Podcast:Pegasus

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode ten, "Pegasus", of season two. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new "Battlestar Galactica" and I'd like to welcome you to the podcast. This one's a lot of fun for me, this is a episode that I've been thinking about for a long time, literally since I agreed to do the project. There's a couple of things you should know going into this: this is the one hour version of "Pegasus". We struggled mightily to get this show to time, and when the footage was complete, I believe the Director's Cut was a good 15 minutes over. Which is a bit of a problem, because that's more than an act's worth of material, and as we tried varying ways to get this down to the hour running length, I kept feeling like the best version of the show was the longer version. So we actually explored for a while the possibility of showing a 90 minute version of "Pegasus", and there was various discussions with the network back and forth. Ultimately, one of the problems was, we had an episode that was too long for an hour, and too short for 90 minutes. We could never quite plump it out to the point where it could be a 90 minute show, and it was always very difficult to pare it down to an hour show. So we finally got it down to an hour, rather than pad it out and just make it slow to get to 90 minutes, we compromised and decided to go with the fastest barn-burner of an episode that we could, in the one hour.

And, uh, fortunately, Universal Home Video has agreed to show the larger, the longer version of "Pegasus" in the season 2 DVD set so there's something for all of you to look foward to. So there will be periodic references to that throughout the show, but I'll try not to dwell on too much on that.

This episode obviously has its genesis in the roots of the show itself, which is the Original 1978 Series. They did an episode in the original Galactica called "Living Legend, Parts I and II", which featured the return of the Battlestar Pegasus. Er, not the return, but meeting the Battlestar Pegasus, and its commander— uh, Commander Cain who was played by Lloyd Bridges. It also introduced the character of Sheba, who was Cain's daughter on Pegasus. And at the end of that, of the original series's two-parter, Pegasus and Cain kind of vanish and it's not clear whether they're alive or dead, but Sheba, the commander's daughter, stays aboard and essentially becomes a somewhat romantic interest of Apollo. Sheba was a character that is not present in this version of the show. I felt that Sheba ultimately was too cute of a character concept; that you'd run into another Battlestar and that commander also would have a child as the commander of his airgroup, or in this case her airgroup. I just felt it was one step too far, it pushed the reality of the show across the line, where essentially then the show is winking at the audience and sort of going "Yeah, they did it so we're going to do it too; it's kind of cute isn't it? That, you know, two commanders and two kids and the kids are gettin' into it!" You know that, I— I just couldn't go there. It worked for the Original Series, I will give the Original Series that, that it— within the context of their show and within the sort of parameters of how they chose to tell stories and their characters it worked perfectly fine. It just didn't feel like it was going to work very well in our episode.

The choice of Michelle Forbes to play Admiral Cain was the subject of much discussion. We went through a lot of actresses' names. We went through a lot of sort of testing, internally about who we would use and what the possibilities for her. I had worked with Michelle Forbes on "Star Trek: The Next Generation", where she played Ensign Ro, and other people knew her from her film work. And there was something really interesting about going with a— not an older woman, but a slightly younger woman. That she would personify this character. It seemed like an interesting challenge, as opposed to going to someone older, you know, and more experienced, in some ways, there was something that I really liked about bringing in the younger admiral, the sort of fast-tracked admiral, who then comes in and takes command of Galactica, and the entire Rag Tag Fleet.

I should say that in the original, in "The Living Legend, Part I and II", Commander Cain did not outrank Adama. That story was similar only insofar as there was, there is a "Battlestar Pegasus", they do meet up with it unexpectedly, and that there's an admiral Cain who's a bit of— more of a hardass character than Commander Adama. There story was very different; it had to do with Cain's obsession with attacking a particular Cylon outpost or base, as I recall, and his determination to attack that Cylon base despite Adama's misgivings and Cain even manipulates the tactical situation at one point; he's out flying Vipers, himself, for some reason, and you know is destroying ships in order to force Adama to attack the Cylon base, which Cain has been advocating all along. We didn't use any of that for the show. We just sort of started with the premise of Cain showing up. I'll be back.

Act 1

We started with the premise of Cain showing up and being a hardass. I like that. I like the kernel of that. That another battlestar comes on the scene and their commander is a tougher one than ours is, and is a bit of a crazy person. On top of that, what I thought was even more interesting was then to say, "Well what if that commander shows up they outrank Adama? What if that commander shows up and takes command of the Fleet away from Adama?" Which would happen. And suddenly I realized that was a more interesting tale. It's one thing to run into the crazy man, or woman in this case. It's one thing to deal with that other commander who's a little out of control and you have doubts about, but it's another thing entirely when that crazy person comes and takes over your fleet. As I said earlier, there's a lot of things that did not make it into the one-hour version of Pegasus. There's a whole leadup to this scene with Adama and Laura and Tigh walking through the hallway, and that's where they talk about who Admiral Cain is. They talk about the fact that Cain was a very young Admiral, had been promoted over several people on the Commander's list. Was sort of an up and comer, and a bit of a tough one in that she had taken command of Battle Star Group 75 only recently before the attack.

Michael Rymer shot this episode. Michael Rymer had directed, of course, the pilot, and 33, and Kobol's Last Gleaming, and the opening two-parter of this season. And this is the next two-parter that Michael shot for us. And there is something about Michael's footage. There is something about the way he shoots the show, the performances he elicits from the characters, where he puts the camera, the lighting schemes that he comes up with in conjunction with our dp Steve McNutt, that in many ways makes it unique and distinctive. When I see the dailies on the show, I've said a few times I can always tell Mike Rymer's. It's like Michael just has a particular voice for this show, and it shines through on an episode like this, which I just think is a great, great, episode.