Podcast:Resurrection Ship, Part II

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Teaser

Hello and welcome to the podcast for episode twelve “Resurrection Ship, Part II” I’m Ronald D. Moore the developer and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica and this’ll be a fun one. “Resurrection Ship, Part II” as I mentioned to those of you who listened to the podcast last week- Resurrection Ship was originally a one-hour episode that we then split into two parts only when we were in post-production and realised that we had far too much story and footage to really comfortably fit into a one hour box. This episode lent itself into splitting into two parts rather easily in that the original Act Two break was Adama and Cain each plotting to assassinate the other and the Act Two out was y’know take out a gun and shoot Admiral Cain in the head which is a great act out as you can imagine and an even better episode out. Not all episodes really lend themselves to that kind of neat cleavage, oft-times if you simply cut an episode at Act Two and try to carve two episodes out of it at that point you’d find that the story was not designed that way, that too many things were left dangling and incomplete and there would be no real sense of it being an episode on its own. In this particular case we were trying to do so much and there was so much material to work with that structurally we simply had an opportunity to cut them in two and really present two different episodes.

The show was always sort of about the struggle between Cain and Adama and then there was going to be this big battle that essentially we’ve been promising since “Pegasus” that Admiral Cain shows up on Pegasus and says she’s been tracking the Cylon fleet and she’s got a hard-on for going after it and the audience knows, ‘okay we’re gonna get to go after that fleet eventually’ and so this is the one where we do finally go after that fleet. I’d say the main- what shifted overall in the development of the story in this part was how much emphasis we put on the Lee storyline versus the other storylines and ultimately how does the Cain situation resolve itself? There were some fundamental things that never changed from story; I knew that from the word go I did not want to destroy the Pegasus, that was very important to me. It seemed like- it just seemed to me that when the audience approaches this show, when they see that there’s another battlestar showing up and “Oh it’s another battlestar with an Admiral onboard, it’s a much more powerful ship than Galactica…” the one thing that the audience probably takes to the bank is, ‘Well, of course they’re going to destroy the Pegasus by the end of the episode, they’re not going to keep it around, I mean that’s just not gonna happen’ and so I just was determined that we were going to subvert and undercut that assumption on behalf of the audience, we were not gonna do that, we were gonna keep the Pegasus around and add it to the fleet and do the thing that you just don’t do.

This image that’s onscreen now of Lee floating on his back in the water and the subsequent cut to space and realising that Lee’s actually drifting through space in his ejection pod and losing air and having his own experience was something we talked about very early. Michael Rymer might have even come up with this image of him floating on his back I believe and I was really taken with it and really fought for it and wanted to keep to it. It went through a lot of iterations and changes as we went through the specifics of it and in fact when we were looking at this as a one hour episode this entire storyline was something that was going to have to be lifted and chopped just to make the run-time which was another reason why I didn’t want to keep it to one hour.

I was very intrigued by this sort of elliptical way of fading in on an episode that you would not come back to the present reality on a storyline the audience were following very closely but to really go into this other-worldly storytelling where something else was going on and originally we had talked about that being the opening to the one hour episode of "Resurrection Ship" because essentially my reasoning was well the audience is going to go out on this cliff-hanger moment at the end of "Pegasus" where the two squadrons of Vipers are facing off and they’re about to fire upon each other and the audience comes back anticipating they’re going to be right back at the very same moment and I kinda wanted to undercut that expectation as well and to come into this stranger thing that Lee is floating. “Why is he floating? Wait a minute, what happened to the Viper battle?” and then you would sort of realise that he’s in this other battle with the Cylons and then you would flash all the way back and play all the events forward. It was an interesting idea and I think it was effective in the script but it was just too much material, like I said, to hold for an hour episode and then as we decided to split it into two pieces there came the question of… well do you still want to maintain that structure, do you still want to open “Resurrection Ship, Part I” with Lee floating in space and carry that over the course of the two episodes? And I felt that that was going to be awkward and that it wouldn’t hold and that if you- it’s sort of- it’s a hard thing to describe, some of this is just sort of instinctual and experience with how tv and its forms work but I just felt that you could not carry that kind of flashback structure where you’ve got Lee floating in the "present" and then flashing back to all the events leading up to it over the course of a two-parter. It felt awkward, it seemed like the second hour was going to run into trouble of how you would establish that convention and so it just felt more comfortable to keep it to the second hour.

