Podcast:Taking a Break From All Your Worries

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Teaser

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and tonight the smokes are Shermans, the Scotch is Glenross, and the episode is "Taking a Break From All Your Worries".

This one went through quite a bit of change. Which is, of course, something I'm sure you're shocked by; those regular listeners to the podcast often hear how radical changes have gone through. This one went round and round quite a bit, mostly in terms of tone and in what we were trying to accomplish with this episode. As the title implies, "Taking a Break From All Your Worries"- oh, and the trucks are back, as you can see, 'cause it's garbage day and I'm here at home in Berkley- home in Altadena, having returned from Berkley, briefly, to do the podcast. "Taking a Break From All Your Worries" is obviously a reference to the Cheers theme song. This episode was conceived as a lighter one. This was our comedy episode, (chuckles) oddly enough. The irony of that is twofold, considering what the episode- how the episode turned out in terms of tone and feel and also the fact that the last time we tried to do somewhat of a comedic episode, we also handed it to Eddie Olmos to direct. And neither one is probably a laugh riot, but I think the Tigh certainly, the "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" episode Eddie directed season one, certainly had a lighter- a light comedic touch. This one was not so much a case of Eddie taking the material and turning it dark, it was just over the process of working through this episode, story lines and scenes and then on to performances and then the cut and mood just kept getting darker and darker, just by the nature of the material. But the irony is we all still thought about this one as our light, fun-filled, episode, right up until where we saw the finished cut. (Chuckes.) We went, "Oh. Ok. So we won't really put a laugh track to this one."

The network, in fairness to the network, was also a bit surprised, because we had sold this to them as a light episode and we said, "Well, we'll do a light episode and this will be the one, episode twelve," and they were quite happy, as you can imagine, after all the darkness that we do in the show, to have something to look forward to on the horizon that was a little bit lighter and when they saw the episode they too were shocked and not too happy that it had not turned out as light as it was- as light as it had been sold to them, in all fairness. And so there was, there were a bit of discussions about content and mood and graphic issues and so on, but in this case they were certainly within their rights 'cause they had been, from their point of view, they had certainly be sold a bill of goods in terms of what the episode was going to be. From our side of the fence, I don't think any of us ever really intended to turn this as dark as it turned out to be.

We had begun this episode with the idea that- of getting a new bar. We blew up Cloud Nine at the end of the second season and when we did that it was with the explicit understanding that eventually we would establish a new bar, a new place to relax- or for characters to go and relax, and enjoy themselves. That was something important to the network, and to us internally, that you had a place to blow off steam and play some lighter moments and so- show the life of the and so on. Once we had brought more civilians aboard Galactica because of the escape from New Caprica and the fact that they lost so many people and they had lost so many ships and we started doubling up and putting civilians aboard Galactica as a way of helping ourselves with story. It also seemed natural to build the bar on Galactica instead of setting it off on another ship of the Fleet that we would constantly have to be finding excuses to going back and forth to go see. So the initial draft of this, the initial story draft, the Le- there was always the Baltar being tortured and interrogated story line driven by Laura, predominantly, but the Lee storyline had to- was a lighter one and it was inspired by Catch-22 and the character Milo Minderbinder and his- who is the supply guy in Catch-22 who is always trading one thing to get another and was always a wheeling-dealing classic military type and also there's a famous M*A*S*H episode that I always have been fond of where Hawkeye has a whole in his boot and in order to get a fresh pair of boots he continually has to get Radar to do something to get Klinger to do something to get "Hot Lips" to do something, this long chain of trades in order to get his boots, and it all comes crashing down and this was- a similar idea with Lee was trading getting Dualla to do something to get Tyrol to do something, etc., etc. to eventually save this bar. First, to build the bar and then in subsequent drafts to save the bar that was about to go under. And it was a nice idea and well executed, but it never quite gelled for me, and as we worked through the story line and as we worked through the drafts we kept shaping and molding it and we realized that we couldn't just ignore the things, the events, that had happened in the previous two-parter in terms of their marriage and relationships with Kara and Dualla and Lee and Anders, Lee and Anders having been married by this time, of course. And so we decided to move it further in that direction. Well, moving that storyline further in that direction inevitably meant that it was gonna be more about the relationships, it was gonna be about problems in their marriages, it was gonna be about much heavier kinds of issues.

