Podcast:A Measure of Salvation

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica and I would like to welcome you to the podcast for episode six, "A Measure of Salvation". I'm at home, for those of you who monitor such things. And I'll turn down the volume here a little bit. And I've returned from my sojourn to Cornell. The- sorry, I'm just organizing everything here a little bit. The Scotch is Macallan 12 and the smokes are American Spirit Lights, both of which were provided to me. A very generous gift from a student at Cornell named Josh, who came up and gave me both after the end of the lecture that I gave at the Willard Straight Hall at Cornell last week. Which is very kind. I like to see that people are still supporting vice in all forms, evil and bad for you, in the Ivy League. So, without further ado, here we go into "Measure of Salvation".

We're still in the recap here. This is obviously the second part of a two-parter. The events that were setup for us in "Torn" now come to play into this episode. We broke these two episodes simultaneously in the room. Broke them both out as a piece. We had this concept of the infected baseship that we all were really intrigued with and wanted to play and it was question of where does that story take you. And very quickly, in the writers room, came this idea. That well, once a baseship was infected with a virus, that the Cylons couldn't- were defenseless against and Galactica and its crew came upon that baseship, wouldn't that be a biological weapon? And that was such an intriguing idea for us that we quickly glommed onto the notion of, "Let's do a whole episode like that."

Here we are back in the show. Or the top of the show. Adama is in the Raptor. Oh, I'm sorry. I jumped ahead of myself. This used to open with Adama and Sharon in a Raptor. There was a scene that was cut here that was scripted and shot that showed Adama himself sitting in a Raptor with Sharon, guarded by a whole phalax of Vipers surrounding him, because the idea being that Adama himself wanted to get some eyeballs on what they were dealing with out there. So there was a short scene where Sharon and Adama basically scoped out the exterior of the baseship, saw all the floating dead Raiders in the air and he asked her what she thought. She gave some theories. And then it was after that that he gave the go-ahead to do it. 'Cause one of the things that we stumbled on, or kept stumbling on, was the justification for them going inside the baseship and it was such a big thing. And what are the dangers? And couldn't it be a trap? And so on, and so forth. And the idea was, "Well, maybe if Adama looks at it himself it'd kinda help justify it." But when we got in the cut, the show was long, as always. It was one of the first things to go. 'Cause you just jump right into it and get past it. That shot right there where there Raptor's pushing through the Raiders, the dead Raiders, was suggested by Gary Hutzel. I don't believe that it was actually scripted, but Gary and his crack VFX team came up with this idea of the Raptor physically moving through the sea of dead Raiders to get into the baseship. And as soon as I saw the previz on it, the previsualization, which are like crude animatics that VFX provides to us, I fell in love with the idea and I was like, "Oh, more, more, more. Let's have more of that." And I want to see him really pushing through it and getting into- inside the basestar, 'cause it was such a cool idea. These scenes- the intercut between Galactica and the baseship were cut several different ways and with different speeds of how fast to get them through the corridors, at what point do they see the dead Cylons. There's a bit of a discontinuity between this sequence and the sequence that we saw in part one in that the halls were strewn with dead bodies when Baltar came aboard and the hallways are a bit emptier here. And we avoided that by simply getting getting them to- avoided the discontinuity really slapping you by getting them to the control room a little bit faster. Because we wanted to play the action in the control room. We didn't want to play it out in the corridors what was going on.

This whole bit of business with Lee leading the Marine team, in some ways is a holdover for an idea that I think I alluded to last week. That we had this idea, as we were dealing with "Fat Lee", as it were, and what we're gonna do with "Fat Lee", and one of the notions that came up was that "Fat Lee" would rededicated himself to being much more of a Spartan, in the truest sense of the word. He and Dualla were going to become Marines. He was going to leave flight- leading the pilots altogether and he and Dualla were gonna go into basic training as Marines and eventually become more ground soldiers to give him a different arc and a different goal for the second- for this season. And that didn't really come to pass. We did play- we scripted various scenes of putting them in training and getting going on that road, but they just kept getting squeezed out by other ideas, or they didn't play right, or for whatever reason we never really cracked that, and ultimately abandoned it altogether as a story. But one of the results was this story still maintains the idea that Lee is leading the Marine team. And that's really why he's there. It was scripted as part of his evolution into a Marine officer. He was gonna be leading squads and platoons like this a little bit more often. And that's why he's here to begin with.

