Podcast:Resurrection Ship, Part II
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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- which 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 in the 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 that 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 doing 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 the 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 how some of 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’d re-establish that convention and so it just felt more comfortable to keep it to the second hour.
Y’know 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, it began with Helo standing and Tyrol lying on the bed and they’re talking about all the ways that they’ve screwed up, 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 and 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 she is going to be beaten in the stomach with oranges wrapped up in a towel and both of those notions are sort of chilling and frightening and so I thought that would 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.