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RDM: Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode fifteen of the second season, "Scar." I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and this week I'm joined by the writers of this particular episode.
Weddle: I'm David Weddle.
Thompson: And I'm Bradley Thompson, and we were very happy to work on this one.
RDM: This is a good one. This is my- one of the standout episodes of the second season, I think. And I'm trying to remember how we- where this episode began in our- our- on our conversations.
Thompson: There was- well, you had come up with feeling that you wanted to get into the world of the fighter pilot.
RDM: Right.
Thompson: You wanted to see what it was like to sweat down on the deck, and what were their lives like. And David Eick came up with an idea that he wanted to see a mano a mano between Kat and- and Kara. That Kara's been out of it for a while there may be a new top gun.
Weddle: That's something that Brad and I wanted to do-
RDM: (whispers) A little closer to that.
Weddle: -in some ways Act- Act- in some ways "Act of Contrition" was a first stab at that. I know from the day we came on the show Brad and I were talking about we wanted to see the life of the Viper pilots almost from the day they get- time they get up in the morning to around the clock.
RDM: Which is really weird we started also with last year's "Act of Contrition" which you guys wrote as well, which was all about the first group of new- new "nuggets" that would come into- into basic training on Galactica after the Fleet was- was on the run. And I think I was- I- I shared their interest in this arena as well. It felt like one of the key aspects of the series, right from the beginning, was, "Ok. This is an aircraft carrier in space." And we went to great pains to try to delineate all the- the markers of what it meant to be on an aircraft carrier, how the squadrons were organized, how the ship was organized, how the pilots were treated and interacted, more or less as accurately as we could portray it. So the thought of doing a show that was all about th- the fighter pilots and all about the squadron, really getting into their lives, was always very appealing.
Weddle: I know one of the the things that Brad and I talked about, one of our favorite World War II movies is "Battleground" because it's the life- the war from the perspective of the grunts. Which in this case, Viper pilots are. And they're part of a larger mission, but they don't always know the big picture of what's going on and they're caught up in just what their tasks are.
Thompson: One of the toughest things about setting this- this up so that it would be- there was one other aspect to this which was, we needed the enemy because Ron got this idea that he wanted only one battle in space. We weren't going to do a series of battles.
RDM: Oh, right. Right.
Thompson: Or a scorekeeping thing and there was- so we had this box to work into. So the question was, "Ok. How can we set this competition up in the framework of one fight that's going to determine everything?"
RDM: Now this scene- the scene that you're seeing here in the tease of them gathering all the- the possessions of the dead pilot together into a box actually lead to a scene that ultimately we cut in editing. We shot it and cut it. Where they auctioned off the pos- the possessions of the dead pilot, which grew out of something I remember from history and fictionalized history as well where in the- in the Royal Navy back in the Napoleonic War era when members of the crew died, officers or enlisted men died, they would take all their possessions and they would take them up onto the deck after the battle and they would auction them off to the other members of the crew, and it was a way of saying goodbye and it was al- or carrying some pieces of their memory forward and also in a practical sense there was gear to be had. And there extra shirts and there were buttons and all kinds of- of things that people actually wanted.
Thompson: Especially in a- in a civilization such as we've got here in the rag tag fleet, a skin magazine or-
RDM: The skin magazines, yeah.
Thompson: That would be a very rare thing. They're probably not making a whole lot of those anymore.
RDM: And we did shoot that aspect of the- of the sce- sequence. This scene was going to then cut to Lee holding up the skin magazine from Beano and it was like, "Ok. How much do I have for this?" And there was a big rowdy scene. I think when we cut it together and put it in the show my feeling was that it f- it was too big. That the- that the- the energy was too up and it didn't quite read as a quasi-memorial Irish wake kind of an event. It was a little bit too much of a- of a balls-out party. And it felt- we were so early in the show that it pulled you out of the fact that these guys, these new guys, are stepping into a situation where people get killed all the time.
Thompson: What wasn't really obvious with that- with the scene that was cut was that these guys are really overcompensating for that loss. They're- they're really- their big partying and all of that stuff-
RDM: Yeah...
Thompson: -was really to hide their grief from one another. (beeping in the background)
RDM: Yeah.
