Podcast:Exodus, Part II
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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 I'd like to welcome you to the podcast for episode "three b", as we like to call it around the office. This is "Exodus, Part Deux". I'll be pulling a solo tonight. Mrs. Ron is not, unfortunately, with us. Smokes are American Spirit. And the Scotch is Glenrothes. So. "Exodus, Part II."
As we discussed last week, "Exodus" was originally one episode. It was written and shot to be a single episode but there was so much story material within it, so many things had to be accomplished that I knew fairly early on that, really, we were probably going to be looking to split this sucker into two parts. Which actually would help us in terms of production, because this initial storyline on New Caprica was so expensive. It sent us deeply, deeply into the hole very early with all the sets and all the locations. Big numbers of extras. Lots of visual effects. That we were already in the hole to begin the season, and if we could split an episode, if we could split one episode into two parts, and get two episodes for the price of one, in essence, that would go a long, long, long way towards helping us make up a fairly significant deficit over the course of the season. So there was, like, a strong economic reason to do it very early on, as well as the creative. When creative and economic combine, you usually find a way to do it, and that's what happened in this case.
I also talked about last week, the fact that this episode cleaved itself very nicely at the midway point with Adama getting 'em all ready to go, and then us finally going. When the two episodes were cut- were edited together, we still had to go back and do some pickup scenes. This scene here at the top of the show in the tease with Lee and Dualla is one of the pickup scenes that we shot much later, and went back. It was nice to visit with Lee and Dualla and deal with the fact that he's out with the remnants of humanity. That they're trying to make the best of a bad situation. But that he's having trouble living with it. The same way that his father did. So that was a nice echo of the fact he is his father's son on some level and that just as his dad had real trouble with turning his back on those people, that Lee would have trouble turning his back on his dad and those people.
We'll talk about the storyline of the Pegasus and how it changed over the drafts a little bit later but, suffice to say, essentially the original story line as constructed always invisioned the destruction of the Pegasus. That was always something that we were going to do at the beginning of this season. I liked having the Pegasus with the Fleet. I thought it was an interesting vessel to have with us. It was interesting that we kept it around as long as we did. But there was something pure about the fact that the battlestar is the last surviving warship and that we did not have this other even bigger and more powerful aircraft carrier sitting off the port bow, as it were. And also there was practical considerations in that the Pegasus sets were eating up studio space that we didn't really have. We had to build all the Pegasus sets on an adjacent sound stage to our normal main sets and this season we had this, this storyline of mine that we'll be getting to in the very next episode that takes place on a Cylon Basestar. And we needed a place to build the Basestar sets. This is really where TV production considerations come in and can really affect the creative arcs of the show. Even though I was predisposed to get rid of the Pegasus within this storyline because it felt like the right time to do it. The Pegasus should go out with a noble sacrifice and should go in an epic battle that really meant something in the life of the series, and meant something to Lee Adama when it finally went down. The thing that really tipped it over the edge was, well, "What gives us the best bang for the buck in the show? Where do we really want to spend our time?" When you have Pegasus we had to populate it, we had to keep people over there. You were always bouncing back and forth between the two ships. Pegasus was a very limited set, in that we didn't have very much. We had, essentially, this room, which was always the Commander's quarters, we had the CIC in Pegasus, and a stretch of corridor, and a multipurpose room that we turned into the brig and we turned into their ready room, etc. But that was it. So, we didn't have much else to do over on Pegasus and when we did try to do other things it was very, very difficult.
This story. The story of Tigh and Ellen was something we decided very early on that we were gonna do. That Ellen's price that she would pay would be a severe one. That she had collaborated with the Cylons, even though it was- she was in a difficult situation with no real way out, she was trying to do the best she could for her husband. She tried to get him out of a jail, and she did get him out of jail, but then when they pressured her she bent. And she gave them the map. And men died. And Tigh's the leader of the resistance. Ultimately knew that something had to be done about that. And that he was gonna be the man that had to do it.
This storyline. The storyline of Ellen and Tigh, I believe was structured to happen earlier. It was gonna happen in the first hour of the- of "Exodus" and I think it was shot that way, but as we were splitting them into two pieces there was a certain amount of horse trading about, "Ok. Which scene should live in which episode?" And the story of Ellen and Tigh was such a strong and powerful emotional piece that I really felt that it belonged in the second hour, not in the first hour. That it really, gave you somewhere to go.