There was more banter and things going on in this sequence, that we did cut out, with Hotdog and some of the other Marines reacting to the dead Cylons a little bit more. Just character for them, going back and forth. All that got dropped along the way.

Now this tease-out where they realize that they're surrounded by infected Cylons and there's a disease here and, "Oh my God. We've walked into a sick ship." I think- You could mak- There's a valid criticism in that you could say that, "Well they did see all the dead Raiders from the outside. There's clearly something wrong with this baseship. And that maybe they should have thought about that before they went aboard." But I- I get pa- and I think that's a valid- you could certainly make that argument. I mean, my counter-argument to that is there's never been a Cylon disease, there's never any- Sharon's never encountered one. They've never gotten sick. These guys don't get head-colds, for God's sakes. It's like- they don't have the same problems like we do, so the notion of a disease wiping out a whole Cylon baseship wasn't something that any of them were thinking about going into this episode.

The beacon, you'll note, has moved into the control c- control room at this point. I'm not even sure if that's correct. We might have stolen that shot of the beacon from the prior episode, because I don't believe we had it in the control room for this sequence. Oh, that's right. In fact, there was another sequence where they actually went and got the beacon and brought it aboard Galactica. Forgive me. On some level I'm seeing this episode after several weeks of not seeing it. David Eick took over some of the later post-production work on this episode and consequently I haven't sat down and actually looked at this episode in a little while, so I'm seeing it with fresh eyes and there'll be points in this commentary where I'm going to refer to things that I either think are still in the show and may be not and vice versa. You'll see- yeah. See that? That shot right there that you saw of the flashlight beam going across the beacon was definitely stolen from the prior episode. Because the beacon was not, in fact, in the control room when we shot this whole piece. The idea was that the beacon was elsewhere in the ship, still down where we last saw it in the Hybrid chamber, and they were gonna go down and get it in a subsequent sequence. But I believe that was all cut. We don't have that sequence in the show any longer.

But one of the contiuing confusion points was the whole notion of the beacon as the source of the virus, so we felt it was important that you see it again, and that you see it in that moment when they're talking about it and when we're dealing with the origins of the virus.

Act 1

Ok. Now we're dealing with the consequences. Ok, we've got guys over there that've been exposed to an infectious disease. How do we deal with it? We didn't really wanna see all the procedures, but we definitely wanted to say there were procedures and this sequence is justify bringing these people back aboard the ship and how they deal with it and the fact that there would be a quarantine and that noone quite knows what's- what they're dealing with here.

It's good to see Doc Cottle back with us, as always. It's always odd, I think I've said this before. It's always odd to see Cottle, to me, in his uniform 'cause I always think Cottle just belongs in that white coat.

Ah, yes. See, now every- they're coming back to Galactica already, but there was an entire sequence where they- after Sharon sussed out where the beacon was and that it was the source of the ra- of the virus, what they did is they went back down to that Hybrid chamber, they wrapped the beacon in a radiation blanket, and then they put it on a Raptor and brought it back to Galactica. The beacon was then aboard Galactica for the balance of this show. Cottle examined it. He tracked down the virus to something specific on the beacon, and that helped explain where the beacon came from, how the virus got aboard, etc., etc. The problem became a structural one late in the show in that what we used to do was there was this idea in the plot at the end where they were going to push the beacon out into space and shoot it towards the Cylon fleet. And the Cylons were gonna see it and go, "Oh my God, that's the beacon, get the hell out of here. That's the beacon that infected everyone and killed everyone. Get out! Go! Run, run, run, run away!" And it didn't really work. We just could never make it work, so we opted to cut it completely and- that meant that the beacon was gonna be onboard Galactica, and we didn't want that. I didn't wanna have to spend the next few episodes dealing with the stupid beacon, 'cause we hadn't planned for any of that and we wanted- didn't wanna follow up on actually dealing with the beacon. So we opted to leave it aboard and in the cut, in the cutting room we left it aboard the Cylon baseship, got them out of there, so the beacon is neatly destroyed and taken care of at the top of the show. If we had kept the beacon aboard Galactica it just would have meant that all the subsequent episodes would have had to deal with them taking it apart, doing metallurgical analyses, all the expected scientific things that you would expect, and it just didn't feel like it was worth it.

