Podcast:The Eye of Jupiter
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Tease
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This is Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, here to welcome you to the podcast for what we call episode ten, "Eye of Jupiter". I am coming to you this week from New York City, where I am in town for less than two days on non-Galactica related business. And I will be sending this shortly over to the offices at Scifi Channel, here in New York, which I have actually never set foot on. I think I have been banned from the New York offices. No, I'm just kidding.
"Eye of Jupiter" was originally called "Eye of Zeus" for a very long time in draft form and into script. We changed the name, ultimately, for not very deep reasons. Just that there was something about "Eye of Zeus" that seemed a bit too mystical and a little bit too over-the-top, even for us. And that's saying somethin'. But we didn't want to- the story still was what the story was, and we didn't really wanna lose that aspect of what the episode was and the slide to call it Jupiter instead of Zeus was an arbitrary one, except it, somehow, for subject reasons that are hard to explain, it sounded a little less hokey. Some could argue it's more hokey, but it was also a nice way to broaden the pantheon, as it were, ha ha ha, of the gods and their references in the Galactica universe and the mythos, in that Zeus being the Greek name for the father of the gods, and Jupiter being the later Roman version of the same idea. And it was nice to have both names- both proper names present in the Galactica world. I believe we've used other Roman names, from time to time, as well, although of course right off the top of my head I can't remember which ones they were, but I think we have established that.
The algae planet storyline was something we talked a lot about in the writers' room and how it was gonna work into the plot. We had always wanted this to be the focal point that. That this was going to be the place where the two storylines ultimately collided. That the Galactica universe- I'm sorry, the Galactica storyline would collide with the Cylon baseship storyline that we'd been following throughout these opening episodes and this was the place that they both came for different reasons. In early versions of the outline were pretty to where we eventually ended up. Except for the process of discovering the temple of the five and then the- getting to the Eye of Jupiter were slightly different in that originally they were- the people that were working on the algae collection were down here on the planet and I think Cally was going to trip over or somehow find a human bone fragment in the dirt. That in turn led them to start doing radar ground imaging of what was beneath the surface of- beneath the surface and that led to the discover that there was a whole underground city that had been buried over time, and then they were gonna start looking more in earnest. And it was right about that point when the Cylons were gonna show up and Adama was going to still have a meeting with the Cylons where they told him what they were- they said, "Ok, we know you've got it, and we want it." And he basically faked his way through it and bluffed them into, "Fuck you, we're not giving it to you," and then it was like, "Ok, find this thing. What is it?" And then at that point Tyrol and Cally and company were roaming around and they were gonna literally fall through the roof on a structure that would end up in the temple.
A lot of things got shifted in the story. Not so much for story reasons but for production reasons. One of them was just- this was a very expensive show to do, as always. We're out on location a great deal and we couldn't afford to build a lot of ruins and falling through, and there was also something - somebody pointed out, legitimately so, that we had done the gag with finding a human skull in, way back, in- on Kobol, with Baltar. And that them finding it again just felt repetitve. So we went for something a little different. The Tyrol finding the artifact- finding the temple here in the tease is more akin to a Close Encounters moment, is what we kept calling it.