Podcast:The Farm
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Hello. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and I'd like to welcome you to the podcast of episode five of season two, "The Farm". This was one of the episodes, as I mentioned last week, that was initially pitched in the initial round of stories that we would be doing as part of the larger arc carrying over from season one. This was going to be the first time that the "A" story, which is the primary story of any episode, would be set on Caprica. And that they would be following Kara Thrace with the band of human resistance fighters that were set up in episode four. And the initial pitch and the initial story outline was that Kara would be on a mission with some of these resistance fighters as they were hunting and trying to find an airbase that they could attack and potentially get a Heavy Raider to escape with. And that she would be ambushed and all the other people, all the other humans, would be killed and Kara would wake up in a Cylon facility. And we would introduce a new Cylon at that point. And that they would be doing fertility and experimental procedures on Kara. And she would be held in some sort of mengalo(?)-like setting and it was like a farm. A reproductive farm where they were holding other female prisoners there, human female prisoners there, as well. And that then Kara would break out and fight back and free the other humans, etc. That is still essentially the story of this episode. It hasn't changed radically, as far as the "A" story goes, except for a key conceptual change was that instead of playing that Kara knows from the beginning that she's being held in a Cylon facility, she would be less sure. It wouldn't be clear. We would play the ambiguity of her situation with the audience from the get-go, throughout the episode.
This episode, in all honesty, was probably the most convtroversial episode of the season second only, maybe, to "Valley of Darkness" for much the same reasons. This episode is dark. This is a dark tale. This is a dark show many times. And the controversy on this show was, "How dark is too dark? How much is too much? Will this episode, and epsidoes like it, scare our audience away?" Specifically, actually, interesting enough, the discussion became, "Will it scare female audience away?" Marketing and demographics and research and all that is part of television and it's something that writer/producers have to deal with all the time. The question is conceptual. What is the show? Who's the show appealing to? And who watches it more than others. Our research shows that more men than women watch the show. Which is to be expected. That's typical in the scifi genre. The question is, "How do you get more female viewers?" And you start getting into a certain amount of wrestling in terms of, well, how to define what appeals to female viewers. How to define what appeals to male viewers. What is- the question that I put to you, and you can answer it any way that you see fit, 'cause you're the audience, is this show a good show for women? This show in particular. Here is a female character, heroine, who's really put- we put the screws to all through the episode. Deals with a lot of fertility issues, reproductive issues, some of which may be potentially uncomfortable or distasteful. The question is, "Does that drive female audiences away or does it bring them to the party?" In any case, regardless of the controversies, this is the episode that we made and fought for and quite strongly believe it, frankly.
This opening sequence here with Kara and Anders is really the only remnant of the relationship that we have. At the start of the season we had grander plans. We talked about, just in conceptual terms, that Kara would meet up with someone from the resistance, become heavily involved, fall in love, and then be- have that person torn away from her at the end of the arc. Either killed or she would be parted from him. As we worked through the stories what we came to find was that we didn't have a lot of time. We had all these other stories that were also demanding viewership, demanding story time, and the Caprica story- we just couldn't keep going back to enough to really fully develop the relationship between Anders and Kara. So what we decided to do was to really kind of do it in the cut, in between the two episodes something happens. And it doesn't take a lot, I think, to fill in those blanks. In "Resistance", last week, you saw Kara and Anders in the game of Pyramid out on the court. You could see the obvious attractions, sexual tension. It goes without saying that these two are going to have some kind of relationship and given who Kara Thrace is and the way she- and my kids are here, as you can tell. Given the kind of person that Kara Thrace is, it seemed only natural that she would, of course, fall into bed with him because that's what Kara Thrace does. And Kara sleeps who she feels like sleeping with and makes no apologies for it and so they had a relationship.
This sequence I particularly like because it's not just an action oh shoot-em up sequence. It's like- director did a beautiful job with this. What's happening? What's going on with Kara? Something's wrong. And I like it because it's one of the few times that I've personally seen, in television at least and mostly and some film, where you really get that sense of being shot. "Oh my God, I've been shot." Now you- our quicker viewers there might notice that the wound jumped from left to right. That was something we knew in the editing room. It was a choice that the editor made and I- we went with. It's not a mistake. It's part of just the surrealness of what's going on. It's Kara's mind coming unmoored from its from its moorings. Unmoored from its moorings, as she goes under. And I liked the telling this story from her point of view that she takes one bullet and, man, out she goes. It's not, again I've talked about this before, but when we get hurt in this series the hurts stick. The hurts really do hurt and we don't just bounce back from them. And think that that's- it's important that a gunshot wound be treated like a gunshot wound. And I will come back for act one.