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RDM: Hello again. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica.
Eick: And I'm David Eick. I also work the show a little bit from time to time.
RDM: (Chuckles.) And we're here to do the podcast commentary for episode seven, "Home, Part II". As we said last week, this was originally all one episode. And as development went on we just realized that there was just way too much story to try to tell this entire tale inside of one hour so this got split up into two piece.
We're still in the recaps from last week. A side note is these recaps are endlessly worked over (laughs) in the editing process, back and forth.
Eick: Yeah.
RDM: There's endless discussions from everybody. From the editors and us to the studio and the network of exactly which elements should be reprised from last week and it's all having to do with, ok, new viewers to the show who may not understand the storyline versus people who just need to be refreshed and brought up to date. And so these little sequences- actually as I'm watching this I'm realizing that's- I don't even remember which pieces are in the recap anymore because I get so bored with the process of arguing about the recap that at as certain point I just ignore it and it's like, ok, the recap will tell people something.
Eick: Yeah. They'll bring something to the table.
RDM: They'll bring something.
Eick: This is also- this episode is in the category of "be careful what you wish for" in a way, 'cause as Ron was saying we learned early enough that we were able to do something about it the episode was too long or had too much story to tell in one episode, but what it really had was about an episode and a half. And so we were able to come up with a strategy, pitch it to the network, get the network to approve us, extending this to a two-parter, which was, in its own way a victory because it didn't have the kind of definitive plot engine that you would have in last year's episodes four and five to make that case. And they finally said yes. And Ron and I were in Vancouver, "Yeah," high-fiving each other, slamming beers, whatever we were doing to celebrate having gotten this approval, but of course we were about to embark on the first day of prep on episode six and realized we had to basically come up with half an epsiode to flesh out episode seven that would also have a backwards domino effect into episode six. So by the time we were sitting at dinner that night, basically rebreaking these two episodes and wondering how they were gonna get accompli- how they were gonna get written before we actually had to shoot them, it was one of those, "Uh oh. What did we just step in." And- so.
But this, I remember this scene showed up. This sce- this teaser showed up a few days later. Ron had gone back to LA. I was still in Vancouver and I was so thrilled with it because it was exactly what you want to start an episode like this with. It was a very changeup approach, rhythmically. It was a series of scenes- the cut is really pretty faithful to how it was written. In which we're seeing disparate pieces of activity and business that are, in a sort of magical way, linking these two very far away places. And I just thought it was really powerful and a way of starting an episode that even if you hadn't seen episode six, there's still this compelling mystery being unraveled to you that would make you interested in episode seven.
RDM: And I actually enjoy writing these kinds of sequences. This is reminicent of, in some ways, of the beginning of "Kobol's Last Gleaming".
Eick: Yeah.
RDM: Where we started with a lot of silent, just visual shots of all the different story elements that were happening in that episode. This is a little simpler in that you're going back and forth between two groups of people in- one group going somewhere, the other group looking for them.