Podcast:Six of One

Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 404 of season four. This is "Six of One". I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'm here to welcome you to the second podcast of season four. Hopefully this one will be slightly more together than the first one, but you never know.

This episode, as were all the episode- all the first half episodes of the season, were done- we broke them all as one- part of one long story arc. In the previous session's podcast I read some quotes from the initial story document on that episode, so I thought we might revisit that again here as well, if I can pull it up here on my handy-dandy Mac. From the initial season notes: Episode two says, "The theme is civil conflict. In a nutshell: Laura and Kara present conflicting direction- directions to Earth. Lee brokers compromise. Tigh, Anders, and Tory take exception to Tyrol's growing obsession with Kara's Viper. Cavil and Leoben clash over the interpretation of reluctant raiders. Results: shocking violence. Birth of Cylon civil war. In depth: The Cylon story. Leoben and Cavil go to the hybrid, ask, "Why do the raiders turn away from the humans?" Hybrid is enigmatic, "Because they won't attack their own." Cavil: "Hogwash!" Unilaterally lobotomizes the raiders to get them to follow commands, incensing Leoben, who responds by making the centurions more alive. Centurions slaughter Cavil-thinking Cylons. Kara and Adama, vis a vis Kara with gun ending episode one, surrenders it to Adama, putting her life in his hands. Her raw emotional purity convinces Adama to reinstate Kara. Laura's outraged. Has her own vision on which way to Earth, plus visions tell her Kara is not Kara. Lee brokers a compromise. Kara will lead scouting mission in her direction while fleet embarks in Laura's direction. Adama promises to himself to be there for Laura and her cancer, regardless of their disagreements. Zarek gets Lee appointed to the quorum as the new delegate from Caprica, and Zarek has his own plans. Final four: Tory is moved when Baltar tells her that the Cylons possess souls, and Cally becomes suspicious of Tyrol, who's sneaking off at night." And basically that is still the rough outline of this particular episode. As you can see, we knew from the beginning that we were gonna end on the cliffhanger in episode one, or episode three, as we continually call it around here, and then come right back in on the action. I was never quite clear why Adama left CIC in that little moment you saw when he rushes off to go downstairs. It's a dramatic device. It's like the commander of the ship, and he wants to be down where the action is, but traditionally he doesn't really do that sort of thing, and I guess it's because Laura is personally in danger that he feels the need to go off, but I never quite understood it, in all honesty.

This beat coming up with Laura shooting at Kara went through several iterations all the way through the process. Initially, in the first draft, I believe, sh- Kara puts down the gun, dares Laura to pick it up and shoot at it- shoot at her- shoot her, and Laura just refuses. She won't pick the gun up, because that kind of the ch- the way we established the character way back in "Valley of Darkness" when she was offered a gun by Lee, she just shook it off. And then I thought, well let's go a little bit further. Let's push that a little bit. Maybe she does pick it up. And I had this notion that she would pick it up and point it at Kara and decide to shoot her, but the safety was still on, and she didn't realize it, and she tried to pull the trigger, but she couldn't because the safety was on. And so sh- there was an intent to shoot her, but then Adama came right in. And that didn't seem to work for people. I think Michael Angeli objected and I think Mary did as well, that it seemed to make her look stupid, as opposed to just being fate that was intervening. There was something about- I'm trying to remember also- There was a version of the scene where Kara didn't push her quite as hard to do it. It was more just like, "Just shoot me. Just get it over with. End this, if you really think I'm a Cylon." And then she just picked up the gun and "Ok," and tried to shoot her. And I think Mary's note, which I thought was well taken, was that you kinda had to push Laura a little further. Had to kinda get in her face a little bit more. Had to really go at her to get this sudden response out of Laura. And the way the scene plays now, of course, she puts the gun down there. Slams it down in a lot of anger. There's more of a beat in between thought and action here so that- there's more dialog going on. Laura has a chance to let the thought tool around her brain for just a second that maybe this woman really is a Cylon. And that really is a loaded gun sitting on front of me and Mary's point, which, again, I thought was well taken, was that if she really thinks that she's a Cylon, if she really thinks that Kara Thrace is a Cylon come back to destroy all of them, or to play some kind of sleeper agent thing on her, Laura probably would pick up the gun and shoot her. And she would take the moment to- she would take the action, because it w- the lives of the fleet could potentially hang in the balance and she thought it was the one time that she could see her doing it. And then it became she would miss her. And miss her at such close range. And that that would feel like the same kind of intervention of fate that I was looking for when she- tried to fire when the safety was on. And in this version it's- she shoots, Mary, closes her eyes right as she's fire- fires the gun and it just b- it just goes right past Starbuck's head, and she misses her from virtually point blank range.

This s- Oh, and I'm dr- the scotch this evening is- oh, actually, it's not scotch. What am I saying? This evening, actually, we're switching. This is Woodford Reserve. We're heading for a little bourbon, which, I think, has come our way before in these podcasts. We're also not at home. We're in our home away from home. We're in Berkley, California, relaxing in the bay area. Taking the airs, as they say. A place we find a bit more comfortable than Southern California, in all honesty. So- but it is a wooden house, with wooden floors, and you will hear my children periodically pounding across the ceiling, in the room I'm in and screaming outside the window, and I guess that's just your tough luck.

I think what was important to me was this out of control sense of Kara- this shrieking, crying. She's just coming apart at the seams kind of a character that had seen something- had experienced something that she was trying desperately to convince people of. And that there was really no rational way to get them to listen to her, so she took this incredibly extreme idea of going and confronting Laura Roslin in her quarters. But then once that you got in there and you got the marines on her and you were holding onto her tightly and you had her in custody, then she would still be trying to plead her case, and trying to, like, say- trying to play on all their sympathies for her. I like the way Katee plays this as she's going out the door. You've gotta kill me. I love that. I love the way she just goes out the door just like shrieking at the top of her lungs. [chuckles] [coughs] Sorry, I'm also fighting off allergies these days.

I think as I explained in the previous podcast, I'm grasping, on some level, to remember production details and story details on how we broke these stories. 'Cause we're so close to the end. In fact, today, as I do this podcast, I was- started- I was writing the first pages of the finale, of the end. So I wrote "Fade in," for the last time on a beginning of a Galactica episode, which is kind of a bittersweet moment, at the very least.

[7:45]