Podcast:Dirty Hands

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and we're here to talk about what we call episode fifteen in our, skewed way of numbering these things, "Dirty Hands". This is another of the standalone pieces that I talked about on the last podcast. As I've talked about in the previous podcasts, each season, or the last two seasons, certainly, we've done a string of standalones in the second half of the season, that were of varying degrees of quality. And I think they weren't our strongest episodes.

This episode I like, and I'm actually quite fond of, but I am virtually certain that not every member of the audience is going to agree. I think that this particular episode is more overtly political than most of our episodes are, and on some level this is the polemic that I say this show would really- never is. So it violates one of the fundamental ideas of the show on that level. That said, I'm pretty much in support of what the ideas behind this episode and felt that I could get behind them, and wanted to strongly say some things that were in this episode, so we did it. So there.

This began life in a very different way than what we ultimately ended up doing. This episode actually was a Dualla episode in the initial story break. This was a show that, again, was going to deal with the Sagittarons. In fact, I believe that this episode and the "day in the life" episode were- used to be in- we used to have them out of order to the way they are now. I think it used- the original structure was going to be He- the "Helo" episode, episode thirteen, then this episode, then the "day in the life" episode. But this episode, the scri- we had such trouble with the story and we totally reinvented the story at one point, that we swapped the air order and moved this down one because "A Day in the Life" was closer to being ready than this one was. And initially the thought was that the Sagittarion problem that was setup in the "Helo" episode, in "The Woman King", about the Sagittarons and how they were an outsider faction within the Fleet and that of the Twelve Colonies the Sagittarons were the ones that were on the outs everybody. We were gonna continue that storyline into this episode, which was going to be about- which was going to open with two civilian ships in the Fleet having an argument over the [[wireless] and ultimately one of them fi- actually firing on the other and having civilian casualties and that prompting a crisis with the Quorum and Laura and Galactica and everyone else. And essentially it was gonna continue this thought that the Sagittarons- that old divisions within the Colonies were starting to reemerge after the New Caprica experience and that the old divisions were starting to make themselves felt again. And that if there was one thing that the- that eleven of the Colonies could agree on, it was that none of them liked the Sagittarons. And that they were gonna split them up. That they, essentially, were gonna be dispersed throughout the Fleet, that they were becoming extremists, that they were withholding food from some of the other ships, and they had their own culture and their own ways of doing things, and that they were essentially a world unto themselves, and the rest of the Colonies disliked them intensely and were gonna split them up, and you got into this whole thing about Dualla as the Sagittaron member of the ship, of our crew that we're most familiar with, and her defense of them and she was gonna be tasked to go down and deal with them as a liaison officer and at first she was essentially the mouthpiece of the government and the ma- the- seen as a traitor by her own people, and then eventually real- have more of a tug back towards her racial identity and her- or her tribal identity, depending on how you look at it. And she was going to side with them openly in almost a mutiny against Adama by the end of it, and that by the end of the episode Adama would have given them- have realized the error of their ways and have given the Sagittarons their own ship and brought the Children of Israel back to one safe vessel that they could call their own. There were interesting things about the story in concept, but we just never were able to make it work. It was a very difficult script. Anne Cofell, who's the writer, struggled with it a lot. We struggled with the break. It was just a big chunk to chew off. There were a lot of different competing ideas within that concept and within that storyline. Not the least of which was our continuing struggle to make the Sagittaron plotline work. And if there was one big misstep that I think we made in the third season was committing a lot of time and resources in the writers' room and in script into this idea of developing the whole Sagittarons into a viable storyline because we were convinced, I was convinced, that it was going to play a huge part in the finale in the trial of Gaius Baltar. And so as a consequence we had this idea of this- subgroup and we were gonna follow them and delineate them and talk about them as a culture. I'll come back after the teaser. 5:29

Act 1

Act one. As I was saying before, we had plans to do this whole thing with the Sagittarons, but it fell apart. It just is- wasn't working. And the first step on that road was this episode. 'Cause we couldn't make this story work, and I eventually just punted and said, "You know what? Screw this. You gotta throw it-" At some point you realize you're banging your head against a wall and there's fundamental reasons why a story won't work. It's not just about execution. It's not about structure. You have a very fundamental problem. This story won't work. So we regrouped. I switched the order of the episodes and said, "Ok. We're gonna take a different approach to this show." (Coughs.)

There were issues of class that were in the original concept. That were certain Colonies were considered above other Colonies. That were certain Colonies that were more equal than others, to put it that way. I liked that idea a lot. I wanted to play that. And so we went further into the idea of class as a defining characteristic of this episode, and decided it was about labor, and it was ab- 'Cause some of the issues that were involved in the original story with the Sagittarons and the work they did, and the work they didn't do, had to do with labor, and had to do with the way that the Fleet operated. And one of the things I always liked about the show, about the series, is when we get into this idea of how the system of government works, how the society functions, reminding the audience of the uniqueness of the Galactica and the Rag Tag Fleet's experience. So I was- eager to get back into that and do it in a little more overt way. So we decided that this episode is about labor. This episode is about class. This episode is about the need for workers to have unions. This episode is about class struggle and I got behind that. I was like, "OK. Let's do that episode." And once we had shifted into doing a different episode, that was about the point where we brought Jane Espensen in, who had done "The Passage" for us earlier, and who is a big fan of the show, and we really like her work, and asked Jane to take a pass at the script.

This episode, I think, opens up the world of the Fleet in a way that none of the episodes really have. How does the Fleet operate? Well, there's a tylium ship out there. There's a refinery ship out there. And they have their own world, their own reality, their own- they have their own narrative of what's happened in the Fleet that is separate from what has happened aboard Galactica. The Gala- the point of view of the audience is primarily with the people on Galactica and showing how- showing their struggles as the pilots and the military, but there's also this other group that's out there in- all these other ships and what's going on with them, and the idea that over on the tylium ship they're having a very different experience than on Galactica, I thought, was a really interesting and charged idea. And then this idea of the book that was just mentioned here, with Baltar. We were simultaneously also talking about, "What is Baltar doing in jail?"

Re-imagined Series definition: Colonial equivalent of radio

Re-imagined Series definition: mineral that can be refined to a powerful fuel, see: tylium

Original Series definition: a highly combustible fuel (see: tylium) (TOS: "Fire in Space")