Podcast:Downloaded

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Teaser

Hello and welcome to the podcast for episode 18, "Downloaded". I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. And tonight we're going to talk about one of my favorite episodes, "Downloaded", the Cylon point of view show. And as always, as I mentioned on "Captain's Hand", there will be background noise. You will have to suffer through and NO WHINING. You'll just have to be tough enough to listen to the podcast.

Anyway, the Cylon point-of-view show is something I wanted to do very early in the season. We started talking about it as an early concept of what we wanted to do. I wanted to do an episode that was told almost entirely from the Cylon point of view, to really get inside their society for the first time, see how they operated one-on-one, with each other, without Galactica being involved. Our first attempt at this was something called "The Raid". "The Raid" was going to be a story where there was a satellite— sorry, a space station- there was a space station out there someplace where the Cylons were meeting. They were meeting to discuss their problems with the humans- the human problem was being discussed. What we started talking about was sort of doing a version of the Wannsee Conference, which was the conference in the Second World War where the Nazis got together at a place called Wannsee and they came up with the Final Solution to the problem of the Jews. There was a wonderful HBO movie called Conspiracy which was just- tremendous piece of work which I thought would be an amazing sort of episode for us if we did that. To do sort of the Wannsee Conference with the Cylons coming up with the Final Solution, but the problem was that the Cylons had already come up with the Final Solution. They'd already devastated the human race, committed a massive genocide so that the stakes weren't quite the same. We kept working on "The Raid" and working on it and working on it and it was going to circle around that they're on this space station and then the B story was on Galactica and Galactica was going to be aware of the space station. They were going to try to infiltrate a group onto the space station to raid the archives or the computers or something on that space station and get information about Earth. The idea was that the Cylons, like Sharon had said in "Home", the Cylons knew more about Earth's religion- about the Colonial religion than the Colonials did and may have ideas about where Earth was and they were going to infiltrate that space station while the Wannsee conference, or a version of it, was going on at the same time. Caprica-Six was there and she's starting to have hallucinations about Baltar. And she was going to see the people coming on board and trying to infiltrate the station and ultimately she was going to let them go and they were going to come back to Galactica with more concrete information about Earth.

We struggled with the story. Several drafts went through and they just didn't work. It didn't like it. It didn't like the space station. Didn't like the parameters of the story. The Wannsee Conference didn't hold up for reasons I mentioned a moment ago. We eventually abandoned that story. However, the notion of doing a Cylon point-of-view show was something we were all in love with. The network really liked it too. And so we kept talking about it. And then we decided- we came to this idea about following Caprica-Six, as she's come to be known, and Sharon. And follow them through the process of being downloaded and having them wake up and see what happened to the two of them and then constructing a story that took place in Cylon-occupied Caprica that was all about Caprica-Six and Boomer, the two sort of heroes of the Cylon, as we call them in the show. And see how they would ultimately come together and sort of settle on a different direction for the entire Cylon nation.

This idea here of the birthing chamber... well, I'll get to that later. Here's like one of the great ideas... was the notion that Caprica-Six would be hallucinating Baltar, in the same way that our Baltar hallucinates Caprica-Six. There was a delicious symmetry to that idea. There was something really interesting and something really profound in sort of- this sort of duality of these two characters. That they both had been changed in a fundamental way by their experience with one another. They were both at the epicenter of this massive genocide, of this horrific event that had altered both of their civilizations forever in fundamental ways. And these two were at ground zero of that idea and that it would affect both of them profoundly. That Baltar's guilt and Baltar's psychosis, as it were, was sort of born out of that event. And that it would also affect Six. That it would affect that woman as well. That she was- she's a Cylon, she's a machine, but they're so close to being human and in some ways it's hard to even differentiate them from human beings. That their psychology- the psychology of Caprica-Six would also be altered by that event especially since one of the sort of fundamentals of who and what she is was her belief in God, her belief in a loving God and her desire to be loved and what did it mean to that character to have participated in the destruction of all these innocent people. To have used the man that she professed to love in such a profound way. That she had used her love for him and his growing infatuation, or possibly love for her, was used and twisted to commit this horrific event. How would that affect that character? And then that Sharon, when Sharon who thought she was a human all along, the ultimate sleeper agent came to wake up back on Cylon-occupied Caprica... How would she adjust? Would she just become a regular Cylon like all the others or would she struggle with it? How would she fight against it? Could she ever integrate herself back into Cylon society? And it was a very provocative, very interesting idea. That's really the roots of this episode.

And there's the other Sharon and then she just totally loses it. She completely flips out, which I think is great. (Laughs) She just starts screaming. Grace- and I have to say right up front, Grace and Tricia and James do such a good job in this episode. I mean they really- each of them are playing nuances of nuances of these characters. James is playing a hallucination for the first time, where he's been on the other side of that for so long. Trish is playing this complex Six that is really a character that we have not seen, in truth, since the miniseries and now she's back and how does she grapple with all that. And Sharon, y'know Grace is playing the character that we haven't seen since "Resistance". And they're making them all very distinct and individual and it's an amazing performance from all three of them. I can't say enough about the cast, as usual.