Baltar's suicide is a topic of much discussion there in the teaser. I think it was Eddie, in a conversation with Mike Taylor and James Callis that came up with exactly how the hanging was gonna work and how he would get the materials and so on. There is a bit of a conceit. I'll admit that we're conceiting a certain amount of freedom in terms of Baltar's incarceration. That he's not watch on a camera twenty-four hours. He's not in solitary. He's not- well, he's in solitary, but he's not under constant surveillance, and that's a bit of a conceit to make the show work and make us- to allow us to do the different episodes we wanted to do.

Act 1

So here we are in the bar. This is the reveal of the bar. The "Why not?"^[06:51]- sorry- Joe's. (Chuckle.) I just looked back through the earlier drafts before I got on the podcast. It used to be called the "Why not?" which was an interesting name. Then it became Joe's, after the bartender. I love that shot of the Ra- of the Viper hanging from the ceiling.

^[07:07]The young man you just saw there in the wheelchair was a visitor to the set who was a huge fan of the show and was actually confined to a wheelchair and the cast and crew took to him and showed him around and really made him feel like he was part of the family, I hope, for the day or two that he was around and put him in the set. Gave him a shirt, put him in. We're happy to include him in the show. So that's a very nice gesture that they made. That some- indicative of the spirit of the cast and the crew on the set. It wasn't really something that I was personally involved with.

This idea of Tyrol and Lee sharing their problems a little bit. Two married men dealing with the vicissitudes of marriage was an idea that we really liked. It felt natural in that these two, the chief of the deck and the commander of the air group prolly saw each other a lot anyway. And naturally talked to one another.

I was talking about earlier, why does Baltar get access to material that he could construct a rope with? Why isn't he watched twenty-four hours a day? It's a conceit. We're pushing a little bit of believability. It's dramatic license if you wanna look at it that way. If he was under constant scrutiny, if they were staring at him twenty-four hours a day, we couldn't do much in the way of story for the rest of the season. And I think that the price that you- if you're gonna do that, you take that dramatic license, to be fair then you don't make them look stupid by allowing him to get materials that he could then escape with or that he could actually injure somebody with, so that there's never a penalty that makes the characters looks stupid for allowing those things to happen. I think that's how you balance the line between realism and dramatic license.

This beat with Gaeta, the o- or the story line with Gaeta was something that was in the very initial story document, that Gaeta still has issues. Especially after what he went through in "Collaborators", was nearly killed for his association with Baltar, now Baltar's back aboard Galactica and there was something interesting about the fact that Gaeta was having trouble living with that. Was having trouble just knowing that the guy was around and sittin' down there in that cell and probably gonna get his trial and everything. And that he would not be able to quite deal with it.

And, of course, here's a scene that I'm sure many of you at home have had where you come home drunk. The wife is still there, still up. You've been out at the bar. She didn't go with you and she ain't too happy.

This episode probably deals more with their marriage than we have done in previous episodes, mostly because of the stories that we've chosen to tell haven't given us a lot of opportunity to deal with Lee and Dualla. At this point in the season, it's starting to feel like we got a firmer handle on the character of Lee, of where he was going. We started to talk seriously about what the f- the rest of the arc was gonna do for Lee for the rest of the season and Jamie Bamber also had a great deal to do with this story line and molding it and crafting it and we talked to Jamie at length about various aspects of where the character was going over the course of the season and you will see in subsequent episodes, coming up, that the groundwork we're laying here with Lee in some ways with Dualla will ultimately platform him to where we go by the end of the season.

This is a lovely little beat of Laura coming and returning Baltar's glasses to him and then the slight flashback to a similar gesture being done back in New Caprica.

