Podcast:The Passage
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Ronald D.- this is Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. And we're here to do the podcast for episode nine of season three, "The Passage". There will be no Scotch, no smokes today. I am not well. (Chuckles.) But such is my dedication that here I am doing my podcast anyway. Yes, yes, yes. Let's all pat me on my back for doing my fuckin' job. (Coughs.) Anyway.
"The Passage" is an interesting show. It's one of the, I think, one of the most harrowing shows that we've done in quite a while. There's ref- internally, we talked a lot about its similarities in tone and mood on this particular show to, all the way back to "33". No, it's not really another "33", but certainly the sense of desperation, the exhaustion, and the fatigue, and the continuing toll that it takes on the pilots is similar in that regard.
This episode was written by a freelancer for us, named Jane Espenson. Jane is someone that we're very excited to have do an episode for us this season. Jane, some of you may know her work from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other things. I actually remember when (impersonating old man) Jane started in this business way back when she was but a lass and I was much younger.Yes. (resumes normal voice.) She came into pitch a story to Star Trek when I was there and we ended up buying it and that's when I first had the pleasure of meeting Jane and I tracked her career from afar over the years and never got a chance to really ever work with her again but she was doing a deal at Universal Television and we heard that she was really excited about the idea of doing an episode of Galactica and become a huge fan of the show and so we jumped on the opportunity to have Jane write one for us. (Coughs.) It turned out very well.
This story, actually, is very similar to the story that we started out with. The idea was to do a, literally a passage. We wanna do something that was demonstrating the Fleet's survival problems, the problems of food, and also do a gauntlet that the Galactica and the rest of the rag-tag Fleet had to go through back and forth. So breaking that down into some components. One of the things that I've always liked keeping into the show and integrating whenever possible are the realities of their situation and the difficulties of surviving out in the universe without any means of support other than the ships that you brought with you and the occasional odd planet you might find something on. So what we did here was, we said, "Ok, when they left New Caprica, let's assume that they had some food." That there were food supplies in some of the ships. There were probably emergency supplies on the ships in orbit. I'd say that there was some planning had been done and that they weren't just com- taking off completely without anything in their hands. So that got them through the initial stages of the escape after "Exodus". And let's also assume that there is some kind of food processing facility. That they have some methods of keeping foodstuffs going, of generating sustenance from some kind of materials, some kind of organic material. But let's say now, for this episode, that something's happened to that supply. We'd had this notion kicking around the writer's room for quite a while that at some point let's do the show where there's- something has attacked the food supply and suddenly, you thought you had all this- all these reserves and all this stuff sitting in various cargo holds and then you find out that it's all gone and suddenly you're on the verge of starvation and you weren't prepared for it and how would that impact everyone and what would they do? (Coughs.) And so that was the basis of this episode.
The notion of going through a gauntlet was- it's something that has tooled around in my mined now and again, and I think it's come up in the writer's room every once and a while. It's a desire to play the Galactica like ship- Galactica, the rag-tag fleet like naval vessels. Which is, one of the key metaphors in the show is that we treat the Galactica like an aircraft carrier. We treat the other ships like ships in a naval sense. We're always moving back and forth across the line about when they're spaceships, when they're not. This one is a melding of the two. The spaceship quality of them is emphasized by the fact that the food supply is suddenly destroyed and they have to suddenly scramble to make up for the shortfall, and then the naval aspect of it is to do the passage throught the storm, which is essentially what this is. We- at Star Trek we had done a couple of stories where the Enterprise had to pass through various space phenomena and you always liked to treat those like the ship at sea. I mean, there's always something evocative and interesting about the roots of these kinds of dramas can all be found in sea stories. These are sea yarns, on some level. (Sniffle.) The plots, that is. And to do an episode like this is to really go into that oeuvre. (Sniffle.)
That's the end of the tease.
Act 1
The pa- "The Passage" story on Galactica changed very little from story outline to what was finally presented. (Phone rings.) I mean, there's a lot of rewrites- Oh I'm- sorry about that, folks. Can't turn off the phone, unfortunately. Not from where I am. (Sniffle.) So you'll just have to suffer through hearing it ring incessantly. Oh. They stopped calling. Anyway. "The Passage" story on Galactica didn't change that much. I mean, we did a lot of internal rewrites, obviously. A lot of scenework. A lot of manuevering around of the Kat story and Kara's impact on it, and so on. But the basic contours of that storyline were pretty much intact.
