Podcast:Colonial Day
| |||||
[edit]
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 Quorum of Twelve was 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 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 and so the idea of having at least one ship in our rag-tag felt 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 in 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 Quorum 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 the 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.
Act One[edit]
I was talking a moment ago about how I wanted the situation that the Colonial survivors find themselves in to really challenge and provoke their notions of society and freedom and I think that idea of a situation that is so dire, that is so fraught with peril, that puts at risk the very nature of existence is an interesting one and how it tests the system of governments and governance and these social rules that people operate in, that idea, that challenge to the fundamentals of the system, is something that I think we're going through right now. I think that the situation in this country, the War on Terrorism, the assertion of executive power in all circumstances, the large- the long march toward extreme authoritarian governance has begun in this country and the idea of how we fight back against that- or the idea of what are the places where we choose to fight back against that and what are the places where we choose not to fight back, what are the places and what are the areas of power and society today in our culture are we willing to hand over to security, are we willing to give up freedoms in which areas in order to provide security. I think those ideas are in the show 'cause those ideas are in the culture right now.
Back to the show onscreen here, this sequence of Kara and Lee getting on Cloud Nine and just relaxing and stopping to literally smell the roses as it were- used to be a pool, in first draft there was a scripted- there was a large pool that also opened the show, there were people diving into the pool because Cloud Nine was like a cruise ship and banquet facility and convention and meeting place and so on originally, before the holocaust, and in this sequence- instead of her spraying him with the hose, which she's about to do here, we had Kara just stripping off her clothes and going skinny-dipping and Lee sort of being scandalised by it and then jumping in as well because we wanted to just give them a moment. It was like, 'give these guys a break, they've had a long difficult season too' and it just felt like 'okay now they're standing out there, it looks beautiful, it is beautiful, let them enjoy themselves and have a little bit of fun'.
This is the lead-up to the meeting. I mean, all these sort of security things, the screeners, the marine guards, the procedures that you see them following, they are intended to be redolent of the familiar security procedures that travellers and people going to various meetings have to experience today, again the notion here is to have this mirror our society, we're not trying to create a new cool-spacey-wow-weird society, this is a recognisable place, with recognisable customs and functions because we're trying to convey a certain idea here and we want you to think about the ideas and enjoy the drama rather than really being distracted by some of the trappings that the drama sometimes brings.
This whole little bit of business, well not here but what we're leading up to, the bit of business with Zarek and will Laura Roslin shake Zarek's hand in public is inspired by- Yasser Arafat came to the White House for the meeting with Yitzhak Rabin and would Rabin shake the hand of Arafat and the symbolism of that and what it entailed and the carefully choreographed maneouver where Clinton got the two men to shake in the famous photograph and video on the White House lawn- I always liked that there was something interesting about just the symbolism of a handshake what it says, how it conveys and so I made this whole little bit of business of Zarek coming up and Tigh won't shake his hand and Ellen who is becoming a little bit more of a player and a little bit more cunning decides to shake his hand and get her picture everywhere and it would make news and that would start to advance her agenda, which we start to learn is a separate agenda from everybody else and we learn Ellen is her own person, her own player, Ellen is a survivor in a literal sense and in a larger sense, Ellen is someone who is going to find a way, somehow, someway to survive and to keep moving up the ladder and she sees him as a possible way up that ladder.
Just a side-note about media because this is certainly the show that features media more than any other in this series, it's a bit of a push frankly, we're pushing what I think is the reality of the show slightly to make it feel more familiar and a little easier to play. We established in the miniseries that there was a group of reporters and press aboard Galactica] for its decomissioning ceremony and presumably a lot of them were either on Laura Roslin's transport or left behind aboard Galactica, in any case there was definitely a press contingent that survived the initial Cylon holocaust. So I didn't think it was straining credulity too far to say that they would continue to function in those roles, I mean what else would they do, they're media people, they're experienced broadcasters and journalists and they would presumably try and cover the events that are happening around them. I think there may be a little too many of them in some cases and perhaps sometimes we stretch a point to try and give ourselves a little bit of a press core because we're trying to convey a certain feeling of politics, a certain importance of the White House, to sort of root you in what the archetypes are supposed to be, but more or less I think it plays fairly real.
This is another location that you never see at British Columbia where the Quorum of Twelve is meeting, as I started to talk about earlier the Quorum of Twelve is an idea that was in the original series, I never quite figured out exactly how you go on the Quorum of Twelve there seemed to be a location in the original series and Adama was a member of the Quorum and I'm not sure if commanders of other Battlestars were or if Adama was unique, I'm sure there are fans of the original series who might have a better answer for that bit than I do, my impression from watching the Pilot and the episodes was that the Quorum seemed to represent each of the twelve colonies and there didn't seem to be a determinate of how one got to the Quorum or exactly what its powers were, it seemed to be a large Grand Council as it were which is a very familiar science fiction riff frankly that happens a lot. It happens a lot in Star Trek, in Trek there were many occasions where you would encounter an alien society and essentially instead of trying to stroke out the complexities of its government and do it by bi-cameral legislation and legislature and the judiciary and how the executive evolves and blah blah blah you would just say 'well, there's the Supreme Council or there's the Grand Council or there was the- ' whatever they were called there was some body that usually sat around tables and nodded a lot because they were mostly extras and there would be the leader of the council and that was how you typically dealt with alien cultures. Galactica has a similar sort of riff, there is this Quorum, it makes sense there is twelve, there seemed to be some kind of senate I guess would be the closest sort of approximation you could allude to. In the new series the way I've started to construct the Government was that the Quorum of Twelve is somewhere between the Senate amd a cabinet, there seems- I guess it can't be a cabinet I take that back- it is essentially some kind of glorified senate, each of them represents their colony which gives them a massive amount of power- just one person per colony in this setup- so the Quorum would have a tremendous amount of say, the rules of voting, is there a filibuster, does it take a simple majority to pass things- in this episode it takes a simple majority to elect a Vice President- does it take a super-majority to pass constitutional amendments etc etc, there's lots of detail work to go on at some point. But again I really wanted to play the reality of what they would have to go through, Laura can't run the entire civilian fleet by herself, any sort of society needs some sort of governmental construct, it needs some sort of beaucracy, it needs some sort of designated hitters for education and security etc etc. There are anarchists listening to this right now who I'm sure will argue that point.
This episode I also wanted to start to get into the fact that the colonies or the colonists, the survivors are not just nameless, faceless, who all think the same thing, there are divisions. There are survivors of colonies who believe one thing, there are survivors of colonies who believe something else, Laura Roslin is not the perfect leader, she is not the most popular President they've ever had, she's never even been elected to this post so she's not, I think, someone who holds the post by acclamation, she's somebody who holds the post because everybody ahead of her in the line of succession died and I think that gives her hold on powers a bit tenuous as a result.