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. (Ron lights a cigarette)
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- a deeply flawed, almost piratical ship, under the command of Admiral Cain. Well, if Admiral Cain had run that 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 into the black mark- 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 a 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 but 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.
This sequence- this little scene here with Dualla and Lee, we played around with in editing quite a bit. There were some lines that were dropped that indicated that a longer passage of time between end of the last episode and this one, to give Dualla a little time to mourn, to give Lee a little time to recover, and move everything along the timeline.
This storyline, the "B story" here, of Rya Kibby and her unwanted pregnancy, and then the abortion decision that Laura eventually comes to was actually a storyline that we had developed very early. We had started talking about this idea early in the first season as a- as a potentially interesting storyline for us 'cause it dealt with a practical issue of, "What are their policies, in the Fleet, going to be in terms of birth control, in terms of abortion?" The population of the species was going to be- hang in the balance, and what would these people really do in these circumstances? And it was definitely an issue we wanted to deal with, and wanted to play, and wanted to see how the characters would react in this circumstance. I thought there was something interesting about Laura Roslin, whose politics on the surface seem probably moderate-to-liberal, Secretary of Education, and one of the ongoing threads of the entire series was watching as Laura is slowly changed by the repsonsibilities of being President. And this storyline was one of those key ideas that, like I said, we talked about early in the first season. And I was fascinated with the idea of this soft-ish appearing woman who's probably, presumably, has all the politically correct positions on these sorts of matters being forced to grapple with the real responsibilities of her- of her role. And I was always interested by playing against the expectations that, I've said this many times though, Laura would be the "dove", and Adama would be the "hawk", and that would always provide very predictable expected conflict between the two. And I always thought it was interesting to subvert that at every- at every turn and always put the characters in situations where they would have to grapple with them as human beings rather than as- as- as just as stalking horses for expected political positions.
Here comes John Heard, who I think is a great actor, in many, many things. I knew him, as soon as his name came up, I was "Oh, yeah! From 'Big'!" Which I think was a tremendous movie and a wonderful, wonderful, film and John had the quasi-villainous role in that episode- in that movie. And more recently I had known him from his work on "Sopranos" as the corrupt police lieutenant. I think John's a great actor and we were really, really happy to have him on the show. He fit in really well. He provided a different color, different flavor to the part and so- it's always nice to get "name" guest cast to come in and juice up the production a little bit here and there.
"Captain's Hand" is also a mix between a standalone episode and a more traditional continuing episode of ours. I think it successfully straddles the line in terms of continuing the ongoing storylines of Lee, and Dualla, and Baltar, and Laura, and Kara, and at the same time dealing with issues that are self-contained within one episode.
Oh, here comes the beep! Oh no! Cover your ears.
Act 1
Ooh. That scary beep. Beep.
Initially, in the early drafts of this in the story and in the first draft of the script Lee came over by himself. It was more of a self-contained "Lee" show that really didn't involve Kara until a little bit later in the drama when she was pulled over to Pegasus. The idea wa- ,in the initial drafts, was that Lee came aboard, and that the problem onboard Pegasus was not- was not that discipline was too tough, it was that it was quite the opposite. It was that it was too lax. The idea was that Trammel was just a nice guy. Trammel was just everything Lee thought his father should be. The idea was Lee comes on board this ship and Trammel's this perfectly nice guy who wants to be liked by his crew and wants to get along with everybody and just commanded with a very soft glove. And Lee found himself fulfilling the hardass role. He came over and yelled at guys and saw that fights were breaking out on the hangar day, nobody- hangar bay, nobody gave a shit about it. People talked back. People didn't carry out orders. There was a certain sense of "School's out on Peggy" since Cain and Fisk had both been killed, and then they get this- this new commander in who hasn't had any experience commanding a ship and he just, more than anything else, wanted to be liked by the crew, because the crew had hated the previous two commanders. And then that was supposed to bring along its own problems. That grew less satisfying. As we played it out it was an odd fit because it never quite felt right that Lee was such a complete hardass with these guys and it cut against the grain, just, we were having trouble making that story work. So we kept working on, "What is the nature of Garner's problem? Is he too lax? Is he too friendly? Is he too much of a hardass? Is he crazy?" The version that we shot, the f- the draft, the filming draft is slightly different than the edited version, too. These early scenes were colored by the fact that- that CIC scene that we left a moment ago where Lee first came into Garner and found out that the Raptors were missing, we played it where Garner was immediately on Hoshi's ass about something. Hoshi was on the phone with somebody at Galactica and was not informing Garner in the way that Garner wanted to be informed. And he was riding his ass and sent him to his quarters and had him arrested and there was a sense of fear everywhere. That Garner was this crazed, desperate. And we were taking direction from "Caine Mutiny", was sort of an archetype for the character at that point, and the idea that we were going to play, and you can still see- parts of it are still here, was that Lee appreciated Garner. Lee liked Garner. Respected him. Thought he was trying to make the best of a bad situation. He was the third guy who had to command this ship, and he was trying to bring discipline back to a vessel that had had questionable discipline. It was a somewhat Kurt-like regime under Caine and it then it was a more overtly piratical regime under Fisk and then Garner was trying to just straighten it all out. And the idea we were going to play was Lee was slow to see that- that Garner was deeply flawed as well. And that was an archetype that was borne out of "Caine Mutiny" which follows a very similar structure in that- that the Queeg-
(phone rings) Now see there? Look! Oh my god! Run for the hills, my phone is ringing. The idea- (phone rings) I could unplug it. I could actually walk ov- hey! I'm going to walk right over there right now (phone rings) and I'm going to unplug it for- for all of you 'cause I don't want any of your precious little feelings to be hurt. (phone rings) Here I go. (Ron's voice gets fainter as he walks away) I'm walking over. And I'm unplugging. I'm unplugging as we speak. And, it's now unplugged. You happy? Everybody happy now?