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: (Laughs.) Ten by ten.

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. And- 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 and 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, and "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.

Just a word about this scene here with Laura getting the giggles before a committee meeting. I like this scene a lot. There was some debate. David Eick, my producing partner, did not like like this scene. (Laughs.) Actually, he and I had fairly energetic discussions about it a couple of times because he didn't buy the whole laughing thing from Laura, and didn't like the way it played, but I love it.

Terry: It's great.

RDM: It's great. And I fought for it because I like it because it sets a specific tone at the beginning of the show, that Laura is winning. Laura is doing very well. She's relaxed, it's fun, you almost never get to see Laura having fun. She and Adama are very close. She's using his- his quarters aboard Galactica to prep for the debate. She gets the giggles before committee meetings she said. It humanizes the character, and just gives a certain sense of confidence, and hopefulness, and that victory is just around the corner for these people, and then of course, it being Galactica, you basically fuck all that up, as quickly as you possibly can.

Terry: You swear on these things?

RDM: I swear on these things... constantly.

Terry: (Ugh.) How do these people listen to you?

RDM: I don't know. I don't know how their children listen to it either.

Terry: (Laughs.)

RDM: Their kids learn to curse, drink, and smoke from me, I hope.

Terry: No more smoking.

RDM: No more smoking. Not tonight.

Terry: People are complaining that it's coming into their rooms.

RDM: I know.

Terry: Through the computer.

RDM: As soon as Terry leaves. (Whispers: Then we'll smoke.)

Terry: But see I read all the boards every single day.

RDM: Don't tell them that!

Terry: I start every day, with a cup of tea, and the boards.

RDM: Don't tell them that. That's not true. She never reads the boards.

Terry: Then I report everything that's said to Ron.

RDM: No. I don't pay any attention to it.

Terry: (Laughs.)

RDM: The other major plotline, of course, that's getting established in the tease is Kara returning to Caprica. This was something that essentially since "The Farm" was something we had promised. I mean, once Kara laid down that mark and gave Anders the dog tag, she has to go back for him, and it was a question of how and when and under what circumstances, and how we could justify it, and make it plausible, and what would be the outcome of it. And the key idea in that sequence is that they found a way to link up the Cylon Heavy Raider's computer system into a Raptor, and that we had established- sort of established that the Raiders had abilities to jump f- a lot farther than any Colonial ship did, and could get back to Caprica in just a few discreet jumps, and by slaving that computer... blah blah blah technobabble technobabble to the Raptor technobabble technobabble they had a way of making it happen, especially if Sharon was working with them. In initial drafts, in fact, right up until we were shooting it was going to be that they were going to take the Heavy Raider itself, and that the other Raptors would be slaved to the Heavy Raider, and we were going to build a Heavy Raider interior, and put the characters piloting the Heavy Raider back to Caprica. At the last minute we had to- we were way over budget on this episode, on thes- this two-parter, just monstrously over budget and then som- we had to make some hard decisions and started cutting sets, and visual efffects, and the interior of the Heavy Raider was something that I cut at the last minute. Said "Okay, you know what? Let's just lose this- this set. It's not that important. We'll put 'em all in Raptors and we'll just move the computer off the Heavy Raider onto the Raptor and just go with it." And you know what? You don't miss it in the story at all. So it was actually a good decision.

I like this little beat here in the tease with Lee in the ready room. I like the way he walked into that scene, the way he seems to be-

Computer: (AOL "You've got mail" sound.)

Terry: Oops.

RDM: Oh, and Terry's on the computer. Isn't that charming?

Terry: I'm sorry. (Laughs.)

RDM: Maybe you should mute that.

Terry: (Continues laughing.)

RDM: I like the way that Lee comes in here and he is now the commander of the Pegasus. And it's nice to see him in his new element and see that he's behaving and being treated like the commander over on that ship and that slowly but surely the Pegasus is becoming his.

It's always interesting when Sharon is out of the flight suit. There's something very fragile-looking about Grace in those- in the wife-beater t-shirt, and the handcuffs, and she- she looks very fragile and vulnerable a lot of times in these shots, which is really interesting considering that she's a Cylon, and we know what the Cylons are capable of.

This tease in another one of the intercu- grand intercutting tease- teasers that I like to do. I did this in "Kobol's Last Gleaming" last season and a lot of other ones. I like the rhythm it gives to these sequences. They become very visual. It pulls you into a lot of different storylines quickly.

This storyline is- I don't know what to say about the Cally-Tyrol story. It's shocking and we'll talk- I guess we'll talk about that- more about that in a few minutes.

This little beat with the presidential debate is influenced a lot, just by presidential debates, and all the small, detailed observation of them down through the years. The podiums, the crowd, the way the mod- moderator talks, the traditional walk across the stage so that Laura and Baltar can shake hands, and that they always seem to be saying something to each other up on that- up on the stage that the audience never got to hear, and I thought it'd be fun that she would tell him, "I'm going to wipe the floor with you." (Switches to "Baltar voice":) "Oh, you must have lost your mind." And her confidence is such that she grins at that and tells him, "You- you must really be in trouble." And there was Baltar's acknowledgement of that, self-acknowledgement of that, that he really does think he's going to lose is evident, I think, in this scene.

The Cally-Tyrol storyline will be controversial. There's no question. It came out of something that David Eick actually suggested about Tyrol seeing a psychologist or a therapist in the show and we wanted to just start with him- he suggested, "Let's start with Tyrol having just completely had some kind of psychotic meltdown or break in between episodes and you're coming into this guy who had some kind of really, psychotic lapse, and did something outrageous. Either tried to kill himself, or try to kill somebody else, and what would that be? It would be a peeling back the onion as you look back and try to figure out where his- his problem came." And he started talking to Aaron Douglas about it fairly early. And I was struck by that. I thought it was a really interesting idea, and I wanted to incorporate it into this show. And it became a question of, "What is that about, and what does he do?" And the first question was, "Well, what does he do?" And instead of starting with the therapist, I wanted to start with Tyrol. And I just- I literally just started playing the beats in the teaser. I was just writing the sequences. He's asleep. The Hangar deck's empty. And then this- this moment happens, where he comes awake.

Terry: This is always so hard.

RDM: And he beats Cally.

Terry: I have seen this three times... and it's just- it's just as har- (gets louder) I said, I've seen this three times and it's always really, really... really hard to watch.

RDM: It is.

Terry: Mainly 'cause it's him. It's-

RDM: It's him and it's her.

Terry: Yeah.

RDM: And that sort of nightmarish "What have I just done?" quality, and "Oh, my god" her lying there with the blood all over her, and then this next shot... of him carr- this shot, of him- of Tyrol carrying carrying Cally through the hau- the hangar deck. I think, actually in the first draft of this, I take it back, I did start it in the the therapis- in this therapy session. He was talking to Cavil, and he was describing what had happened, and it was all had taken place off camera. And I think it, yeah, it was a note... it was a- I think it was a David note, later, on the second draft. He said, "Let's see it. It's just such a shocking thing he's describing, it's so horrific. We should see it." And I was like, "Yeah. You know what? We should." But they- but the- the sense memory that I'm twigging to was when I was writing the Cavil scene, so I was writing the therapy scenes with- with Tyrol I remember just making up the story as I was writing it, and it was waking up and shattering Cally's jaw.

Here comes a beep. Wait for it...

Re-imagined Series definition: the process of using the FTL engines to make an near-instantaneous apparent faster-than-light transport of a ship from one point in space to another

Re-imagined Series definition: used to signify a civilian transport vessel over a certain gross weight/mass, i.e. Colonial Heavy 798