Weddle: What I love is- is we're really focusing on those bunks are being emptied and filled on a- if not daily basis, weekly basis, and this is an ongoing atrophy that's eating at these people day in and day out and other episodes we would never normally focus on that. It's great to take the microscope down to these pilots themselves.
Thompson: One of the nice things that Michael Nankin brought to this- many nice things he brought to this show was the- the little moment you saw earlier with the- putting the tag of Beano on the new guy-
RDM: Oh, yeah.
Thompson: -Jo-Jo-
RDM: Yeah, I love that.
Thompson: -which is... *grunt like being punched*. It's almost like that moment in- in- in- when the- whey they bring the- when the guys climb into the body bags in Apocaly- not "Apocalypse Now". The [1] film.
RDM: Oh, "Full Metal Jacket."
Thompson: "Full Metal Jacket."
RDM: Oh, yeah yeah yeah.
Thompson: They get there and they're in the body bag and you go, "Oh. Wait a minute. Oh. I'm in a dead guy's bunk."
RDM: Yeah. (zippo lighter) In fact there's Hotdog's- Hotdog's got the skin magazine in the background-
Thompson: Mmmhmmm.
RDM: -that was theoretically auctioned off.
Weddle: Michael Nankin did just an incredible job of bringing the scenes to life and we knew we were writing a dark show when we wrote it but when we got on the set and he and the actors just made these moments come viscerally alive it was very exciting for us and that we also realized, "Wow. This is even darker than we- we knew." S-
Thompson: One- one of the things that happened especially was there was a- there was a lot of really good material and- bringing this down to something that fit within the forty-one minutes or so that we've got to tell a story was a masterful job by Ron and David and the editing people.
RDM: Yeah, this was a big editing challenge. We had actually two editors on this show. It was ver- very complicated and Annette, who's edited several of our shows, and then Mike O'Halleran who was an assistant editor who actually this was the first professional full-on editing gig that he did. And it took a lot of hours, a lot of playing around with the structure of the flashbacks, what was your transition in and out of the flashbacks. Probably the biggest change was that the fighter- the actual combat that we show, the duel between Kat and Kara and Scar had many more conv- permutations and convoluted stuff that was- that was scripted. It wasn't convoluted by accident, it was, like, we wanted a very complicated maneuvers and a lot of fighter pilot stuff back and forth. But it was hard to make it a coherent, easy to follow, narrative in this structure where you're going in and out of the- of the- the k- present day fight and going back to all these pieces. And so we winnowed it down to the bare essence of the fight against Scar.
Thompson: This- this thing that you just saw Kara do, this- this- crash landing, this carrier landing actually comes from astronauts that we interviewed for another- another project we were on where they would go to bars and literally dive across the tables.
Weddle: Do "carrier landings" and "naval shooters" of tequila, which you're seeing right now.
Thompson: Yeah, the belly-button shooter.
Weddle: Yeah, the what's interesting, Ron, about this show is this was a difficult show to make work. This- if I'm right-
RDM: Yeah. No, this wasn't-
Weddle: -It was not easy to make work, but- but and often that's a sign of a show that's in trouble, but ultimately turned out to be o- a very strong show.
RDM: And I think part of that was we all were in love with the show. We all, everybody, top to bottom, really liked this episode. And so, it was just a- such a big, complicated piece of material. We really worked overtime to make this thing work. Like that shot right there of the reflection of the Vipers in the visor of Scar is something that actually Gary Hutzel threw in. He- this- it wasn't scripted and it wasn't in most of the initial pre-vis that they showed us and it just cropped up as a shot that he wasn't even going to put in the show at one point and then we- he hi- he alluded to it. We had him show it to us in the editing bay and we fell in love with it. And now it's like this great moment.
Thompson: The visual effects on this deserve some special mention 'cause this was- when we originally called up Gary Hutzel when we were thinking about what we were going to do and how this was going to be one dogfight, Gary had said, "Ok. This is something. We gotta got to start working on now. Long before we shoot the show. We've got to start making this happen." And he had a- lined up all these people for- for the big- for the big visual effects show and this was the time to call in all of the markers.
RDM: I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think they delivered the last visual effects shots on this episode, like, this week. (chuckles)
Thompson: It was actually delivered after the mix.
(everbody chuckles)