And now we're out of the- out of the tease.
Act 1
Oh. Ok. Now we're back. Ok. We always knew this was gonna be a heart-wrenching scene. It was a heart-wrenching storyline. It was particularly heart-wrenching as well for us among the cast and the crew and the production team because it meant saying goodbye to Kate Vernon. When Ellen first came aboard Galactica in season one in "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down", none of us really had an idea where we were gonna take that character 'cause it was- she was a force of nature, she was a survivor, she was fun, she was different than anybody else in the Galactica world. She didn't seem to fit in with anybody else. She just wouldn't play by their rules and be the good wife. She had a completely fucked up marriage, nevertheless a marriage that worked, and they were a really interesting duo. And as she continued to be one of the members of our family we all started to fall in love with her and the character. And then we came up with this great storyline for her. Trapped in this position, and then having to die. And, I gotta tell you it's one of the more emotional things we've done on the show, was killing this character and it was heart-wrenching for me to tell Kate. And David and I both called Kate and told her and it was very hard. It was very difficult. It felt like a member of the family was dying and she took it hard and we took it hard and it was hard on everyone. But I have to say that this scene is just magnificent. It's an amazing piece of acting by both these actors. And it moves me every time I see it. And it's really, I think, an interesting place that we've taken this character that came on and was so flighty on some level, and not serious, and silly, and very sexual, and just sorta conniving, and then in a crisis, when- in the hell that was New Caprica this character dies but there's a certain nobility to her death and there's a certain- She goes out in an honorable way, if you think about it. 'Cause she really was trying to do the very best she could. And it's tragic. It's a tragic loss. And the fact that Tigh kills her. Tigh kills her by his own hand. Sitting with her. Looking at her. Hands her the cup. Does she know? Does she know? I think she might know. Tigh says very little in this scene and yet Hogan is giving us so much. I mean, it's just a beautiful piece. It's a beautiful piece in the life of the show. And it's just so tragic and it's so emotionally frought and it just brings an end to something that began literally in one this first scenes in the miniseries. One of the first things you learn ab- in fact, the first thing you learn about Tigh, other than the fact that he drinks, is that he has this crazy wife that people make fun of and that he's very defensive about, and yet that he clearly feels very deeply about. And he feels very deeply about this woman until the very end. And then this- this event in this man's life will reverberate throughout the rest of the season. This is a loss that he doesn't recover from very easily, if ever. And how could he do anything else? He couldn't do anything else and look at himself in the mirror, in a way. And there was a certain code he lived by. A certain code he held his men to. A harsh code. And in the end he had to impose that same harsh code on himself and his wife 'cause he expected his men to follow as well.
The escape plan and the fire and all that, I think I talked about that this last week, was something that came up while we were working through the drafts of exactly what would be the way that the- what would be the cover that would allow them to get off the planet. This little scene, though, was added much later in that it starts to show that Baltar has been in there trying to tell them things that they haven't been listening to. That he tried to tell them, in his own way, that what they were doing on New Caprica was a mistake. That it wasn't working very well and that they should have listened to him all along. "And what would you have us do?" "Just leave. Just leave." And what would they have done? I think that's an interesting question too. If not for the rescue attempt, had things deteriorated to the point where they would actually have listened to Gaius Baltar? Probably not. Because of the fact- because of what D'anna says here. The Cylons are all too aware of the fact that vengeance is something that runs deep in the human spirit and indeed it runs deep in Cylons because they are so much like us. That they really would tell their children and their children's children about the tale of the Cylons and that one day you must go find those people that destroyed our civilization and you must destroy them. And that is one of the more interesting things about, I think, humanity. Is that for all of our more noble qualities- for all the better angels of our nature, there is this part that doesn't forget. That always says, "I was wronged by your father's father's father, or my family was wronged by your father's father's father a million years ago and I'm still holding that grudge today. Because I passed that on and I will pass it on to my children." And that's tragic. And it means that on some level that the conflict can never end.
