Podcast:Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast of the final two episodes of the first season here on Battlestar Galactica. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and creator of this version. And since this is the finale I'm going to be recording this podcast- I'm going to do both parts together, and for both episodes I'm going to assume you have seen the episode before you listen to the podcast, so if you don't want the episode spoiled I suggest you watch the episode first.

First of all I should say they were both designed to be shown together, it is really a two-hour movie split into two parts, and probably the most satisfying way to watch them is to record them and watch them back-to-back. However they are perfectly acceptable episodes in their own right, and each one has it's own coherent narrative that you can follow, but it's a richer meal if you chose to watch them together.

We started talking about the finale I'd say mid-way through the first season, and there were certain things that we knew we wanted to accomplish at the end of season one that I had set out, actually back in the story bible stage, and presenting it to the network and saying that these were the directions that the characters- this is where Laura and Adama were going to end up by the end of season one, and we accomplished that. This Kobol's Last Gleaming in its finale in the second part definately ends up where I thought season one should end.

Now I'm taking in more specific terms about the episode. This tease, it's one of my favourite teasers, not only in the series, it's one of my favourite teasers that I've ever done. I guess I like it primarily because most of it is non-verbal, it's very visual teaser, it's just sort of cutting back and forth between these disparate story lines. It's also an example of how things translate from page onto screen. If you read the draft of this it's described a little differently, it started in close up, it was starting on fingers, cut to a woman's mouth, cut to a gun, cut to a woman's hands, and there was this sort of rhythm of exteme close-up cuts that I was establishing the script- in discussions with Michael Rymer, the director- you can only direct the show so much on page, you have to allow the director to do his job, which is to actually direct the show. So I mean, as a writer I tend to find that I direct a movie in my head as I'm writing it, and I kind of have an idea in my head where I think the camera is, the close-ups, the rhythym of certain scenes in the editing back and forth and so on, and you have to kind of let that go, to an extent, you have to let the director and the actors and the rest of the team come in and bring their voices and their visions to the material, and this is a good example of that. This is all stuff that I wrote, eventually, the boxing match, Sharon putting t he gun in her mouth, and Helo confronting Caprica Sharon on the planet and going back and forth- the style of it, and the rhythym of it, and exactly what the shots are and how it's conveyed is really something that the director and then the editor, between them put together. And it's great 'cos you watch your material get lifted and again, your hope is that you deliver a script to a production team that takes the material and improves on it, and makes it better, and make it sing, and makes it really alive, because it's really not alive on the page, it's really just words on a page and it requires people to say the lines, and it requires other people to shoot them, and somebody else to put it all together. And on this show I had a tremendous team, and they were able to create what I think is a lovely, interesting, compelling teaser to the show.

A side note about the boxing, that we've gone through now a couple of times. The boxing I think was something that was suggested I believe by Eddy and Jamie, something that they thought of that Adama and son could be doing. All the boxing I believe was choreographed by them, and how they did it and all that was something they worked on for quite a while.

This reveal of her sleeping with Baltar was always in the original draft. I think in the earlier versions you didn't have the sort of fake-out where you think it's Lee, and I think that that also was a suggestion of Michael Rymer to for a moment think that it really is Lee, and then you see that it's actually Baltar.

I love the way these intercuts play, that you're going directly from the gun in Sharon's mouth, to Sharon being shot on Caprica and feeling all these characters are in conflict, and all these characters are at wrenching points in thier lives, and it's setting the table for larger, and more sort of cataclysmic events as you go on. I think it's also in general- it's not just the culmination of what I wanted the season one arc to be, I think it's also the culmination of a lot of plot thread that we set up, and character lines. I mean this whole line between Kara sleeping with Baltar is set up way back when she first meets him back in, I believe, Water. That's the first time she lays eyes on him and doesn't really care for him, but you could see there was a little bit of a spark, and Baltar being Baltar he was eager for his next conquest, and never quite let go of the fact that Kara Thrace wouldn't give him the time of day, and that of course made her all the more desirable to him, and the more she blew him off the more interested he became.

