Podcast:Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down

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Teaser

Hello. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, and this is our very first podcast. This is episode nine, "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down", written by Jeff Vlaming, directed by Edward James Olmos. "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" was originally called "Secrets and Lies or Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" by Jeff, and when I saw those titles on the script I knew that we just had to go with "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down", it was too good of a title to let lie on the cutting room floor, as it were.

Alright, so this takes us out of what we call the "precap", and now we are into the actual recap of previous episodes on the good battlestar.

"Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" began life as a very different episode than what it ultimately turned out to be. It was originally going to sort of be a riff on "Crimson Tide", a movie if you're familiar with about an incident on board a U.S. nuclear submarine where Denzel Washington, the executive officer, and Gene Hackman, the commander of the submarine, are at odds about whether to launch the nuclear missiles or not, and ultimately they— Denzel Washington tries to relieve Gene Hackman, and Hackman fights back, and the crew picks sides, and they run around the submarine pointing guns at each other, and it's a very tense, taught thriller. I think it's a very good movie, one that I always thought was a— y'know, prime for us to do a riff on. So we always— we put "Crimson Tide" up on the writers' board as a possible episode eight or nine. And we all sort of got excited about the concept and really liked the idea of doing a "Crimson Tide"-like type episode where Adama and Tigh would each start to think that the other one was possibly a Cylon, and that the paranoia that was in the fleet had seeped into the two men at the very top, two men that were very close friends and allies, and that you would get to a place that by the end of the episode, that Tigh and Adama were actually pointing guns at each other. And it was a great idea, but ultimately it didn't work out, and there are many reasons why it didn't work out.

I mean, first of all, the fact that we wanted to do "Crimson Tide" meant that we wanted to do something like "Crimson Tide". You often find that you're sitting in the writers' rooms and you use sort of a shorthand jargon for episodes and what you want to try to do, and you'll say "well, let's do 'Casablanca' or let's do 'Crimson Tide' or let's do 'The Wild Bunch' or some ver— some sort of archetype an episode or a story model, and we use this sort of shorthand among each other. And nine times out of ten, what happens is that each episode goes through so many evolutions and changes that by the time it's written, produced and on the air, it seldom bears any resemblance to the original idea. So certainly this episode doesn't bear much resemblance at all to "Crimson Tide" the movie, except in the most sort of thematic way, it's just about suspicion and distrust, and that's about as far as you can go.

Essentially, the reasons why we didn't go down those paths are sort of complicated and we'll try to talk about them tonight as the episode goes on, but suffices to say at the beginning that we decided to take this episode in a less dark direction, as evidenced by this very first scene where we start seeing very serious matters in the episode were already starting to be treated slightly, just slightly comedically. Starting to see a little bit of quiet interaction between Adama and Laura, and what they're talking about of course is very serious matters about who may or may not be a Cylon within the fleet, but you can kinda tell that just within the actors performances, and especially the way Laura's dealing with Adama, that we're not gonna take this too seriously tonight.

This shot was actually suggested by our visual effects supervisor, Gary Hutzel. These are the vipers streaking towards Galactica as if to be on a collision course, and then at the last minute breaking across in this dramatic fashion. This is the observation deck, which came about beca— y'know, out of several discussions. There really aren't any windows aboard Galactica, it's not really a traditional sort of sci-fi spaceship where you get to look outside and see space all the time. It's not like the bridge of the Enterprise where there's a giant viewscreen where you're always looking at stars and looking at space. And aboard Galactica, which is really a warship, the idea that there would be big places of windows was sort of ridiculous. But it did feel right that perhaps there was one place, that perhaps there was one area of the ship which accepted a window, a port, to look out, and that it would be a fairly confined space for the crew on these very deep space missions that probably last months, if not years, and that there might be a place where they could go and just stargaze for a little bit. And in this situation, it seemed like there would be a lot of people lining up to try to look at the stars and— y'know, a break from the monotony of staring at metal walls and the claustrophobia of being onboard a spaceship out in the vacuum of space.

And we wanted to play a scene with Billy and Dualla, who were a couple that we had established having some sort of romantic interest in each other way back in the miniseries, and we hadn't really done very much with them ever since. You saw them briefly in "Bastille Day"— y'know, they were together and Billy clearly has an interest in her and there were some raised eyebrows from Laura about his interest and he sort of apologizes for getting her stuck in that situation, but we hadn't played too many beats with them, and I wanted to get back to that. I sort of liked the idea of the young lovers that would still try to find moments when they could just be together, when Dualla would get out of her uniform and Billy would get away from the president, and they would just go on a date together.

This is the piece that I love the most, actually, ironically, is that small little cutaway to all the people standing in line in the corridor. I remember that the idea was, "okay, there is this observation deck, there's limited seating, and there are people stargazing and draw— sketching, and making out and whatever, but that there's a line of people sitting outside waiting to get in and that your time in here is very restricted, so it wasn't really a romantic date so much as it was the illusion of a romantic date, that you could go in there for a few moments and try to forget your situation.

This is cutting into a much longer scene, of Billy going back and reporting to Laura and we learn that Billy's been spying— trying to spy on Adama on Laura's behalf. Um, scenes— I said that this was cutting into a scene, scenes are often chopped up in various ways for a variety of reasons, most often because of length issues. On our show, for whatever reason, we're always— the scripts are always too long, and the assemblies, the editors' assemblies and directors cuts are inevitably too long as well. It's our accursed running time, which is only like forty minutes and change of actual program content once you take out the main title and the precaps and recaps and the end credits. It's not that long. It's not that much more than an actual half hour. It's only forty minutes, and we're always biting off more than we can chew and cutting the episode down much, much further.

That is actually a stolen shot from a different sequence. We wanted— we didn't have really a good teaser-out, and so we had to hunt around to find an interesting image to go out on. We didn't feel that there was a good enough sort of hook at the end of the teaser, and one of the challenges of writing and producing television is always finding that hook at the end of a teaser to go out on. In this particular instance, we never felt that we had it, so we had to sort of shop around within the episode and find pieces of Adama. I'm not even sure what scene that's from, if it's even in this episode. We had to find a sort of moment of Adama where he looks scary and possibly Cylon-like.

And now we are into the main title section of things to come in tonight's episode, which is a great sort of idea that we came up for early in the process. Actually, I think I came up with this idea. This was— this is an homage, really, to— or stolen, depending on your point of view, of "Space: 1999", which did something very similar in their original main title.