Podcast:Home, Part II

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Teaser

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. And there's just some, I don't know, I really enjoy the intercut of it and finding the little thematic ties and what it- you're telling the story visually instead of with dialogue and a lot of tv- so much of tv is just talking heads-

Eick: (simultaneously) Talking heads.

RDM: -and people telling you things endlessly. And it's always interesting when you can try to- especially start an episode just visually. To just make it film. To just tell- show it instead of tell it.

Eick: So although there was a lot of shuffling of scenes, basically what we- and so it was quite this scientific but by and large the first half of this episode was all brand new and the second half of the episode picked up where we had left off the original second half of episode six. So it was a bit of a mental jumble and a lot of email, a lot of phone calls, a lot of flurry and we were fortunate that episode six was directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, who had done episode five last year, and this year's episode seven was directed by Jeff Woolnough, who'd done episode ten last year, "The Hand of God". So we're dealing with directors who knew the show and who were pretty intimate with the characters and with the style and the do's and don't's of Battlestar Galactica and that helped the process because we were able to continue to refine the script as we went without running the risk of having the director hopelessly confused. This also- this episode was uniquely difficult, production-wise. Probably the most difficult episode we've done of the series, production-wise, with possible exception of the finale last year, because of the exteriors and because of the number of characters in all the scenes. And when you're working on an eight day schedule and just having to cover the dialogue and the reactions and the different points of view of every scene, well, when you've got two or three people in a room it's one thing. When you've got eight people standing on a hillside, you can shoot all day and get a page of film. So it's it was a real challenge.

RDM: How many days out was this?

Eick: This was six days out, two days in, and that was after a lot of struggle. It was originally seven days out, one day in.

RDM: 'Cause there's a pattern that we do in each episode. Generally our pattern is five days in, three days out. But that's just- for budgetary reasons you look it at that way 'cause days out are generally more expensive than days interior on the stage and so you apportion yourself a given number as a pattern, week in, week out. So to really upend it and go- to go six out and two in really changes a lot of the dynamics of how you're shooting the show, how you're budgeting the show and it's hard. And then add rain to the sequence, which I added.

Eick: (Laughs.) It was out, it was out, it was in-

RDM: It was out, it was in. There was lots of complaining about the rain. Well, can we do the rain? We gotta have these big sprinklers out there and hose them down and it makes the cast miserable and everybody gets miserable. But if they're just tromping through the woods and that's all that there is, it just didn't have the same sense of-

Eick: Well, during the Hercules and Xena days, Rob Tappert used to say women on horseback was the cheapest special effect. (Laughs.)

RDM: (Chuckles.)

Eick: The second cheapest special effect is rain.

RDM: Rain.

Eick: Rain looks great on film, it adds a whole dimension to the scene, you're pulled into the drama in a different way because there's just this inherent desperation to everything because everyone's wet and trying to survive. And- so I'm thrilled we kept it. It was not the episode you would ideally do that.

Act 1

Eick: Now we're watching what is technically a rough cut. This is by and large a locked edit of the episode although we have not done our final-

RDM: Final visual effects or...

Eick: -polish. Watch the-

RDM: Color time. Or any of this.

Eick: Well, I mean, we haven't even like done- On all of these there's at least one watchthrough where you make ten little adjustments and you-

RDM: Oh, that's true.

Eick: You go out on a different beat, you add a closeup, you take out a closeup. And so I think the timing will still be identical, but we'll try not to remark on a scene that-

RDM: Any particular cuts.

Eick: Yeah. (Laughs.)

RDM: This is the best part. This exact time index.

Eick: (Laughs.) So this is more of the mythos that we talked about in the last podcast where a lot of the stuff flies off the cuff and you hope it works and then you backtrack and you go in and you try to make sure that there's actual integrity to it versus-

RDM: And a lot of this stuff on the Cylon- there's a tremendous amount of information, actually, about the Cylons. What they know. What the mythos is of the show that comes up in these two episodes. And a lot of it are things that we've talked about for a couple years and hinted at-

Eick: Never had the chance to do.

RDM: Just never did. Just never really brought out. And this was like a really good opportunity to do that.

This plot. This Baltar-Six plot. It was a late developer in the script. That shot's right out of Scandal, which I love. This whole storyline with Six telling Baltar that he's actually just crazy is something that I think dates back to season one. We were in love with this idea that at some point Six would change the game and tell Baltar, "You know what?"

