Podcast:The Hand of God

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Teaser

Hello and welcome to the podcast of commentary on episode 10, The Hand of God, on Battlestar Galactica. I'm Ronald D. Moore and I'll be your skipper and guide here for the next five days and four enchanting nights as we talk about The Hand of God.

This particular episode is one that remains virtually the same from the story outline onward. David Eick, the-my partner and the other executive producer on this show, often refer to this episode as 'The Big Mac' and 'The Big Mac' is what we tended to call it around the offices. 'The Big Mac' because it's sort of fast food - its like here's the guilty pleasure, let's go out and blow a lot of stuff up, let's have some fun, let's do a war story, let's sort of get back to the roots of what the show is about, which essentially is a combat series about an aircraft carrier in space and fighting its foes.

Part of the concept of this series overall was that we knew going in that we would not be able to - nor did we really want to - do a battle episode every single week. We knew right away that was not going to be economically viable for us - we simply couldn't have enough money to produce that week in/week out - with Vipers continually engaging the Cylon raiders and etc., in a never-ending battle. And also, creatively, I never really wanted that to be the show. I always saw the show, as I've said many times before, as a drama first and an action-adventure series or science fiction series a distant second. So I always wanted to make the characters front and center. Which is in part one of the reasons why Laura Roslin was invented in the first place as long as we're- she's on the screen here.

The role of the President, as I have probably also mentioned before, I always thought was vital to the life of this series as opposed to the original series because I was always interested in playing a civilian versus military dynamic - the tension between those two and I thought also just given the sort of more realistic approach to the genre that we were going to take I knew that the President was going to have to have a role -a strong role - and that the political leadership of the survi- the remnants of humanity and the survivors of our rag-tag fleet was going to be a very important story and I wanted to play it and that it would have to be this way that you would have to have someone in charge of the government - we couldn't just have Adama week in and week out making these decisions for all these civilians.

This particular scene, with - obviously Laura's having hallucinations about snakes, which dovetails into our backstory and running subplot about her cancer and her hallucinations which are brought on by the drug that she's taking. This is also one of our press conference scenes - which to me was a way of sort of reinforcing the notion that Colonial One is our analog to Air Force One and that you sort of needed something larger than the Oval Office to sort of convey the White House as it were - I mean, we have sort of her office aboard Colonial One that we will see in a moment (or maybe we won't) and that was never really enough to convey sort of the power and the importance of the Presidency, so we came up with this idea of using the press conference because it's essentially such a familiar fixture in our day-to-day politics in the United States - the press conference, the press corps asking questions, the President standing behind the podium - it's such a familiar - the iconogra - the iconography of that is so familiar that it sort of reinforces this idea that she is the President over and over again.

To get back to the plot here for a second - Crashdown and Sharon are out hunting for Tylium fuel. Tylium fuel is lifted directly from the original Battlestar Galactica series. Unlike Star Trek and other futuristic sort of space operas, which sort of posit in Star Trek's case the Enterprise runs on matter/antimatter engines and there are books and reams of material and technical data that you can find that tell you exactly how the Enterprise engines work but essentially it's like this - the collision of matter and antimatter creates such an enormous release of energy that it drives the Enterprise forward.

The original Battlestar Galactica simply said that they had fuel. It was something called tylium fuel. And you had to find it, you had to refine it, and you had to put it in your gas tank to go. I liked that idea; I thought it was - it fit well within the sort of the retro-technology point of view that I was taking in this version of the series. So I kept it as opposed to simply giving the Colonials and the Cylons some vers - some variant of nuclear energy or again matter/antimatter or some out there sounding sort of space notions of what would drive these ships. Fuel is a good thing. I think it's a limitation; it's something that you can - you can run out of periodically, your supplies can be threatened, it gives you a need to go do things, ships have to be refueled; it's just sort of an interesting bit of texture in the series and it's sort of another way we tend to depart from what sort of has become the contemporary accepted conventions of science fiction. I think I've spoken about this sequence in previous podcasts but once again this is our upcoming shots of tonight's episode which is really an homage to Space: 1999. And I will save the rest of my comments back to the show to the other side of the main title.

