Podcast:Hero

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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, here t o welcome you to the podcast for what we affectionately call episode seven, "Hero". And there won't be any Scotch today. It's a little too early in the day, even for a hardcore like me. The smokes are Shermans. Trying a little somethin' different. So actually my wife reccomended from back in her smoking days. She no longer embi- partakes of the tobacco leaf. But I do on occasion. I don't smoke nearly as much as all of you think I do.

Anyway. Episode seven, "Hero". This one was a little bit more of a one-off than what we typically do. A little bit more of a single, self contained story carrying us through the whole episode. We felt at the beginning of the season we had arced out the entire New Caprica storyline that took us through to "Exodus" and then into "Collaborators", and then we had this two-part episode that developed that was about the infected baseship and the consequences of that, culminating in the decision of whether or not the people on Galactica were going to use the biological weapon. And then after that we wanted to do a series of a little bit more contained episodes that weren't quite as serialized, didn't have as many long-running storylines as we had been playing for a while. And so one of the first ones that came up was this story, "Hero". This is written by David Eick, my producing partner. And the origins of this, though, actually go back a little bit further than this season. This was initially a concept that was pitched during the second season by David Weddle. I believe this is his idea. It might have been him and his partner, right? I remember David mentioning it in the room, had this idea that they would discover something about Adama. That Adama would- had been holding a secret that essentially he was holding the idea that- holding secret the idea that he had participating in a black op mission before the Cylon attack. And that he would secretly blame himself, on some level, for helping to prompt the Cylon attack on the Colonies itself. Which is a pretty big idea, and it took a lot of discussion. We were like, "Ok. What does that mean in concrete terms?" I liked the idea that there were black ops operations going on amid the Colonials before the Cylon attack. After all, forty y- our backstory is that there's forty years between the last Cylon- the first Cylon War and the attack on the Colonies. And it seemed plausible that the Colonial Fleet had been doing something during that whole time and it was curious to see what was going on the other side of the Armistice Line.

This little opening sequence here with Laura and the picture, which we just went past in Colonial One, like I've said before, I want that picture for my own. That'll have a point of pride in my own home someday of Baltar. And I think David knew that, and I think that's why he wrote in that little piece about putting Baltar's picture over the toilet. I don't think it was so much a slam against James and the- or the character as it was tweaking me that my coveted picture was going above the toilet.

Anyway. This sequence- this concept, that Adama was holding a secret all these t- all this time was a pretty interesting and provocative one within the writing staff, and I liked it, but we d- it didn't seem to find a place in the second season and we- it kicked around in our list of suggested stories as we were approaching the seventh- the third season, getting way ahead of myself now. So for the seventh episode David was going to write one and we wanted it to be a stand- a somewhat standalone episode that wouldn't require too much heavy lifting on the part of the audience in terms of backstory and what have you. So this seemed like a good opportunity to get into that and- I think it- I'm trying to remember where the idea of a prisonser having escaped came up. I think it came up in the room but I could be wrong. David Eick might have had that idea on his own, but I think it was something that came out of story discussions about what would prompt this secret of Adama's- prompt the revelation of the secret of Adama's. After all, he'd been holding onto this secret for a while. And there was something interesting about saying, "Ok. When the Cylon attack happened during the Colonies, was there a part of Adama that was starting to go, 'Did we bring this on somehow?' Did something that he was personally involved with have the potential to have brought on the attack?"

Now. To be fair, we never really wanted to say that Adama was directly responsible for the attack on the colonies. And indeed the episode doesn't really say that. The question is, "Does he feel responsible? Does, in his mind, does he still harbor some lingering doubt that perhaps the events that he were involved with had some unexpected blowback that resulted in the attack on the Colonies?" But I wanted to make it clear, and I think it was important to all of us that it not really be so simple. That one black ops recon mission behind Cylon lines could've really brought about the cataclysm. That clearly the Cylons had been working on it for a very, very long time. They had agents in place. They had sleeper cells, etc., etc. They were working Baltar for years. So even though Adama felt like he's- his hands weren't entirely clean and we could believe that as a character he felt personally responsible, the show goes out of its way to make sure that that direct connection is never actually made.

