Podcast:Sacrifice

This page is a transcript of one of Ronald D. Moore's freely available podcasts. All contents are believed to be copyright by Ronald D. Moore. Contents of this article may not be used under the Creative Commons license. This transcript is intended for nonprofit educational purposes. We believe that this falls under the scope of fair use. If the copyright holder objects to this use, please contact transcriber Steelviper or site administrator Joe Beaudoin Jr. To view all the podcasts the have been transcribed, view the podcast project page.

Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast of episode sixteen, I believe, this is now ep- "Sacrifice". Season two. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica series. This is also an episode I had certain issues with. It's not my favorite episode of the season. I don't openly dislike it, though, you may be relieved to know, like I did openly dislike "Black Market" a couple of weeks ago. My problem with "Black Market" was that I felt that it- ultimately fell short of what the show is about in terms of what type of story we were trying to tell and that ultimately it was just to conventional- for what we we're- what I think the show does best. This- this- this show, I think, works in parts. I think it has a lot of interesting ideas in it. I think there's specific places where I think we stumble and don't quite deliver on all- on all that the show can be, and I'll try to identify those as we go through. But o- overall I think this show works, and there's things about it that I think are quite nice. Maybe a word is- is worth mentioning here about just the nature of these podcasts. I was unaware about how widely these podcasts are listened to within the- the show itself. A lot of people that work on the show do listen to these podcasts, as well as executives, and so on, and it's worth reiterating that flaws and things that I try to point out in these episodes, things that I'm not satisfied with or are not happy with, ultimately re- redown to me. I'm the- I'm the showrunner. (Chuckles.) I'm the executive producer. A lot of these things are decisions I either made myself or decisions I was aware of and signed off on, so none of this is really meant as criticism to my- to my team, who I value immensely.

Okay. Here in the open. In the scripted version and in the original cut we opened this sequence with an open scene. That is, a scene that takes you someplace other than what the main characters and you're just starting in mid-story, and that was the sequence, this sequence, right here that you're watching with Sesha's husband. It opened with him working in that corridor, finishing up some repair duty, getting on the phone, telling his wife that he was going to be home very soon, and then suddenly the Cylon attack breaks out and he's- the ship, the freighter is damage and he's pulled out into space. It di- it wasn't that satisfying an opening, and I think it's always been a problematic aspect of this particular episode for, for again, what are script reasons. Here's a guy who we kill in the opening moments who we have no- no connection to and the only thing that really matters about him is that he's her husband, in that it drives her obsession and radicalization through the course of the episode. But, the- the pro- it doesn't quite work because it happens so quickly, you don't know who he is, you don't really care, then he's gone, and then we're- we're building a lot on your identi- identification with her emotional trauma, trying to make that the basis for what drives her into taking these extreme actions. And it doesn't quite work. We- we salvage it a little bit by concentrating more on Dana on those opening shots where you're really more with her and you realize that she has a backstory, that somebody mattered to her, that died, but you're really a little bit more with that character than you are with him. And that helps a little bit. It's still not a perfect- a perfect solution. We probably should have tried to work in a different- either a different motivation for her or really gotten a little bit more in depth to what that relationship was about, made us care a little bit more for- to what she lost.

'Course the biggest thing about this episode is the death of Billy, and the exit of Paul Campbell from our main cast. And, Paul's been there since the very beginning. Established in the miniseries. And he's been one of my favorite characters and he's certainly one of my favorite actors and one of the favorite cast members. Paul's very popular, very well liked. Was really an important part of the family. And the decision to "off" him was not made lightly. It really came more from a sense on our part that we- that Paul really is a good actor. Paul is getting a lot of opportunities. Paul was being offered lead roles on other shows and in features and we were trying to accomodate that and trying to make that work out as best we can to give him those opportunities, but yet, we were holding him on the show in a- in what is a supporting role, and doesn't work all the time, sometimes he doesn't work at all, sometimes the days are limited. And ultimately we- we got to a place where we felt that it was mutually benefecial to everybody to- to let Paul go. To let him go do- to let him pursue a career that he- he richly deserves, and it wasn't really fair to just keep him tethered to us. It came into a s- I dealt with a similar situation on "Roswell", a show that I worked on a few years ago. And one of the- one of the characters there was being offered, Colin Hanks, who was one of our characters on "Roswell", was getting of- he was being allowed to go do things like "Band of Brothers", and he had a movie that feature that he wanted to go do and we let him out. It was causing scheduling problems. We kept coming up with excuses for why the character would be gone for big stretches of time and it became so cumbersome that ultimately we- we made the same decision. We'll let him go and kill off the character. And he recurred, in flashbacks and as a ghost and that sort of thing in "Roswell." And something similar happened here. With Billy, because of the nature of the series, there was really no logical way for him to just stop being Laura's assistant. It didn't make sense for the character to suddenly leave her and say, take up residence on some other ship and pursue some other life that would have required a whole, pretty global shift in who the character was and what he was all about, and it just didn't feel right that he would just pack his bags and say, "I'm done, Ms- Madame President. I'm gonna go be a farmer on the farm ship." Or something like that. It just- it just wasn't plausible. It didn't ring true and it just felt better to go this route.

This is- this bar is not a location. This was actually constructed by our- our art department. It was- it's a nice big bar. It was a pretty expensive big set for us. Initially, we had talked about playing out this entire drama in a shuttle. A shuttle was going to be moving from Galactica to some- to Cloud 9 and along the way, in mid-journey, Sesha and her cohorts took over the shuttle and held everyone on there hostage. And we were going to play the whole show in that. It was much more claustrophobic environment. It was going to be a- more intense, that you were inside the shuttle for the whole time. And that just became awkward. It became awkward in terms of production because we don't have a shuttle sitting around, so you had to construct a shuttle from scratch. Believe it or not it's easier to make a big bar than it is a whole functional shuttle with all the control surfaces or c- control panels, etc. and technology and make it big enough that we would be able to put all the players in it and had had a couple of different rooms. You had to have a cockpit. You had to have a passenger area. You had to have places where people could believably be trying to assault and get in. And it was just far more compli- complex, and so we opted to put it in a bar on Cloud 9.