Podcast:Rapture
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RDM: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and we're coming to you live this week from Berkeley, California, where the Mrs and I are relaxing and trying to take a little time off, but the podcast must be done and so here we are. I'm here with the lovely and talented Mrs Ron. Say hello, Mrs Ron.
Terry: Hello, Mrs Ron.
RDM: There you have it.
"Rapture" is part two of the two-parter that is the midseason cliffhanger, of course, of season three. As we go through this episode you'll— this will be err— we'll be talking about a lot of sort of editing changes that happened along the way in this episode more so than story changes. The story and script of this episode didn't change radically through the process, there was a lot of polishing, a lot of narrowing down of scenes and choices, but actually, in comparison with a lot of the other scripts this season, the big— the fundamental storylines of Rapture remained pretty consistent throughout, but we were battling things like the ever-present problem of time, having too much story and trying to fit it all into the broadcast window, and also dealing with some of the arcane matters like act length as we went through.
There will be no smoking this week, the smoking lamp is out.
Terry: Yes, as Mrs Ron is here.
RDM: Yes, sad to say.
Terry: But there's ice in the glass.
RDM: But there's ice in the glass.
Terry: He bought scotch.
RDM: I bought scotch, we're cheaping out on the scotch though, this is Johnny Walker black, so it's a blend—
Terry: Well that's because we're out of town, we didn't want to take the good stuff on the airplane.
RDM: Yeah, where the bottle would open up in our luggage and pose a danger, because you can't have liquids on your airplane any more, of course.
Terry: But it wouldn't be a podcast without the scotch.
RDM: That's right. So anyway, here we are back at err— in the nuclear standoff section, which as I told you in the first part was originally slated to be a mid-episode climax, it was the mid-episode crisis in part one, and I shifted it to the end of part one to make it a cliffhanger because I thought it was a more effective cliffhanger than simply going out on the Anders-Lee standoff down on the algae planet. So this whole sequence was originally planned to sort of cover the movement of Baltar and D'Anna from the Cylon baseship down to the algae planet surface in part one and would have occured, I believe, at the end of act two or three in that episode. Then the first part was going to end pretty much down on the planet with Anders and Lee pointing guns at one another in early drafts, and then as we— as filmed it was just the Sergeant pointing a gun at Anders. But whole sequence, this whole bit of business aboard the Cylon baseship, all this stuff was slated to be in part one. But as I was looking over the two episodes, it just felt like we didn't really have the most dynamic cliffhanger that we'd ever had, so we— I opted to move that down the line, and actually as we— as I look to it later we eliminated another standoff, another nuclear sort of countdown section that was supposed to be in this episode.