Ok. Now we're into a whole- this is Felix at his best. Felix is now going to deliver to you, ladies and gentleman, a great deal of information in a lot of visual strokes. And we're gonna- we don't have huge sets to work with. The time constraints are punishing. The budgetary constraints are forced on him are punishing. And he has to give us the exodus, the escape from New Caprica, of thousands of people with battles and all kinds of storylines happening in and around them and it's a challenge. This is why we had Felix do this episode. Because I knew that Felix could really deliver it. Now some of those shots you'll recognize. There was an angle, right there that shot of the two guys running towards the Pyramid goal is actually something we stole in part one and put it over the section where Laura was doing her voiceover and she's talking about insurgents and you didn't re- That shot was actually in the earlier context it was just a generic insurgents shot, and actually it was something we stole from this sequence.
Love all the Raiders flying overhead. They're dealing with a major fire, a conflagrations are setting- are being set off all around the city. And then the insurgents get their weapons and start fighting and try and get to the airfields and it's chaos.
Meanwhile... Now this storyline was different in the original draft. The original draft storyline of the rescue had to do with both battlestars working together. Pegasus and Galactica would come to the rescue. And what was going to happen was that Galactica was gonna appear to be destroyed. They were gonna set off a nuke at the same time that they were being hit by the Cylons and during the flash, during the brilliant bright flash of the nuke going off, Galactica was going to jump away and jump into a very low orbit over New Caprica and try to be a- try to play escort ship and fight off the Cylons as the civilians came above. And as I was working through my draft it didn't- I was having trouble just making it work and tracking it. There's a lot of times you think things work well in story and then you find out that they don't work as well on the page as you thought that they would. And I was also looking for ways to- I wanted to call back the training manuever that we saw all the way back in "Occupation" and make that play into it. So you saw that they were working on the same maneuver. And so as I was working the logic of the scene I started with the training maneuver. And it was like, "Ok. What were those guys training?" They were sending out drones. And what are the drones about? Maybe the drones are simulating battlestars. And then I came up with this thing about, "Ok. It's two- the drones are the decoys making the Cylons think that the two battlestars have arrived." And in the original storyline what happened was after Galactica jumped away, after the fake nuke allowed Galactica to jump away from the Cylons, the Cylons started pounding on Pegasus which was supposed to be fleeing, trying to run away. And that it was trailing coolant, and so on, like a wounded beast and that the Cylons were gonna be smelling blood and going after the wounded battlestar, not realizing that the other battlestar was really still alive. And then eventually what was gonna happen- see now I'll just talk through the blacks 'cause I've had a Scotch.
Act 2
Pegasus really was gonna be destroyed and Lee was gonna make it a suicide mission from that point. And we di- then we talked about various other ways of going at this, and one of the ways of going at it was to then have, "Ok. Which battlestar would they send in on the suicide mission?" And that became, well, it should logically be Pegasus and we had a version where Adama and everyone transferred over to Pegasus and they were aboard Pegasus and while Galactica was guarding the Fleet and then Pegasus got destroyed. But then I had to get all those other people off Pegasus and at a certain point it became more logical and more consistent to go with the version that's in the show now. That Lee would guard the remnants of the Fleet and Galactica would lead the rescue effort on its own. Try to the make the decoy mission work, and then jump down into a low- literally into the atmosphere, launch its Vipers, try to rescue everybody, and then have Lee and Pegasus come to the rescue.
There aren't as many beats in this Leoben-Kara storyline as in the other two s- other three episodes, precisely because this was stretched out over two hours. And we didn't have- there weren't a lot of- we didn't structure in a lot of other story to tell. So that wasn't a storyline that I felt could really be beefed up very well.
I like this little beat of Gar- this is, I love. Zarek runs into Jammer, says, "Protect the President." And Jammer lives. Because, I think there's an expectation as you're watching this that Jammer's gonna buy it because, hey, he was a collaborator. Wore an NCP uniform and would die. And, indeed, he did die, I think, in earlier drafts. Then we decided to keep him alive, and that it was more ironic that he would survive the holocaust and make it back to Galactica. Although his fate is not so secure aboard Galactica, I must say.
There was a Cylon control center that we had structured in, in early drafts, where you'd see the Cylons in some sort of high-tech control room with data streams and things playing on their faces as they dealt with the battle up above. It was gonna be an expensive set. I didn't think it was money well spent at a certain point and these things are wildly over budget, and I just said, "You know what? Screw it. Keep 'em in Colonial One. That's the nerve center of the Cylon occupation. That's where they will stay." And som- I really liked that they were picking up the phones. That they continue to pick up the phones.