Hey, now this scene with Helo and Tyrol- in “Resurrection Ship, Part I” you saw the first half of this scene. This was originally just one scene, where it began with Helo standing and Tyrol lying on the bed and they’re talking about all the ways that they’ve sc-, their problems with all the various Sharons and Tyrol saying he’s done and Helo saying ‘Well I can’t let go’. And then that moment was interrupted by the entrance of the 'Yee-Haw Boys' (1 and 2) as we kinda call them. So this was all part of the same sequence, then when we got into post on the two episodes we realised that actually part one was a little short, part two was a little long so there was some horse-trading that had to be done to bring the episodes to the exact correct time and this episode or this scene, was another thing that cleaved in half very nicely. You were able to chop this up into two distinct pieces without really having a problem either way.

We played around with the exact incident that happens here quite a lot, some of this is inspired by “Full Metal Jacket”, the scene in “Full Metal Jacket” where they’re beating on one of the recruits with a bar of soap and a towel was a very sort of haunting- disturbing is a better word to use- that I always remembered. The scene in “The Grifters” where Anjelica Huston is briefly threatened that maybe she is going to be beaten in the stomach with oranges wrapped up in a towel and both of those notions were always sort of chilling and frightening and so I thought that they'd be really effective to use in this scene- that there is something classic about the notion that you hit someone in the stomach when you don’t want to leave a mark and yet it’s incredibly painful.

Act One

Okay, now we’re back in this scene- now, there’s the infamous bar of soap- as shot there was a lot more fighting and kicking back and forth and there was actually a point where Tyrol got a shot back at one of these guys and there was more beatings going on and I felt very strongly that the way to maintain dramatic cohesion in the scene was to have less beating, it’s more effective- the suspense, the- when is he gonna- you can see it’s cutting away quickly because in that previous shot he was about to hit him and it’s more about the suspense of when are they gonna do this? What are they gonna do? And you’re dragging out the tension as far as possible, that I felt was more intriguing.

This was an opportunity when we went back and re-shot scenes- it felt like, well, these guys are now- Helo and Tyrol that is- are now on Pegasus and aren’t they really hated and detested over there? What’s gonna happen to those guys that are in the clutches of Pegasus? And it just quickly came up that “Hey, the Yee-Haw Boys, the Sunshine Boys as they’re called in the script, may have something to say too and it may not be very pleasant.”

I also like this little beat a lot of Fisk coming in and getting these guys- y’know busting these guys, throwing them out, threatening them and yet making clear that he does not have a lot of sympathy for Tyrol and Helo. Fisk’s character was an interesting one, he’s in a very difficult position, you get the feeling like he’s done what he had to do to stay alive and keep the machine going but he has his own private qualms but he’s not really somebody that would have been Adama’s guy. This little interaction with the officer and the two enlisted guys is based on things that I recall actually from personal experience of being aboard a freighter in the Navy briefly as part of my Navy ROTC experience. I was on the frigate USS W.S. Sims off the coast of Florida and I recall an incident- not like this- but I recall a disciplinary moment like this where an officer called two enlisted men that were doing something- I can’t really remember what they were doing because I wasn’t really on the s- I wasn’t really privy to the whole incident- but I saw him suddenly, “You two over here, standing tall!” and boom, those guys came over. The officer was a senior- he was I believe the XO of the ship, as I recall, had them come over, stand tall, and talked to them very quietly and made it clear that they were about to get in incredibly serious trouble and then sent them on their way. And it was really like a shocking kind of moment because the two enlisted guys in question were kind of well-liked and they were guys that tended to get away with a lot from the Chief and so-on that I observed over the course of the weeks and then this- the classic hard-ass but quiet XO had busted them on the spot for some violation of ship's regulations. I can’t really recall- I remember where it happened, it was near the fan tail but I can’t really remember what the incident was and it was really the demeanor of how that happened that informed the writing of this particular scene. And I love the sentiment at the end the notion that Fisk again puts back into play the notion of, “You can’t rape a machine” which really goes to question the audience’s- or enforce the audience to question its own view of what’s happening. Well is she a machine or isn’t she? She looks, walks, talks, smells, seems to be a person but she is a machine and if she is a machine can you rape a machine? It’s another way of always providing a sense of imbalance, of the audience never being quite comfortable in their assumptions of what’s going on and who to root for and how they should deal with a very complicated situation, which is one of the things that I enjoy about the show.

