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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 this week we're here to discuss episode thirteen, "The Woman King." Coming to you from a small cabin in the Russian River. Terry and I are ensconced for a few days. But the podcast must be served, so here we are. There's no Scotch for this particular gathering. I'm having actual absinthe, from a secret location overseas. You can actually get this fine substance in the United States, despite rumors to the contrary. And so absinthe is the drink. (Takes a drink.) From my Carnivàle days, gave me a taste for it. And we won't discuss- be discussing the smokes this week.
Ok. Thirteen. "The Woman King." This episode came essentially out of our desire to do a couple of different things. One was to setup a long-running plot line that was supposed to last from here until the end of the season that had to do with the Sagittarons. Ultimately that one did not pan out the way that we anticipated, initially, about what we were gonna do with the Sagittarons as a people. It was going to figure prominently in Baltar's trial, by the end of the season, and this episode was designed in part to get those storylines going. However, once we actually got into the meat of Baltar's trial, beyond even the first draft. I mean, we did a first draft that had the Saggitarions featured prominently, and what they were doing, and then dropped it in subsequent drafts. And I'll talk more about that as the show goes on.
So here we are in the tease. This sequence of Helo having trouble sleeping was shot much later. We didn't initially have this as the opening to the episode. Initially what we were gonna- what we had was this fly- the pilot banter and chatter of them flying out (phone rings) and of course it has to be a podcast because there's a phone ringing, but I can turn it off here, so, there we go. Anyway it was gonna have pilot stuff going on and people on a mission, chitchat back and forth, giving each other limericks, and so on. And then that didn't really seem like the most effective opening, 'cause it's- it really is a show about Helo. And so I wanted to- start with Helo and let's get into his mindset, right from the get-go. 'Cause one of the things that we wanted to do about the ep- about this show in designing it was to give ourselves a "Helo story." A full-blown story about Helo and his life, to an extent. In a large part this episode is a follow-up- (phone rings) Somebody just keeps calling. And look. It might be my wife so I will actually put this on pause here for a moment, something I never do. And I'm back. It was nothing important, just the network with the pickup call. No, no. I'm just joking. But it was really the network.
Anyway. This whole little sequence of the pilots coming in and bustin' each other as they walk up the corridor and then jazzin' along. That was an offsh- it came out of the sequence that I said that we dropped at the beginning of the show, which was them all flying and busting on each other and coming up with bad, really bad, limericks (chuckles) as they were bantering back and forth. But it was essentially all to setup this idea of Helo's isolation. And this, in part, impetu- the impetus in part to do this Helo story was to follow-up what Helo had done back in episode seven- six when he had prevented Galactica from using the biological weapon against the Cylons, and part of this- part of the backstory and subtext of the episode was Helo having been exiled ever since. That essentially Adama knew that it was Helo, didn't really wanna do a formal investigation into it, but it- had essentially sidelined him. He was given the "shit jobs." Colonel Tigh was back at the XO and Helo was assigned to deal with the civilians down in Dogsville. Some of those textures are still here- bit by bit, though, we just kept losing a lot of that stuff along the way, 'cause the story- there was a split in the story about what this particular show was about. Is it about the Sagittarons? Is it about prejudice? Is it about Helo's exile and quest for redemption? There were a lot of competing interests about what the show was about, and like I said, we were trying to set up this longer-term, long-range, backstory of the Sagittarons overall, so that kept consuming more and more of our attention and bit by bit the Helo- Helo as exile kept going away.
Part of the things that we lost along the way about Helo's backstory here, which I think was a shame, was the idea that he had been trying very hard to make a name for himself and had been sending lots of reports to Adama and had been pestering Adama for weeks, and finding ways of being a hero. That on some level Helo was looking for an excuse to be a hero again, and he kept finding- being "johnny-on-the-spot" who would say, "I have discovered this new problem, sir. And here's my solution to it." And he was that officer who's trying so hard to prove himself that he's becoming a pain in the ass. And that, in turn, informed why his initial warnings about what was going on down here with Doc Robert were ignored. That there was a certain "boy who cried wolf" quality to what was happening with Helo and the psychological underpinning for it was that he felt guilty over what he had done by killing the Cylons and preventing Galactica from using the biological weapon. It raised questions in his own mind of his own loyalties and his own worth as a man and him wanting to still be a hero in his own eyes and in- and to some degree in his wife's eyes, and that was propelling him into this need to find a situation to be a hero in. Like I said, it was a complicated psychological backstory and the episode just being too large, you just kept getting sidelined, and sidelined, and sidelined, and now there's not much of that notion really left in this particular episode.
Oh, we're still on. (chuckles) We're in the main title sequence. I don't know what to say in the main title sequence this week. It's pretty. It's very pretty. So is the fire here in the cabin. Terry's off doing something... in town. In Kernville. Ok, and we're out of the tease.
Act 1[edit]
Initially the structure of this episode actually began with- we were gonna start at the end of the show. Michael Angeli, who wrote this episode, had structured a draft where in the tease- was going to open with Helo in a confrontation with Adama and Tigh and Cottle about Doc Robert and making his accusations and essentially being shut down and told to knock it off and that they didn't believe him and he had to go somewhere else to deal with his personal issues, which is what everybody thought was driving him to make these accusations and then he left the room, and then he had the confrontation with Tigh and they had a battle- or Ti- not a battle, they had a fight. And that was the end of the tease. And then it was like, start act one three days earlier. It's valid structure and we've used that structure many times. Usually we do that in post when we're trying to jazz up an episode. Michael did it in the draft, and just because we're perverse, we decided not to that this episode and to make it a little bit more linear and a little bit more straight-line, to take you along the away and walk you through the parameters of what was happening.
