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RDM: Hello and welcome to the podcast I'nm Ronald D. Moore developer and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica and I'm joined here by my lovely wife, the lovely and talented Mrs. Ron. Say, "Hello," Mrs. Ron.
Terry: Hello Mrs. Ron
RDM: And we're here to discuss part one of the season finale, Crossroads Part I, which we call episode 18 around these parts.
Terry: I'm here again because Ron is now doing these in bed at 11 o'clock at night-
RDM: Yes-
Terry: In a state of exhaustion. And uh-So-
RDM: I hope-
Terry: I'm-I'll probably be pretty quiet too.
RDM: The smoking lamp is again out, but the scoth is Urgegragor 10 from-single malt from the Highlands.
Terry: There has been a question as to what is your favorite Scotch.
RDM: That's a hard question to answer, Talisker is one of my favorites. Jeru, that new one I got from that professor at USC. This new one came from John Hodgman who was here last night.
Terry: Mr. PC.
RDM: Mr. PC from the Apple commercials.
Terry: Ok, let's get into it. This is Crossroads Part I. In case you're wondering, no we did not forget to put the pre-cap on that says, "The Cylons Were Created By Man," etc. etc. Truth is we were pressed for time on these last two and we asked for special dispensation to do away with the pre-cap, as we call it, and also with the main title. So-to give us-in order to give us more time to tell the story and really play this for all it's worth. This sequence back at the opera house which we've seen before, the Kobol Opera house, was a very late edition to the script. I took a pass at the finale fairly late in the process, while we were in prep. I added this section and some other pieces that we'll talk about as they come along.
Terry: This is so spooky.
RDM: It's very spooky. It's very, "Don't Look Now," the Nicolas Roeg picture in a lot of these shots and very creepy and very effective. I like a lot of this a lot. Originally, we had always known that we wanted to do the trial of Gaius Baltar this season. It had originally was going to take place around episode 12 or 13 after the escape from the algae planet. Then as time went on we started talking about what the season finale was going to be and I started to getting more and more in love with the idea that the finale was going to be the trial of Gaius Baltar. That took a little bit of salesmanship actually with the network. The network was not entirely that we would-that a trial episode was really the best way to end the season. But I was really sold on it and then went back to the writers room and said "Ok, we really have to deliver because they're definitely skeptical this time about our ability to pull this off." So as-so we developed this long art that was going to culminate in this long art that was going to culminate in the trial, that I talked about before. With the Sagittarons becoming a problem in the fleet that's where the Helo, The Woman King episode originated to introduce the Sagittarons. We had more storylines with them as a sort of sub-group within the twelve colonies. And how they were sort of the ouitcasts of the bunch the the other colo-tribes sort of take advantage of them. It was included in this intialy drafts of these two episodes and it was going to play a key part in the trial. It wa-the plot was esentialy that as bit by bit the defense team, Baltar's defense team kicked the-the legs out from under the prosecution's case as it was presented there came a point where Lee, who at that point was going to be the sole attorney for Baltar, Lee was going to come into possession of a video tape that was sold to him by somebody on the black market and the video tape was going to have on it actually video footage of Baltar executing colonists on New Caprica. And it was him, it was there's Baltar pulling the trigger and he's killing people. It just had him dead to rights, and that's where this episode whas going to end: with Lee coming into possession of this video tape and deciding what was he going to do? The second part of the episode-the second part of Crossroads was going to deal with the dupe video tape getting into the backstory on New Caprica. The idea was that the Sagittarons had sort of isolated themselves from the rest of the population and there was a famine that struck the food supply and people were in desperate straits. The Sagittarons were refusing to share the food that they had carefully cultivated to themselves. At some point Baltar-and the government sent in the troops and Baltar got involved in the situation that at first looked on the video tape like he was a cold-blooded murder; but as the case went on you discovered that actually; but as the case went on you discovered that actually that he was more-it was more along the lines of the moment in Lawrence of Arabia that Lawrence has to shoot the man to save the larger situation between the two tribes. That storyline was present in these two episodes when we went into prep. The problem was, it just wasn't working because when we read it-Michael Rymer was probably the first person to put a finger on it- that it was making up a storyline that the audience wasn't invested in. Meanwhile, all the crimes that the audience was interested in with Gaius Baltar weren't being addressed as effectively and the trial wasn't really about anything they could really sink their teeth into. And I tend-and late in the game I realized that he was right. So I took a pass at the script and as I was taking my pass at these two scripts I essentially dumped that plotline completely-And uh-punted and said, "Ok, we're going in a different direction." And I started writing started playing with different storylines and different characters and stripped that out of the entire porcess and it subsequently meant that we had to go back and we had y'know-we had shot those other episodes except for the Dualla episode and that was dumped entirely in favor of the Tyrol episode. We had established the Woman King and a lot of the Sagittaron backstories was in bits and pieces in the other episodes and so we had to go back add it to the reshoot and take that out of the earlier episodes and that's just sort of the cost of doing business when you run a tv show the way I do. Where you sometimes you improvise and you go in directions that you didn't think you were going to. So a lot of these storylines, like this one here with Baltar and his cult followers on teh outside was somehting that developed pretty late in the game. I think this might of been in Michael Taylor's script-I take that back Michael Taylor did come up with this notion of the women out there that were sending letters and he was receiving visitations in prison. It's very Mansonesc. What's going on, for all his crimes; for all his notoriety in the script-within the fleet, there's still people out there that caught into him, that seem to be attracted to these dark figures that are on trial. That seems to be uh-tends to be what happens in these kind of trials. There are people that are obsessed with them.