Ok. This little bit was something that I came up with in a rewrite. That, ok, Galactica can't just jump into low orbit. It's going to jump into the fucking atmosphere and fall like a rock. And that's- this is just, like, tremendous effects work. There was something really delicious about the idea of the battlestar jumping into the atmosphere. It can't manuever. It can't fly. It wasn't designed for this. It'll be a miracle if it makes it out. But it's just falling. It's just falling, and falling, and falling. And this shot, straight out into the atmosphere. I love this. This is, like, tremendous effects work by Gary Hutzel and his team. And it's just going, going, going, going. And then at the last second it jumps out. Now watch all this. This is, like, visual effects a-go-go. And we better win the fucking Emmy for this, this year, or I'm gonna, I swear to God. The Vipers and that- these little pickups. These are all pickup scenes here in the Viper cockpits here that we shot much later 'cause we didn't know that we- I didn't know how much time we had for this sequence and none of this was really scripted. There's the big passby's. Boom goes the guard tower. And then right in. That's just, like, tremendous work. If I do say so myself. It's just, it's great looking stuff. And then they go and they attack the- and get into the shipyard.
We had some internal questions about the technical feasibility of Galactica jumping into the atmosphere and falling through the- falling like a rock through this. You could argue it either way. It's all s- it's science fiction so who knows what Galactica's made of and the structure integrity, etc., etc. My logic was, "Look. If Galactica can take hit from a nuke, and keep on moving, which we established in the miniseries. If it can take a nuke and still be ok on some level, this is a tough motherfuckin' machine." So that means if it- I can buy that it has enough structural integrity to fall through that atmosphere. It couldn't maneuver. It can't fly. That's not what it's designed to do. But I bought the idea that it could hang together long enough to just fall straight down and then launch its Vipers and then get the hell out of there.
This beat of Anders finding Kara, unco- she's unconscious because, in terms of plot, you don't want him to come in right here and that she's awake and she says, "Hey, I've got my daughter," and "Take her too." So this is a bit of a- this is a bit of manipulation that she's been laying unconscious all this time.
This shot. Now this doesn't quite sell the story point enough 'cause we only had one visual effects shot to sell this with. The idea was after they jumped out to the atmosphere, they jump up above, and they really only jumped into pretty low orbit again, and they're, like, clawing for altitude all the way up.
Again, here's Captain Kelly who- we needed some people to be talking in CIC so it's always better to use familiar faces.
This episode is really one of the biggest and longest and most sustained action sequences that we've done in the life of the series. It really does just- it's a relentless, relentlessly paced show. It's just go, go, go, go, go.
And right here. He knows he can't hold off four. So right away we know we're in trouble. And of course, if we're in trouble, it must be an act-out. 'Cause that is the rule of television.
Act 3
And here we go. I mean, now we got the big battle goin'. You got the smoke and the things and I love the fact that Adama is, like, wiring things himself on his- in his own CIC. We haven't seen Galactica this screwed up in a while, and it was important to me that whatever damage, and I made a point of this, whatever damage we sustain in this we're gonna live with for a while. So those scorch marks and damaged consoles are not goin' away time soon. Eddie with his damaged hand. And coming up here is one of my...
Ok. Now this, I think, is a key moment. This tells me a lot about William Adama. When he knows that the end is here and he really is facing that moment, there's a moment in every person's life, or at least in every character's life, when they face death. Truly face it and truly believe that they're gonna die. How do they react? And when you answer that question you have said something fundamental about that character and who they are and what they're about. And when William Adama's answer, when he felt he's really going to die, what did he do? He stopped. He looked around to the men around him, and he said, "Gentlemen, it's been an honor." And that to me defines that character. You can't redefine the character. You can't have him face that situation and react differently again. He can face a different situation. He can have other people in jeopardy. There's situations in which he would continue to fight. But in that circumstance, when everything fell apart, he just turned to the men around him and said, "It's been an honor," and accepted it. And went out- was going to go out in a quiet way, instead of raging against the light. And I thought that that's an interesting choice. It's not the traditional way that a key- a hero reacts to these circumstances and that's really what attracted me to it. And I think as a writer you fit, especially in a tv show, you have to choose. You have to make choices and live with them. And that's a choice. That is a choice about who Adama is and when you take a character to that place and you answer that question you've now, like, rounded out the definition of that character in a very fundamental way. Kara's answer in a similar situation would not be the same.