This scene also was an additional scene which was written and shot after the fact, one of the- when we were viewing the episode, the original episode, we realised that Cain and Starbuck were really sparking off each other really well. It was an interesting relationship. Michael Rymer particularly liked the way the two actresses played together and it seemed like there was an opportunity to do at least another scene between the two of them to take Cain a little further down the road of bonding with Starbuck, to see a little bit more of the humanity of her but at the same time getting a little bit more of a firmer handle on her philosophy and that the great irony of the scene of course is that her philosophy, that she’s espousing, is essentially telling Starbuck to ‘kill her’, that there are hard things that have to be done, that you can’t flinch from certain ugly matters that have to be done in order to ensure the survival of the ship and its crew or in the larger sense of the human race which is always one of the stakes in Galactica. “Yet inevitably…”- and I think that’s true what Cain just said, “that inevitably there is a moment where we all face a great sin and we have to decide whether we act on that sin or not and that the struggle comes in moments small and large.” We may not all be faced with the particular dilemma that Starbuck is faced with, whether to kill a superior officer on the orders of another man, but all of us face sin and all of us face compromises and things that we may or may not do for larger goals and it’s a question of how you respond to that and Cain’s philosophy is one that you don’t flinch from that moment, you don’t turn back, you move forward, particularly in a war-time context which is what they’re grappling with of course all the time in Battlestar Galactica.

Well let’s see- see where we’re going here- this was also an additional scene that was shot after the fact, we just sort of felt that there was an opportunity to see one more taste of Lee. Where is he? Since his overall storyline involving the ejection sequence and then floating in space by himself and witnessing the battle by himself and then coming to a place where he had given up or really embraced the notion of death. We wanted to see that there was another moment that after he had learned from Starbuck what she was going to do, that he would have a moment where he could question his father or at least make clear that it’s- this is so antithetical to everything that he himself stands for and that he thought his father stood for, that it just felt like he had to put words to that.

There was yet one more scene with Lee that we did shoot but then cut, where Lee was in the Ready Room, after this scene actually, where he went by himself, was having a drink by himself and Dualla came in but it was kind of repetitive, where we really saw- where it felt like he had said the same thing in three scenes and so we cut the third one with him and Dualla even though it set up another little piece of the burgeoning relationship between him and Dualla that we’ve been subtly playing over the course of many episodes. But ultimately we didn’t need it, this scene said it all, set his emotional stake in context and we didn’t need a further one.

I also like this- it’s just an interesting little touch that there are still couriers, there are still documents that need to be signed, it’s just another nod towards the retro nature of the Galactica and its technology and our Colonial world. It makes it identifiable, it makes it slightly more human, Galactica’s not really gone to the paperless society and it’s not all just pressing buttons, there are still physically things that have to be signed, that commanders have to put their names to with a pen and say that they have signed off on and I just like that. I like those kinds of little touches.

This was an interesting little sequence that we played around a lot with in editing, this is Starbuck getting ready for her mission counter-pointed with Fisk and his marines getting ready for their mission, everybody getting together. The question that arose as we’re watching episode in post a couple of times is that one thing that does get lost here is you forget that there’s a battle coming up, that there’s this big operation because again all the setup to the big battle operation was all in the first two acts of the original script and subsequently they are now in the first hour episode so there is a bit of a sense here- I would say a problem we never quite licked- there is a little bit of a sense of losing the connection with that plot thread, that oh, there’s this major operation about to happen and that’s really what they’re all getting ready to do and then beneath that they’re getting ready to do their two specific tasks.

I just love this little moment here, this was one of my favorite little beats that I wrote when I was dong the re-writes on er- “Good hunting” “You too Colonal”- there’s just something, I dunno, there’s something poetic about that. I just love that, that little pass-by. I’ll come back for the next act.

Galactica 1980 definition:  When John Steadman asks if the Warriors know anything about these creatures, Dillon looks this up (1980: "Space Croppers")

Re-imagined Series definition: Executive Officer, e.g. Saul Tigh