Podcast:The Woman King

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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 this week we're here to discuss episode thirteen, "The Woman King." Coming to you from a small cabin in the Russian River. Terry and I are ensconced for a few days. But the podcast must be served, so here we are. There's no Scotch for this particular gathering. I'm having actual absinthe, from a secret location overseas. You can actually get this fine substance in the United States, despite rumors to the contrary. And so absinthe is the drink. (Takes a drink.) From my Carnivàle days, gave me a taste for it. And we won't discuss- be discussing the smokes this week.

Ok. Thirteen. "The Woman King." This episode came essentially out of our desire to do a couple of different things. One was to setup a long-running plot line that was supposed to last from here until the end of the season that had to do with the Sagittarons. Ultimately that one did not pan out the way that we anticipated, initially, about what we were gonna do with the Sagittarons as a people. It was going to figure prominently in Baltar's trial, by the end of the season, and this episode was designed in part to get those storylines going. However, once we actually got into the meat of Baltar's trial, beyond even the first draft. I mean, we did a first draft that had the Saggitarions featured prominently, and what they were doing, and then dropped it in subsequent drafts. And I'll talk more about that as the show goes on.

So here we are in the tease. This sequence of Helo having trouble sleeping was shot much later. We didn't initially have this as the opening to the episode. Initially what we were gonna- what we had was this fly- the pilot banter and chatter of them flying out (phone rings) and of course it has to be a podcast because there's a phone ringing, but I can turn it off here, so, there we go. Anyway it was gonna have pilot stuff going on and people on a mission, chitchat back and forth, giving each other limericks, and so on. And then that didn't really seem like the most effective opening, 'cause it's- it really is a show about Helo. And so I wanted to- start with Helo and let's get into his mindset, right from the get-go. 'Cause one of the things that we wanted to do about the ep- about this show in designing it was to give ourselves a "Helo story." A full-blown story about Helo and his life, to an extent. In a large part this episode is a follow-up- (phone rings) Somebody just keeps calling. And look. It might be my wife so I will actually put this on pause here for a moment, something I never do. And I'm back. It was nothing important, just the network with the pickup call. No, no. I'm just joking. But it was really the network.

Anyway. This whole little sequence of the pilots coming in and bustin' each other as they walk up the corridor and then jazzin' along. That was an offsh- it came out of the sequence that I said that we dropped at the beginning of the show, which was them all flying and busting on each other and coming up with bad, really bad, limericks (chuckles) as they were bantering back and forth. But it was essentially all to setup this idea of Helo's isolation. And this, in part, impetu- the impetus in part to do this Helo story was to follow-up what Helo had done back in episode seven- six when he had prevented Galactica from using the biological weapon against the Cylons, and part of this- part of the backstory and subtext of the episode was Helo having been exiled ever since. That essentially Adama knew that it was Helo, didn't really wanna do a formal investigation into it, but it- had essentially sidelined him. He was given the "shit jobs." Colonel Tigh was back at the XO and Helo was assigned to deal with the civilians down in Dogsville. Some of those textures are still here- bit by bit, though, we just kept losing a lot of that stuff along the way, 'cause the story- there was a split in the story about what this particular show was about. Is it about the Sagittarons? Is it about prejudice? Is it about Helo's exile and quest for redemption? There were a lot of competing interests about what the show was about, and like I said, we were trying to set up this longer-term, long-range, backstory of the Sagittarons overall, so that kept consuming more and more of our attention and bit by bit the Helo- Helo as exile kept going away.

Part of the things that we lost along the way about Helo's backstory here, which I think was a shame, was the idea that he had been trying very hard to make a name for himself and had been sending lots of reports to Adama and had been pestering Adama for weeks, and finding ways of being a hero. That on some level Helo was looking for an excuse to be a hero again, and he kept finding- being "johnny-on-the-spot" who would say, "I have discovered this new problem, sir. And here's my solution to it." And he was that officer who's trying so hard to prove himself that he's becoming a pain in the ass. And that, in turn, informed why his initial warnings about what was going on down here with Doc Robert were ignored. That there was a certain "boy who cried wolf" quality to what was happening with Helo and the psychological underpinning for it was that he felt guilty over what he had done by killing the Cylons and preventing Galactica from using the biological weapon. It raised questions in his own mind of his own loyalties and his own worth as a man and him wanting to still be a hero in his own eyes and in- and to some degree in his wife's eyes, and that was propelling him into this need to find a situation to be a hero in. Like I said, it was a complicated psychological backstory and the episode just being too large, you just kept getting sidelined, and sidelined, and sidelined, and now there's not much of that notion really left in this particular episode.