Act 1[edit]
RDM: Act one. OK. This storyline here of the Raptor going back to drag the trail, lookin' for the Cylons, was something that was in early drafts as we started to re- We knew that we wanted to bring the Cylon threat back into the show, here in the last two episodes. We had been away from it for a while and we stayed away from it deliberately so that we could bring them back in a big way towards the end. And this notion that they had been following along for quite some time and that Galactica was taking precautions, just in case they were, but- and would leave this trailing Raptor behind to sit and wait and see if the Cylons would show up at their old position, and that this time Adama decides to leave a Raptor for a longer period of time was something that was always in the story from the early get-go.
When I saw the first cut of this episode, which I really liked, I responded very strongly to the first cut of the show, this was how Andy, the editor, and Michael Rymer chose to open the show. You open straight into the courtroom with the opening statements, which I thought was really interest- an interesting journey. But ultimately because the episodes were also extraordinarily long, they were like ten and, I think, twenty minutes over, respectively, there was a lot of reshuffling that had to be done in the structure, and some things had to go to make room for others, and as a result the teaser reverted back to the way the teaser was actually and structured initially and the opening arguments moved back to the top of act one. There is a significant lift here in her speech. She talks about loss and numbers and how they count up the people that live instead of the people that are dead, because of their particular situation, which I thought was a really intriguing idea that was in Taylor's script, but initially she wrote the number of the entire Twelve Colonies up on that whiteboard in the background, which was like fif- I can't remember what the number was. I'll probably get it wrong if I quote it. But I think it was like fifty-one billion, or something. And she had this big number, and then from that there was a series of subtractions of people lost in the initial attack and the people lost down through the years, all the way down to New Caprica. And it was a chain of reasoning that led her all the way to the crimes of Gaius Baltar, which was very effective, but it just took too long to get there. And in fact, we had to digitally remove the original numbers from the top of that chart, because the old numbers were up there as well, and so we had to go in and ask Gary Hutzel and- Gary Hutzel and friends, our new variety show, to remove the old numbers from the board. Cassidy, the prosecutor, in the sh- in early script and definitely in the story, was a man, was an older man. A bit of a professor. But as we got close to casting the part we started to feel that we hadn't had another strong female character in the show in a while and we wanted to bring another voice into the courtroom and make the opponent a woman. Which I thought was a good choice.
This beat- you'll notice that Laura is gone from the courtroom there. There was a sequence that was cut where Laura- you saw Laura get up and have to leave the courtroom at a certain point, and she goes into the officer's head by herself, and she's in there splashing water on her face 'cause she's not feeling well, so it was another clue in her storyline, what's going on with Laura. And while she's in there, Sharon comes out of one of the stalls and they have a moment together where Sharon- in my dra- when I took a pass at it, I had Sharon actually confront her and say something to her, 'cause she had never been in a room with Laura since the dis- since she learned that Laura had stolen her baby. And I had her say something like, "Just remember that a Cylon let you walk out of here alive," or something, and then she walked out. And everybody thought that was cr- too much and that Laura- that it was too dangerous, and it was too overt, and so I back- but there was a scene shot where Laura was in the bathroom and she and Sharon just looked at each other. And it was a lovely scene, and it'll probably end up in the deleted scenes on the DVD or on the website, because Mary did this great thing of leaning her head against the faucet. The coolness of the metal cooling her forehead, and Sharon came out, and they looked at each other just for a moment, and it was meant to evoke the idea that they reco- they had seen each other in the dream sequence, but weren't ready to really verbally acknowledge that to one another.