Eick: "Just kidding."

RDM: "You're right. Just kidding. You're nuts. There's no chip in your head, you moron. You're just having a psychotic break." And that was a really delicious idea and I always wanted to play it. And for some reason it went in and out of a couple of storylines. And then we forgot about it and we were working on this story- on this script and again, we had to flesh this out and make it a full-blown episode on its own and the question came, "Well, what is Baltar doing during all this?" He's not gonna go to Kobol. We knew that right up front. We didn't want to play that. Well, what would be interesting to cut back to him and I don't remember how we- we just said, "What about that old story?"

Eick: Well this was in- there was a version of this in the oldest draft of episode six. Remember, he went into the cage and Six wasn't there but Sharon was there.

RDM: Yeah.

Eick: And we played this whole development where he was seeing Sharon in his head and then Sharon became Number Six and said, "You're just going crazy."

RDM: Oh, right.

Eick: And it the fin- we were finally doing it, but it just didn't it didn't fit, we weren't sure about breaking the law of who Baltar sees in his head. Did we really want to say he starts seeing other Cylons in his head? So we abandoned that and it had been cut but when, again, when we decided to expand what had been one episode into two, we still were in need of some new material to flesh out an entire second episode and it was a perfect opportunity to bring this notion back in because it's hysterical to me. (Chuckles.)

RDM: Yeah, I think this is very funny.

Eick: I love the idea that he's wondering if he's really gone mad.

RDM: I love that he just goes off in such a typical Baltar rant there. Just, James off doing his thing and then suddenly she's like laughing. And this is really closer to how Trish actually looks. Trish wears her hair in a ponytail quite often and wears sweats and this is kinda who she is and it's fun to just suddenly change the character so completely. And then he would be so taken off stride by just how natural she is and that she seems perfectly genuine. She's telling him that he's just crazy. "Wake up and smell the psychosis."

Eick: Yeah, that was one of my favorite lines.

She's- but yeah Trish is like this in life. She's disarmingly approachable.

RDM: Yeah.

Eick: There's that quality to supermodels and it's not stretching it to say that that's what Trish was and is. I mean, she was a big, big deal in the modeling world and is only- that's only in the past tense because she's begun to develop such a talent as an actor now that she's fielding calls from all over the place. But she has this quality to her that it is a- that's a very approachable, very accessible. When you see her she's the first person in the room you gravitate to, not just because she looks like what she looks like, but because there's nothing about her that is that is that quintessential supermodel, get- stay away from me.

RDM: There's nothing offputting about her at all.

Eick: Nothing offputting. And it's great because she's very bright. She's from a farm in Toronto, well, upstate Canada, basically, and she's just very down-home. (Chuckles.) Which you wouldn't necessarily expect.

RDM: The look on James' face. (Laughs.) He conveys fair so well.

Eick: Yeah. Fear and-

RDM: Fear and-

Eick: -confusion-

RDM: -confusion-

Eick: It's really- it's interesting because it takes a lot of guts to place this sort of thing.

RDM: Oh, yeah.

Eick: 'Cause you don't know when you're going too far. I mean, he certainly has a natural metronome inside him that knows how to measure these kinds of rhythms but I would terrified as an actor to do some of what he does.

RDM: He's a very brave actor.

Eick: Yeah.

RDM: He really is very vulnerable and exposes himself and takes a lot of risks with the character.

Eick: Well, I was on the set with him the first day we did- the first day of production on the miniseries was the sex scene with he and Number Six.

RDM: Oh, in the house?

Eick: Yeah. So he had just met this woman-

RDM: Oh my God.

Eick: And he's got to go in, get in bed, get naked, and grind with her... topless because we were shooting her from behind and she was topless. And she's very- she's a very free spirit. She's very comfortable with her body, obviously, but James, I was just- I couldn't believe he didn't have a complete panic attack. I just was so shocked. It's like, looking at him in awe, going, "How are you doing this? Isn't this..." He was having a blast.

RDM: And this scene has one of the few times that we've actually run up against broadcast standards and practices and they slapped us back down. We argued to no avail.

Eick: I'm so proud this little-

RDM: Yeah, this is a great little sequence that I added to it to. The original line that Tyrol has coming up here is-

Eick: "Topography's for pussies."

RDM: Yep. "Topography's for pussies." And then I added in the beat later where Adama says, "Yeah, and Adar was a prick."

Eick: "Was a prick," yeah.

