Podcast:Epiphanies
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Hello, my name is Ronald D. Moore and welcome to the podcast for episode thirteen "Epiphanies". I'm the executive producer and creator of the- or developer of the new Battlestar Galactica.
"Epiphanies" essentially is our biggest Laura Roslin show to date. We'd been talking about doing an episode like this since way back in the first season. A lot of the roots of this episode come out of things that were in the backstory of the character ever since the mini-series, namely we wanted to deal with things like who she was before the attack, what her life was like and getting a glimpse into what she was like as Secretary of Education before she became President.
Some of the elements in this episode were actually, I think, suggested by Mary McDonnell. In early conversations with Mary on the script of the mini-series she started talking about President Adar, there was a line in the mini-series where she said- she was talking about how she got into politics and how she didn't really wanna be a politician but she had worked for Adar and that he was the kind of man that you just couldn't say no to. And Mary took that to me- that he was a Clinton-esque figure that you couldn't say no to, and of course being a Clinton-esque figure it also raised the possibilty that perhaps there was something more between the two of them than just the professional relationship. And that stuck in everybody's heads and whenever we would talk about Adar throughout the course of the first season, we always jokingly talked about the fact that she had an affair with him and then it became something more than a joke and we started to seriously consider the possibilty that maybe she had had an affair with the President. And that that would be an interesting insight into the character of Laura Roslin, and I'll talk more about that as we go along.
This opening sequence is meant to convey the notion that she's dying obviously, she's coming into Galactica and she's flashing back to what is essentially her last day on Caprica. This is the day that she found out that she had cancer, this is the day of the attack, all this is sort of- all these flashbacks are gonna be things that we never showed you in the mini-series and in fact, in truth, we didn't really think about them in the mini-series. When the mini-series was shot and edited together the implication was that she left directly from the doctor's office that you saw a few moments ago and went out and got on the transport that becomes Colonial One and then took off. But there's no reason to assume that she didn't have time to do anything else, so as we were constructing this episode it all seemed to be about the last day on Caprica and we went at the episode from that angle and then there was a continuity error that I realised much, much later, that I'll get to later that changed those plans. But the inital impulse was, okay, lets play this sequence as Laura is dying and she's thinking back to the day when it all began, when she learned that she first had cancer and when the Presidency fell on her head and everything began and ended on that particular day.
It seemed right at this point in the life of the series to finally do the episode that really dealt with her illness, that really dealt with the fact that Laura had been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer and that the President was slipping away from us. It had been alluded to all throughout the first season, this season we have been very direct about it, we had said that she wasn't gonna make it, the doctor had given her a very short term- a very short time in which to live and then indeed in the last weeks episode- at the end of the episode you saw her having trouble getting up and just physically walking out of Colonial One after her meeting with Adama. And it just felt like this had been simmering along for a long time and that we had to deal with it at some point, we had to really face the fact, as do all the characters, that Laura had what was a terminal illness and that it had to come to some kind of a head.