Podcast:Resurrection Ship, Part I

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode eleven, "Resurrection Ship, Part I". I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and this would be the first podcast of season 2.5, or 2.1, or whatever we're calling it currently.

"Resurrection Ship" is an interesting episode in that it did not begin life as a two-parter. I've often talked on these podcasts of our great difficulty in maintaining our time limitations on the show. We often found ourselves with episodes that are running ridiculously long, longer than anticipated. No matter what our best efforts at holding the line at the script stage and even on the stage, we often get into the cutting room and find episodes that are wildly over length. And this one in particularly was a good twenty minutes long. Twenty minutes is really long. It's a lot to cut out of a show. That's essentially like two full acts, if you think of an act as being roughly like ten minutes in length. And what happened this time around— we ran into a similar problem, some of you might recall, in "Pegasus", the season fin— the finale of season 2.0 or whatever, that we did four months ago. And in that situation we were sort of able to carve out the bare essentials of the show, make something that was exciting and dynamic, and still preserve sort of the longer version of "Pegasus" for video release. This time out, we opted to go a different direction. We really felt that completely cutting— completely eviscerating the show by cutting twenty minutes out was wrong, and this time another option sort of opened up before us.

We realized that actually, this show— this particular episode, "Resurrection Ship", in the original incarnation, lent itself pretty well to simply dividing it in half and creating two full episodes. The act two break of the original "Resurrection Ship" is the end of this particular episode. And this episode ends with the assassination plan. Pic— I almost said "Picard", that was very close— Adama plotting to kill Cain simultaneous with Cain plotting to kill Adama was the act two break in the script, and in the original cut. Because the show lent itself so neatly to simply chopping it in half, we were really able to make two dynamic, interesting episodes about it. Instead of having to cut out all the guts of the things that we love, we were able to preserve everything that we liked, and also because neither episode was quite up to time, we had a chance to actually go back and shoot additional scenes.

This made everybody happy. We were happy, the director was happy, cast, crew, the network; it really worked out to everybody's benefit and we got a lot more bang for the buck, and we were able to go in and really sort of goose up additional scenes that we sort of thought were lacking even back at the script stage, and then really flesh out the whole show.

This particular sequence being one of them. In the original draft and in the original cut of "Resurrection Ship", you never saw this mission of Kara's. Kara simply went off camera in "Pegasus", did this stealth thing, did this recon mission against the Cylon fleet, and then she showed up sort of in the middle of the battle. The way it was structured, the original sort of tease for "Resurrection Ship" was you were sort of in the middle of the would-be dogfight, the fighters are cruising at each other, "what are they gonna do? what are they gonna do?", and suddenly in the middle of it all, "oh my god, Dradis contact, there's a Cylon coming at us, what are we gonna do?", it breaks up the whole fight, the Vipers turn to go after the new intruder, and "oh!", it turns out to be Starbuck. And then you sort of fill in, "oh, she went on the recon mission, you might have forgottten, blah blah blah." It was okay. It would've worked, but it wasn't as good as being able to see the recon mission. In this case, you kind of did want to go see the stealth ship do its thing, for once. So by shooting additional scenes were were then able to go in, shoot this stuff in the cockpit with Kara, and then we had some additional funds available because were creating another whole episode to do some neat visual effects work to really go see the Resurrection Ship.

This whole sequence was with the two groups of Vipers going at each other was something we went— we labored on for a very long time both in script and in visual effects world. There were a lot of different variations of this, of y'know, what would the fighters do when they encountered, how do you track the fighters, one against the other, what would the dynamics of the fight be... there was even a version we considered at the script stage where they actually did shoot at one another, where the Vipers started opening up at each other and actually exchange gunfire at each other for a few moments before Kara's stealth ship came in. But ultimately I kind of felt that once these guys actually pull a trigger, and once these guys actually shoot at each other, there was really no going back from that. That there was no way that they would ever really be able to get along with each other every again in any kind of realistic way, so I was glad we pulled that out.

This whole little bit here, with Lee and Stinger in the cockpit— you'll note that this is one of the last times that you see stinger, unfortunately, in "Resurrection Ship", which is kind of too bad, but the actor wasn't available to us beyond this, so he shot this little piece, and he wasn't available when we wanted to then later go back and do some additional scene work with him. Which is kind of a shame, because the antagonism between he and Lee in particular, and he and Kara, was really nice in "Pegasus".

This little beat was something that we were able to restore, the sort of game of Chicken we were able to restore between Narcho and Kat. We were able to put that back in when we did the big re-cut. It's also sort of an interesting dynamic forming here where we're starting to start to establish that Kat is the next hotshot pilot behind Starbuck, which will play very strongly in subsequent episodes, especially episode— what used to be episode fourteen, and what is now episode fifteen, called "Scar", which will be coming up later this season.