The idea of the illness and the illness that the Sagittarons brought aboard and are spreading, even though it's treatable, was a late-developing idea as we struggled with the Sagittarons and what their beliefs were and why they were different, why they were the victims of prejudice from some of the other colonies. There is this developing idea this season of something that we had been talking about within the civilian world for a long time, and had never really- now we bring to the forefront was this idea that there were class structures and hierarchies and different, if not racial, at least tribal feelings among the Fleet that- what- which colony you were from had meaning within the Twelve Colony structure and that as they were out on their journey, post- the post-apocalyptic journey, that eventually those feelings and rivalries and prejudices would rise to the fore as well, and so we had always been look for ways to start indicating that and this story with the Sagittarons, like I said a couple of times, was intended to eventually illuminate and be part of the backstory that actually happened on New Caprica during the missing year. And during that time there was an incident. There was a massacre. There was like a whole complicated backstory of what the Sagittarons had done and had done to them. They had essentially isolated themselves on New Caprica, had done their own thing while everyone else was doing something else, and essentially there came a crisis point and people were killed, and I won't give you the whole thing. But Baltar was directly involved with it, so was Zarek. Gaeta was around. And it was gonna figure- eventually there was a secret within that that was going to figure prominently in Baltar's trial. So we were laying a lot of this pipe to set up who the Sagittarons were and what was going on.
This scene, for instance, with Zarek and Laura, which I think is a nice scene. It's nice to see Richard back and it's nice to have Tom Zarek back among us, even for a little bit. There was a scene, a follow-up to this scene later in the show, where Zarek went to see Baltar. And when Zarek went to see Baltar he basically was feeling him out to see what he was gonna say, what he wouldn't say, how he could help, under the guise of helping him, and Baltar was essentially gonna get wise to why Tom Zarek was really there, which was to cover his own ass, and that Zarek was involved in the Sagittarion incident- Sagittaron incident on New Caprica and was worried that Baltar might implicate him at a trial, and it was starting to setup the shifting political agendas and these shifting mysteries to raise the idea that there was something up here, that you would be following this for subsequent episodes.
Like I said, like I keep saying, once we got to the trial episode we did structure that in. It was part of the story, initially, and at a certain point I just felt like it was complicating things and it wasn't really paying off. I know Michael Rymer, who directed the trial episode at the end of the season, felt the same way. And we just opted out. At a certain point I said, "You know what? Forget it. We're not gonna do th- just drop the whole Sagittaron thing. Let's make it a different trial. Let's make it a trial on the merits of the story that we do have about Baltar, not make up this new thing in the back." And when that happened, this episode was already in the can. Other episodes were already deeply, well into being done. And this is triage. Now you have to go back. This is what happens when you- when you run a show the way I run it, which is- I like a certain amount of improvisation and I like a certain amount of making it up as you go along. That's how I like to run a show. I make no apologies for that. It does have certain downsides to it, and one of the downsides is that sometimes you make a decision like that later and you shift on the fly because you feel, instinctively, that you have to for the story. And then you have to go back and now you have triage that you have to do on the subsequent epis- on previous episodes that you've already set in motion and you've already set- made certain decision. This is one of them. It fortunately was not a deadly blow to this episode. It was a subplot with Zarek, primarily, but part of the Raison d'Être for this episode was to set the Sagittarons up as a bigger presence in the Fleet than they ultimately turned out to be. So in that sense making the decision later actually hurts the series a little bit, hurts this episode a little bit. 'Cause you kinda wonder why we're spending all this time with the Sagittarons, and that's a legitimate beef. I think it's legitimate to walk away from this episode and say, "Why did we spend so much time with the Sagittarons in the episode?"
One nice thing about this episode, and about this little cluster of episodes, thirteen and fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen, are all very much standalone episodes. They don't... they don't really require a great deal of knowledge of the show in order to enjoy them. I think that your enjoyment of these episodes is enhanced if you know the backstories but these are good shows for newcomers to the series to watch to get a feel for the kind of show it is, the tenor of the episodes, what kind of storytelling we do.
Act 2[edit]
We played a lot with the doctor's character and why he was doing what he did and what was really going on there. I think part of the problem of this episode is on some level this episode isn't really saying anything new. I mean, it's- what's the message of the show? Prejudice is bad. Racism is bad. Tribalism is bad. People die. You don't want to be that guy. It's not a new message. It's not a provocative message. It's a standard TV idea. That our hero discovers the truth that somebody is- has hidden racism and that is actually act on it and people are dying, so the hero stops him from doing that. It's a perfectly valid trope. There's nothing really wrong with it. It just doesn't- it doesn't lift the show into a new realm, I guess, is my point. I don't think it's a f- I don't think it's a problem episode. I don't think it's a bad episode. I li- I think it's well executed. I think it's a great episode for Helo. I think that it's great to see Tahmoh- it's great to see Tahmoh carry a whole show.
Here we are, back in Joe's bar. I love the fact that we're back in Joe's. Ooh, Racetrack out of uniform. Racetrack out of uniform looks fantastic. Good to see