Podcast:The Ties That Bind
| "The Ties That Bind" Podcast | ||
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| [[Image:{{{image}}}|200px|The Ties That Bind]] | ||
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| Posted on: | 2008-04-28 | |
| Transcribed by: | DarthRazorback | |
| Verified by: | ||
| Length of Podcast: | 43:36 | |
| Speaker(s) | ||
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Ronald D. Moore | |
| Terry Dresbach | ||
| Comedy Elements | ||
| Scotch: | Woodford Reserve bourbon | |
| Smokes: | ||
| Word of the Week: | ||
| Legal Notice | ||
| All contents are believed to be copyright by the speakers. Contents of this article may not be used under the Creative Commons license. This transcript is intended for nonprofit educational purposes. We believe that this falls under the scope of fair use. If the copyright holder objects to this use, please contact the transcriber(s) or site administrator Joe Beaudoin Jr. To view all the podcasts that have been transcribed, see the podcast project page. | ||
Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 405, this is [the] fifth episode, it is, what is the name of this episode? [laughs]This is Ronald D Moore, I am executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'm here to welcome you to the podcast for... "The Ties That Bind"! [laughs] Ties That Bind. Sorry. I just did the podcast for episode four a moment ago and I lost track. Anyway, this episode, like other episodes in this series that are proven problematic, ultimately I think has worked out pretty well, but I still have some issues with this particular episode, how we— what we're able to finally deliver to the screen. I think you'll find that it's an interesting episode, there's a lot of great moments within it, which I think really, really save it, but I think ultimately the mistake that I— that I probably made in structuring out the story to this episode, is that I didn't quite— I leaned a little bit too much [on] the Cally story, on the story of, Cally and Tyrol's marital problems and her ultimate attempt at suicide and tried to make that the A-line story going throughout. I don't think I quite gave it enough. It's got some interest beats going on, there's a lot of interesting questions of trust and identity and certainly the conflict in Tyrol realizing his true nature, trying to discover what's he all about, you know with the other final four, talking to Tory and how that impacts his marriage and ultimately driving Cally around the bend, was an interesting idea but I think in retrospect I probably should have structured it from the outset as more of a subplot instead of really, truly the A-plot because I don't know that it quite sustains itself.
You can see even as we're— right here from the beginning, this is not the way it was scripted. In the script and all the structures, we opened here in the scene in the quarters on Cally and Tyrol asleep. Early versions of the drafts had Tyrol in bed with her looking down at her while she was sleeping , contemplating his life, flashing back to peaks of their married life together, trying to understand where it all fits in and I think there were even flashes, and we shot them, of him momentarily contemplating killing her, in the same way Tigh had had a moment where he flashed on the notion that he could suddenly shoot Adama in CIC, Tyrol had a moment where he thought about what if he killed Cally and potentially his own son and that freaked him out and drove him out of the room. We dropped that as it went on and I think as I was going through the cut I decided that it wasn't really working for me and I couldn't— there were too many things going on and they weren't quite working, so I opted for— to make it more Cally's story and to really emphasize elements that were already there but to try to make them really carry the weight. Namely that she is under a tremendous amount of stress, she is like any young mother with a young baby, she's up, she's losing lots of sleep, she has a job to maintain, it is a stressful job. Her husband is, to say the least, (laughs) conflicted and having problems of his own, and she's becoming dependent on medication and it is a volatile mix and she's going around the bend a little bit from the very beginning because in order to get to the place where Cally wants to throw herself and her child out that airlock, I started to feel like we hadn't done enough to really justify how crazy a moment that was. So as I went back through the cuts several times, I kept underlining and playing with ways of emphasizing the jagged nature of her existence as the way she was looking through the world as opposed to how everyone else is looking through the world.
In the early drafts Tyrol gets out of bed and goes and finds Tory to go talk and then she wakes up and goes— finds him, and in this version he is just there from the very get-go. This fuzzy camera lens was something that Michael Nankin, the director, brought to the table. I think it was the right instinct on his part to try to give some sort of POV to Cally so we could get inside of her head and that it's literally a drug induced fog, that she's really not in her right mind already and it doesn't take much to get her to a place where she's having weird experiences, and Tyrol is giving her lots of reason to suspect him. This little moment with Tory touching his elbow, is the piece that really sends her over the edge in this scene. I think, in retrospect, we should have made more of it and understood a little bit what Tory was after with Tyrol specifically. I think what comes through in the scene right now is Tory is interested in her own experience, you know, in the way her own senses have changed and her own perceptions of reality have changed since she's realized that she is a Cylon and she is looking at life with certain new eyes and trying to get Tyrol to come there with her. But this sexual undertone to it is unexplained and it isn't quite developed enough. I mean, is she really coming onto him? It is a pretty overt gesture to put her hand on his elbow and stroke it. And she seems to be deliberately seducing or at least luring him in a flirtatious direction, and what's that all about, and we dropped that, unfortunately. We don't really keep playing it and I think that's one of the problems of the episode is that I think there's a lot of good ideas that just aren't quite developed far enough to maintain it through. So as a result, I think the cut now is a little jagged in that you start, there's a little bit of stutter steps where you start in that direction and then you start in another direction and you get hints of something else along the way. Like I said, I don't think this is a terrible episode by any means. I don't mean to overly apologize for it, it is just an episode I struggled with and never felt that it quite came together in the way that I wanted to at the very beginning.
Act 1
And again, the scotch is bourbon, and is Woodford Reserve left over from the last session. This scene, with Laura and Adama, I absolutely love. This is just like a lovely, lovely scene. The Laura and Adama story this season, to me, is just one of the best things of the year and it’s just going to bear watching; just keep your eyes on these two characters. This scene was originally how the episode ended. In early drafts it was a scene where Adama came in with the book and said hey, you know, I brought this book, I thought you might be interested, and she said, just read me the first paragraph because I usually can tell whether or not it is a good book or not. They had some more dialogue and then he sat down and started. And in subsequent versions, I think we pared it back and pared it back where he then just came in at the end and they’d had this sort of ongoing conflict through the show –you know they’d been at each other about this Demetrius mission and this was the way that the episode ended—was this lovely gesture [by] Adama, coming in, despite it all, and sitting and just reading her a mystery. You know, while she went through diloxin, which is our chemotherapy, and it was a beautiful ending to the show, but as I started watching it, I had this sort of impulse to move it way up –to move it to the top of act one—because I kind of wanted to hit you with the emotion of it very early. And I wanted to counterpoint it. I wanted to go from this, to see how close they were and how far they had progressed and what a lovely gesture it was that this man was doing this for her without even being asked to and that she was appreciating it as such. And I really let it play. I let this play as much as we had. They kept trying to cut it back and I wouldn’t and I just let it play for as much footage as we possibly had [chuckles], I jus t let Eddie go with it. And then I wanted to cut from here to the press conference because then it was saying a more complex thing. Instead of oh I know we fight but then he loves her in the end on some level, I wanted to start with the fact that they loved each other, or he loved her on some level, again, that he can’t say. But then, when she gets back on her feet and then they go back to their jobs, and they can still fight and that seemed like a more complex idea – a more interesting idea—that it wasn’t saving it all for the sweet sentimental ending, it was saying that they have lives and they are continuing to go on with their lives. I really like the way it cuts now and to get right back into the business after that lovely little scene.