Podcast:The Passage

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Ronald D.- this is Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. And we're here to do the podcast for episode nine of season three, "The Passage". There will be no Scotch, no smokes today. I am not well. (Chuckles.) But such is my dedication that here I am doing my podcast anyway. Yes, yes, yes. Let's all pat me on my back for doing my fuckin' job. (Coughs.) Anyway.

"The Passage" is an interesting show. It's one of the, I think, one of the most harrowing shows that we've done in quite a while. There's ref- internally, we talked a lot about its similarities in tone and mood on this particular show to, all the way back to "33". No, it's not really another "33", but certainly the sense of desperation, the exhaustion, and the fatigue, and the continuing toll that it takes on the pilots is similar in that regard.

This episode was written by a freelancer for us, named Jane Espenson. Jane is someone that we're very excited to have do an episode for us this season. Jane, some of you may know her work from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other things. I actually remember when (impersonating old man) Jane started in this business way back when she was but a lass and I was much younger.Yes. (resumes normal voice.) She came into pitch a story to Star Trek when I was there and we ended up buying it and that's when I first had the pleasure of meeting Jane and I tracked her career from afar over the years and never got a chance to really ever work with her again but she was doing a deal at Universal Television and we heard that she was really excited about the idea of doing an episode of Galactica and become a huge fan of the show and so we jumped on the opportunity to have Jane write one for us. (Coughs.) It turned out very well.

This story, actually, is very similar to the story that we started out with. The idea was to do a, literally a passage. We wanna do something that was demonstrating the Fleet's survival problems, the problems of food, and also do a gauntlet that the Galactica and the rest of the rag-tag Fleet had to go through back and forth. So breaking that down into some components. One of the things that I've always liked keeping into the show and integrating whenever possible are the realities of their situation and the difficulties of surviving out in the universe without any means of support other than the ships that you brought with you and the occasional odd planet you might find something on. So what we did here was, we said, "Ok, when they left New Caprica, let's assume that they had some food." That there were food supplies in some of the ships. There were probably emergency supplies on the ships in orbit. I'd say that there was some planning had been done and that they weren't just com- taking off completely without anything in their hands. So that got them through the initial stages of the escape after "Exodus". And let's also assume that there is some kind of food processing facility. That they have some methods of keeping foodstuffs going, of generating sustenance from some kind of materials, some kind of organic material. But let's say now, for this episode, that something's happened to that supply. We'd had this notion kicking around the writer's room for quite a while that at some point let's do the show where there's- something has attacked the food supply and suddenly, you thought you had all this- all these reserves and all this stuff sitting in various cargo holds and then you find out that it's all gone and suddenly you're on the verge of starvation and you weren't prepared for it and how would that impact everyone and what would they do? (Coughs.) And so that was the basis of this episode.

The notion of going through a gauntlet was- it's something that has tooled around in my mined now and again, and I think it's come up in the writer's room every once and a while. It's a desire to play the Galactica like ship- Galactica, the rag-tag fleet like naval vessels. Which is, one of the key metaphors in the show is that we treat the Galactica like an aircraft carrier. We treat the other ships like ships in a naval sense. We're always moving back and forth across the line about when they're spaceships, when they're not. This one is a melding of the two. The spaceship quality of them is emphasized by the fact that the food supply is suddenly destroyed and they have to suddenly scramble to make up for the shortfall, and then the naval aspect of it is to do the passage throught the storm, which is essentially what this is. We- at Star Trek we had done a couple of stories where the Enterprise had to pass through various space phenomena and you always liked to treat those like the ship at sea. I mean, there's always something evocative and interesting about the roots of these kinds of dramas can all be found in sea stories. These are sea yarns, on some level. (Sniffle.) The plots, that is. And to do an episode like this is to really go into that oeuvre. (Sniffle.)

That's the end of the tease.