This opening statement by Romo Lampkin- a lot of this courtroom stuff, especially here in the early going, is pretty much as Michael Taylor wrote it. I didn't really mess with a lot of this. I made trims and s- minor polishes here and there. But this pretty much all of his work. In the early script, well, in the early story, of course, Lampkin had died in the episode before, and Lee was carrying the whole case. And then as we went into subsequent revisions, Lee's role helping Lampkin kept getting smaller and smaller, because the closer we got to actually shooting the show I started feeling that you had- the believability factor became more and more important and focusing on that element more, and felt right that Lampkin is the lawyer, and that Lee's helping him. Lee's not really expected to make arguments, to cross-examine witnesses, to do any of that stuff. He's just the guy at the table helping Lampkin, and that they're only c- eventually you'll get to a place where he had a significant contribution, but not at the beginning.
There's that- there's Laura. She actually coming back from the officer's head, there.
Mark Sheppard tells me a story that- I don't think Mary liked the fact that he kept- turning on her before she sat down, and she wanted to get all the way down to her seat and Mark, every time she was about to get to her seat he'd whirl around and catch her in it, and it was pissing her off, but it just helped her irritation in the scene a little bit.
You'll notice that we have a lot of spectators in the audience, and there's several of our regulars in the audience that we cut to occasionally. Tahmoh and Alessandro are there, sittin' side by side in some shots, and there's Tory and Laura. And all these people had to sit in this courtroom, which is a redress of the hangar deck, for hours on end while they shot a courtroom show, and one of the things that the cast almost to a man, and a woman, said afterward, was "Oh my God. Can you imagine having to do a courtroom show every fucking week?" 'Cause you have to sit in these positions for take, after take, after take, and nobody gets to move, and only one person speaking, then somebody else does their lines, and then you do it again. And it drove them just batshit. Tahmoh was talking about how they were trying to keep themselves awake, just to do the coverage, and then they had to do coverage from other angles, and they had to always be sitting in these chairs, and it was like a struggle to just maintain consciousness through vast stretches of the trial.
I really like that overhead shot of the Raptor, pushing down, that Gary put in here. Gary really added a lot of bells, and whistles, and flourishes to all the visual effects sequences here in the finale. I think he and the visual effects team really pride themselves in being able to add in things that surprise the producers when they- when all is said and done. And you get a lot more bang for your buck from those guys.
This storyline, that begins pretty much here, with Laura and the chamalla and the return of her cancer, this was something I added in my draft. And this came out of a couple of things. One, I was looking for other colors to play in the courtroom, in the trial episode, 'cause I felt that we weren't quite throwing enough surprises. We weren't really pushing the show far enough. We weren't taking enough chances. It was too much trial. We had the stuff going on with some of the other characters hearing things. But there really wasn't enough meat to sink you teeth into. And, secondarily to that, but just as important, was the fact that we had lost track of Laura, I think, over the course of the second half of the season and Mary and I had talked about that, and Mary was concerned that we had lost track of her character. She didn't seem to be doing too much and what was the next moves for her. I remember that conversation and I was really struck by it, and I was concerned by it, 'cause I agreed with her. I was- we had spent so much time trying to figure out what to do with Lee, and how we were gonna have a trial of Baltar, and the Sagittarons, and the search for the final five, etc., etc., that Laura did get lost in the shuffle, and I really didn't like that and I was committed to trying to do something with her strongly in the trial episode. I felt that she shouldn't be a direct participant in the trial, because that didn't make sense and didn't seem right, but I did want to do something with her. So as I was taking my pass through the script I just got to the scene where- I wrote that scene in CIC and I had the tea come in, and she was- or no. I'm sorry. The tea was a much later thing. She wasn't feeling well and she walked off into the weapons area and then Adama followed over and Lee watched them interact, and there was something in the way Lee watched her and Adama interact that he knew that something was up. And I determined, at that moment, as I was writing the scene, when he was looking up at Laura, and he saw the way that Adama was talking to her and the way that- I think Adama, in the script, put his hand on her arm or something. It was some very intimate gesture of compassion and concern, and it was at the- and it was in that moment I said, "She's got cancer again." And I knew that was a big move, but it felt right, and as I- and I immediately knew that it was gonna be a big turn in the trial and that Lee was going to- was gonna out her for it, and that she was gonna have visions again, and it meant that she was seeing things. It just- all these things just spun out in the moment as I was working on the script, and I knew that I seized on something I really liked. And it was an instinctive moment. It was an improvisational moment. But it tapped into things that I wanted to do in the show. The- when Laura's cancer was cured in the second season, I was never entirely happy with the notion that that was it for that story. That Laura having cancer and being the dying leader taking the Fleet to- taking the- leading humanity towards salvation was always a defining characteristic of her character. It was the way we are introduced to Laura. That she found out that she had terminal breast cancer and it was important to me at the moment that we did it that we had to relieve that pressure. We couldn't- I couldn't sustain her dying forever. It just didn't feel like that was- the show was gonna become about Laura in a hospital bed for the next two years.
