Podcast:Sometimes a Great Notion
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Ronald D. Moore | |
| Terry Dresbach | ||
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name is Ronald D. Moore, and I am executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'm here to welcome you to the podcast for episode thirteen of the fourth season, or episode twelve, depending on how you wanna count these things. I think of it- this episode thirteen. This is "Sometimes a Great Notion". Our first episode back after the hiatus. The Scotch is not Scotch in a startling break with tradition. It is Woodford Reserve Bourbon, for no particular reason other than my whim. But the smoking lamp is lit, and the smokes are American Spirit. [lights cigarette] This podcast is being recorded in lovely Berkley, California with- at sunset with the sun dipping down the San Francisco skyline. Which I tell you just for historical purposes.
Ok. "Sometimes a Great Notion." This is a great episode. I think it is one of the strongest of the series. It's an incredibly dark episode. As you may have gathered. In some ways this is probably the darkest episode that we've done so far. [clears throat] Which is not to say things are going to be getting worse before they get better, but it's also not really saying this is the darkest episode [laughs] of our journey thus far. This episode began life as one of many in the fourth season during the writer's retreat. We talked about what was going to happen at the midseason break and as we covered in the last podcast, we wanted- I wanted the midseason break to be pretty startling and shocking and get us to Earth at a point where the audience was not expecting us to get there, namely in the middle of the season instead of waiting for the final episode, and the idea was to say to these people, and to the audience, "What happens when you take the fondest dream away from all these characters?" When you take away the thing that all- they've all been hoping to find and dreaming about and praying for and barely surviving incredible odds and nightmares over and over again and they finally get to Earth and it's not what they thought it would be and it's a disaster as well. [clears throat] What happens to you? And this episode is the first an- the first of the answers on- the first of the answers that we'll be providing for Galactica. Sorry. Small technical malfunction I had to deal with there. This episode written by David and Bradley, one of their best efforts, I think, I mean- in some ways it's probably the best one I think- they've done, and I don't think that takes anything away from all the many other episodes. But this is a really complex, intriguing piece and they did a tremendous job with this. There's really just kudos to go around to just about everyone involved with this particular episode. You can see just from the cast here in these opening shots in the tease, that they're already deep into their characters and deep into the story and the director, Michael Nankin, I think this is one of his finest efforts as well. This is just an extraordinary episode, I think, in the history of the series.
Like I said, we started talking about it during the writers' retreat in Tahoe, that summer, [clears throat] and we talked about, OK, what would be the first episode back, and how bad would it be? And my instinct was let's make it as bad as humanly possible. Let's just make it- I wanna see the ship fall apart. I want to see everything just fall to shit. That they get there- I mean, 'cause realistically speaking I thought it would be something of a cheat and just wrong if they got there, they found that Earth had been destroyed, and they just got back on the ships and carried on with a stip uffer- stiff upper lip- and just kept going, and said, "Ah, we'll find someplace else. It'll be fine." It felt like you had to do more than that. This is the culmination of a long journey for all these people and as they stand here on this beach they have no hopes. There's nothing- we're not giving them any comfort. We're not saying it's gonna be OK. We're just saying it's really bleak. It's really terrible. And it sucks. And I wanted them to deal with what happens when it sucks. And importantly- most importantly I wanted the people at the top to lose faith. Laura and Adama fall apart, because one of the things that we'd maintained over the course of this series was that no matter how bad the shit got, no matter how deep it got, you could always count on Laura and Adama, at least, to be there. That Laura was always gonna be steady, Laura was always gonna try to soldier on. Adama, literally, would soldier on. And that with mom and dad leading the way you would always get to a place where you could understand how people would survive. In the previous episode we saw Adama collapse, emotionally, at the revelation of Tigh as his- as a Cylon. His best friend turns out to be a Cylon. In this episode it's really- he hasn't quite dealt with that. He- got the uniform back on and he decided to go find paradise, to at least go see that the nightmare was over. But now the nightmare isn't over. And what does he do then?
Dualla. We talked about the fact that in the last run we were probably gonna lose some characters. That felt right for the show. It felt right for the style of the show, what we were telling, and we decided early on that Dualla was probably gonna die here.
