Podcast:Rapture
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RDM: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and we're coming to you live this week from Berkeley, California, where the Mrs and I are relaxing and trying to take a little time off, but the podcast must be done and so here we are. I'm here with the lovely and talented Mrs Ron. Say hello, Mrs Ron.
Terry: Hello, Mrs Ron.
RDM: There you have it.
"Rapture" is part two of the two-parter that is the midseason cliffhanger, of course, of season three. As we go through this episode you'll— this will be err— we'll be talking about a lot of editing changes that happened along the way in this episode more so than story changes. The story and script of this episode didn't change radically through the process, there was a lot of polishing, a lot of narrowing down of scenes and choices, but actually, in comparison with a lot of the other scripts this season, the big— the fundamental storylines of Rapture remained pretty consistent throughout, but we were battling things like the ever-present problem of time, having too much story and trying to fit it all into the broadcast window, and also dealing with some of the arcane matters like act length as we went through.
There will be no smoking this week, the smoking lamp is out.
Terry: Yes, as Mrs Ron is here.
RDM: Yes, sad to say.
Terry: But there's ice in the glass.
RDM: But there's ice in the glass.
Terry: He bought scotch.
RDM: I bought scotch, we're cheaping out on the scotch though, this is Johnny Walker black, so it's a blend—
Terry: Well that's because we're out of town, we didn't want to take the good stuff on the airplane.
RDM: Yeah, where the bottle would open up in our luggage and pose a danger, because you can't have liquids on your airplane any more, of course.
Terry: But it wouldn't be a podcast without the scotch.
RDM: That's right. So anyway, here we are back at err— in the nuclear standoff section, which as I told you in the first part was originally slated to be a mid-episode climax, it was the mid-episode crisis in part one, and I shifted it to the end of part one to make it a cliffhanger because I thought it was a more effective cliffhanger than simply going out on the Anders-Lee standoff down on the algae planet. So this whole sequence was originally planned to cover the movement of Baltar and D'Anna from the Cylon baseship down to the algae planet surface in part one and would have occurred, I believe, at the end of act two or three in that episode. Then the first part was going to end pretty much down on the planet with Anders and Lee pointing guns at one another in early drafts, and then as we— as filmed it was just the Sergeant pointing a gun at Anders. But whole sequence, this whole bit of business aboard the Cylon baseship, all this stuff was slated to be in part one. But as I was looking over the two episodes, it just felt like we didn't really have the most dynamic cliffhanger that we'd ever had, so we— I opted to move that down the line, and actually as we— as I look to it later we eliminated another standoff, another nuclear countdown section that was supposed to be in this episode. This little bit here between Lee and Anders and the decision to go after Kara—
Terry: A hot Lee and Anders. Hot slaves.
RDM: The greased-up Roman gladiator look of (laughs) Lee and Anders I wi—
Terry: Is it supposed to be hot there?
RDM: I think it's supposed to be hot, I wish—
Terry: Or in that way they just want to see Lee and Anders greased up.
RDM: Well that's always fun, but I think it was supposed to be hot, see it's nice and bright and sunny outside, funny that they're not sweating as much outside as they are inside—
Terry: No, but there's a lot of fans who live for sweaty Lee and Anders.
RDM: The rescue mission of Dualla going after Kara did change a few times in the script, in the original it was not as it is now, getting inside the Raptor and taking off and making it back to orbit, it was actually Dualla having to carry Kara, physically, back across broken ground and rescue her, 'cause Kara— I think she had a severe wound, I believe it was her leg or something, and she was really hurt, and it was— we wanted Dualla to have to physically pick Kara up and carry her back, we thought that was kind of interesting, putting the two women—
Terry: And Dualla's three-feet pig and—
RDM: Yeah, that came up of course, the practicality of doing that. But also, the more to the point, what really came up, more than just the difficulties of executing the physical movement of it, was trying to limit the number of days on a location. As I told you before—
Terry: And that would've taken an extra 4, 5 days?
RDM: Well, it was just— we had— we were looking for ways of carrying down all the action on a location, 'cause we were— we sent the entire film unit up to Kamloops in Canada, which was an overnight trip, it was outside the zone, which is a union term, it's very far away from our studio—
Terry: It's a lot of trucks—
RDM: It's a lot of trucks—
Terry: —a lot of people, a lot of—
RDM: —and which all translates into a lot of money—
Terry: —a lot of money—
RDM: —so we were looking for ways to limit the number of days we would actually be out on Kamloops and how many people we had to take out there. You'll note that the entire Dualla-rescues-Kara sequence takes place almost exclusively inside the Raptor, which means that we could shoot it on the sound stages and fake the fact that they were on location.