That's a great shot. The vipers chasing each other's tail, Kara coming in, getting the message from Starbuck. All this was sort of in the original draft, this whole little sequence was shot as part of the original movie. You'll notice that there's quite a bit of cockpit stuff. The stealth fighter was really sort of boosted for this episode, they did some additional work on the consoles to really get it moving so that we could really have a full blown fighter to go play all these scenes in.

Back into CIC with Admiral Cain here, and then you have Fisk. This was all part of the original section. Again, I had this idea that originally Kara, when she showed up in the stealth Blackbird, that she would do something that would— specific that would send out a signal. She was gonna flare her engines, she was gonna send out some kind of TECHTemplate:Ref pulse, there was going to be some bit of whole little techno-nonsense that was gonna make her simulate like a Cylon. It all became a lot of mumbo-jumbo, and it was always kind of hard to figure out what exactly she was doing, and it's just better that she simply shows up on DRADIS, and you just kind of get it, y'know? This is— a lot of times where you just over-think what you're trying to accomplish, and the audience kind of follows it regardless, they just kind of get it. It's like, "okay, Apollo sent her a message, she did something, and now they all think that she's a Cylon." You really don't have to get into to all the techno stuff about exactly how and why that sort of thing happened.

There was— now when this was one episode, when "Resurrection Ship" was one episode, it actually opened differently. It didn't open with us coming right back into the cliffhanger moment from "Pegasus". It opened with a completely different sequence that is actually now the beginning of Part II of "Resurrection Ship", which was namely a shot of Lee Adama, which I guess I can't give away, because hey, you haven't seen Part II yet. For those of you who are picking up the podcast on the internet, I guess I won't spoil it for you. But suffice it to say, when you to to "Resurrection Ship, Part II", the opening sequence of "Resurrection Ship, Part II", was once the opening of the sequence of "Resurrection Ship" in toto.

All this sort of live video interactive stuff had to be done very quickly on the fly, as you might imagine. Usually visual effects has time to go out and work up designs on these ships, and work up all the various sort of schematics, and you can play around with what exactly the ships are like and how they behave, and all that. This time we needed live, on-screen video. By and large we tend to avoid what are called burn-ins, where you are matting in a visual effects shot into somebody's screen on Galactica. It's just something that we tend to avoid to give all these sort of— it frees up the camera movement, it makes the— everything feel— have a little more sense of verisimilitude, it's just more real, ultimately. So we do tend to avoid burn-ins. We've done them on occasion, and we tend to do them more often in the Viper cockpits where you don't notice, but when you're walking around CIC in situations like this, to do a burn-in is kind of distracting because the camera has to be locked down, and it kind of limits everything, it becomes another visual effects shot that you have to then count, and account for with your money, and blah blah blah, and it's all kind of a big pain in the ass. But anyway, that just means that the visual effects guys have to have these designs up and running quickly, so there's enough time for the graphic artists to come up with the exact monitor shots that we're using throughout. So we had to lock into the design of the Resurrection Ship very early.

Now this is a later insert, this little piece of business here, where bah-boom— you go in and there's all these naked Sixes hanging out in the resurrection ship, which is such a great act-out. Gary Hutzel, who is our visual effects supervisor, was really tickled on the idea that we were gonna have all these naked Sixes hanging out in the Resurrection Ship, and he needed more time to work that shot up, to make that shot work, so that was something that he actually slipped in after all the footage was shot, that was like a later insert that was shot as a separate piece. You saw sort of some hair there at the left of frame, and that was not Michelle Forbes, that was sort of a photo double.

And we're into the boom-boom-boom, to the percussive, and now we'll go to act one.

Act 1

It occurs to me that I haven't done one of these podcasts in several months, and I'm a little out of practice on doing these. Usually I'm a little bit more in the game, 'cause you've just been sort of in the game longer as you're doing all these podcasts one after the other, and you get into a rhythm. And I haven't done this in a while, so it's kind of interesting to come back into the show; it is sort of like getting back into the season after a long break.

"Resurrection Ship" was shot after our hiatus. We took a hiatus in the middle of summer for about four weeks, to give everybody on the cast and crew a little break, and it was also an opportunity for the writing staff to sort of catch up on the scripts. This particular episode was going through a lot of changes. We went through a lot of sort of permutations of exactly how the storyline was going to resolve itself. We always knew that Cain's fate, which I won't give away, was already something that was in the story outline very early on, so we kind of knew what was going to happen, if not the— exactly how or who was going to responsible for what happens to Cain at the very end, but we kind of knew where that was going.