And she has to go back for the child. And the chaos- I mean, it's all just this chaos of trying to get out, and who's gonna get out, and what's the time. In the middle of it, Kara has to go back.
And I love this. This feeling of- this is, not quite, but this is sort of Hitler in the bunker. It's the Russians are out there. We're losing. We're not gonna make it. What do we do? If you commit suicide on some level. And they're gonna nuke the city. And that there's a place for Baltar. I mean, that was a key question. How could Baltar escape with them? Well, he's only gonna escape with them if they want him to. And that there was a sense of, yeah, well you could call it loyalty. You could call it recognition of their own shortcomings. Cylons are learning and changing and they have different points of view on things than they did at the beginning. The fact that they're willing for Baltar to come with them now says alot. I love that the Gaeta beat, with the gun.
This is all just, again, tremendous effects work by Gary and his team. These ships in orbit. Not all of them make it. All they have to do is just get up and rise up into the air and jump away. We just made- we had to set the bar low enough so everyone could get over it within the context of the world. It's like, as a writer, designing these things, you have to construct the scenario so that it's filled with jeopardy and it's scary and you don't know if the heroes are gonna make it. And you want them to make it, just by the skin of their teeth, 'cause that's the best drama, but you can't- you don't want to violate the rules that you've setup for the world. And this particular escape felt like it exists within the rules of the universe that we have set up. There's really nothing we have said in the show that means that this scenario could not work.
Now Caprica-Six has already been shot once, so she certainly doesn't want to be shot by Mr. Gaeta. This may be the first time that we've seen Gaeta with a gun. This was also a scene that was- James Callis had a great influence on. One of James' ideas was that he would- as he's challenging Gaeta, it wouldn't just beg for his life, and say, "I have to save the world. Let me go save the world." It was also there was a fatalism to it and a sense of a man at the end of his rope who had done things, said things, experienced things, who was really ready to check out for the first time. And Gaius Baltar, up until this point, has never been ready to check out. He's always blinked. He's always found a way to get away from danger and his own survival, his own self-preservation instinct, always came out on top. But there's a moment here where he's- he walks up to that gun and he wants Gaeta to shoot him. And part of him, I think, really does beg for death. It wants release. That he's been tortured, he's gone through so much that the bullet through his would really end it for him and in many ways would be more mercifull. And I think that was an interesting impulse on James' part. He really saw that part of the character. And James keeps us very honest about Baltar. And he's stunned. He's stunned that Gaeta let him go. That's the great thing about it. There's no victory in that moment. It's not, like, "I've convinced you and I'm gonna go save the world now." It's like, "Holy shit! You didn't shoot me. Holy shit! Really? I'm really gonna live and now I have to go disarm this nuke?"
And the death of the Pegasus. Interesting story. When I came back for, I don't remember where this was. It was before we started shooting the premiere, but I came back to the office at the Universal lot and I went back to the bungalos where my office is, and across the way, literally outside my office window on the opposite building there was a giant banner hanging out the windows that said, "Save the Pegasus." It was like, "What the hell is that?" And I went up there, and turned out that our visual effects team, our in-house visual effects unit, had taken over that floor and they put this big banner outside that nobody else on the lot even knew what the hell it meant, but I could see it, and it was, "Save the Pegasus," and I went up there and met the guys. And they showed me around and it was very funny and it was really endearing but we destroyed the Pegasus anyway. So goodbye Peggy. This is just visual effects a-go-go. And let's just run it into one of the basestars was, like, an early idea. Let's really give her the heroic death. This is all a little bit out of style. This is a little- this shot, particularly, the landing pod swooping by camera with the name Pegasus and we track into the other basestar. So it takes out two basestars in its death throes. It was something Gary Hutzel wanted and advocated and I thought was great. Yeah, it's a little- it's a hyper-real idea. It's not staying pure in our documentary point of view and what would really happen. The fact that the wing flies off and smashes another ship is a complete dramatic conceit. But there's the satisfaction of that too. There's a point in the show where you don't want it to be so "real" that it leaches all the drama and all the satisfaction of it. And the death of the Pegasus you want some drama and you want some satisfaction. You really want it to feel like it was worth it.