Oh, we're still on. (chuckles) We're in the main title sequence. I don't know what to say in the main title sequence this week. It's pretty. It's very pretty. So is the fire here in the cabin. Terry's off doing something... in town. In Kernville. Ok, and we're out of the tease.

Act 1

Initially the structure of this episode actually began with- we were gonna start at the end of the show. Michael Angeli, who wrote this episode, had structured a draft where in the tease- was going to open with Helo in a confrontation with Adama and Tigh and Cottle about Doc Robert and making his accusations and essentially being shut down and told to knock it off and that they didn't believe him and he had to go somewhere else to deal with his personal issues, which is what everybody thought was driving him to make these accusations and then he left the room, and then he had the confrontation with Tigh and they had a battle- or Ti- not a battle, they had a fight. And that was the end of the tease. And then it was like, start act one three days earlier. It's valid structure and we've used that structure many times. Usually we do that in post when we're trying to jazz up an episode. Michael did it in the draft, and just because we're perverse, we decided not to that this episode and to make it a little bit more linear and a little bit more straight-line, to take you along the away and walk you through the parameters of what was happening.

The idea of the illness and the illness that the Sagittarons brought aboard and are spreading, even though it's treatable, was a late-developing idea as we struggled with the Sagittarons and what their beliefs were and why they were different, why they were the victims of prejudice from some of the other colonies. There is this developing idea this season of something that we had been talking about within the civilian world for a long time, and had never really- now we bring to the forefront was this idea that there were class structures and hierarchies and different, if not racial, then at least tribal feelings among the Fleet that- what- which colony you were from had meaning within the Twelve Colony structure and that as they were out on their journey, post- the post-apocalyptic journey, that eventually those feelings and rivalries and prejudices would rise to the fore as well, and so we had always been looking for ways to start indicating that and this story with the Sagittarons, like I said a couple of times, was intended to eventually illuminate and be part of the backstory that actually happened on New Caprica during the missing year. And during that time there was an incident. There was a massacre. There was like a whole complicated backstory of what the Sagittarons had done and had done to them. They had essentially isolated themselves on New Caprica, had done their own thing while everyone else was doing something else, and essentially there came a crisis point and people were killed, and I won't give you the whole thing. But Baltar was directly involved with it, so was Zarek. Gaeta was around. And it was gonna figure- eventually there was a secret within that that was going to figure prominently in Baltar's trial. So we were laying a lot of this pipe to set up who the Sagittarons were and what was going on.

This scene, for instance, with Zarek and Laura, which I think is a nice scene. It's nice to see Richard back and it's nice to have Tom Zarek back among us, even for a little bit. There was a scene, a follow-up to this scene later in the show, where Zarek went to see Baltar. And when Zarek went to see Baltar he basically was feeling him out to see what he was gonna say, what he wouldn't say, how he could help, under the guise of helping him, and Baltar was essentially gonna get wise to why Tom Zarek was really there, which was to cover his own ass, and that Zarek was involved in the Sagittarion incident- Sagittaron incident on New Caprica and was worried that Baltar might implicate him at a trial, and it was starting to setup the shifting political agendas and these shifting mysteries to raise the idea that there was something up here, that you would be following this for subsequent episodes.

Like I said, like I keep saying, once we got to the trial episode we did structure that in. It was part of the story, initially, and at a certain point I just felt like it was complicating things and it wasn't really paying off. I know Michael Rymer, who directed the trial episode at the end of the season, felt the same way. And we just opted out. At a certain point I said, "You know what? Forget it. We're not gonna do th- just drop the whole Sagittaron thing. Let's make it a different trial. Let's make it a trial on the merits of the story that we do have about Baltar, not make up this new thing in the back." And when that happened, this episode was already in the can. Other episodes were already deeply, well into being done. And this is triage. Now you have to go back. This is what happens when you- when you run a show the way I run it, which is- I like a certain amount of improvisation and I like a certain amount of making it up as you go along. That's how I like to run a show. I make no apologies for that. It does have certain downsides to it, and one of the downsides is that sometimes you make a decision like that later and you shift on the fly because you feel, instinctively, that you have to for the story. And then you have to go back and now you have triage that you have to do on the subsequent epis- on previous episodes that you've already set in motion and you've already set- made certain decision. This is one of them. It fortunately was not a deadly blow to this episode. It was a subplot with Zarek, primarily, but part of the Raison d'Être for this episode was to set the Sagittarons up as a bigger presence in the Fleet than they ultimately turned out to be. So in that sense making the decision later actually hurts the series a little bit, hurts this episode a little bit. 'Cause you kinda wonder why we're spending all this time with the Sagittarons, and that's a legitimate beef. I think it's legitimate to walk away from this episode and say, "Why did we spend so much time with the Sagittarons in this episode?"