This sequence was cut down quite a bit. There was a longer section here. This is the Cylon Raider aboard Galactica now. This had a little more bells and whistles attached to it. There was more of a protocols being barked about. Going through the various steps that they took to safeguard the ship, and so on. The chase was actually even longer. The chase in space, of Starbuck and Kat escorting the Raider in. Or getting the Raider to the Galactica. It's maneuverings and all that. There was a longer VFX sequence that ultimately was a little bit confusing in terms of where they were, spatially, in regards to Galactica, you got a little confused in some of the screen directions, and also we were just fighting time as always, as you hear my refrain in these sections, time is always a really difficult thing.

Now this episode is the first episode of this season I didn't personally take a pass at through my typewriter, as it were. After writing the first two and rewriting the subsequent four or five, depending on how you count, I was getting to what we in writing business call burnout. (Chuckles.) I was getting really toasty and tired and at a certain p- I th- in some part- in some ways the flaws in episodes five and six can be attributed to my own fatigue, at a certain point. I don't really know how guys like Aaron Sorkin and David Kelley do it, where they literally write every single word of every single episode and do it, like, over and over again and do it brilliantly. I find that I can do, like, five... five in a row before I st- I'm really starting to get tired and you're just like putting words down on the page. And you're just trying to get through the day and get your pages out because the show doesn't stop. That's one of the challenges of being showrunner in television is that ultimately you're responsible for all the episodes and you feel the obligation as you're going through them to make each one of those best you- they can be and because you are the creator and the head writer they all have to have a certain voice. They're- you're try- all the writers on the staff are trying to capture your voice for the show. And so as you're rewriting it you're bringing it closer to what you think your voice is for the show. But at a certain point you star- it becomes diminishing returns. It becomes- your fatigue level, or at least my fatigue level, is starting to overwhelm the fact that it's my "voice". Ok, we're out of the tease.

Act 1

So, this one David did solo and I really didn't rewrite any of it. I gave extensive notes, of course, and so did the studio, and the network, and the director's notes, and so on. So it wasn't like there was just one draft here. But David carried the burden on this particular episode. There's only one scene that I took a pass on. We'll get to that later.

This little bit was interesting in that it was our first glimpse inside Colonial Fleet Headquarters. It's not much of a set. It's a very constricted set because at this point we were now all in the cost saving portion of our season, trying desperately to contain costs, keep the story small and producable so that we could start saving money per episode to make up for the vast cost overruns that we'd incurred at the beginning of the season.

This was a nice little bit for Cottle to come back and do. It seemed realistic that the first thing that he would be doing would be down in sickbay doing a physical. I love the fact that Cottle offers him a cigarette. (Laughs.)

There were various versions of Laura's involvement in the storyline. In early drafts, Laura started to smell a rat pretty early in the show. Probably at the same point, structurally, as she does now, when she's in the scene coming up with Laura- with Adama and Tory and Novacek. But afte- Oh there's a great visual effects still showing some of the damage from the New Caprica storyline. This little scene- anyway. Laura, in early drafts, started to smell a rat, realizes something was wrong. Adama wouldn't tell her. And so what she did was to enlist Lee. She got Lee to do some digging and try to find out what the secret was that Adama was trying to hide. And in those early drafts, what he had was, he had actual audio tapes of the encounter- of the mission. There were secret tapes that were somewhere in the- Galactica's audio archives that we were saying. There was an actual room with audio archives on analog tapes, in keeping with the fact that the Galactica computers are not nearly as powerful as our- as many modern day computers are, and they're not networked, etc. So there were actual tape banks down below some place that mission tapes were kept in, and there was a secret one that had the exchanges between Adama and Bulldog aboard the Valkyrie. Now some of the- we started running into all kinds of problems with that particular storyline. I had trouble believing that the audio tapes of Adama aboard the Valkyrie- he had kept, versus destroying, and that he had kept them and transferred them to Galactica where they could be found. And Lee was going to find them and play them back and confront his father with the truth and his father was going to be very upset and angry. I think in one draft Adama even hauled off and smack- and hit Lee, for the first time, which was what's- gonna be a- an amazing moment but, didn't feel like we had really earned it legitimately, so we started backing off the idea of the tapes. There was something provocative about hearing the tapes. It was the scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now where they're playing the tapes of Colonel Kurtz, or it was like the conversation. Here's a tape of something from the past and it gave Lee a real drive in the show to find out what was going on. I'll come back to that later.

