Podcast:Scattered
More actions
| |||||
Hello and welcome to the first podcast of the second season for the episode "Scattered". I’m Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. Thank you all for tuning in and for listening to the podcasts, which I will try to continue to do for as much of the second season as I possibly can. <chuckle> This episode of "Battlestar Galactica" to kick off season two went- underwent a great deal of changes all the way from concept on to final broadcast. Initially, we had a different plan to open the second season instead of doing a direct pickup on the cliffhanger ending from last season’s finale "Kobol’s Last Gleaming". I wanted to do something a little different and not come back directly to the cliffhanger and actually do a completely separate sort of episode that was an episode set some time in the distant past. I won’t tell you too many details about that episode, because it’s still sort of on the drawing boards and still something we’re considering doing at a later date. But in essence, what is now "Scattered" and the subsequent episode, episode two, "Valley of Darkness", were actually going to be episode number two, and then as it worked out we decided not to go that way and decided to open season two a little bit more traditionally with a direct pickup into the cliffhanger. That said, "Scattered" really wasn’t going to, I didn’t want "Scattered" to directly pickup the cliffhanger.
Still, I was still kind of like fighting against that notion and wanted to really kind of ah subvert the audience’s expectations of what we were going to do. And the episode in script form actually picked up or opened with an open scene in a bar on Caprica twenty years ago and you just kind of cut into this scene it was a bar filled with a lot of people, televisions and on in the background giving commentaries on pyramid games etc. And you went over, and there was Colonel Tigh at the bar, a much younger Colonel Tigh with hair, and he was doodling a Viper weapon systems on a napkin. And some guys came in, you realized they were crewmen from another merchant freighter that he was on and ah they were taunting him in some way and a fight broke out. And the fight got pretty ugly and Colonel Tigh ultimately has a man down and is about to break his neck when another man rushes up behind him and is about to hit him with a bottle and possibly kill him and you hear the chick chick sound of a shotgun and you pan off and there is Adama. And this was how Adama and Tigh first met. They met in a bar in between the wars. The backstory to the series is that the initial Cylon conflict was fought forty years ago and in that war both Tigh and Adama were young men who did not fight together, they fought in separate ways on separate vessels, had separate experiences. And after the war was over, both men were discharged along with many other service people out into the civilian world and they both sort of happened to sign up aboard the same civilian tramp freighter that was plying the trade routes in among the colonies and that was how they met.
In any case, that’s how I wanted to open this episode. We were going to open this show with just that scene and show how the two men met and then come into the scene you’re watching now where Tigh takes command of Galactica and Adama’s been shot and there is all this chaos. And the episode was going to continue to sort of flash back onto their relationship of the early days of Tigh and Adama and how the two men met and what meant to each other, what it was that Adama saw in Tigh for the first time and sort of really go through the creation of the friendship. And counterpointing that with events in the current day Galactica where Adama’s life hangs in the balance and Tigh is making decisions based on, in part on things that he learned from Adama way back in those days. And we shot those sequences. Those sequences were shot and ah edited together, and we looked at them. But ultimately, we didn’t like them. We just didn’t feel, they weren’t quite the show, frankly. And um, and really not through any, you really can’t point your finger at any particular person (missing) maybe me because it was my concept. And you know. I don’t know that I created or had the writers of this episode Bradley Thompson and David Weddle; I don’t know that I gave them really a rich enough environment to really tell that back story. In any case, when we watched the cut, we all kind of felt, and the director included, that it was, it would just be a better story to tell the tale in a more linear fashion. And that we would still use that material, still use the flashback material that we had. But instead of making it these objective points of view, we were going to tie them, we were going to change them into subjective points of view. That is, we would tie them directly into Tigh’s experience. They would be from Tigh’s memories instead of sort of the audience watching these events happen as if you were just cutting back in time. We would tie them all to Colonel Tigh specifically. So as you watch the show, you’ll see that there are many places where we're going directly off of Tigh. You know, you’re creating these flashbacks now in a subjective way. Tigh is thinking about Adama. You can see it subliminally there in the teaser. He’s thinking about Adama along the table. He’s remembering the moment he met Adama. It’s informing his decision now. So it really kind of changed the tenor of the episode, instead of it being this sort of dramatic device that was sort of counterpointing present day reality with past events. It became more of a character study of Colonel Tigh because now you’re sort of going inside Colonel Tigh’s head. And sort of, you know, living with him – his experiences as seen through the prism of his relationship with Adama.
Now I apologize, because my DVD, <laughter> my DVD copy of "Scattered" is screwing up slightly. So it’s freezing periodically. And I’m having a little trouble. I think it’s my home system more than anything else. My handy dandy home system that I just got. In any case, I am now at the section where Dualla, where the fleet is jumping away in any case. Dualla is just saying jump, there we go. So the roots of this story, even before the cliffhanger, this idea that the fleet would be lost and scattered across a vast section is actually something that predates season two. It actually is something that was in one of the first log lines for the series way back when I was sending up a list of potential storylines to the network saying that these are the shows that we would do if you would take us to series and on them were ideas like "33" you know the idea that the Cylons come back every thirty-three minutes was one of them. The riot aboard the prison ship was one of them. And the fact that there would be a jump and the fleet would be scattered across a vast expanse was one of them. This is a little slightly different instead of all the ships of the fleet being scattered and lost, it’s essentially that Galactica is really the one that’s been lost. You know it’s Galactica that has jumped to a different location than the rest of the fleet. You’ll notice I’m in the main title sequence here. The main title sequence you’ll note has changed this year. We have lopped off the second part, the sort of upcoming scenes section with the drum beats and all that in favor of keeping just sort of the beginning and making it a little bit shorter. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that when we come back on act one. And hopefully my DVD will continue to function. <quiet> Boom… Galactica.
Act 1
Ok. Act one. As I was saying, before I get into the Baltar-Six stuff that you're seeing now, we also changed the main title theme back to the UK version, which was always the preference of the producers and everyone on the show and there was some internal debate about which was the best main title, which was the best theme music. I think at end of the day, basically everybody agreed that the theme that we had season one was not as evocative and interesting as the UK version so we all agreed to do that. The reason behind losing the second half was to just make the whole thing a little faster to get through the main title a little quick, and also there were complaints. There had been- some people just don't like seeing scenes from the upcoming show. I really dug it. I always- I was always a big proponent of it and really liked it. I know that David Eick, my partner, also loved it too, but, there were legitimate people that said, "Well, we don't wanna be spoiled. We don't wanna see the scenes that we're coming up on." So we decided to lose it.