Podcast:A Day in the Life
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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 we're here to talk about what we still refer to as episode fourteen, "A Day in the Life". The Scotch for today's session is Bruichladdich, with the "yellow submarine" label, which I've yet to figure out what that really means, in regards to Scotch. And no smoking today. The smoking lamp is out.
OK. Episode fourteen. This episode does not- did not turn out as well as, I think, we had all hoped that it would. I think there's a variety of reasons why and we will discuss them today, as we often have on the shows that didn't turn out quite as strong as we had initially hoped. What's interesting, to step back and give an overview of the show and the rhythms and currents of the series. This- there's a spate of standalone episodes, some of which are more successful than others, occurring here in the second half of season three. Shows like thirteen, fourteen, and a to an extent fifteen, although I think fifteen is, in some ways, the strongest of the three. In any case, there's a trio here of standalone episodes that didn't quite come together and aren't quite as strong as I think many of us had hoped. And that parallels certain things that happened in the second season where we also had a spate of standalonish episodes that didn't quite really come together as strongly and I think- we spent some time looking for systemic reasons or managerial reasons why we come to this place in the second half of the season and tend to have trouble. And I'm not sure that there is a reason other than just bad story decisions. I think that conceptually I liked this idea of doing the "Day in the Life" episode and centering it around Adama. The "Day in the Life" is a staple of television storytelling and it's always there in the writers' room. It's something that I think writers are always drawn to, which is to break from format and do a character study and the "Day in the Life" is a structure that provides you with opportunity to detail out all the little minutiae, which is a bit of a redundancy redundancy, but all of the minutiae in a character's day and explicating the how's and why's of their job and their friendships and their pressures and stepping back from plot and narrative and giving you an opportunity to delve into character. I think it's also a very tricky structure that appears on its surface to be simpler than it really is. I've gone at these kinds of stories a couple of times and I'm always attracted to them. They inevitably always turn out to be much more complicated beasts than what you think they would at the outset.