This scene, the flashback scene aboard the Cylon baseship. Virtually all the dialogue here, interestingly enough, is improvised by Lucy Lawless. The scene was supposed to be really MOS, silent, and it was really just her pacing around talking to him in the cage and you weren't gonna really s- hear anything. But on the day Lucy went into character and started improvving all this stuff, all this- I think she and the director worked out this thing with the rattling the bars of the cage, but all of her dialogue is actually something that Lucy improvved. And it's great. And we weren't gonna even use it but it was so good that we decided to really use it in the show. And it's really another testament to the contribution of the cast and the actors. The cast are the actors, of course. Of the cast to the show. They really provide a great deal of texture and a great deal of import to their characters and to the scenes and, in this particular case, actually wrote the scene herself. So it's really a testament to Lucy's ability and her identification with the character and her understanding of the world and understanding of what this show is about that she was able to just improv all that off the top of her head.

Like I said, the storyline with Laura was going to be Laura realizing that something was amiss. That Laura- there was something- there was a secret Adama was keeping from her and she was gonna get Lee to ferret it out. And when Lee ferreted out the information and found the tapes of his father and confronted him with them, that was when Adama actually resigned. Adama was gonna actually resign command of the Fleet, turn command of the Fleet over to Lee. And it's only after they discover what- that Bulldog's mission- that he was intentionally let go by the Cylons and ordered that he- in order for him to come to Galactica and disrupt everything and screw with the command and really cause chaos that they pulled back from- that Adama pulled back and was convinced to maintain his command of the Fleet. Like I said, the audio tapes were problematic and hard to believe. And then we just started, for time and space, we started realizing that didn't have really time to do this whole Lee investigative story and that the investigative story was not nearly as interesting as the personal story was. Which is often the case, I find in this show, that ofttimes we concoct these intricate plots and a lot of moving parts to get you to the fourth act and then as you're working through the scripts, as you're working throught the drafts, you discover that, or I discover, that the thing that is really interesting to me are all the character moments and how it impacts on the people and I end up cutting plot and simplifying plot to focus on the characters. Which is generally the opposite of how TV is done. I mean, there's an old axiom in television that when you're long the first thing you cut is comedy, the second thing you cut is character, and then, only then, do you start cutting into plot. I often go the opposite. I prefer to hang onto character at all costs and humor is something that we're usually have very, very little of so typically we want to hang onto the little tiny comedic moments whenever and wherever they are. And so I'm loathe to c- but I'm loathe to cut character, ever, so ofttimes I will sacrifice plot for character because, in just my personal view, character is what it's all about and it's all about these people and that's why you're tuning in, week after week, is to see what happens to these people and that the plot mechanics are never quite as interesting as the character dynamics and watching what happens to them.

I like this little exchange with Laura and Adama at the end of their scene because she knows somethin's up. He's not giving it to her and she'll willing to give him the space. That sh- the President is not pressing, is not pushing, is not pushing him to the wall.

This little moment here, after she's gone. Man alone in his cabin, and uncharacteristic outburst of violence. Knocking over the chair.

And then cutting from there to D'anna just randomly walking the corridors. For just a bare moment I think you do wonder what's going on and is she clearly on Galactica. It's obviously a dream sequence, at a certain point. And I think the trick is always to play with the audience's expectation in a dream sequence. Is it a dream, or is it not? And the closer to reality you can make the sequence, the more believable that it is that perhaps it is something real and you're getting a lot of mileage out of just wondering which is which. As a nice touch, the door there saying, "End of line." Which of course is something the Hybrid says over on the Cylon baseship all the time. ^[00:16:56] "End of line," by the way, as an aside, in terms of the Hybrid, is a callback to Tron, of all things. Tron the f- the largely forgotten computer animated movie from Disney that was done in the 80's. It's Master Command Program always had "End of line" as a end of a sentence and I always liked the rhythm of that and the computer voice of that, "End of line." And so I gave it to the Hybrid.

This little bit here with D'anna waking up with Six and Baltar. I had to keep like arguing internally with various people, including David, about the fact that that was worth doing, because I like the fact that we just jump ahead in their relationship. That after last week you saw that D'anna- that Baltar had made a breakthrough with D'anna in the torture sequence. And I thought it was perfectly acceptable to jump ahead in that narrative and just say, "Ok. You know what? In between episodes, essentially, he's- he has now started an affair with D'anna and Six." The Cylons having no real problem with those sorts of relationships. One imagines that there's probably all kinds of interesting things going on with all the various Cylons in many combinations and many numbers of partners, so they wouldn't really have a problem with sharing a bed with a man and a woman as well.

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