One interesting thing about this episode is both Eddie's d- well, two interesting things. Eddie's direction and the way the show is cut. Eddie really went for the dramatic jugular in almost every scene and he pushed the actors and pushed, I think, the nature of the show into some really interesting directions. You'll see a lot more closeup. You'll see a lot more charged emotions from characters you're not used to seeing. Laura in particular. I think Eddie pushed Mary into territory that she wasn't entirely certain that she wanted to go, but ultimately she went there and trusted him and went there with him. And I think that it's a remarkable performance by Mary in this episode. I think that her ang- her genuine fury and anger and need for revenge on Baltar comes through. The- you get a sense of a great deal of history between these two characters. It's interesting to see that she's back in control and that the positions have been completely reversed from where they were on New Caprica. And how she handles it. That she's still maintaining the veneer of the President, but there's this rage that's boiling just beneath the surface.

It was also an interesting question of how to treat Baltar in this situation. I think early story li- story drafts and script drafts played him more comedically. We had, I believe, more of Number Six making an appearance, like she does here, and as we went through the drafts we peeled that pack a little bit, and a little bit, and a little bit, to emphasize the nature of his confinement and really make you feel like this is a guy in a very bad position.

As we talked about last week, they snuck Baltar's body aboard Galactica so that no one in the Fleet even knew he was there, which was intended to give them an option of just chucking this guy out the airlock if things went south or they decided to. They didn't want it really known that he was back, 'cause they didn't really wanna deal with the political fallout of that situation.

It's an interesting question. What is Baltar's guilt? And I think we've played a lot of ambiguity over the last two and a half seasons in terms of what Baltar knows, what he doesn't know, what he did, what he didn't do. There was a whole back story that we started to go into in this episode that was actually shot that ultimately was dropped because we did not pay- we decided not to use it in the trial. And yes, we're heading for- we're obviously headed for a trial of Baltar by the end of the season.

I love Mary here. I love the chaos of the scene. This is really Eddie. This is Eddie sculpting the scene in a way to bring the passions to a boil, to really sense that it's getting out of control. Laura's completely capable of doing what she's threatening to do here. Tigh is certainly capable of doing what he's been asked to do here. And when he's dragged out of that cell, I think there is a sense of "God know where this is going. What's gonna happen to this man? What are they really gonna do to him here?" Early drafts had us doing more beatings of Baltar, Tigh was really gonna be in charge of the interrogation early on. It was really gonna be puttin' the screws to him in a literal sense, trying to get him to confess his crimes and to give them information on the Cylons. Ultimately felt like, well, we'd already physically tortured him on the Cylon baseship and didn't see a lot to be added to that idea to do it again, so this one became much more psychological. This whole thing about whether they'll throw him out the airlock, drag him away, trying to break him psychologically, the sleep deprivation, and then ultimately, the drugs.

Act 2

RDM: Act two. As I was saying, the drugs were then more of a mental and psychological way to torture Baltar to get information out of him, which was in stark contrast to the way that the Cylons deal with him.

There was a little bit more in the script about the fact that Adama had used drugs like this on prisoners in the past, that we never really addressed who those prisoners were and what they- who they use them on. But the implication was that they were certainly- they were used on other human beings. They were used on Colonials 'cause they had no reason to use them on Cylons, certainly, before the attack on the Colonies.

Again, look at the way- look at the faces, look at the energy of the scene and the emotional- we're in tight here a lot. This is a lot of bringing you in to a very tense moment and really feeling the desperation that people are pushed and pulled by. The we start this intercut. I think one of the interesting things that Eddie did in his director's cut was the way he intercut all the different story lines. It was much more aggressive than what we usually do and I would- say that it's thematically intercut instead of cutting on action. I like to intercut scenes a lot. You see that- a lot of the teasers that I write, or that I rewrite, I use that technique a lot of cross-cutting between disparate elements and giving them- discovering a thematic tie as you go along. Eddie's choices, and the editorial choices here by Andy Seklir, our editor, are much more in tune with the emotion of the scene and sometimes changing up the emotion of the scene by cutting to something to counterpoint it, other times to continue just the emotion of the moment, but a lot of the intercuts and where they occur were not scripted. This beat was not scripted to go in this place. This beat actually occurred much later in the script.