This scene right here with Laura returning to Galactica is one of my favorites. I really like this scene. The- looks on everyone's faces. The way Mary plays it as she gets off the raptor and looks at them and literally doesn't know what to say. Laura's always been able to say something. She's always been able to rally the troops somehow. And this time she really can't. And the way Michael Nankin directed this scene, it really conveys all of it with precious little dialogue. There's just this sense of hopelessness. There's this sense of they really are lost, and you can see people's faces and them starting to lose face- lose faith by the second as this- scene plays itself out. This shot coming up with Laura coming through the crowd here- she starts to head in one direction and then she loses her way and then goes back the other direction and- I wasn't there during the shooting but what I was told was that actually on the set that day she, Mary, actually walked in the wrong direction [chuckles]
Act 1
What I- just picking up on that thought, the idea was that Laura had- Mary had lost her way on the set physically. Like, she had gone the wrong direction. The camera just followed her and that- so that moment of her being lost was genuine, but then Michael like- Michael Nankin liked it so much that when they did the reverse, that is, when they put the camera on the other side, they just decided to run with that idea that she was lost and had to backtrack her way through. So that's why you see that reversal.
This little story with Leoben and Kara is just to keep the Kara mystery going, to make this discovery of her body and her viper and to start to get to the realization that actually the events the audience saw in the third season when Kara's viper was destroyed and she died, actually that did happen. It wasn't a fantasy a time glitch. That really happened and here's the physical evidence to prove it. So what does this person, what does Kara Thrace, think about that when she gets there?
This scene with Dualla coming into Helo and Athena's quarters with Hera is a great moment that was almost cut. I think Michael Nankin almost cut it at one point and then I put it back in or I might be misremembering the editorial process on this. I know there was some discussion of cutting and possibly a network note but I liked it, and I liked it right here, because it's so out of context that amid all this despair and blekakness there is this family and they do have to try to raise this little girl and they're gonna try to play with her and they're gonna try to keep their lives going, and God knows what they say once they're on the outside of that door. But my favorite part of the scene here, is what Dualla says when they leave. The way she just talks in that way that adults sometimes talk to little kids who don't understand. [begins sing-song voice] As long as I say anything in this really nice sing-song voice you won't understand that the apocalypse have- has come and all of us are going to die. [ends sing-song voice]
So- [chuckles] this scene out on the beach was always in the script. Actually, as I reviewed the script and the story document earlier today, I discovered to much my great pleasure that actually this story didn't change very much at all. The- all these story arcs and scenes were in the original story outline that David and Bradley wrote. It was pretty much as the story was broken and the script was pretty much locked in at a fairly early point. All this backstory about Earth and the thirteen colonies and the Cylons and the humans and the Twelve Tribes, and Kobol, and all that, was the subject of incredible discussion. We talked a lot at the writers' retreat and over the course of the season about exactly what was the backstory. How does this all add up? How does this all make sense? We worked it through in several different iterations. The notion- many of the notions in here are not fully explained yet, because that comes later in the last few episodes. But this fundamental idea that there was, once upon a time, there was a place called Kobol, where the gods and men lived together. And man, on the planet of Kobol, stole fire from the gods, in some sense. It's the classic story. They stole fire from the gods and that fire was the knowledge of life, and how to create life, and they created their own Cylons. And it was that creation, and the destruction of their- of paradise that was the end of Kobol. And twelve colonies- twelve tribes went that way, and the thirteenth tribe, the thirteenth tribe of Cylons now, went the other way. And they found and settled a planet that they called Earth. And that at some point the people on Earth, the Cylons on Earth, repeated the pattern and destroyed themselves as well. So this is- feeds into the overall, "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again" mythology of the show.
