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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, here to welcome you to the podcast for what we affectionately call episode seven, "Hero". And there won't be any Scotch today. It's a little too early in the day, even for a hardcore like me. The smokes are Shermans. Trying a little somethin' different. So actually my wife reccomended from back in her smoking days. She no longer embi- partakes of the tobacco leaf. But I do on occasion. I don't smoke nearly as much as all of you think I do.
Anyway. Episode seven, "Hero". This one was a little bit more of a one-off than what we typically do. A little bit more of a single, self contained story carrying us through the whole episode. We felt at the beginning of the season we had arced out the entire New Caprica storyline that took us through to "Exodus, Part II" and then into "Collaborators", and then we had this two-part episode that developed that was about the infected baseship and the consequences of that, culminating in the decision of whether or not the people on Galactica were going to use the biological weapon. And then after that we wanted to do a series of a little bit more contained episodes that weren't quite as serialized, didn't have as many long-running storylines as we had been playing for a while. And so one of the first ones that came up was this story, "Hero". This is written by David Eick, my producing partner. And the origins of this, though, actually go back a little bit further than this season. This was initially a concept that was pitched during the second season by David Weddle. I believe this is his idea. It might have been him and his partner, right? I remember David mentioning it in the room, had this idea that they would discover something about Adama. That Adama would- had been holding a secret that essentially he was holding the idea that- holding secret the idea that he had participating in a black op mission before the Cylon attack. And that he would secretly blame himself, on some level, for helping to prompt the Cylon attack on the Colonies itself. Which is a pretty big idea, and it took a lot of discussion. We were like, "Ok. What does that mean in concrete terms?" I liked the idea that there were black ops operations going on amid the Colonials before the Cylon attack. After all, forty y- our backstory is that there's forty years between the last Cylon- the first Cylon War and the attack on the Colonies. And it seemed plausible that the Colonial Fleet had been doing something during that whole time and it was curious to see what was going on the other side of the Armistice Line.
This little opening sequence here with Laura Roslin and the picture, which we just went past in Colonial One, like I've said before, I want that picture for my own. That'll have a point of pride in my own home someday of Baltar. And I think David knew that, and I think that's why he wrote in that little piece about putting Baltar's picture over the toilet. I don't think it was so much a slam against James and the- or the character as it was tweaking me that my coveted picture was going above the toilet.
Anyway.