Podcast:Final Cut

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Teaser

Hello. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and this is the podcast for episode eight of the second season, "Final Cut". This episode is the first of a few stand-alone episodes that we've- we're doing here in season two. This is all following, this is the first episode after epsiode seven, "Home, Part II", where we wrapped up many different plotlines and essentially began season two. So, instead of launching into a brand new giant arc of long-term storytelling we decided to tell some standalone episodes, some things that weren't so buried in the mythos. Do a different flavor of episodes now that we were into this part of the season.

Right here you can see we are starting to pick up on the Gideon incident, as it were, from "Resistance" and that is the jumping off point for the events of "Final Cut". But by and large, this is exactly the kind of episode that a new audience normally should feel comfortable sitting down and watching it for the first, watching the show for the first time, or even if they have missed several episodes.

This footage of the Gideon massacre seen through the documentary lens was not shot at the time that we did "Resistance", although we really wanted to. We were, I think I've expressed before, my- I was dissatisfied with a lot of the riot, per se in "Resistance" in how it was finally realized and we did have a handheld camera on the set during that shoot, shooting footage that we intended to use in this episode 'cause all this was being planned in advance. Unfortunately the handheld footage didn't really convey the emotion that we wanted it to. It was understandable because essentially the director of episode four was concentrating on episode four and subsequently, or as a result of that, the foota- the handheld footage that we had from "Resistance" didn't work so we ended up having to go back and reshoot that whole little opening segment. Which I think is works, which I think is ok. I'm on the fence about the little boy. I go back and forth about whether we should've go'd the little boy or not, is it treakly, is it a step to far? We kinda split it down the middle 'cause it went on a bit after that with him crying and so on and I felt that was too much and then we took it out and didn't feel like enough and in any case it was one of the least satisfying pieces that we did.

This is of course Lucy Lawless's first episode for us. Lucy was David Eick's idea, my producing partner on the show. David had worked with Lucy on Xena: Warrior Princess, which of course is what she's most famously known for. Back when he was working for Renaissance, which produced that show. And so he suggested her. And he knows Lucy and her husband and we had talked about having her on the show before this and it didn't work out for whatever reason and then, as this role came up, David mentioned he for it and it seemed like the right fit. And he checked with her, and she was into it and decided to do it. I think she had passed on an opportunity to do the show the first season because of some other commitments that she had and couldn't break and did this role for us and I wasn't quite sure what to expect to be completely honest. I wasn't a big, I didn't really watch Xena. I had seen the show and my impression of her is very, very different from that show than it is on our show and I think it's- then I met Lucy and talked with her for an evening, when Dave and I took her out to dinner, and felt her a really interesting, really engaging woman and a really fascinating person and what's interesting is how much of a chameleon she is. There's really no trace of anything remotely Xena-esque in her performance in this episode. Everything from her look, to the accent, to the way she holds herself and handles herself feels very, very different from my impression of that character. The model for this character was we kept saying a Christiane Amanpour-type character. By that we meant a very no-nonsense kind of going after the story type of reporter, not a muck-raker, not a tabloid reporter, not somebody out for their own glory, but somebody who's goin- who has a story and is going to bite into it, is going to keep it going no matter what.

The genesis of this story began, I believe, when we were talking in the first couple of episodes, I think, I had this idea that I wanted to an episode from a reporters viewpoint on the Galactica. The idea was that the reporter would have been on the ship, you'll recall maybe the first couple episodes that there's references to a press corps that was being held on the Galactica and the first couple episodes after the initial coups against Laura and then Adama got shot and there was all- there was a lot of crises right in that time and there was a press corps trapped down somewhere in Galactica being held in a wardroom. And we started to talk about and somewhat developed a story about essentially doing an episode that- where we would cut down into that sort of room where all the press was gathered and trapped and follow one reporter as he or she figured out a way to get a story and what the impression and tell the whole episode from that person's point of view to track what they would think of Galactica and what they would think of the people and their perceptions and misperceptions as an outsider and watching episode from the inside out. Which I thought was a really interesting idea. We- but unfortunately I think the reason that we all opted not to do it, and I'll talk more about this at the top of one.