Podcast:The Woman King
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and this week we're here to discuss episode thirteen, "The Woman King." Coming to you from a small cabin in the Russian River. Terry and I are ensconced for a few days. But the podcast must be served, so here we are. There's no Scotch for this particular gathering. I'm having actual absinthe, from a secret location overseas. You can actually get this fine substance in the United States, despite rumors to the contrary. And so absinthe is the drink. (Takes a drink.) From my Carnivàle days, gave me a taste for it. And we won't discuss- be discussing the smokes this week.
Ok. Thirteen. "The Woman King." This episode came essentially out of our desire to do a couple of different things. One was to setup a long-running plot line that was supposed to last from until the end of the season that had to do with the Sagittarons. Ultimately that one did not pan out the way that we anticipated, initially, about what we were gonna do with the Sagittarons as a people. It was going to figure prominently in Baltar's trial, by the end of the season, and this episode was designed in part to get those storylines going. However, once we actually got into the meat of Baltar's trial, beyond even the first draft. I mean, we did a first draft that had the Saggitarions featured prominently, and what they were doing, and then dropped it in subsequent drafts. And I'll talk more about that as the show goes on.
So here we are in the tease. This sequence of Helo having trouble sleeping was shot much later. We didn't initially have this as the opening to the episode. Initially what we were gonna- what we had was this fly- the pilot banter and chatter of them flying out (phone rings) and of course it has to be a podcast because there's a phone ringing, but I can turn it off here, so, there we go. Anyway it was gonna have pilot stuff going on and people on a mission, chitchat back and forth, giving each other limericks, and so on. And then that didn't really seem like the most effective opening, 'cause it's- it really is a show about Helo. And so I wanted to- start with Helo and let's get into his mindset, right from the get-go. 'Cause one of the things that we wanted to do about the ep- about this show in designing it was to give ourselves a "Helo story." A full-blown story about Helo and his life, to an extent. In a large part this episode is a follow-up- (phone rings) Somebody just keeps calling. And look. It might be my wife so I will actually put this on pause here for a moment, something I never do. And I'm back. It was nothing important, just the network with the pickup call. No, no. I'm just joking. But it was really the network.
Anyway. This whole sequence of the pilots coming in and bustin' each other as they walk up the corridor and then jazzin' along. That was an offsh- it came out of the sequence that I said that we dropped at the beginning of the show, which was them all flying and busting on each other and coming up with bad, really bad, limericks (chuckles) as they were bantering back and forth. But it was essentially all to setup this idea of Helo's isolation. And this, in part, impetu- the impetus in part to do this Helo story was to follow-up what Helo had done back in episode seven- six when he had prevented Galactica from using the biological weapon against the Cylons, and part of this- part of the backstory and subtext of the episode was Helo having been exiled ever since. That essentially Adama knew that it was Helo, didn't really wanna do a formal investigation into it, but it- had essentially sidelined him. He was given the "shit jobs." Colonel Tigh was back at the XO and Helo was assigned to deal with the civilians down in Dogsville. Some of those textures are still here- bit by bit, though, we just kept losing a lot of that stuff along the way, 'cause the story- there was a split in the story about what this particular show was about. Was it about the Sagittarons? Was it about prejudice? Is it about Helo's exile and quest for redemption? There were a lot of competing interests about what the show was about, and like I said, we were trying to set up this longer-term, long-range, backstory of the Sagittarons overall, so that kept consuming more and more of our attention and bit by bit the Helo- Helo as exile kept going away.
Part of the things that we lost along the way about Helo's backstory here, which I think was a shame, was the idea that he had been trying very hard to make a name for himself and had been sending lots of reports to Adama and had been pestering Adama for weeks, and finding ways of being a hero. That on some level Helo was looking for an excuse to be a hero again, and he kept finding- being "johnny-on-the-spot" who would say, "I have discovered this new problem, sir. And here's my solution to it." And he was that officer who's trying so hard to prove himself that he's becoming a pain in the ass. And that, in turn, informed why his initial warnings about what was going on down here with Doc Robert were ignored. That there was a certain "boy who cried wolf" quality to what was happening with Helo and the psychological underpinning for it was that he felt guilty over what he had done by killing the Cylons and preventing Galactica from using the biological weapon. It raised questions in his own mind of his own loyalties and his own worth as a man and him wanting to still be a hero in his own eyes and in- and to some degree in his wife's eyes, and that was propelling him into this need to find a situation to be a hero in. Like I said, it was a complicated psychological backstory and the episode just being too large, you just kept getting sidelined, and sidelined, and sidelined, and now there's not much of that notion really left in this particular episode.
Oh. We're in the main title sequence. I don't know what to say in the main title sequence this week. It's pretty. It's very pretty. So is the fire here in the cabin. Terry's off doing something... in town. In Kernville. Ok, and we're out of the tease.