There was one structural change that occurred actually in post-production on this. The script was written with a complicated flashback structure which I really liked. This- the flashback structure was- that it was all gonna be framed by the Adama-Tigh conversation. That you would open with Adama coming into Tigh's quarters with the booze and the gun and say, "You wanna talk, Cylon? Let's talk. Have a seat. Sit down." And that you- we were gonna essentially tell all these stories were gonna be interspersed throughout the- what am I trying to say? I'm not doing this podcast very well. All of this material was gonna be essentially flashback material. That the show was bookended and framed by the conversation between Tigh and Adama and that you would keep coming back to Tigh and Adama all the way through. Michael Nankin dispensed with that structure in his cut, and when I got the director's cut he had discarded the flashback structure and had just ironed everything out and made it chronological. And as soon as I saw it- it just- it worked perfectly and I was more than happy to go with that version and never look back. I don't think we ever- I don't think we ever cut a version using it as a framing device. There- maybe the editors assembly did that- probably did, but by the time I saw it that was already long gone. And I think stronger for it. Sometimes I think my instinct as a storyteller is to try to do the razzle-dazzle too much. Every once and a while- I like mixing up time. I like flashbacks. I like monkeying and fucking with the chronological- the chronology of sequences. And I think it's an interesting way to tell stories. But it's not always appropriate for every scenario. And this is certainly one where the fundamental narrative was so strong and the character journeys were so strong that you didn't need anything else on top of it.
Getting back to Dualla. We had decided to kill the character and to let the character die. It was- we wanted someone to pay a heavy price for this- discovery of Earth, and that Earth- was not what they'd hoped it would be, and that it was actually nothing at all. And it felt like not everyone should come back from that. And Dualla was the one that we decided would take the hit here. But you'll notice that the arc for Dualla is actually- even though she- at the very beginning, she despairs when she finds- when she holds the radioactive soil in her hand, when she finds the jacks, the remnants of the long-dead civilization, and she's- you see it on her face in the raptor scene how devastated she is about what's occurred. But then from that point forward she's just to all intents and purposes it looks as though she's trying to get back on the horse. She's trying to look forward and trying to be optimistic. The question obviously arises, "Has she decided to kill herself, even now, at this point? And is she just- is she just marking time? Has she not made that decision yet? I think those are probably questions best left to the audience. I think in my opinion on the character, I think that probab- she's probably been contemplating suicide since that moment on the raptor. That she's probably just gotten to a place where she can't face the notion of journeying forever in the stars and loneliness with nothing specifically to hope for and to just place all of her hopes and dreams on the off chance that maybe they'll find a planet to call home someday, and that that's just not something that she could actually face.
I like that we got back to the Lee-Dualla relationship here in her last episode. I've said before that I think that we mishandled the Dualla-Lee relationship, that we rushed it early on, and then didn't quite know what to do with it and it- we jig-jagged back and forth with it a few too many times. I think here at the end, though, I think it's really nice. It works really well. Kandyse really brings you back into the character and reminds you of why she was such a pivotal character in the show, that she was one of the original characters. She's there from the get-go, and so her loss, I think, is more keenly felt as a result.
This episode here with Callum and Katie is some of their best work. I mean, it's interesting to see how the relationship between the two of them has changed since "Flesh and Bone" when she was the interrogator and he was the prisoner, and then on New Caprica the roles were reversed, and he's always sorta been the demon, and the guide, and the journ- the fellow traveler on her journey who knew more about her journey than she did. But in this episode, he gets to a place where he literally doesn't know what to do. Doesn't know what to say. Is afraid to see things, for the first time. And Kara, being Kara, even this version of Kara, or whatever you wanna think of this version of Kara, is still plunging forward, is still seeking answers, demanding answers- going into the places where saner people and more deliberate people probably would not and should not go.
Katee is just at some of her best in this episode. She's just a formidable actress and you can feel the force of her personality in each one of these scenes.
This is a great beat, when they- when she pulls up the helmet on the pilot and- oh, there's blonde hair in there, oh, I don't wanna see that. Ooh, I don't wanna see that. Scifi didn't wanna see it either. [Laughs] But actually, I don't think they complained too much. I think they might have- might have asked us to cut a couple of frames from the shot, or something, but by and large they didn't give us any real grief on any of this. Actually, the network was very supportive of this episode. They were really very supportive of the concept, [lights cigarette] of the script, of the cut. To their credit, the network really, really got aboard the last journey here and really, really like what we were doing. And even though they said, "These are hard episodes to watch. This is a very difficult episode to watch," they said. It's just brutal. Beat after beat, just gets worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, all the way through this. They supported it all the way. They never asked us to pull back from any of it.