I also think that this is a great moment, and this is a really, really good scene because of the actors involved. Because there's really nothing going on here, I mean there's not a lot of dialogue, there's really not a scene per se. What there is is the look on her face, on Six's face, and the look on Baltar as her looks at her. You start to realize for the first time that it's actually a relationship, it's not just a hallucination in his head, it's not just a case of Baltar's imagination, and she's always playing the same note, and she's always cute and funny and making quips and seducing him. She says he can sleep with other people, she says that love is not sex, she says all those things, and then he does it and he sleeps with Kara, somebody he might actuall have feelings for, and it bothers her. That look on her face and his sort of side-long glance over at her, the look of guilt on James' face when he plays that, I think speaks volumes. It's just a tremendous little piece of acting.

And again, the tease is just this sort of lyrical intercut between different stories, it's not really just sort of handing you the plot. And I think that's why it's one on my favourite teasers, I think this teaser and the teaser for 33, which we began the season with are my favourites of the series, certainly. 33, I liked it because it was challenging, it was provocative, it sort of grabbed the audience and said "OK, catch up, 'cos we're in the middle of a crisis, and we're not gonna explain anything to you, we're not going to spoon feed you all the plot and this and that. You're just gonna have to figure it out, and we respect that you're intelligent, and that you can figure it out." And this tease is again just sort of "OK, there'll be a plot, relax. Here are the characters, watch, take it in, see where they've been, remember what's happened to them and sort of be prepare for the things that are going to come in tonight's episode."

Act 1

There are changes all over the place, and cert- in terms of structure, and how we laid out the story. One of the changes is right here, this whole sequence of Laura in whatever sort of imaging system that they have aboard Galactica, and the continuation of her cancer treatment; it was originally scripted, all of these little cuts - and there were more cuts - where supposed to be in the teaser, along with all the other stories that you were intercutting. But Michael Rymer and the editor felt that it interrupted the flow, that they had established a nice rhythym of going back and forth between the Sharons especially, and then Lee and Kara, and there was sort of- there was a duality in how they were structuring the editing of the tease, and you were sliding between- There were relationships in other words, between Lee and his father to Kara, and there was a relationship there, and then the two Sharons obviously had a relationship, and then Laura sort of in that mix, didn't quite fit the puzzle that they were working out. So ultimately we just moved it into the top of the next act, which is a valid choice.

This whole storyline that it's dealing with here, and the prophecies and the religious aspects of the show, are obviously something that have developed over the course of time and throughout the series, and I love the fact that it's tied in to her taking a specific drug. I like the fact that there's question about what's causing her to see these things; is it a drug, is it actually a prophecy, I like all the questioning of it.

This scene, there's this little bit here with Baltar and the glass, and topping it off and then drinking it. Again, that's James, there's a lot of that, one of the real joys of the show is watching the cast members embriod around their characters, find little details of characterization that make the characters more alive. It really works because it really breathes life into the show in a different way. You can kind of tell that these people inhabit their roles in a different way, than say 80 to 90 percent of standard television is done, these are real people and they're in a real scene together.

A note on the card game: in the original series it was called Pyramid, for those of you who are studying such things, and somewhere along the line I transposed the names. I misremembered what they called it and I- the sort of raquet-ball slash basketball that they played in the original and that we refered to in this series, I now call Pyramid, and the name of that game in the original which was Triad is now what we sort of call our poker game. So it's one of those "Oh, it's one of the charming differences between the old and the new.", it's either that or it's just a stupid error that the writer made.

Speaking of writing, these two episodes, the story is credited to my producing partner David Eick. This was his first crack at writing and stroking out story for television, and so while I was concentrating on re-writes and production details of earlier episodes, David was ahead working out- doing the heavy lifting which was to really figure out how some of these puzzle pieces work. This is a very large story with a lot of complicated moving parts and David was the one who took the first crack at sitting down and trying to line them all up, and that's a big load and I- he did a great job. Because if somebody doesn't come in and do that at the beginning then you have to do that all when you get to the teleplay, so a lot of the credit for how well these two episodes work goes to my partner David Eick.

This is a good example I think of one of the textures that James does exceptionally well in this series. The notion of the man who has the invisible- fill in the blank: the invisible rabbit, the invisible person, the demon on his shoulder, who knows, the whatever- it's a riff that's done many times in many ways. And oft-times that actor who's given that part doesn't pull it off believably, a lot of times you watch and you go "Well if I was there I would know that he's crazy, or he's talking to himself, or he's talking to somebody else obviously, I mean he's not even making any effort to cover it for god's-sakes.", and so you just don't really believe it. Well, I think that James carries it off quite well, he plays all the double ontondras (?), he is careful to anyways have a recovery point where he seems to be just ranting off by himself, and then he kind of redirects to line back to the people in the room like that. It's a delicate, deliacte act beacuse you have to believe that he can get away with the things he gets away with. And even that look between Billy and Laura is an acknowledgement of the fact that not everybody can see Six and "Who is he talking to right there?", he's staring around, he's a quirky, odd scientist. And I think that given the fact that he's the only genius, he's the only scientist, he's the only man of his calibre in the entire fleet, plus he's been elected Vice President, they're sort of forced to give him a freer reign that they probably would with somebody else.

