it'd change the dynamics of everything.