I like this beat a lot. Sorry. Just to get back into the scene where we are. This Caprica-Tigh scene. I mean, he hits her, and then she hits him back (laughs) so quickly and so well. And this look on- Trish's face. That little almost smile. It's just really nice. It's nicely done stuff.
Anyway. Back to Laura. So when we cured her, at that moment, I talked about it with Mary, and we both said that it could come back. That's the end of the act. I'll come back.
Act 2[edit]
RDM: Mrs. Ron is tapping away on her keyboard, actually on the message board as we speak, and bells are cats running around.
Terry: Mmmm. Yeah, I'm writing about spoilers.
RDM: That cats are running around the room.
Anyway, Mary and I had talked at length about the fact that the cancer could definitely come back, and that I fully anticipated at some point in the story it would come back, because I still felt that she was the dying leader. That that was who she was. That's- that was her role in the show. And that, while the cancer may have gone into remission for a time, and actually even van- actually vanish according to Cottle, that it was always lurking in the background. And when I put it back in the script and sent it to- sent it out, I- got a call from Mary, 'cause she was surprised too. She said, "Okay. What are we doin' here? And how do wanna play this?" And I said, "Well, I think she approaches this differently this time. I think this time she has been waiting for this other shoe to drop. She has known that it was gonna happen someday and she's thought a lot about how she would- deal with her treatment and her life if her cancer came back. And so this time she's gonna face it in a little differently. She's not gonna hide it. And she's going to deal with the ramifications of it and she's gonna deal with, the reality of it, in a very, very different way." And Mary really liked that. And we had a long talk about it and we committed to this direction and just went for it. And I think it's one of the best things in this particular episode.
This storyline with Tigh, Tigh being forced to admit that he killed Ellen on the stand is a brutal, brutal moment here in the show. I mean, Romo Lampkin really just twists the knife in this guy. The f- but- it's completely legitimate. He's drinking. He's drunk. He's a drunk witness on the stand, and his credibility is definitely at stake. And this whole notion of, "Why is he after Gaius Baltar? Why he is he determined to put Baltar out in the airlock?" It's because he blames Baltar for the death of his wife, even though he killed his wife. It's a very complicated emotional line.
As- just to step out a little further away from the show, like I said earlier, there was a lot of trepidation going in. Could we do a trial show? Is a trial show really gonna be effective for Battlestar Galactica? Can we- I mean, essentially, can you do Law & Order in Battlestar Galactica? And we had done a- we had done the tribunal show in season one with Tyrol, and it was OK. I think we liked some aspects of it. Some aspects didn't work as well, but it didn't really feel like we had- cracked it, so I think that made us doubly concerned of our ability to pull it off, but I really wanted to commit to this direction. I just figured, "We're gonna do it. We're gonna make a trial episode." And even as we scripted it and shot it and prepped and shot it and everything, I think we were still all wondering, "Could we pull it off?" But when I saw the first cut, when I saw Rymer's cut of this show I just went, "Oh my God. We've done it. This is a trial ep- this is a legitimate courtroom drama." And it really works. There's something about the canvas of a trial. The players, the prosecutor, the defense attorneys. The form of the trial, as drama, in the American theatrical tradition has become so familiar, and there's certain rhythms to it and there's certain traditional climaxes and twists and interesting little subsets, that it does become its own subgenre. It's a great to place to tell story. That it's just- it's- the strictures of the courtroom and the rules of the courtroom allow you to concentrate the drama in these little pockets and in these particular moments which- they leach out spontaneity, and they leach out conversation between conversation between characters. It's Socratic in many ways. It's eliciting information simply through questioning.