I like the fact that Anders is turning out to be a much more interesting character, I think, than anybody anticipated at the beginning when he was created, in that his feeling for Kara is star- is equaling her feeling for him. That he's not just a very simple jock. He actually has interesting complexities and layers, and that this woman means a lot to him, and that he's seeing bigger pictures. He's aware that she's somebody special. He's aware of her relationship with Lee. This is not a stupid man. This is a man who thinks about his life and is trying to make his way through a very difficult situation. He's not a military guy, and so he approaches this entire series from a different perspective than most of our other regulars do, 'cause he's not a man with a mission. He's now a man who's back on Galactica and what's he supposed to do with his life? We had talked about in the writers' room various- lots of other ideas for Anders. He was gonna go into the Marines. He was gonna go into flight training. There was a lot of different notions that came up of giving him a job, and they just kept falling away by the wayside 'cause they took up time. It didn't seem like they were exploring new ground with him. It didn't quite feel correct for Anders. There seemed to be something right that as Kara was drifting and Kara was unsure what she would do with her life that Anders would not completely leave her orbit and was gonna try to solidify that. That the relationship between those two was as important as it was to her.

And then, again, cross-cutting this with Lee and Dualla is- was a choice that-

Terry: Are you smoking?

RDM: -Eddie-

Oh. Hello, Mrs. Ron.

Terry: You're in here smoking.

RDM: I am in here smoking. I have returned to Altadena, therefore the smoking lamp is on- is lit.

Terry: Ewwww. It's in the hallways.

RDM: We'll-

Terry: Your children are all gonna die of second-hand smoke.

RDM: No, the children aren't even here.

Terry: And the cats.

RDM: Well, the cats might. (Chuckles.)

Terry: Don't approve.

RDM: In fairness to Dualla here, I think that one thing that is lacking in this episode is understanding the circumstances under which she made the decision to marry Lee. There was a scene that we shot for "Unfinished Business", one of the flashbacks, that had Lee proposing to Dualla in the Raptor on the way after he had been betrayed by Kara, and when Lee asked her to marry him she actually had this long monologue where she talked about the fact that she knew that Kara was the woman in Lee's life. That Lee was always gonna love her, that that was never gonna change, but in much the same way that Laura in that same episode was talking about the fact that they had to live for now, 'cause they didn't know how long they had until the Cylons came back, and to try to make the most of the lives that they had while they still had them. That was the reason for why Dualla married Lee in the first place. She knew that one day Kara would come back into his life. But she knew that until then she would have him. And she didn't know when they would all die. She didn't know how long the horizon was for any of them. So sh- when he asked her to marry her, she explicitly said, "I know Kara will come back one day, but until then I will marry you, Lee." And Lee was protesting and denying, "No. I'm done. That's all history. It's old- it's old business. It's never coming back." And she was just wiser to know that some day it would. So that informed that scene that you just saw with her alluding to the fact that she knew- she went into this marriage with her eyes wide open.

Again, you see that Eddie has intercut those two scenes in a very interesting way. Now we're back here with Kara and Anders, and watching these two very different couples, but they're both struggling with a lot of the same issues. One of the primary issues being the relationship between Kara and Lee and their inability to let go of these other people or to let go of each other, and it's trapped this foursome, the quartet, as we call them in the writers' room. The quartet is trapped in this dance- dance of doom.

Here you see- what is the character's name? I cannot- I'm blanking on the character's name. She's played by Kerry who is- Kerry who is Jamie Bamber's wife, of course. ^[22:10]She had, actually, a bigger role in early drafts, and even as the draft as shot. Part of the scenario was gonna be that she was tending to Baltar. She would come and she was the medic that would come and take care of him in the cell and you'll see that she's like helping him here in the sick bay scene, in the drug scene. And part of it- her story line was gonna be her mounting disgust with what's going on and her ethical problems with what the doctors and the nurses were being asked to do in sick bay, ultimately driving her to say, "I can't do this anymore." She's gonna step away from the whole scenario. And then at the end, when it's announced on the wireless that Baltar is- has returned to the Fleet- I'll come back to this.