One nice thing about this episode, and about this little cluster of episodes, thirteen and fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen, are all very much standalone episodes. They don't... they don't really require a great deal of knowledge of the show in order to enjoy them. I think that your enjoyment of these episodes is enhanced if you know the backstories but these are good shows for newcomers to the series to watch to get a feel for the kind of show it is, the tenor of the episodes, what kind of storytelling we do.

Act 2

We played a lot with the doctor's character and why he was doing what he did and what was really going on there. I think part of the problem of this episode is on some level this episode isn't really saying anything new. I mean, it's- what's the message of the show? Prejudice is bad. Racism is bad. Tribalism is bad. People die. You don't want to be that guy. It's not a new message. It's not a provocative message. It's a standard TV idea. That our hero discovers the truth that somebody is- has hidden racism and that is actually acting on it and people are dying, so the hero stops him from doing that. It's a perfectly valid trope. There's nothing really wrong with it. It just doesn't- it doesn't lift the show into a new realm, I guess, is my point. I don't think it's a f- I don't think it's a problem episode. I don't think it's a bad episode. I li- I think it's well executed. I think it's a great episode for Helo. I think that it's great to see Tahmoh- it's great to see Tahmoh carry a whole show.

Here we are, back in Joe's bar. I love the fact that we're back in Joe's. Ooh, Racetrack out of uniform. Racetrack out of uniform looks fantastic. Good to see Connor again. Connor from the resistance, all of you remember. And this is us starting to use the bar a little bit more. This was another of the justifications for having- for setting up Joe's bar at all was that we could get back to these kind of scenes a little easier if they're on Galactica than you ever could on Cloud 9. Of course, we'd always had the rec room. Pilots and people were always hanging out in the rec room to an extent, but it's nice to have a change of pace.

In this scene I feel like- I think we pushed a little too hard in terms of the racial animosity from Tyrol and some of the other guys towards the Sagittarons, especially as it was something that we had never really said in the show. So I think that's- we pushed a little too hard here, but we had to push hard here because had to make point of it because it was a new idea in the show. So it's one of those damned if we do, damned if we don't kinda things.

We had other tales of Dualla as Sagittaron. There was a whole other story where it was more of a "Dee story", where Dualla was really the one leading this episode and really- or leading a story. It wasn't even this episode. It was really- we had one that was much more strongly about Dualla as a Sagittaron and her conflicted feelings of being in the military, 'cause Sagittarons didn't join the military, and that was seen as a betrayal by her people, and then she was forced to deal with them in a crisis, and ultimately that story went away too, 'cause we- again, we were looking for many ways to enhance the tale of the Sagittarons, overall in the series.

This is interesting because here's Head-Six- Head-Baltar again, which we hadn't seen Head-Baltar in quite a while, and it's great to have him back. I had to push this through a little bit. There some people that- there was some internal resistance. "Why are we going back to Head-Baltar? Aren't we done with him?" And I felt, "Well, no." I mean, she's- if she's- if she is who we've always said she was then she's essentially still seeing him and that there's meaning to that and I wanna keep the idea of Head-Baltar alive with Caprica-Six, not to spend huge amounts of time on it, but essentially keep it going because I have other plans and other ideas for what will become of Head-Baltar, down the line. Not even necessarily in this season but part of the larger plan for the show.

I like this little beat of Laura still monitoring these sessions personally. Her invested- her investment, her interest in what happens to Caprica-Six and the prisoners, I think, is an interesting tale that we keep moving along. What's gonna become of Caprica-Six? What will Laura do when Baltar goes to trial? But essentially the scene is an excuse to do this. To really get back into Caprica-Six's head and to see that she's still having these conversations with her version of Baltar.

It's always tr- it's been tricky scheduling a lot of this stuff, 'cause Head-Baltar doesn't have a beard and Baltar in the prison cell does have a beard, and so there's been this- there was always sleight of hand in scheduling these scenes. When we would shave James, don't shave James. Give him time to grow the beard. Fortunately James' beard grows in quite quickly. It's almost like that Simpsons cartoon where Homer looks in the mirror and he shaves and then like two seconds later the five o'clock shadow like (makes sound effect) comes back on his face. (chuckes.) James must have something like that, 'cause he can grow those beards quite rapidly.