I'm glad that we kept this little tiny bathroom on Coloniel One, which is so much like an airplane, 'cos it really conveys that sense of being in a ship going someplace. And this whole bit, the fact that she hurts him, the fact that Six can actually slam his head into that mirror and hurt him, it underlines the fact that she's always a dangerous character, and that she's not somebody to be trifled with. And it also really raises to spectre of what is going on in this guys head, I mean if she's a chip in his head she's exerting a tremendous amount of control on his body to make it fling itself against the door. But on the other hand, if she's just a hallucination, if he's just losing his mind, then his mind is taking steps to injure himself, to cause great harm and damage to himself, which I also think is fasinating.

A principle difference between a script and a filmed episode is that there was a device I was going to use, that we may still use at some point, which was to intersperse on camera interviews with the cast talking directly to the camera, as if speaking to an off screen interviewer. And they were being interviewed in the aftermath of these events and looking back on them and we were- I was intercutting those moments with the contemporary action, whcih was a really interesting device. But ultimately we just never had time to film it, and the episode was just too vast and big as it was, so we dicided not to go there.

I'd say one of the principle differences beyond the lack of interviews between script and film too is just there were structural changes. The end of night one now is Kara stealing the raider, and jumping back towards Caprica. In the script, that didn't happen until the end of night two, and the original ending for the end of night one was the upcoming crash of the raptor, with Crashdown and his team going down in the atmosphere, and we were cutting out on the action of that. The script was filmed and it wasn't really until Michael and Andy Cooper, who was the editor on this, were in the editing room together- Michael had always voiced a concern that he thought night one was a little too soft, and that there was just too much story in night two, and they were able to juggle the elements and play it so we could end- he moved up the whole Kara story so we could go out night one with the great ending of Kara jumping away and Adama saying "She's gone home.". And the Raptor crash does actually play out in night one and it opened up more room in night two to give all the moments in night two enough room to breathe, so ultimately that was a smart and important decision.

Act 2

Back on Cylon occupied Caprica. You'll notice that it rains a lot, I don't know if I've spoken about this at all in previous podcasts, because I don't remember such things, but you'll notice it rains a lot in Cylon-occupied Caprica. Part of this is our acknowlegement towards the ecological disaster that must have befallen the planet following the nuclear attack, some sort of nuclear winter must have set in, or certainly climate changes are underway, given all that's happened. So part of it is that acknowledgement of the reality of the situation, and part of it is also to give it, in an episode like this, a distinct look thats different, say, than Kobal which we're going to be going to shortly. So as a producer have this challenge where you have two planets in this episode, you're cutting between Kobal and Caprica, you need them to quickly orientate the audience and be visually distinct from one another, so that you're not confused on which planet you're on. These are the things that keep producers and exectutive up, awake all night long.

This scene I am quite fond of: Lee coming down and confronting Kara. In the scripted version this confrontation came later, there was a different moment after the Triad game, where Lee started to realize that Kara had slept with Baltar and he starts to understand that. He basically publicly outed Kara in front of the squadron, in the ready room, in the same way that Kara pulls crap on the pilots all the time, and gives people shit, and just generally is not above practical jokes and public humiliation. And Lee turned a back on her and basically had a practical joke ready in the ready room, and made it clear to everybody that she was sleeping with the vice president and they all hoot and laugh and really took it to her. And it was an interesting scene, but it also seemed a bit out of character for Lee, we didn't really believe Lee would do that. This seemed more true: that he would just go down and get in her face, and that Kara would have a lot of guilt and not want it to go there. And then we've got boom, boom. I like the fact that it doesn't devolve into some kind of scrum, it's not a fight. She hit him 'cos that's what Kara is, Kara will throw a punch every once in a while. I think that's part of her character that every once in a while she gets pushed too far and she snaps and she'll hit you. And the thing with Lee was he hit her right back and then kept going on. So to me that spoke volumes about their relationship, and about who Lee is and who Kara is as well.

