Podcast:Collaborators
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode four, technically, of season three. This is the episode, "Collaborators". I'm [[Ronald D. Moore], executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica series. This week we're coming to you live, well sort of live, from my office on the Universal lot instead of at home. So those of you who look forward to the sounds of children and kittens and Scotch clinking in glasses will unfortunately be disappointed this week. You'll just have the sound of Diet Coke, but I'll smoke in my office anyway in defiance of California state law.
Anyway. "Collaborators" is an interesting episode in that, it may well be, and it's hard to say this with a straight face, but this may well be the darkest episode of Galactica that we've done. And that's sayin' somethin'. I've also been interested that a lot of people have told me, that have seen this episode, on the show and at the studio and other people who get advance copies for one reason or another. A significant number of them have told me that they thought that this is one of the best episodes in the entire series. Which kinda surprises me. I mean, I like this episode a lot. I think it's a really interesting, provocative piece of work, but I am surprised at the- I guess the depth of feeling. I mean, I've had people come up to me, here on the studio lot, working in departments that I don't even really interact with very often, and have stopped me to say, "That your lighter doesn't work." (chuckles.) To stop me and say how much they liked this episode. And how moved they were by it and there- People have talked about personal experiences or family experiences that had to do with the Holocaust and how some of these things echoed into that or people that knew people in France after the war and it's been interesting to see the reactions to this.
This episode came out of an early discussion of what the initial handful of episodes were going to be. And one of the first things we said was, "Ok. Well what happens as soon as they get back? And given everything that has transpired aboard- on New Caprica with people collaborating and other people in the resistance. What happens when you throw them all back together into the ships of the Fleet? Would they just carry on? Is life just- move on as normal?" And that seemed a bit of a stretch. And then we started talking seriously about primarily what happened in France after the Nazis were driven out and liberation came. There's the famous newsreels of women who had slept with Nazi officers being paraded in the streets, their heads being shaved. Those- there was a time, a small time period immediately after the liberation where people were settling scores. And it seemed like that would happen in this circumstance, too. Given the setup of a chaotic escape. The thrust- being thrust back into the ships of the Fleet. The central government trying to get itself together and figure out who's here and who's not. That essentially in the emotion of those first hours, if not those first days, people would be settling some scores and would be going out and saying, "You know what? Some of what you people did, you guys did, was fucked up and you're not gettin' away with it."
Initially this sequence- well, there's a lot to talk about in terms of what the early story was. Let's just talk about this sequence here with Jammer getting tossed out the airlock. In the initial drafts, Duck and Jammer- we had transposed the roles. This was going to be Duck. 'Cause Duck was going to be the collaborator and Jammer was going to be the suicide bomber, and then as we went through various revisions we decided that these were better roles for these particular characters. Actually at the suggestion of Aaron Douglas, who pointed out that given who Jammer was, and the way we had played him, had just seemed like Jammer was a little bit- better for this kind of a role. That he was- he had- we had painted him a bit weakly in "Valley of Darkness" and then he was a guy that could get led astray and make the wrong decisions and then end up in this position. This sequence, to me, is one of the toughest we've ever done, 'cause essentially we're opening the episode with a murder. And it's not just any murder. It's a murder of one of our characters, who we've established, who we've come to know over the seasons, who we know tried to do something heroic, and he's being killed not by faceless, bad, evil vigilantes out there. Our guys are right in the thick of this. Tigh, Tyrol, Anders. And the we have Connely and then we have Barolay. Excuse me, Connor and Barolay to round it out. But there was something about opening the show with this kind of sequence to really send the message that we're not kidding around. That this one- you're gonna go for a ride here, and it's not going to be an entirely pleasant ride. That this is gonna be about the line between vengeance and justice. It's gonna be about responsibility. It's gonna be about the truth. It's gonna be about a lot of difficult things. And that we weren't really gonna shy away from them.
And this sequence just is a- it's a hard one to watch. When I was watching this in dailies I remember this was brutal. We were, like, "Oh my God. This is gonna be such a brutal opening to a show." And that's sayin' somethin', again, for Battlestar Galactica you know it's sayin' somethin'. And we- I wanted to play every beat of this. I didn't want him to face it stoicly. I wanted him to beg for his life. And you get to that interesting moment there with Tyrol when he says to Tyrol, "I saved Cally." I think that's where you, the audience, go, "Well wait a minute, maybe there is a way out here." 'Cause he did save Cally. We saw him save Cally. We remember him saving Cally. It's not just a ploy. And Tyrol goes over there and asks him if it's true. Tyrol says, "If that's true..." and then Connor rightly points out that, "Well, wait a minute. Maybe he did save Cally. But does that make up for all these other deaths? What about all these other people that died, including his son? Does saving Cally make up for that?" And I think that's a hard question. And I think their answer is, "No. No it does not." Not in this circumstance. Not in this world. Not with these people. And so, he's given the ultimate punishment of- he does such a great job. That look on his face when- the look on Jammer's face when he's looking through that glass window, just before he's sucked out into the void, is just wrenching and heartbreaking and- and then you're back to these guys. And what have they done? The toll of what they're doing and how it weighs on them. The man that lost his son is a stand in for many of the people that died down on New Caprica that we never saw but we refer to. So it was important to have somebody in this scene who had a direct connection to loss. That it wasn't all theoretical. That just as- in the same way that Tyrol's loss- or Tyrol's victory of having his wife be saved is personal, we needed somebody in the scene that was also had paid a price that was personal.
This little sequence is the setup for a runner that will be lasting all season is that the ships are more crowded now. We've lost ships in the exodus from New Caprica and now a fair number of civilians are now living aboard Galactica, forcing a lot of changes in how we do business and where the civilians live and they're a little bit more in our face this season.
I like this tease-out a lot in terms of the humanity of it. That we just left the execution scene, you come immediately to the family life of one of the men. And he raises the question, "Did somebody help you? And who was it?" And she doesn't know, but it did happen. And did happen the way that Jammer said it happened. So now he has to live with the knowledge that he just killed the man who did save his wife's life. And that's a difficult thing. And I don't think there's an easy answer for that. I don't think the- again, I've said this many times, the show doesn't try to answer all these questions for you. How do you feel about Tyrol and what he has done, given the fact that there's his wife, who is now alive, thanks to the man that he just sent out the airlock? But does that heroic deed make up for the grim things that Jammer had participated in as a member of the NCP? And the answer is there on Tyrol's face. I don't think there is an answer. He doesn't know. He's torn.
Like I said earlier, this show went through a lot of changes. Let's see, where you even begin? The initial storyline for this episode did not open- it opened with someone being airlocked on another ship, on the Monarch as I recall, and Tyrol was involved with a bunch of other people that- from the resistance or from New Caprica. They were killing Duck in that version, which later became Jammer, but the full blown circle and the formality of it had not really been established in the first draft. We were still playing with, "What are the storylines?" And the show was actually gonna concentrate more on a lot of other storylines that are happening.