I think you could legitimately ask, "Why don't they connect that to Baltar? Haven't they seen Baltar do the same kind of behavior, and they put two and two together?" Well, I guess. I did think about that. I thought, "Well, what does that tell them?" It tells them that they share some strange behavioral thing that maybe you could connect and say that, "Well, that's another indication of how co-opted by the Cylons he's become or how invested he is in them." Or something along those lines. But it's not really incriminating. And it doesn't really help you or tell you very much. So it just seemed like- I think it might have even been in a draft at some point that she remarked on that, but it felt like once you set that in the script and once you had played that scene for the audience you were essentially saying, "Aaah. That's a clue that's going somewhere and Laura's gonna take that information and she's going to do something with it." And ultimately I didn't think it went anywhere so I just opted not have to- not to really bring it up.

A lot of discussion about the bittamucin and the medic- medicine involved with this, and what it would and wouldn't do. The medical shows inevitably make my eyes roll back in my head so I was happily to remove myself from a lot of the in-depth discussions of medicine for Galactica. The thing about the Sagittarons is, I think, that is ultimately disappointing to me is that I don't think we ever gave them a distinct enough culture that wasn't clearly- I mean, I think that they're big problem of not going to the doctor and believing in medicine unfortunately has become such a TV thing. There's been lots of episodes of lots of series that dealt with Christian Scientists who refuse medical attention for one reason or another, or for other religious sets that may refuse medical attention for their belief system. And those, unfortunately, those tend to crop up on hospital shows, they're a staple of that, of the patient who comes in or who is brought in on an ambulance and won't be treated and the arguments between the doctors and the parents and- often comes up in TV procedurals. I'm sure Law & Order has done at least twelve of them, that's a joke, I have no idea. But any- I saw unfortunately because unfortunately in the context of this show, it just means that you're familiar with these issues. This is a pretty old issue of when they refuse treatment, in what circumstances, how much do we respect their beliefs, versus the health of the ship and health of other people, etc., etc., etc. And it's not a- because it's not a fresh idea and a fresh discussion we didn't have a lot to add to it. So I'm a little disappointed in terms of what- where the Sagittarions ended up and who they are, in terms of their unique culture in the show. That said, I don't think it hurts the show. I mean, it means the show is not transcendent. It means the show does not really break new ground. It doesn't really transcend the genre and become something interesting, because, oh my God, and there was this culture of Sagittarons and they unlike anything you'd ever seen before. That, to me, would've been a victory. As it is, it doesn't- it just doesn't quite get into that territory.

Now the scene you just watched with- that was not only the scene that was going to open the show, in the original draft, followed by this scene. And this was essentially the teaser in the first draft and then in subsequent drafts we moved it into chronological order. But that scene with Adama and Helo, I believe- now I'm getting myself confused. But I'm pretty sure that that- that the extension of that scene is the deleted scene that is in tonight's episode where Helo confesses to Adama. I could be wrong. I actually apologize, 'cause I don't recall. But the- it's either a continuation of that same scene or it was a later scene (chuckles), nothing to do with that scene, so there you go. Those my memory, for what it's worth.

The deleted scene in tonight's episode is the moment when Helo confesses to Adama that he was the one responsible for shutting down the biological weapon- from using it against the Cylons. I liked that scene a lot. I'm on the fence about whether we should have included it in the show or not. It wasn't cut just for time, although that was part of it. It was also that it raised a huge issue in the show that then ultimately went nowhere in the show. As I said in the beginning of the podcast, it was one of the impetuses for doing the episode was to include that moment and to talk about Helo's subsequent arc since the events of that earlier episode how his decision had affected him and his shipmates, etc., etc. But because so many of those elements had gotten cut back, there really was only that scene left in the show. So it became a choice of, well, he has this one moment. He can confess to Adama this thing that refers to several episodes ago and Adama essentially doesn't want to deal with it and let's him know that, "You know, you don't want a- I don't want an investigation here, and I don't think you do either and get the hell out," and it goes nowhere, and I'll come back to this after the act break.