Act 1

Act 1, "Hand of God". "Hand of God", as I said at the outset, is virtually the same episode that we set out to tell at the very beginning. Which is somewhat of a rarity, and also something that is nice when it does happen.

This particular episode was written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, a team of writers that I worked with on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during its last couple of years and two of the first people that I thought about bringing aboard Battlestar Galactica because I knew that their sensibility would match up quite well with what I wanted to do in the series. Bradley in particular has a vast (laughing) and interesting knowledge of military lore and and technical jargon and tactics and sort of shares the - his -shares my interest as an amateur historian in military issues and I knew he would be a great addition.

His partner, David Weddle, is very different than Bradley in many many ways, David's a writer for the - a sometimes writer for the L.A. Times, he has also written a fine, fine biography of [Sam Peckinpah] which I recommend to all my listeners, called If They Move, Kill Em, and he's appeared in a couple of documentaries about Peckinpah and is a movie - is somewhat of a movie historian himself. In any case, they came up with this story in response to the request of David Eick and I to come up with 'The Big Mac'; we need a combat show.

And as I think I started to say, the idea of combat in the series from the get-go, when I pitched it to the network originally, I was very clear that we not going to be fighting the Cylons continuously. We would probably encounter and have combat episodes every third or fourth episode roughly. Both for budgetary reasons and creative reasons. The creative reason was - I did not see how you ran into the Cylons every week and defeated them every week - which you kind of have to do in order to just keep the series moving forward - and still maintain the Cylons as this sort of frightening, unstoppable foe. This was a problem that I had run into in some ways before at the Star Trek franchise where there was an enemy known as the Borg, which was this cybernetic sort of half human or half organic and half synthetic creatures that assimilated -- cultures and they were essentially set up as the perfect unstoppable force that you could not reason with you could not talk to and you could not defeat and they would just keep coming. Well, the problem was they were so cool you kept going back to them and time after time the Enterprise would find a way to defeat them. So, eventually, the Borg sort of become somewhat toothless; they just sort of lose the scare factor because you beat them every week. I didn't want us to fall into the same trap here, so right from the get-go I made it very clear we were only going to do combat in small bursts, we were going to try to always keep it scary, our losses would be real, we were never going to really be cute about how we beat the Cylons, we were never going to really be pulling something out at the last minute - some virus inserted into their computers or anything like that. We would play it as real as we can given the parameters of dramatic television, of course.

This scene between Elosha and Laura is moving Laura Roslin along a path that sort of ties into the larger Battlestar Galactica mythos. Just as Tylium was something that was found in the original series, so was this idea that there was a larger mythos to Galactica. The original Galactica series began with this short prologue and the main title sequence voiced by Patrick Macnee which began 'There are those who believe that life here began out there' and he proceeded to talk about how that some people believe that the pyramids and the Mayan civilizations and other ruins of past civilizations on earth were actually built or aided in some ways by ancient astronauts. This was an idea that was very current in the 1970s - Chariots of the Gods was a best-seller - In Search of, [Leonard Nimoy] explored the issue many times. So the idea that there were past visitors to Earth who were either human beings from some other part of the galaxy or were true aliens who came down and helped us - or influenced our development in some way shape or form - this is something that was built into the original series.

As I approached Galactica, the new version, I decided pretty early on that I wanted to keep that part of the mythos, I didn't want to play it too heavily up front in the mini-series or the first couple of episodes, because I felt it was more important to establish the characters, sink into the world, set up kind of a storytelling that we were doing, and really hook the audience into the show before we sort of start to introduce this more grandiose, mythological concepts. But it was very important so -- at this point in the series, in the latter episodes of the first season, you'll start to see more and more pieces of Laura, starting to realize there are connections - not just a connection between themselves and what they believe is the possibly mythical planet of Earth, but also that there is a larger story that was perhaps being told. There is a larger, more eternal tale that all of them are wrapped up in.