It's just- this is just a heartbreaking performance by Michael Hogan. I mean, he really-
Terry: Yes.
RDM: He just so- you feel for him as he gives it up, as he just- as he admits to what he's done on the stand and it's just- terrible.
Terry: He's so good.
RDM: He's so good. He's just so, so good.
Terry: Talk about deserving of an Emmy.
RDM: Yeah, I mean, this guy really... just a fascinating man and a fascinating character. And then he would have to sit in public and confess to his greatest sin and the thing that haunts his dreams and it's just- tragic. While his best friend in the world sits five feet away at the judges table.
You'll notice that there is another judge that speaks quite frequently. It was important that we didn't make the tribunal- that the courtroom wasn't run by Adama, 'cause that just seemed like it pushed the conceit too far. You're already- asking the audience to make a buy here. You're asking them to buy that Adama and Lee could both be involved in the court. That's a complete buy. You have to buy that. To then have Adama be the lead judge all the time, and making all the rules, and really be in charge of the trial, was just too much. You just couldn't accept it. So we had to create another judge to carry a lot of that weight.
I like all this stuff. Anders is- we saw in the tease that Anders and Seelix, there's the implication that something's going on with those two. That had a lo- more in the script and little bit more was shot to flesh out that story point. And then this look between Tory and Anders here, and there's this sound. What's going on with this? Do they hear something? Do they not hear something? What's coming in over the radi- over the wireless set. This is just slowly bubbling stuff in the background.
And then we get in here. This is- this- there was more to this- to Laura on the witness stand. She talked more about their life on New Caprica. She talked about the first time she was picked up. She talked about being in jail with Gaius Baltar, him coming to visit her. There was just more description. But it was also stuff that the audience already knows if you've been following along with the show. It built very nicely, and it was well performed, but when you were looking for major cuts within the show, that had to go. And one of the key things that I decided to do in the editing room when we were looking at, "OK. How do you bring these two shows to time?" was I essentially moved up- I essentially cut deeply into part one, and I pulled up a lot of things out of Crossroads, Part II. Part one was initially going to end with Laura on the stand saying that she has cancer. That was literally the last line of part one, was Laura saying, "I have cancer." ("Dramatic" Duh-duh-duh.) Fade out. End of story. Several of these subsequent scenes that follow on after Laura's revelation were actually taken from "Crossroads, Part II" and pulled into part one.
This scene here is a fascinating scene, an important scene. It kept going in and out of the cut and I tri- I was- it was a wardrobe problem that screwed me in the editing room.
Terry: Oh God, please. What?
RDM: Because I wanted to ma- I wanted at one point to make Laura- Laura's testimony one long piece. That she got on the stand, and then Lee got up and cross examined her, and then this whole thing. But she was in the same- she was in two different outfits. And I-
Terry: Because they probably shot it-
RDM: She was on two different days.
Terry: But wait a second. So they sh- So you wrote it as two different days?
RDM: I wrote it as two different days.
Terry: And then-
RDM: And the-
Terry: And they shot it as two different days.
RDM: Yeah.
Terry: But it was the wardrobe department's problem?
RDM: Yeah. Because they put her in two different outfits.
Terry: For two different days.
RDM: Yeah.
Terry: So actually, you changed your mind.
RDM: Yeah, I changed my mind. And the wardrobe department wasn't smart enough-
Terry: They didn't-
RDM: -to anticipate-
Terry: -to read your mind.
RDM: -that there are many different ways that I might cut the show.
Terry: Right. And go to the director and say, "Could you shoot it in every possible outfit in case Ron changes his mind down the road."
RDM: All they had to do is shoot it in one outfit.
Terry: This is the problem. You see, this is the problem people.
RDM: I can't be held responsible for these-
Terry: Right, yeah. But see, if I hadn't been here people would've thought that the wardrobe department somehow messed up instead of the writer.
RDM: If you hadn't been here I wouldn't have even said it about our-
Terry: Yeah, right.
RDM: -lovely wardrobe department and our fabulous costume designer, Glenne Campbell. No relation.
I was on the set for a lot of this, actually. I went up for some of the shooting of the finale. I hadn't been up to the set in quite a while, and I saw them shoot a lot of the stuff with Lampkin, and Leee, and Baltar in the quarters. These three guys were very- an interesting trio. There's a lot of testosterone going on in this room. There's a lot of just- interesting back and forths. They're like- busting each other's balls between takes. It's an interesting dynamic to watch.