The biggest changes that happened in the story outline and in the script that we kept wrestling with was sort of an outgrowth of this scene.

Here we've got Laura and Adama and Cain in a political struggle at the very top. And we had notions early on about— that the stru— of making Laura a bigger player just in terms of the politics of what's going on here, that Cain in the original story and original script had a plant to attack the Resurrection fleet, and part of her tactic was to use the civilian fleet as a decoy. That idea is still in this episode, but a key difference was that in the early days, Cain was going to, um— Cain required civilian ships to purposely sort of set themselves up as bait, and she needed Laura to approve it, and it all came down to sort of an idea of whether Laura could trust Cain to ultimately come to the rescue of those civilian ships. And there was a lot more conflict that had sort of been set up in "Pegasus" in the original story, and that then played through in this episode, about Cain versus the civilian fleet. Cain wanted fuel, the civilian fleet went on strike and said, "Screw you, we're not giving it to you. What the— Who the hell are you?" Cain didn't take that very well, she was leaning on Laura, Laura was telling her— was leaning back on her, but ultimately Laura recognized the value of destroying the Resurrection Ship, and was willing to go for it. In a very pragmatic way, she knew that she could not relieve Cain, that even if she told Cain to stand down, or ordered Adama to relieve Cain, or try to arrest her, or anything like that, Laura was pretty sure that the Pegasus crew, given everything they had been through to date, was essentially going to mutiny and that they wouldn't put up with it. She told Adama in one of the drafts, "Well, I mean, if somebody came in an relieved you of Galactica, what would the Galactica crew do?" And y'know, they would mutiny, and they would not put up with Adama being thrown in jail, and it was pretty much the same thing on Pegasus. So in that storyline, it came down to Laura essentially realizing that she was dying very soon, she didn't have very long to live, she had to make sure that they wiped out the Resurrection Ship, because that gave the fleet the best chance of survival, and there was some line I think to the effect of Laura having a faith in that eventually if there's one constant in the universe, it's that what goes around comes around, and that Cain would get hers in the end. It wasn't really a great resolution. It was really great y'know, sort of story direction, and we struggled with it.

We went through several drafts, and I was on what was supposed to be my vacation with my family, and the— we were on a camping trip in the redwoods of Big Sur, California, and I had "Resurrection Ship", I still needed to bring back— when Hiatus was over, I needed to bring back a new version of "Resurrection Ship", and I sat there in the campground with the computer at the picnic table with a long cord running to the engine of the car, charging the battery periodically, and then writing "Resurrection Ship", and the on the way back, on the long trip down I-5, I wrote with the laptop in the front seat of the car while my wife drove. And essentially pounded out a different version of the script with whereby the assassination plot was going to be the big turn.

In the original— I'm sorry, I should have backed up, in the original, after Laura has agreed to let the civilian fleet be used as a decoy, Cain of course broke her word and would not protect the civilian fleet, which had Colonial One in it for some reason that we could never quite figure out. Earlier versions had the Astral Queen, Zarek was involved, blah blah blah. But essentially the fundamentals of the old story was that Cain was not going to protect the civilian fleet, which she said she would, and that was when Adama really sort of had to stand up to her and take her down himself, and then by happenstance some other things occurred aboard with— aboard the Pegasus that allowed us to then have a resolution. But the version of the assassination plot was something that was a much later sort of developing storyline, and when I came back from camping, it simply worked better. It was simply a better choice to play it this way, that Laura— Laura comes up with the idea of killing Cain. And that Adama would be taken aback by it. And I— it's one of the dynamics that I love in the show, is the sort of reversal of the traditional roles, that playing against type of who's the hawk, and who's the dove, and what does "hawk" and "dove" even really mean in this circumstance. These people are out by themselves. They have no government to fall back on except the one in— the government in that room. There's no judiciary, there's no higher authority, there's nobody else, there's just them. They have to decide what to do, how they're gonna survive, if they're gonna survive. And there comes a point when Laura looks at the situation very coldly, and says, "Well, given who this woman is, and the way she's behaving, this can only end one way. And you've got to kill her." And I love the fact that Adama's reaction is just, y'know, "Has the world gone mad? I'm not an assassin."

Notes

1. Template:Note "TECH" is a term used in Star Trek scripts as a placeholder for to-be-determined technobabble.

Re-imagined Series definition: nerve center or "bridge" of a battlestar, see: Combat Information Center

Re-imagined Series definition: "Direction, Range, and Distance", Colonial equivalent of radar or lidar