Now watch this. This beat here with Leoben is great. He's lost. Look at that. We've never seen that from Leoben. It's just a genuine break of faith and of everything he thought he knew, because he was the Cylon who could kinda see things that others couldn't. And now he doesn't have that. And if he doesn't have that, what does she have? See? He's almost like falling over, there. He's almost staggering, and Callum Keith Rennie just does a tremendous job with all this.
It's probably worth talking about the circumstances of this episode. This episode was actually technically the last one shot before the writer's strike hiatus interrupted everything last year. The strike was actually called just as this episode was about to start shooting. There's the act break.
Act 2
Started to talk about how this episode was shot. This- the writer's strike was called, I think, the day before, or two days before, the episode was to begin principle photography, and under the terms of the strike, obviously, nothing else was gonna be written, and there wouldn't be any change pages on this, so these guys were gonna be on their own with a- script that was fortunately done, and locked, but there weren't episodes beyond this. [lights cigarette] As the executive producer/showrunner, I had control over that and I could- I made sure that there were no scripts that could be- that would be completed that- to even allow the possibility that we would keep shooting beyond this episode. So that the show would shut down.
Let me pause here for this moment with Anders and the guitar- the guitar handle. Him remebering- 'All Along the Watchtower'. It was a nice little beat that I wanted to insert back in. This was sorta dropped in the director's cut and I felt it was important to establish the tie of the music into the mythology of the show and back to- that it was here on Earth. And that Anders was here on Earth. And I- a subtlety that I think is dropped here somewhere is I think Anders, he played the song for his friends is said up here, the final four when they were on Earth, he played it. But I think it was also intended that he wrote it, and it's a su- that's a subtlety that may or may not come through.
But back to the shooting of this. The strike was called and so we all- the writers all went out on the picket line and I kept getting calls from up north in Vancouver saying that people were worried, what was gonna happen, was the show gonna get canceled. People didn't quite know what was gonna take place and so I called up north and I said, "I'm gonna come up. I'll come up tomorrow and I wanna talk to everybody, the cast and crew, together." And of course, in the meantime, once that word went out, suddenly I got these other panicked phone calls saying, "Well, the rumors are that you're coming up to pull the plug on the whole show, that the show's been canceled, and that production's over, and everyone's terrified of you coming up here." And I said, "No, no, no. I'm just coming up to talk, tell them the show's not over. I'm actually just coming to dispel these kinds of rumors and tell everybody what's gonna happen." So I came up to Vancouver and I flew up that morning, got there in the afternoon, and it was a rainy day in Vancouver, one of many. And Harvey Frand, our line producer, had gathered the entire cast and crew in CIC, and so I went to CI- they ga- ironically, on that day, were the day that the third season jackets, the crew gift jackets, had arrived, and so everybody had new jackets on and I got my jacket, and I strode into CIC and everyone was standing there, all around, up on the second level, on the first level, they were surrounding me. And I walked in, and I just started to talk to them. I had a little- I had scribbled down some notes and I just said, "This is the deal." I said that, "There's a strike and that means I'm on strike. The writers are on strike, and there aren't going to be any more script pages coming. That means that we can't help you with this." I said that, "You might be wondering if- how I feel about the rest of you continuing on with production during the strike, and would I want you to not shoot, or whatever," and I said, "Well, there's no picket sign outside this studio. I'm not gonna go get a picket sign and establish a picket line outside this studio, and I want you all to work," because even though I was a big supporter of the strike and I felt very strongly about what was being fought for, I also was very sensitive to the fact that I had a responsibility to my people and I wanted- it was their jobs and their livelihoods and it was a difficult thing and I told them all I wanted them to work as long as they possibly could. I told them I wanted to get as much overtime as they possibly could, which gave Harvey Frand a fit, but I just said, "Make this the best one ever. If this- I don't think the show will be canceled. I think the show will come back, but you never know, and I want this to be a great episode. And so I trust all of you and it's like I said, 'We're sort of taking a blind jump' like Admiral Cain did in the Pegasus, and she took a blind jump and didn't know where it was gonna lead and this is a blind jump, and none of us know where it's gonna lead and I wish you all well and I'll see you on the other side of the jump." And I walked out and they applauded and I was crying and there was a lot of tears and I got back on a plane and flew down to Los Angeles and that was the last time I saw them until I came back to direct the next episode after the strike.