RDM: And they wouldn't let us say either one. Which I guess is gender equal, actually.

Eick: Exactly! (Chuckles.)

RDM: They wouldn't let us say "pricks" or "pussies". And I made a very- I actually called broadcast standards-

Eick: I remember, yeah.

RDM: -and made some whole eloquent pitch about, "Well, it's context and he's not calling someone a pussy. It's not used as an epithet. It's really just a general statement of life and that 'Adar's a prick,' is a joke. It's not harsh. It's not demeaning." And they just, "Oh, that's really interesting. No, you can't say it." It's just really annoying.

Eick: Yeah. It's a very arbitrary set of conditions-

RDM: Oh, it's so arbitrary.

Eick: They don't really give you a guidebook. You just- you get away with stuff you can't believe you got away with-

RDM: And it's cable, so it's like, they really do just make up their own rules.

Eick: Yeah. There's no one in control.

RDM: There's no FCC. It's just, whatever.

Oh. Now this is not a special effect.

Eick: No. This is a high pressure air blaster I was very adamant about us using. All throughout prep I was being told it was impossible because it can cause an embolism. It's blowing so hard into your flesh that it can cause an air bubble and kill you. But, I had to have it and so- and I felt the actors had lived very rich lives and if something were to go wrong they would go out like (unintelligble).

RDM: (Chuckles.) We'd get good press out of it.

Eick: Yeah, they'd die with their boots on. Come on. So it's basically, I'd seen it in a James Bond movie the first time called Moonraker which Roger Moore contraption that's simulating the g-forces that you pull in outer space. Well I didn't know how they did it until we had our prep meeting here I said, "In Moonraker, how does Roger Moore's cheek ripple? How do they do that?" 'Cause that was before CG and our special effects guy said, "Well, it's a high pressure blaster, but they're dangerous." I said, "Well, how dangerous?" (Laughs.) "Define dangerous."

RDM: Dangerous is when I have to sit in front of it. Acceptable risk is when Eddie has to sit in front of it.

Eick: Exactly. Well, of course, all you have to tell Eddie is that it's dangerous. It'll make him do it.

RDM: Yeah, then it's like next he'll want to take one home.

This sequence. This is the campfire sequence, the first night. This is a little trick for those of you aspiring writers out there. There's a lot of characters in this scene. This is the enti- virtually the entire- a big chunk of the entire cast shows up for this sequence. Directors hate this. It's a lot of coverage. It's a lot of giving everybody a line, and it's just a nightmare to shoot. To corral all these actors simultaneously and try to stage it. So what I did here, you'll note that these are all grouped off in little pairings. Everybody's off and there's little couplets and there's little miniscenes where you can isolate just a couple of actors at a time which makes it a lot easier to shoot. Director still complains about it, because he got a little pieces to shoot.

Eick: In the rain.

RDM: And the rain. But, in essence, you've just given them a way to make these sequences doable. When you've got like eight major characters and they've all got lines and they're all talking together, directors just want to throw things at you. 'Cause it just really complicates-

Eick: Well, because on a- and not that they want to throw things at you as a matter of principle. It's because when you've to shoot six or seven pages a day-

RDM: Yeah, when you're moving through this-

Eick: And you've got an eight day schedule, you're only hope of getting out alive is to have tricks like this. And even so we were way over schedule on this episode because it was- you're dealing with the elements, you're dealing with exteriors, you're dealing with loading them up (unintelligble)

RDM: To stay for night too, didn't they?

Eick: Yeah, they stayed for night.

This is James Remar who we introduced in the last podcast but who we were very fortunate to get to play the character Meier.

RDM: And I swear to God, somehow he looks younger than he did in 48 Hrs.. 48 Hrs. and the craggy, really all scarred up.

Eick: "I got shot. That's impossible."

RDM: "I don't believe it. I got shot." (Laughs.)

Eick: Oh yeah. "I don't believe it." He- for a guy who's so tied into a particular role, he loves talking about- a lot of these guys they don't want to talk about the thing that their known for-

RDM: Yeah, that they're famous for.

Eick: And James and I spent a lot of time talking about Walter Hill and talking about what it was like making that movie.

RDM: Yeah?

Eick: Oh yeah. He was very proud of it, as he should be.

Act 2

RDM: We're back on Kobol.

Eick: This is a sequence that had a lot of good stuff but it that had to get lifted for time.

RDM: Yeah, there's a lot of little character beats between everybody's- they're journey through the forest.

