Podcast:Colonial Day
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Hello and welcome to the podcast commentary of episode eleven Colonial Day, I am Ronald D. Moore the executive producer and creator of the new Battlestar Galactica and tonight we're going to be talking about the eleventh episode of the first season Colonial Day. This was- essentially began life as our West Wing episode and we'd always wanted to do an episode that really took place in Laura Roslin's world and really dealt with the politics of the fleet and Galactica and the people and the survivors of the human race and how that would evolve over the course of the series.
As I was developing the show early on and setting up the major players I felt very strongly that the President should be a very important player in the show. In the original Battlestar Galactica there was a Quorum of Twelve, which is reprised in this episode, of political leaders of The Twelve Colonies which before the attack of the Cylons in the original Galactica the Quorom of Twelve were the political quasi-military leadership of the Twelve Colonies.
Before we delve further into that, because I tend to digress a lot in these as long time listeners will know, this is Cloud Nine which is actually the college of VC University. We definitely wanted to get outside of Galactica, go explore another ship in the fleet and we decided that if we had at least one vessel that was set up in some sort of arboretum type setting that had a dome on it, a place where you could create- that had recreated some sort of Earth-like or colony-like exterior that would be a nice place to open a show up, it keeps the show from getting too claustrophobic, but it prevents or it allows us to stay within the fleet instead of having to go and make up the colony- the planet of the week idea which I was very much opposed to doing from the get-go. I didn't want the show to be about going to alien worlds constantly that happened to look like Canada. I wanted to essentially use Caprica- the story-line on Caprica to be location driven in Vancouver and we would essentially be saying that Caprica looks an awful lot like Vancouver but as far as other planets- I think it starts to beg credibility at a certain point when all the other planets in the universe look like Canada. I'd never really wanted to go to other planets in this series and I definitely didn't want to explore other aliens so the idea of having at least one ship in our rag-tag feelt that had a certain sort of exterior feel to it allows us to have it both ways; we can go outside and we can do a few- some episodes like this where the characters get to go outside and be in the trees and get a different sort of visual sense without it really breaking the reality of what we had set up so far.
And there are the sirens and the dogs which I'm sure you've all come to know and love at my little home here in California and I'm er... yeah isn't it great? There they go, the public services, my tax dollars at work.
In any case the West Wing episode was something that we had talked about from the very, very earliest going, I always wanted to do something that was more political that dealt with the practical realities of trying to govern and run a society that had- run the remnants of a society that had just been destroyed and unlike the original series I didn't want the political leadership of our rag-tag fleet to really be straw men for Adama to knock down over and over again, because that was essentially the dynamic developed in the original series. The Quorom of Twelve would come up with some lame-brain idea, 'Hey let's go make peace with the Cylons' or 'Hey let's stay here on this planet' where obviously the Cylons were gonna come in five minutes and Adama being wiser and smarter would always find a way to beat them and cooler heads would prevail and Adama and Apollo would save the day. I didn't really want to do that because I didn't like the message of it, I didn't really like the notion that, 'what you really need is just a good, smart military who can control and run everything'. I just didn't like that, I liked playing the natural tension between the civilian and the military authority in this situation, I wanted to really explore what it meant to be a democracy in these circumstances and a republican form of government in these circumstances. And I thought it also said something interesting about this society- the Colonial society, that they do value and treasure and place great emphasis on the fact that their government is still with them. I mean the entire Laura Roslin plot line throughout the series is really a tribute to the fact of how strongly these people believe in their system of government, how fundamental the notions of democracy and representation and the vote and equal rights and- the sort of things that in this country, the United States, are also built into our culture. We have this fundamental belief in the Constitution, a fundamental belief in the Bill of Rights and there is argument about margins of it but we have this undeniable belief system. I wanted the rag-tag fleet and in essence their society to mirror our society in that way but then I wanted an ability to test all of those assumptions, I wanted this circumstance and this set of problems to continually challenge and really provoke those ideas.