Now this whole bit of business here, Baltar and the Cylons, is really trying- is why we did a lot of this, was to get to the point where, okay, he's been over there, he's been having a good time, he's been roaming the halls. It's been a little weird, mysterious, but now the gloves are coming off. Now these guys think that he was involved in something, they think that he was resposnible for the destruction, the deaths, of all those Cylons, forcing them to leave them behind, and that essentially Baltar has been lying to them all along and what are they gonna do about that? And as much as Baltar tries to, in his way, come clean, to talk to them in this moment, they've now pushed to the point where they no longer believe him.

There was a lot more of this sequence of James Callis being naked (chuckles) that we cut. Which he did wonderfully. He walked in, he stood up, he put his hands over his crotch, he was much more defenseless and vulnerable in the moment but James is so charming and so funny in those moments that unfortunately when you put it together it leeched all the seriousness from the scene. I mean, and that's a valid way to go. You could have the comedy of the scene playing on top and the undercurrents of fear and tension and the threat underneath. It's a valid way to construct the scene, but we just opted not to go in that particular direction.

Ok. Now this is actually not on location. This is actually a completely CG environment that we have put him in. This is really James and Tricia in the lounge chair and a bit of sand and then the table and the objects on the table are on a soundstage against a big green back- big green screen, and then we're compositing in the beach scene and the ocean and all that. And you can feel it in this. You can feel the slight artificiality of the environment, which I thought was ok because of the nature of what's really happening here. That this is really all in his mind, and you're in this hyper-real environment. It didn't bother me. In fact it didn't bother me so much that we had to do it that way. We had to do it that way because- they were going to go out to the location and shoot it, but it was a public beach and Tricia was gonna be getting naked and unfortunately that wasn't gonna work. (Chuckles.) I don't think she really want to do that and, although I'm sure the beach enthusiasts would have been more than happy to have her disrobe out there and be humping our- one of our characters, it ultimately did not work out, and we had to bring it back to the stage.

Ok. This torture bit. See, you can see- you can I'm at home because the front gate is creaking and the dogs are barking and on my brand new high-gain microphone is, I'm sure, picking all this up. Sorry.

The torture sequence here was definitely something that we went back and forth with the network on several times about how graphic to be, how much screaming, how gr- how much pain he was gonna be in, at what points you cut to his face, at what points do s- how many th- you get down to these conversations with Standards and Practices about, literally, how many pelvic thrusts can Number Six do sitting on top of Baltar. Which, you know, is one of these absurd conversations that you do in television because they all have- for some reason. I always imagine that in the Standards and Practices office there's some chart on the wall that outlines how many pelvic thrusts are beyon- are unacceptable on Scifi Channel and how many cuts to somebody screaming and all that jazz. Which is just insane.

Ok. We didn't want this to really be all about how they resolve the virus for the humans or the Cylons, so you'll note that we got them quickly out of this thing. 'Cause it wasn't- the point was not how do we medically tech our way out of this- out of a crisis, or out of a jeopardy situation. The point was really that this was a virus that was harmless to humans, potentially dangerous to Sharon, and ultimately lethal to the Cylons. So you'll not that we move rather quickly through all that bit of business.

Act 2

So we get here into Galactica again. Alright, these scenes were all moved around quite a bit because, again, we had this other subplot of the beacon being aboard the ship and in sickbay and Cottle examining it and figuring things out. And I believe this sequence actually came later, after they had had a discussion about potentially ways of cur- of not curing, but make- allowing the Cylons to live a little longer, giving them the equivalent of AZT to extend their lives. And this sequence took place after that discussion. This discussion coming up here. First we had this structurally, where they talk about the disease it all of its glory, as it were, and then Cottle says, "Well, I can keep 'em alive for a while." And Laura Roslin says, "Ok. See about that." And then you were gonna cut to that scene. We restructured it for various reasons. Ultimately it felt like I wanted to keep in the moment of the sick Cylons, remind you that they were still onboard the ship, and watch Cottle just come in and yank one out and see that they were doing experiments and things on them.

You'll note that Lee, we're positioning here as the harder ass of the- the hard line, hardliner, of the group. He's in his t-shirt as opposed to in his uniform. Again this is a nod towards the direction of a slight shift in Lee's character. That he's becoming more of the warrior. A little less upright and neat in the way that, say, Helo is playing. This turned out to be, ultimately, a very big Helo- a very important episode for Helo.