These bits here, with Dualla on the telephone and with the Sergeant, were obviously on location and we wanted some of that to give you the feel that they were really out there, but we quickly realized that we couldn't do the whole thing, we had to bring them back to the studio.
This bit of business was always a little bit confusing, and we struggled a lot with it in the script and in editing, the fact that there is a standoff in orbit and D'Anna is able to successfully bluff her way into getting at least one Cylon raider down to the planet surface, even though Adama has threatened to nuke the site. She gambles that he wouldn't actually nuke the site over just one Raider, as opposed to the entire flight that goes through and he backs off and doesn't, so it's a successful ploy. I think that dramatically you kind of ride with us through this section, I think that you're willing to accept that she won the standoff, and that he split the baby a little bit and decided that it wasn't truly worth nuking the site over that one Raider. There is a more fundamental logical question of course, which is why the Raiders don't just jump down to the planet surface the way that we see Raiders jump in other circumstances. I don't have a good answer for that, except this worked better dramatically and that's what we did.
This section— I like this a lot, this little beat of Helo and Sharon, and cutting in on what they're gonna do about their baby, was always one of the more intriguing emotional storylines in the episode, and I liked coming into the situation and not really knowing what they were talking about and what was going on in their head. I think as scripted in the first drafts, this conversation was going to take place in a Raptor, that Sharon was going to try to steal a Raptor and go fly out of Galactica and go to the baseship to get her baby, and I called bullshit on that and said 'Well, y'know—' I think one of the tropes of doing science-fiction shows or shows about military life is that there's always this moment when the pilot, or some pilot, goes and steals a plane and flies it away, gets on the carrier deck and flies a stolen plane off, and I just never believed that, it's just so unbelievable, so I— we almost did it and I just pulled— she can't steal a Raptor, that's just crazy, so we opted not to go that route. And this is a more effective scene, I think, anyway—
Terry: Did Kara steal that airplane?
RDM: No.
Terry: No.
RDM: No. This I love, they're holding each other, they're crying, (Sharon says "I love you" in the background) "I love you", and watch the look on Helo's face here. And this is a great Rymer, see Rymer's really good at this, at staging, at— so that you're drawn into the emotional moment, you're not quite sure what's gonna happen— see, look at that look on Helo's face— and then 'Boom!'. And oh my God, he shot her. I love that.
Terry: That's just so hard.
RDM: That's so h— that's so bad, that's just like 'Wow!'. (Helo screams in the background) And then we did this— the anguish cry, that's a really power— I like that, that's one of the better teasers, I think, we did this season, in terms of what the tease-out is. 'Cause it's just— I think it real— it's a really shocking and heartfelt moment emotionally.
Terry: Oh, this makes you think about it, what if you gotta do something like that, it's just so— it's so utterly human—
RDM: Yeah, even though he knows she's gonna go download and be on the other side, but—
Terry: —what does it matter—
RDM: —what does it cost you, what does it mean to actually—
Terry: —to actually do that—
RDM: —to hold your wife in your arms and put the gun to her chest and pull the trigger—
Terry: —that's something you never think about.
RDM: No, I never think of that, honey.
Terry: (laughs)
RDM: Are you drifting off to sleep now?
Terry: No, no, I'm on the way.
RDM: Terry doesn't sleep very often when I'm around.
Terry: (laughs)
RDM: We don't know why. OK, that's the end of the tease.
Act 1
RDM: OK, and we're back. When I w— when I took a polish pass through these two episodes, one of the things I did on my pass was to—
Terry: Do people know what a polish pass is?
RDM: Essentially, there's a point in the development, the life, history of each script where usually the show runner takes a pass through the script, and it's the polish pass at the end, and sometimes I do it, and sometimes I don't, I'm happy not to do it—
Terry: —a polish pass, meaning he re—
RDM: —I polish it, and I polished this one at the end, and one thing I did was to shift this scene from a scene in CIC I think it was, where they were confronting Helo and being very angry with him, to putting it in the room, with her body still being taken and the blood on the walls, and the, y'know— they were still very much in the moment. And you do that because it also brings the audience very much in the moment of what had just happened, I mean you're in the moment of the killing, and I thought that was a much more powerful place to play the scene.