Act 3

RDM: So, like I was saying, Helo's confession essentially went nowhere, so I could keep that in the show, and then just feel like- have it stick out like a sore thumb, a little bit, because it really was in isolation. There was no followup to it. And didn't really have a play into what was happening the rest of the episode, or I could cut it and thereby excise one of the principle reasons for doing the episode in the first place. And at that moment I think in my view you, as the producer, make the decision of, "What's the episode about for you? What is this episode now about? And is that moment so crucial that the story that's in front of you on the screen doesn't matter any more or not?" And usually that's- that argument loses and essentially you look at the film you have in the cutting room and you say, "Well, whatever I intended to do, whatever the idea that I set out to do in this week's episode, this is what I have." I believe that very strongly. Whatever your intention was in writing the script, this is the film we shot. Ok? And this is the episode you now have. So, the challenge is to make the best version of this. Make the best film you have. Make the best episode of what you have. Instead of hanging on to try to execute what your initial concept was, because that's just- it's water under the bridge and fifty other clichés. So that was essentially, again, the reason why I said, "Cut the scene." It was easy to do in terms of time, to justify, 'cause we were long, as always, and looking for cuts. And also it stuck out like a sore thumb. And it didn't help this episode. It hurt this episode a little bit, 'cause it diverted your attention into another arena and another backstory and another notion, at a time when the show- this episode is asking you to pay attention, 'cause you can feel that we're moving towards revelation. We're moving towards confrontation. You could sense the rhythm and the pace of the episode starting to pick up a little bit. Things are happening. Revelations are being made. And then suddenly this story took this left turn into this other subject. And then it went nowhere after that.

So I- I'm glad it's gonna- it'll be seen by America in tonights episode in the deleted scenes. But I think it was the correct decision not to put it in the show. Which is an interesting thing. 'Cause now we're starting to find the utility of having the deleted scene after the episode, as broadcast, which I'm starting to like, because it give you an opportunity to show certain things to the fans and to the audience, the wider audience, about textures that were supposed to be included in the show and that tell you a little bit more about the characters, but which might have interrupted the show or not played correctly in context and in tonight's episode is- deleted scenes, a perfect example of that.

I totally dig- digging this absinthe. I haven't begun to hallucinate, but I'll let you know if I do. It's an old wives tale about absinthe. Which we studied quite a bit in my days at Carnivàle. One of our characters loved absinthe, drank it all the time. Always wanted to try it. Now I have the real deal. Why am I talking about alcohol? Because it's absinthe and I'm going mad. I'm going mad, here on the podcast. Sorry.

Here is the actual woman King. The relationship between Helo and the woman King was an interesting one, I think, in theory more than it was in actuality. I wish- I guess if I could go back and mess around with this episode more, I would try to detail out a little bit more of the finer subtleties of sh- this woman was and her relationship with Helo. I wish she had a little bit more of a relationship with Helo. But that- I don't know. I'm not sure that I have an easy answer to that. But that's an area that I would want to tweak and mess with a little bit.

I like these glimpses of Helo and Sharon's home life. It was- it feels very natural. It feels very real. I believe that this is where they live. I believe that this is their behind closed doors relationship. This is how they hang out and deal with their lives on Galactica and it's nice. I think this- Sharon and Helo are probably the most believable couple that we really have. That's in part because we've watched the relationship develop over such a long period of time and the way it began and the specifics of it all. But it's also just a testament to the natural chemistry between the two actors, between Grace and Tahmoh. They really- they've been playing scenes together for so long and they have such an innate understanding of one another's rhythms and who they are that it's really a pleasure to watch them do this kind of work. Oh, and here's Mrs. Ron. Home at last with Chester, our dog.

Terry: Hi everybody.

RDM: Hi everybody.

Terry: And the dog.

RDM: And the dog. Chester's tail is now-

This subsequent scene of Helo- I think we cut now to the Helo in the corridor, if I'm not mistaken. 'Cause I this upcoming scene was added later as a pickup scene. No, I'm thinking of a different cut.

Anyway, Helo then goes to Cottle's office. This we did have to go back and reshoot later. We didn't have all of this during the time that we shot the episode, so a lot of this material was shot weeks later, well out of sequence. It was important to get this idea of Helo going through- this is where it moves into classic procedural territory, where Helo goes through the files, looks up information. This is your hero moment, hero Helo moment, of him getting the clues, putting it together. This is fill in the blank- Walker, Texas Ranger

Re-imagined Series definition: to fire on an enemy during a fighter engagement ^{(TRS: "Valley of Darkness")}; active wireless communications traffic

Galactica 1980 definition: Troy attempts to use a phone booth near a gas station prior to their first run-in with Jamie Hamilton ^{(1980: "Galactica Discovers Earth, Part I")}.