This storyline on the Cylon baseship did go through several major changes. This was going to be- it was gonna involve the baby Hera a lot more, we had a great deal more dealing with the impact of D'anna sleeping with Baltar and Caprica-Six, how that was causing division within the Cylon world. That the other models were starting to go, "What's up with the Sixes and with the Eights? They seem to be sleeping with Baltar? Where's that going? He's causing problems." And then those model were getting defensive. Essentially, it was starting to portray Cylon society as starting to come a bit unraveled and starting to have problems because of the entry of Baltar into that world, which I thought was interesting. But it took up a lot of time and we kept having to pare back that storyline.
The other tale that was in this episode that ulitmately did not see the light of day was a long- was a Laura story, which I really can't talk too much about, other than to say that there are elements of that story that subsequently found their way into episodes much later in the season. So, that's why I can't really talk about them too much in this podcast, but when we get to those episodes I'll try to harken back to the halcyon days of yore when we were doing episode nine.
(Coughs.) Sorry.
There was something about having the danger be radiation as a visceral fright in the episode that I thought was an interesting way to go and very effective. Radiation has that special invisible terror, I think, in people. I think it's really- if you're in the room where there's radiation or you're in the city that's been irradiated, all those sorts of ideas, I think, really strike those of us who grew up in the Post-war world with a special kind of fear and resonance. The idea of the hair falling out and all the stages of radiation sickness I think hold a special terror for the audience and so I wanted to make that the real villain in the episode. The radiation was gonna get 'em as they went back and forth.
There was a great deal of discussion on the technical aspects of this show. I am sure that there are continuity errors or maybe some unscientific things that made it into the show. All I can tell you is that a lot of conversation went into how these things work and exactly what we were gonna portray, and what were the mechanics of getting through the cluster. I had etensive conversations with Michael Nankin, the director, who's directed several of these episodes for us. At one point it was going to be that the planet was g- the planet that they're going after was going to be inside a star cluster, so you would have to get all the way inside of this cluster to even find the planet. And ultimately we went away from that because that setup certain problems for subsequent episodes. By the end of this episode, I'm not giving anything away, this is the podcast afterall, we do realize the Cylons are heading to the same planet where Galactica is. You didn't want a situation where the people on Galactica and down, they had to leave that planet. We had to, like, repeat the passage. You didn't wanna have to like do the passage all over again, just to get out of that situation. And as we struggled with the technical parameters of it, talked- we talked a lot about star cluster, we talk a lot about novae, we talked a lot about, oh, just, every imaginable kind of space phenomenon. We settled on this idea of the cluster and making it a true passage and just positing that the cluster was so large and so vast that there were limits to what these people can do, technically. To get all- to go all the way around this thing was gonna take too long. They would not have time to literally go around to get to this planet and get the food, and the only way to do it in the time allowed was to actually pass through. We also posited, ok, Galactica herself is shielded, heavily shielded, she's- can take a hit from a nuke, afterall, so people inside Galactica will probably be safe from the radiation. People on the civilian- the civilian ships weren't designed for that. They would have some shielding for random space radiation of various kinds, but probably would shield their cockpits the most. The storage compartments and so on would not be as well shielded. Their navigational sensors would not be as good as Galactica's, etc. etc., etc. So, I'm only bringing this up to emphasize the fact that all these underlying technical issues are discussed at length in all the production meetings and script the script's story stage, and so on. And even so I'm sure there are mistakes.
This story with Kat. We talked early on about the idea that if you're gonna do a show like "The Passage", there had to be a price to pay, to give it meaning. Going through something this harrowing and watching just some day-player person who we've never met before show up and then conveniently die just wasn't gonna have a lot of meaning. It would not really have an impact. And we started talking, unfortunately, about Kat and we all sparked to the idea that this would be Kat's sendoff in the show and that she would die in this. And there was something poetic about it. There was something perfect about it. And we were conflicted. That's the end of act one.