Podcast:A Measure of Salvation

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and I would like to welcome you to the podcast for episode six, "A Measure of Salvation". I'm at home, for those of you who monitor such things. And I'll turn down the volume here a little bit. And I've returned from my sojourn to Cornell. The- sorry, I'm just organizing everything here a little bit. The Scotch is Macallan 12 and the smokes are American Spirit Lights, both of which were provided to me. A very generous gift from a student at Cornell named Josh, who came up and gave me both after the end of the lecture that I gave at the Willard Straight Hall at Cornell last week. Which is very kind. I like to see that people are still supporting vice in all forms, evil and bad for you, in the Ivy League. So, without further ado, here we go into "Measure of Salvation".

We're still in the recap here. This is obviously the second part of a two-parter. The events that were setup for us in "Torn" now come to play into this episode. We broke these two episodes simultaneously in the room. Broke them both out as a piece. We had this concept of the infected baseship that we all were really intrigued with and wanted to play and it was question of where does that story take you. And very quickly, in the writers room, came this idea. That well, once a baseship was infected with a virus, that the Cylons couldn't- were defenseless against and Galactica and its crew came upon that baseship, wouldn't that be a biological weapon? And that was such an intriguing idea for us that we quickly glommed onto the notion of, "Let's do a whole episode like that."

Here we are back in the show. Or the top of the show. Adama is in the Raptor. Oh, I'm sorry. I jumped ahead of myself. This used to open with Adama and Sharon in a Raptor. There was a scene that was cut here that was scripted and shot that showed Adama himself sitting in a Raptor with Sharon, guarded by a whole phalax of Vipers surrounding him, because the idea being that Adama himself wanted to get some eyeballs on what they were dealing with out there. So there was a short scene where Sharon and Adama basically scoped out the exterior of the baseship, saw all the floating dead Raiders in the air and he asked her what she thought. She gave some theories. And then it was after that that he gave the go-ahead to do it. 'Cause one of the things that we stumbled on, or kept stumbling on, was the justification for them going inside the baseship and it was such a big thing. And what are the dangers? And couldn't it be a trap? And so on, and so forth. And the idea was, "Well, maybe if Adama looks at it himself it'd kinda help justify it." But when we got in the cut, the show was long, as always. It was one of the first things to go. 'Cause you just jump right into it and get past it. That shot right there where there Raptor's pushing through the Raiders, the dead Raiders, was suggested by Gary Hutzel. I don't believe that it was actually scripted, but Gary and his crack VFX team came up with this idea of the Raptor physically moving through the sea of dead Raiders to get into the baseship. And as soon as I saw the previz on it, the previsualization, which are like crude animatics that VFX provides to us, I fell in love with the idea and I was like, "Oh, more, more, more. Let's have more of that." And I want to see him really pushing through it and getting into- inside the basestar, 'cause it was such a cool idea. These scenes- the intercut between Galactica and the baseship were cut several different ways and with different speeds of how fast to get them through the corridors, at what point do they see the dead Cylons. There's a bit of a discontinuity between this sequence and the sequence that we saw in part one in that the halls were strewn with dead bodies when Baltar came aboard and the hallways are a bit emptier here. And we avoided that by simply getting getting them to- avoided the discontinuity really slapping you by getting them to the control room a little bit faster. Because we wanted to play the action in the control room. We didn't want to play it out in the corridors what was going on.

This whole bit of business with Lee leading the Marine team, in some ways is a holdover for an idea that I think I alluded to last week. That we had this idea, as we were dealing with "Fat Lee", as it were, and what we're gonna do with "Fat Lee", and one of the notions that came up was that "Fat Lee" would rededicated himself to being much more of a Spartan, in the truest sense of the word. He and Dualla were going to become Marines. He was going to leave flight- leading the pilots altogether and he and Dualla were gonna go into basic training as Marines and eventually become more ground soldiers to give him a different arc and a different goal for the second- for this season. And that didn't really come to pass. We did play- we scripted various scenes of putting them in training and getting going on that road, but they just kept getting squeezed out by other ideas, or they didn't play right, or for whatever reason we never really cracked that, and ultimately abandoned it altogether as a story. But one of the results was this story still maintains the idea that Lee is leading the Marine team. And that's really why he's there. It was scripted as part of his evolution into a Marine officer. He was gonna be leading squads and platoons like this a little bit more often. And that's why he's here to begin with.