Kobol I was talking about earlier. The Original Series did an episode where they did go find Kobol, and I haven't seen that show in a while but as I- my recollection of it- and I- was that they find Kobol, and there's a lot of pyramdis on it. And there was stock footage of Egypt that they blue-screened [note: can't hear the name here, but I'm sure someone familiar with TOS could / would know already] in front of, and he went into the pryramids, he's about to find the secret of where Earth is and then it all goes to hell. Going to find Kobol, the roots of humanity, the sort of birthplace of everyone in the Galactica universe, I was very attracted to from an early point. It seemed like a natural thing to do with the characters, it feeds directly into the myth- the larger mythos of the show. I mean it's- at some point you have to answer these questions, or you should answer these questions. They're called the twelve colonies, they call themselves colonists and Colonials. Well, the colonies of what? Colonies of somebody, colony- a colony implies a mother planet. So to find that mother planet at some point seemed a natural place, in both the Original Series and for us. And it became a "What is Kobol?", "What is this place?". Is it Eden? Is it a paradise? Why did we leave? What's there still? What do we hope to find there? These are a lot of the discussions that we had going around and round.

This was a complex scene that we had to handle very deftly, which is she looks at the photograph and sees something that the others do not, and then relates that to an illustration here in the book. And that's always tough, as a writer and producer you're always finding yourself in situations where you do have to rely on inserts, and you do have to rely on cut-aways, and things that aren't present that you can't see immediantly on the set, and you're hoping like hell that later, when they finish the book, that you'll be able to see what you need to see when the book is actually done. 'Cos nine times out of ten, they can't get the book with that kind of specific illustration done in time to have it there on the day when you need it, so you really- you're hanging yourself out there over the edge a little bit, because you know it's a key plot point, that she has to look at the photograph, the phototgraph has to read correctly, and then the book has to relate to the photograph, and you have to understand all this.

This section here is a key moment in the development of Laura's character in that it's really not until that point that she starts to accept and believe that the scriptures and the prophecies have some validity to them. Not only have some validity to them but may be literaly true, and maybe that the way to Earth is through Kobol, that we can find our home. And I think it's interesting to note that she comes to that idea, not as a woman of faith, not as a woman who has a "quote end-quote" personal relationship with her Gods, but she comes to it logically. She looks at the puzzle around her, she looks at the pieces, and the clues, and what's been laid out for her, and how they add up. And she she says "Well, this is what makes sense.", I mean, whether it's prophecy or scripture or whatever you want to call it, what was written over there is happening over here and there has to be a connection, so this must be the way to Earth. And so she comes to it from a very secular viewpoint on a very religious topic, and I think that set sets her up into an interesting place as we move forward in the series.

This scene between Baltar and Sharon: I liked this because it starts to move Baltar in a much darker direction. This is Baltar the manipulator, Baltar- not Baltar the imp, or Baltar the seducer, or Baltar the clown, or Baltar even trying to save his own ass, really. This is Baltar going "OK, this is a Cylon, she's kind of dangerous, she's dangerous probably to everybody and escpecially me." 'cos that's what matters most. She doesn't get that she's a Cylon. Here she is, sitting in this room, obviously contemplating suicide. And Baltar shifts the situation, and actually advocates her death, and gets her to put that gun back in her mouth and try to kill herself. And it's a very dark idea, it's a very almost nihilistic notion that Baltar is starting to, bit by bit, take a more active role in maniplulating events themselves. Hes's not comletely content to watch the way things work out and play it by ear, as it were. I think all the editing and direction in this sequence, and throughout the show, but especially here, it's quite well done. It's quite interesting, it's not really how television is traditionally filmed and edited. Usually, much more traditional masters, much looser, you're not going for the over-the-shoulder where you can barely see the actor's face. But it has the effect- when you use it correctly it has the effect of making you feel like a voyeur in the scene, that you're looking over Baltar's shoulder trying to see- can't quite see the expression on his face, worried about what he might be saying or not saying. And then you come- and then you kinda break it and you come out here to a little bit more traditional frame, and now your involved in the scene. But you're feeling a bit like an interloper, feels like your sitting there, watching it happen, and he kisses her and goes away.

Re-imagined Series definition: visual indicator used in a battlestar's Instrument Landing System during a hands-on approach ^{(TRS: "Miniseries", "Act of Contrition", "Final Cut", "Black Market")}