Podcast:Daybreak, Part I

RDM: Hello, and welcome to the last podcast of Battlestar Galactica. I'm Ron Moore, the executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, here to welcome you to the podcast for Daybreak. And I'm joined, at least for a short while, by my lovely and talented wife, Mrs. Ron, Terry Moore.

Terry: Maybe we should call me Terry this episode.

RDM: We'll just call you Terry, just to sort of-

Terry: Although, I don't know. Should we call me Mrs. Ron for tradition?

RDM: Mrs. Ron to the bitter end.

Terry: Maybe.

RDM: Maybe.

Well. A lot to talk about. Long episodes, 'cause we're gonna do the whole finale at once. We'll take a break here and there as needed.

Terry: I'm gonna check out a little bit because I think that you guys deserve to have Ron solo, but he didn't wanna do it all completely by himself. And I just wanna say something to the "Okay" thread. I got my- we got our chickens. We got eight chickens sitting in the ref- in the kitchen. Alive chickens. Live chickens, I should say.

RDM: Yes, live chickens.

Terry: Just a little aside.

RDM: The Scotch for night i- the Scotch for tonight is Highland Twenty Five, brand new special bottle for the occasion, and the cigarettes later on, after Mrs. Ron has excused herself, will be Export A's. The taste of Canada.

Terry: And I really don't care that much if Ron has an occasional cigarette. I'm not a smoke Nazi.

RDM: That's right.

Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about the origins of this. We started talking about the finale episode originally at the Las Vegas writer's retreat a year and a half ago, almost two years ago now.

Terry: Although I think it's kinda stupid.

RDM: And then-

Terry: [laughs]

RDM: -we subsequently talked again about it at last year's Lake Tahoe writer's retreat where we really stroked out the arc of the final season and where it was all going to-

Terry: In advance.

RDM: In advance, as best we could. 'Cause we knew that going into the last season we want it to be one basic, essentially one long continuous story all the way to the end. And we talked in general terms about what was going to happen in the finale. I look back in my notes for where the original thoughts were, and I'd say we did some of them, and some of them we clearly abandoned. [cat meows]. There were things- Hello Ella. We abandoned some of these things as we got into the second half of the season because the writer's strike gave me time to reconsider and think about some of the directions that we were going and we decided to abandon some of those ideas. Well, let's talk a little bit about here, this open. The finale-

Terry: It's so pretty.

RDM: The on-air finale is- has been restructured a couple of times from the scripted version.

Terry: I haven't seen this.

RDM: The scripted version of the finale the flashbacks were intermingled all the way through the show, and they were not chronological, in that in the opening you cut from Laura in sick bay with the drip, drip, drip of her IV to the fountain of Laura, and you- the first flashback you saw of Laura was her in the fountain. Likewise you saw pieces of Adama at the strip club. You saw Lee with the broom, and the pigeon. You saw Kara and Lee, together, drinking. And you saw all these things out of order. And as the episode progressed, I just dropped in pieces of backstory for each one of them along the way, and they were, like I said, they were non-linear. They were out of order and when you read it on the page, it was very effective, and people really responded to the script, which was very gratifying to me. They really loved it and liked it and there was something about the non-linear nature of all the flashbacks in the original draft that was really compelling and interesting and you were trying to figure out what the puzzle was about. When you put it together, when it was actually filmed and cut together that way, Mike- one of the first things Michael Rymer did was, he said, "OK. When it's non-linear like that and you're watching it as a piece, it's