Podcast:Exodus, Part II
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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 I'd like to welcome you to the podcast for episode "three b", as we like to call it around the office. This is "Exodus, Part Deux". I'll be pulling a solo tonight. Mrs. Ron is not, unfortunately, with us. Smokes are American Spirit. And the Scotch is Glenrothes. So. "Exodus, Part II."
As we discussed last week, "Exodus" was originally one episode. It was written and shot to be a single episode but there was so much story material within it, so many things had to be accomplished that I knew fairly early on that, really, we were probably going to be looking to split this sucker into two parts. Which actually would help us in terms of production, because this initial storyline on New Caprica was so expensive. It sent us deeply, deeply into the hole very early with all the sets and all the locations. Big numbers of extras. Lots of visual effects. That we were already in the hole to begin the season, and if we could split an episode, if we could split one episode into two parts, and get two episodes for the price of one, in essence, that would go a long, long, long way towards helping us make up a fairly significant deficit over the course of the season. So there was, like, a strong economic reason to do it very early on, as well as the creative. When creative and economic combine, you usually find a way to do it, and that's what happened in this case.
I also talked about last week, the fact that this episode cleaved itself very nicely at the midway point with Adama getting 'em all ready to go, and then us finally going. When the two episodes were cut- were edited together, we still had to go back and do some pickup scenes. This scene here at the top of the show in the tease with Lee and Dualla is one of the pickup scenes that we shot much later, and went back. It was nice to visit with Lee and Dualla and deal with the fact that he's out with the remnants of humanity. That they're trying to make the best of a bad situation. But that he's having trouble living with it. The same way that his father did. So that was a nice echo of the fact he is his father's son on some level and that just as his dad had real trouble with turning his back on those people, that Lee would have trouble turning his back on his dad and those people.
We'll talk about the storyline of the Pegasus and how it changed over the drafts a little bit later but, suffice to say, essentially the original story line as constructed always invisioned the destruction of the Pegasus. That was always something that we were going to do at the beginning of this season. I liked having the Pegasus with the Fleet. I thought it was an interesting vessel to have with us. It was interesting that we kept it around as long as we did. But there was something pure about the fact that the battlestar is the last surviving warship and that we did not have this other even bigger and more powerful aircraft carrier sitting off the port bow, as it were. And also there was practical considerations in that the Pegasus sets were eating up studio space that we didn't really have. We had to build all the Pegasus sets on an adjacent sound stage to our normal main sets and this season we had this, this storyline of mine that we'll be getting to in the very next episode that takes place on a Cylon Basestar. And we needed a place to build the Basestar sets. This is really where TV production considerations come in and can really affect the creative arcs of the show. Even though I was predisposed to get rid of the Pegasus within this storyline because it felt like the right time to do it. The Pegasus should go out with a noble sacrifice and should go in an epic battle that really meant something in the life of the series, and meant something to Lee Adama when it finally went down. The thing that really tipped it over the edge was, well, "What gives us the best bang for the buck in the show? Where do we really want to spend our time?" When you have Pegasus we had to populate it, we had to keep people over there. You were always bouncing back and forth between the two ships. Pegasus was a very limited set, in that we didn't have very much. We had, essentially, this room, which was always the Commander's quarters, we had the CIC in Pegasus, and a stretch of corridor, and a multipurpose room that we turned into the brig and we turned into their ready room, etc. But that was it. So, we didn't have much else to do over on Pegasus and when we did try to do other things it was very, very difficult.
This story. The story of Tigh and Ellen was something we decided very early on that we were gonna do. That Ellen's price that she would pay would be a severe one. That she had collaborated with the Cylons, even though it was- she was in a difficult situation with no real way out, she was trying to do the best she could for her husband. She tried to get him out of a jail, and she did get him out of jail, but then when they pressured her she bent. And she gave them the map. And men died. And Tigh's the leader of the resistance. Ultimately knew that something had to be done about that. And that he was gonna be the man that had to do it.
This storyline. The storyline of Ellen and Tigh, I believe was structured to happen earlier. It was gonna happen in the first hour of the- of "Exodus" and I think it was shot that way, but as we were splitting them into two pieces there was a certain amount of horse trading about, "Ok. Which scene should live in which episode?" And the story of Ellen and Tigh was such a strong and powerful emotional piece that I really felt that it belonged in the second hour, not in the first hour. That it really, gave you somewhere to go.
And now we're out of the- out of the tease.
Act 1
Oh. Ok. Now we're back.