Podcast:The Hand of God
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of commentary on episode 10, The Hand of God, on Battlestar Galactica. I'm Ronald D. Moore and I'll be your skipper and guide here for the next five days and four enchanting nights as we talk about The Hand of God.
This particular episode is one that remains virtually the same from the story outline onward. David Eick, the-my partner and the other executive producer on this show, often refer to this episode as 'The Big Mac' and 'The Big Mac' is what we tended to call it around the offices. 'The Big Mac' because it's sort of fast food - its like here's the guilty pleasure, let's go out and blow a lot of stuff up, let's have some fun, let's do a war story, let's sort of get back to the roots of what the show is about, which essentially is a combat series about an aircraft carrier in space and fighting its foes.
Part of the concept of this series overall was that we knew going in that we would not be able to - nor did we really want to - do a battle episode every single week. We knew right away that was not going to be economically viable for us - we simply couldn't have enough money to produce that week in/week out - with Vipers continually engaging the Cylon raiders and etc., in a never-ending battle. And also, creatively, I never really wanted that to be the show. I always saw the show, as I've said many times before, as a drama first and an action-adventure series or science fiction series a distant second. So I always wanted to make the characters front and center. Which is in part one of the reasons why Laura Roslin was invented in the first place as long as we're- she's on the screen here.
The role of the President, as I have probably also mentioned before, I always thought was vital to the life of this series as opposed to the original series because I was always interested in playing a civilian versus military dynamic - the tension between those two and I thought also just given the sort of more realistic approach to the genre that we were going to take I knew that the President was going to have to have a role -a strong role - and that the political leadership of the survi- the remnants of humanity and the survivors of our rag-tag fleet was going to be a very important story and I wanted to play it and that it would have to be this way that you would have to have someone in charge of the government - we couldn't just have Adama week in and week out making these decisions for all these civilians.
This particular scene, with - obviously Laura's having hallucinations about snakes, which dovetails into our backstory and running subplot about her cancer and her hallucinations which are brought on by the drug that she's taking. This is also one of our press conference scenes - which to me was a way of sort of reinforcing the notion that Colonial One is our analog to Air Force One and that you sort of needed something larger than the Oval Office to sort of convey the White House as it were - I mean, we have sort of her office aboard Colonial One that we will see in a moment (or maybe we won't) and that was never really enough to convey sort of the power and the importance of the Presidency, so we came up with this idea of using the press conference because it's essentially such a familiar fixture in our day-to-day politics in the United States - the press conference, the press corps asking questions, the President standing behind the podium - it's such a familiar - the iconogra - the iconography of that is so familiar that it sort of reinforces this idea that she is the President over and over again.
To get back to the plot here for a second - Crashdown and Sharon are out hunting for Tylium fuel. Tylium fuel is lifted directly from the original Battlestar Galactica series. Unlike Star Trek and other futuristic sort of space operas, which sort of posit in Star Trek's case the Enterprise runs on matter/antimatter engines and there are books and reams of material and technical data that you can find that tell you exactly how the Enterprise engines work but essentially it's like this - the collision of matter and antimatter creates such an enormous release of energy that it drives the Enterprise forward.
The original Battlestar Galactica simply said that they had fuel. It was something called tylium fuel. And you had to find it, you had to refine it, and you had to put it in your gas tank to go. I liked that idea; I thought it was - it fit well within the sort of the retro-technology point of view that I was taking in this version of the series. So I kept it as opposed to simply giving the Colonials and the Cylons some vers - some variant of nuclear energy or again matter/antimatter or some out there sounding sort of space notions of what would drive these ships. Fuel is a good thing. I think it's a limitation; it's something that you can - you can run out of periodically, your supplies can be threatened, it gives you a need to go do things, ships have to be refueled; it's just sort of an interesting bit of texture in the series and it's sort of another way we tend to depart from what sort of has become the contemporary accepted conventions of science fiction. I think I've spoken about this sequence in previous podcasts but once again this is our upcoming shots of tonight's episode which is really an homage to Space: 1999. And I will save the rest of my comments back to the show to the other side of the main title.