Leoben, the Cylon had referred to this with Kara in the episode Flesh and Bone, there is a quote of the scripture that is used time and again called: 'All of this has happened before and all of this has happened again'. Which is a phrase that I have always been in love with because, if memory serves me correct - and I haven't actually pulled out the movie and checked this - but I believe it is the opening words of the Disney animated version of Peter Pan which I love the connection to and I thought it was just an elegant phrase; there's something really kinda nice about that. I mean, Peter Pan, and all that sorta symbolism about fantasy and reality and growing up sort of those sort of notions and I love that that's sort of part of their mythos and their scriptural belief that all of this has happened before and all of this has happened again. Which I think is marvelous.

Anyway, enough with the mythos, back to the hard core action of the show. This is the Big Board, as we called it. This came out of a creative - again a creative and budgetary problem, as so many sort of things in the show do. They sort of have both parents of budget and creative. How do you illustrate and dramatize to the audience a complicated military plan in space? I'd gone round these -round and round these sorts of ideas many times before - again, primarily at Star Trek, both NextGen and Deep Space 9 where occasionally we would do battles and we would have tactical plans that had to be elaborated to the audience and sort of ideas that had to be conveyed in somewhat succinct terms. And the conundrum you always find is that you never quite have enough money to just do it all in exterior space shots - and show all the movement of all the ships and set up all the geography correctly and see them going from A to B and this ship is over here and that base is there and we're trying to get over here. And it's confusing - even if you did have the money, it's all the ships against black, I mean, really unless you're like in the orbit of a planet or something, the backdrop in every single shot is the same starry blackness. And it's very hard to convey a sense of geography - that is, where ships are in relationship to one another, particularly when they're moving. So, you have that problem. Also, the other problem is that if you go with the more obvious answer to that, it's to simply do it all on a computer screen - to hand it over to the art department and your computer graphics people and visual effects and okay 'show me on a map, on some kind of flat 2-D surface that I can do a close-up insert shot of where the Galactica is, where the Vipers are, where the station is, where the Cylon raiders are, show me how the plan's supposed to be, move all the dots from here to there, give me a red line between the Vipers and the Galatica that's moving' - you get into these long detailed technical discussions with various skilled artists who give you everything that you ask for. The problem is, when you get those on-screen schematic graphics, and you put them in your show, nine times out of ten, they don't make sense. Real graphics, if you look at real, usable, functional graphics as they would be in say an Aegis cruiser in the United States Navy trying to track multiple aircraft and ships and missiles and what have you in the Persian Gulf, say, it is a confusing jumble of symbols and iconography and notations and colors that makes perfect sense to the people who use it. And it looks really cool, but it doesn't tell you the story quickly and easily. And the trick in these kind of shows is to tell the story - you want to tell the audience what the plan is. You're not trying to sort of wow them with how technical you are and how close you're emulating sort of the technical reality of the show. You're trying to simply get across an easy story idea. The Cylons are there, we're coming from here, we're going to go over there, we're doing this other thing. So then you -- what ends up happening if you go down the computer graphics road is that you end up simplifying and simplifying and simplifying the graphic until it looks like something out of Fischer-Price where the Enterprise say is a bright yellow dot that's labeled Enterprise and moves in a very precise, straight way to some other dot that says 'Klingon Ship' and it's moving in a very easy to understand way and suddenly all of the interesting tactical movements are wiped away and you sort of fall in the cracks - you never quite have a way to convey a complicated battle in anything remotely resembling a satisfying manner. Which is why the most successful space battles are the kind of the simplest ones in space - generally. The Enterprise is being attacked by the Reliant in Star Trek 2 is essentially two ships going at each other. I'll be back.