This was- this beat here with Simon being brought down the corridor and ultimately interrogating Simon. This used to come out of a very different set of circumstances. They went in and dealt- brought out a Six, one of the Six's came out, and started to talk to them because they had- oh that's right. There was- in fact, we shot this. I'm sorry. We shot a whole scene where, essentially, after that meeting in Adama's quarters they were talking. Adama said, "Somebody needs to go down there and talk to them. Who's gonna get them to talk?" That, "Why would they ever tell us anything." And he said, "Well I know someone who might be able to get them to talk." And we had Kara. We cut to Kara. Kara went into the cell and had a conversation with the sick Leoben. And it was a reversal and a play on the fact that she had been held prisoner by Leoben and that now she was the interrogator once again. And it was a way for her to turn the tables on him and she was using the fact that he was dying and she had a way to keep him alive as her way to torture him. Leoben was trying tap back into her mind, into her psyche, and screw with her head again and talk about Kacey, talk about God and her destiny, and ultimately the other Cylons in the room were listening to the whole thing, and when Kara was saying that they had a way to keep them alive, but they had to help them. They had to give up information. What happened was that one of the Six's copped to it and said, "Oh, he- I'll talk, I'll talk, I'll talk." And they take the Six away, and then the Six came into this scene. In the script we star- I started to feel like that was a mistake. That it was weird and unusual for Six to roll over so quickly and we weren't using Simon very effectively. We hadn't used him as a character in the show in quite a while and it f- it just felt more interesting, somehow, to bring Rick Worthy in and have him be that guy that rolled over. So we made that change before we shot it. And then when in the cutting of the episode, it felt like you could get to this idea that the Cylons wanted to live and were afraid of dying 'cause they knew that they would not be resurrected and that you could bring in one of the prisoners and have him just spill his guts, as it were, without going through the whole machinations with Kara and Leoben, which ultimately they didn't feel right. When I saw the scene it was ok but it just didn't feel like it went anywhere and it felt like a tangent in the episode and it didn't feel quite right so I opted to cut it fairly early in the process. Now it's just a cleaner, faster line because you're getting to the heart of the drama. I mean, the point of the show is not to deal- to dip back into the Leoben-Kara storyline. The point of the show is really to get to this idea of the virus as a biological weapon. And so this act is all moving rapidly towards Lee giving this- Lee having this epiphany and realizing what the virus could give them a way to wipe out the Cylons permanently. Which takes us to a scene with the President.

These scenes about the biological weapon and about the morality of using the biological weapon, here, and later with Adama and Laura, mimicked very closely a lot of the arguments that happened within the writers' room. We discussed these issues at length about what would they really do, and there were certainly writers who felt rather strongly that, "Well, why wouldn't they use it? Isn't that the thing that you do? I mean, my God. The Cylons wiped out their race, been pursuing them. They're the implacable enemy. And why wouldn't you use this weapon? They'd be fools not to." And then there were others who felt, "Well, wait a minute. Genocide is just tit for tat. What does that mean about us? And aren't we better than them?" And, "What are we saying?" And it felt like a really interesting moral conundrum. And it raised some difficult issues. I was really- like this idea of Helo as the voice of that. That Helo, the man who had fallen in love with a Cylon and fathered a child with one, stepping back, "Ok, now wait a minute. What are we doing here? We're no different than they are. Is that what we're about?" I think it's a l- I think it's an interesting argument. I'm not sure there's a clear answer to this argument. I'm not sure that there's a clear answer to the right and the wrong of what they're debating here. Which, to me, is what the show is all about. That it's not about giving you the answers it's about raising the questions. What is the right choice in this circumstance? What is- Is genocide ever justifiable? Can- is there a line beyond which you cannot cross and still be a moral person. And- or does that all get wiped away if you say that the stakes are survival and the very legitimate argument that, "Hey, if you don't survive, all the moral conundr- all the moral quandaries go away and are pointless if you're not around to argue them. So doesn't the s- your own survival outweigh everything else?" And it does come down, on some level to whether they're people. Are they people? If they're a race of people, it's genocide.

There were certain- it reminds me. There was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that dealt with similar issues with the Borg and Picard and a virus. Whether he was gonna unleash a virus against the Borg, and whether they were such a threat to the Federation, and so on. This show ultimately, the characters take a different approach to it. They debate the issue in somewhat starker terms and even the decision itself is actually quite different than in that episode. But we did bandy that about in the room. So, for those of you who were fans of the Next Gen and wonder, yes, we did talk about that Next Gen episode.