There was more banter and things going on in this sequence, that we did cut out, with Hotdog and some of the other Marines reacting to the dead Cylons a little bit more. Just character for them, going back and forth. All that got dropped along the way.

Now this tease-out where they realize that they're surrounded by infected Cylons and there's a disease here and, "Oh my God. We've walked into a sick ship." I think- You could mak- There's a valid criticism in that you could say that, "Well they did see all the dead Raiders from the outside. There's clearly something wrong with this baseship. And that maybe they should have thought about that before they went aboard." But I- I get pa- and I think that's a valid- you could certainly make that argument. I mean, my counter-argument to that is there's never been a Cylon disease, there's never any- Sharon's never encountered one. They've never gotten sick. These guys don't get head-colds, for God's sakes. It's like- they don't have the same problems like we do, so the notion of a disease wiping out a whole Cylon baseship wasn't something that any of them were thinking about going into this episode.

The beacon, you'll note, has moved into the control c- control room at this point. I'm not even sure if that's correct. We might have stolen that shot of the beacon from the prior episode, because I don't believe we had it in the control room for this sequence. Oh, that's right. In fact, there was another sequence where they actually went and got the beacon and brought it aboard Galactica. Forgive me. On some level I'm seeing this episode after several weeks of not seeing it. David Eick took over some of the later post-production work on this episode and consequently I haven't sat down and actually looked at this episode in a little while, so I'm seeing it with fresh eyes and there'll be points in this commentary where I'm going to refer to things that I either think are still in the show and may be not and vice versa. You'll see- yeah. See that? That shot right there that you saw of the flashlight beam going across the beacon was definitely stolen from the prior episode. Because the beacon was not, in fact, in the control room when we shot this whole piece. The idea was that the beacon was elsewhere in the ship, still down where we last saw it in the Hybrid chamber, and they were gonna go down and get it in a subsequent sequence. But I believe that was all cut. We don't have that sequence in the show any longer.

But one of the contiuing confusion points was the whole notion of the beacon as the source of the virus, so we felt it was important that you see it again, and that you see it in that moment when they're talking about it and when we're dealing with the origins of the virus.

Act 1

Ok. Now we're dealing with the consequences. Ok, we've got guys over there that've been exposed to an infectious disease. How do we deal with it? We didn't really wanna see all the procedures, but we definitely wanted to say there were procedures and this sequence is justify bringing these people back aboard the ship and how they deal with it and the fact that there would be a quarantine and that noone quite knows what's- what they're dealing with here.

It's good to see Doc Cottle back with us, as always. It's always odd, I think I've said this before. It's always odd to see Cottle, to me, in his uniform 'cause I always think Cottle just belongs in that white coat.

Ah, yes. See, now every- they're coming back to Galactica already, but there was an entire sequence where they- after Sharon sussed out where the beacon was and that it was the source of the ra- of the virus, what they did is they went back down to that Hybrid chamber, they wrapped the beacon in a radiation blanket, and then they put it on a Raptor and brought it back to Galactica. The beacon was then aboard Galactica for the balance of this show. Cottle examined it. He tracked down the virus to something specific on the beacon, and that helped explain where the beacon came from, how the virus got aboard, etc., etc. The problem became a structural one late in the show in that what we used to do was there was this idea in the plot at the end where they were going to push the beacon out into space and shoot it towards the Cylon fleet. And the Cylons were gonna see it and go, "Oh my God, that's the beacon, get the hell out of here. That's the beacon that infected everyone and killed everyone. Get out! Go! Run, run, run, run away!" And it didn't really work. We just could never make it work, so we opted to cut it completely and- that meant that the beacon was gonna be onboard Galactica, and we didn't want that. I didn't wanna have to spend the next few episodes dealing with the stupid beacon, 'cause we hadn't planned for any of that and we wanted- didn't wanna follow up on actually dealing with the beacon. So we opted to leave it aboard and in the cut, in the cutting room we left it aboard the Cylon baseship, got them out of there, so the beacon is neatly destroyed and taken care of at the top of the show. If we had kept the beacon aboard Galactica it just would have meant that all the subsequent episodes would have had to deal with them taking it apart, doing metallurgical analyses, all the expected scientific things that you would expect, and it just didn't feel like it was worth it.

Re-imagined Series definition: battlestar landing bay mechanism that arrests a landing Viper, Raptor or other small craft ^{(TRS: "Final Cut")}

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: initial skills training; can refer to basic military indoctrination, and arms and ground training ^{(TRS: "Fragged")}; and basic flight training ^{(TRS: "Miniseries")}