Podcast:The Captain's Hand
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 17 of season 2. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and this is for "Captain's Hand," the podcast that was delayed from last week, so I'll be giving it to you this week. In fact I'll be doing two of them back to back tonight. I'll do "Captain's Hand" and then we'll go right into "Downloaded", on a separate track, of course. (Zippo lighter.)
Before we get going we should probably mention, right off the top, that let's have a little less of the whining, out there on the bulletin boards, shall we, about the noises in the background here at the pod- at the podcast around the old Moore manse. You know folks, you just gotta be tough enough to listen to the podcast. These are imperfect conditions. We do this at my home, not in a nice, tidy, little studio. We do ever our best effort to keep it quite for y'all, but c'mon, enough with the whining, with the pewing- with the mewling and puking out there. Be tough enough for the podcast. We drink, we smoke, we curse, we have a good time. Get with it- get with the program.
Ok. So here we are. Pegasus. Teaser. There go the Raptors off on a training mission. In early drafts of "Captain's Hand" this particular crisis happened much later in the show. It was one of the problems that we struggled with in the early drafts of the story was, what was the nature of the crisis, and when should it begin.
The whole notion of this episode revolved around the coninu- acknowledging and dealing with the continuing command problems aboard Pegasus, which felt like a natural outgrowth of the idea that the ship, the Battlestar Pegasus, that showed up was a deeply flawed, almost piratical ship, under the command of Admiral Cain. Well, if Admiral Cain had run her ship the way that we saw her run that ship, one would assume that there would be a variety of problems that would definitely outlive her. And so we wanted to continue to play that as the season went on, and the first CO after Cain was obviously Commander Fisk, who promptly got himself into the black market and got himself killed for the trouble. And then we moved on to Commander Garner, who in early drafts was always named Trammel. But legal, as legal often does, came back to us with some- some whining about the name Trammel, about it being too close to somebody else's real name, and of course, we had to change it over to Garner at the last second. So there are many references that we all kept catching ourselves calling him Trammel. In fact, we named him Trammel in an earlier episode, in an offhand way. A line from Adama. We had to go back and reloop that in ADR at the last second.
I like this notion of- the beat that open this little section here with Lee and Dualla, that the pilots and the crew had private signals among themselves to "Stay clear of the quarters when I got a girl, or man, or both inside." And that they had a private signal. You couldn't quite see it 'cause we had to cut the- clip off the head of that shot when Duck and the other pilot came up there was a pair of boots were hanging from the hatch, and they knew, as soon as they saw the pair of boots that that meant that somebody was in there and getting a little something. And that was what prompted them to bang on the door, and the gag was, "Oh. It's the CAG." And they kinda looked at each other and went away.