Eick: I had this scene where Billy-

RDM: Billy's not here yet.

Eick: Oh, yeah. But there was just (unintelligble)-

RDM: It was all a principal banter.

Eick: Yeah. I mean, Billy at one point alerts to Laura Roslin that he's an atheist.

RDM: Yeah.

Eick: And you go, "Really?" She stops in her tracks.

RDM: "What?"

Eick: "What?"

RDM: Which I loved.

Eick: Yeah.

RDM: I really regret losing that.

Eick: And he just says, "Yeah. For me it's never been about God. It's never been about that. It's that I believe in you and I believe in Commander Adama." Character beats like that get lifted a lot of time because at a certain point you have a proscribed number of minutes you can do your episode and the story has to make sense and you often end up having to cut for plot instead of character just so that you can tell a story.

RDM: I like this little thing of Kara haranguing her about going back to Caprica, and it's like-

Eick: She wanted to look at her.

RDM: "You know what? Can I just find this arrow?"

Eick: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, "What do you want fr-"

RDM: "What do you want from me?"

Eick: (Laughs.)

RDM: "For crying out loud..."

Eick: "Can I get a bike for Christmas? Please, please, please? I want a bike, please. C-" Yeah. But you know what? And this is gonna sound a little odd, maybe, but I think Mary looks so- it's that Dances with Wolves thing. Michael Rymer was talking about this yesterday. You see her out in the wilderness like that and there's just something-

RDM: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Eick: -right about it.

RDM: I think its-

Eick: Mary McDonnell looks great outside with the trees. She just does.

RDM: I love this, this whole thing, too. What's she grabbing?

Eick: Heh.

Uh. Doc Cottle. He's become quite a fixture in the show. Donnelly Rhodes.

RDM: I love the fact that we don't really give him, like, stories. There's not like the "Cottle story".

Eick: No, no, no.

RDM: He's just this character that shows up and you know- you just look forward to him coming into scene and busting somebody's balls.

Eick: Yeah, there's a great- he's got some really great stuff, actually, coming up. Episode eleven, which we're- we just started shooting today, which is the second half of season two. Michael Rymer's directing. Cottle has a scene with Laura Roslin in which she- oh, this may be episode twelve. Or, what's the scene where he says, "If you want to psychoanalyze me, you'll spend your last days psychoanalysing me. It's a really big waste of time."

RDM: I think that's twelve.

Eick: Is that Mark Verheiden? Just a great sense of (unintelligible) that- that he's genuine and he's not doing any of this for effect. This really is him.

RDM: Yeah. It's who he is.

Eick: Although I wish he were a little angrier on that line.

RDM: Yeah, I wish he was a little angrier there. Which is usually not the problem.

Eick: Yeah, exactly.

RDM: It's usually-

Eick: Donnelly is very good with the anger.

So, yeah. This was the plot runner that we were able to make work in episode seven as an extension of what had been setup in six, which is the plan to assassinate Lee. And roping Sharon into this. In an early draft of this, Ron had Helo much more involved. He was basically more- he still is, but in an earlier draft he was in a rock and a hard place to the extent that he knew what Sharon was gonna do, as I recall.

RDM: Yeah.

Eick: And- trying to make th- strike that balance between a guy that you associate with our side of things being so caught up in Sharon that he might actually-

RDM: -help her-

Eick: -yeah, help her, became too much of a stretch to go with a ch- or certainly, if we're gonna go that far with a character, it probably would have doomed Helo to an unseemly demise at some point and it'd been-

RDM: A cell next to Lee.

Eick: Yeah. So, Tamoh, who is such a great actor and is so great for this show, I think we found a way to suggest his culpability or his being seduced by Sharon without going quite that far with it. Although I still think we have in Helo now a character who we have to keep an eye on.

RDM: Yeah, I think he-

Eick: I mean, the (unintelligible)

RDM: He does have conflicted loyalties on some basic level.

Galactica 1980 definition:  Troy attempts to use a phone booth near a gas station prior to their first run-in with Jamie Hamilton (1980: "Galactica Discovers Earth, Part I").

Re-imagined Series definition: in military parlance, directive to continue the attack; otherwise used to refer to journalists (TRS: "Maelstrom")

Re-imagined Series definition: initial skills training; can refer to basic military indoctrination, and arms and ground training (TRS: "Fragged"); and basic flight training (TRS: "Miniseries")