Act 3

Just to continue that thought from the previous act, Kerry's character was going to be the one that leaked the information to the press, and in the scene in the bar, actually, it was supposed to be a shock that the information got out, nobody knew how the information had left Galactica, and there was a cut-away shot to her sitting in the bar and reacting to that information, knowing that she had been the one who had leaked it, as a way of saying - she was a whistleblower. That was her function. She wanted to blow the whistle to keep them from just executing this man or torturing him any further. She was gonna let the news be known. And ultimately that was cut because of time and because the shot in the bar didn't really sell. It didn't sell the idea. We had cut it back so much that it was just a shot of her listening to the [[wireless], and didn't play.

Again, here you see we cut away from the dramatic scene, the scene which you think that you would stay in, which is Baltar floating in the nether-world of his mind, under the influence of the drugs and Eddie chose to cut away from that and go straight into a scene between Kara and Lee. Now I think, if I'm not mistaken, in the director's cut there was this scene happened and then after this the scene that you saw with Starbuck and Anders would- took place after the scene you just saw with Lee and Kara, so that first scene with Kara and Anders was slated, or at least scripted, to be much later in the show. And then either in Eddie's director's cut or in the recutting that myself and David Eick did, we moved- we swapped those scenes so that you setup the problem with- oh, dear. There's a- somebody's- I'm so sorry. Somebody's backing up their truck somewhere. Think of it as an emergency signal. Ah. There. It went away.

This whole thing with the tank of water and Adama's interrogation of Baltar, this was crafted in large part with- between discussions with- between Eddie and the writer, Michael Taylor, and I think Michael Angeli, our other writer, pitched in a lot on these sequences. This was a really interesting idea that they really ran with on the stage and- dealing with water is always a really difficult proposition. Water just always brings all these special problems into production and you put some- a character floating in the water in the script and inevitably it's one of the first things that production wants you to take out, just 'cause it's a huge pain in the ass dealing with the water and the mechanics of where it's gonna be, and the special gear, and the time involved in doing anything with water, and it destroys sound, etc., etc., etc. But it's also good if you can stick through that process and keep anything like that in the show, just because it's so unusual to see it in television because it's almost always eliminated from everybody's script. In this case we were really lucky that Eddie really believed in this passionately and just refused to let go of it and no matter what the production difficulties were they always found a way around them and he just persevered. So we have this nice sequence of Baltar in the water, which I think is really effective and really creepy.

There was also a question- yeah. See that moment there where Kerry knocks over the stand, that was then her exit. She was then gonna say, "I can't do this anymore," and she leaves. She left sick bay.

There was also a question of how much Baltar would confess to under the tank and what- how that would affect the trial later on. If he confesses and says he did participate in the genocide of the race, if he deliberately did this or that, or he was- if, essentially, they got the answers they were looking for here, there wasn't much to have a trial about, later. So as we began to do story breaks and conversations about the trial, and what the nature of the trial was gonna be, and what the charges would be, and how he would try to defend himself, that also kept causing us to go back and rework these scenes. Michael Taylor had to do a great deal of rewriting and carving on this particular episode because of decisions made on other episodes. We kept having to go back and play around with things and so on.

Oh, I'm sorry. ^[27:38] This was the moment when Kerry, I think, decided she had to leave. Going from that to the spinning wedding ring is, I think, a really inspired choice that they made in editorial. I loved it as soon as I saw it. I love the way that Eddie keeps pulling you out of that moment. That traditionally you would just stay with that story and not break it because the theory is you don't want to break up the dramatic tension of what's happening to Baltar in sick bay, and normally the idea of cutting away to these other scenes would be antithetical to the whole notion of what you're trying to do. It's like, why disrupt that mood? Why interrupt those sequences by cutting away? Oddly enough, and it was a revelation to me as I watched it, these cutaways to the Lee and Kara scene that you saw a moment ago and to this scene between Lee and Tyrol actually in some ways, I think, deepen the scene with Baltar and make it feel more harrowing. It feels like it- it definitely feels like it goes on longer, but it also just feels like there's this nasty awful thing happening to this man that no one else is even aware of. And yet what they're talking about is just as important in their lives as is the th- in some ways, arguably in some ways, as what's going on with Baltar. That they're all deeply involved with their own personal issues and their own thing. And had no idea what's going on- in the sick bay.