Podcast:Hero
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, here to welcome you to the podcast for what we affectionately call episode seven, "Hero". And there won't be any Scotch today. It's a little too early in the day, even for a hardcore like me. The smokes are Shermans. Trying a little somethin' different. So actually my wife reccomended from back in her smoking days. She no longer embi- partakes of the tobacco leaf. But I do on occasion. I don't smoke nearly as much as all of you think I do.
Anyway. Episode seven, "Hero". This one was a little bit more of a one-off than what we typically do. A little bit more of a single, self contained story carrying us through the whole episode. We felt at the beginning of the season we had arced out the entire New Caprica storyline that took us through to "Exodus, Part II" and then into "Collaborators", and then we had this two-part episode that developed that was about the infected baseship and the consequences of that, culminating in the decision of whether or not the people on Galactica were going to use the biological weapon. And then after that we wanted to do a series of a little bit more contained episodes that weren't quite as serialized, didn't have as many long-running storylines as we had been playing for a while. And so one of the first ones that came up was this story, "Hero". This is written by David Eick, my producing partner. And the origins of this, though, actually go back a little bit further than this season. This was initially a concept that was pitched during the second season by David Weddle. I believe this is his idea. It might have been him and his partner, right? I remember David mentioning it in the room, had this idea that they would discover something about Adama. That Adama would- had been holding a secret that essentially he was holding the idea that- holding secret the idea that he had participating in a black op mission before the Cylon attack. And that he would secretly blame himself, on some level, for helping to prompt the Cylon attack on the Colonies itself. Which is a pretty big idea, and it took a lot of discussion. We were like, "Ok. What does that mean in concrete terms?" I liked the idea that there were black ops operations going on amid the Colonials before the Cylon attack. After all, forty y- our backstory is that there's forty years between the last Cylon- the first Cylon War and the attack on the Colonies. And it seemed plausible that the Colonial Fleet had been doing something during that whole time and it was curious to see what was going on the other side of the Armistice Line.
This little opening sequence here with Laura Roslin and the picture, which we just went past in Colonial One, like I've said before, I want that picture for my own. That'll have a point of pride in my own home someday of Baltar. And I think David knew that, and I think that's why he wrote in that little piece about putting Baltar's picture over the toilet. I don't think it was so much a slam against James and the- or the character as it was tweaking me that my coveted picture was going above the toilet.
Anyway. This sequence- this concept, that Adama was holding a secret all these t- all this time was a pretty interesting and provocative one within the writing staff, and I liked it, but we d- it didn't seem to find a place in the second season and we- it kicked around in our list of suggested stories as we were approaching the seventh- the third season, getting way ahead of myself now. So for the seventh episode David was going to write one and we wanted it to be a stand- a somewhat standalone episode that wouldn't require too much heavy lifting on the part of the audience in terms of backstory and what have you. So this seemed like a good opportunity to get into that and- I think it- I'm trying to remember where the idea of a prisonser having escaped came up. I think it came up in the room but I could be wrong. David Eick might have had that idea on his own, but I think it was something that came out of story discussion about what would prompt this secret of Adama's- prompt the revelation of the secret of Adama's. After all, he'd been holding onto this secret for a while. And there was something interesting about saying, "Ok. When the Cylon attack happened during the Colonies, was there a part of Adama that was starting to go, 'Did we bring this on somehow?' Did something that he was personally involved with have the potential to have brought on the attack?"
Now. To be fair, we never really wanted to say that Adama was directly responsible for the attack on the colonies. And indeed the episode doesn't really say that. The question is, "Does he feel responsible? Does, in his mind, does he still harbor some lingering doubt that perhaps the events that he were involved with had some unexpected blowback that resulted in the attack on the Colonies?" But I wanted to make it clear, and I think it was important to all of us that it not really be so simple. That one black ops recon mission behind Cylon lines could've really brought about the cataclysm. That clearly the Cylons had been working on it for a very, very long time. They had agents in place. They had sleeper cells, etc., etc. They were working Baltar for years. So even though Adama felt like he's- his hands weren't entirely clean and we could believe that as a character he felt personally responsible, the show goes out of its way to make sure that that direct connection is never actually made.
This sequence was cut down quite a bit. There was a longer section here. This is the Cylon Raider aboard Galactica now. This had a little more bells and whistles attached to it. There was more of a protocols being barked about. Going through the various steps that they took to safeguard the ship, and so on. The chase was actually even longer. The chase in space, of Starbuck and Kat escorting the Raider in. Or getting the Raider to the Galactica. It's maneuverings and all that. There was a longer VFX sequence that ultimately was a little bit confusing in terms of where they were, spatially, in regards to Galactica.