Battlestar Galactica

Episode #219 - "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I"

This document is ©2005, John Larocque. All rights reserved.

49,579 survivors in search of a home called Earth.

The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

Synopsis

Ron Moore's Commentary

3/3/2006 -- The other major plotline, of course, that's getting established in the tease is Kara returning to Caprica. This was something we had promised essentially since "The Farm." Once Kara laid down that mark and gave Anders the dogtag, she has to go back for him, and it was a question of how and when and under what circumstances, and how we could justify it, and make it plausible, and what would be the outcome of it. And the key idea in that sequence is that they found a way to link up the Cylon Heavy Raider's computer system into a Raptor, and that we had sort of established that the Raiders had abilities to jump a lot farther than any Colonial ship did, and could get back to Caprica in just a few discreet jumps... They had a way of making it happen, especially if Sharon was working with them.

In initial drafts, in fact, right up until we were shooting it was going to be that they were going to take the Heavy Raider itself, and that the other Raptors would be slaved to the Heavy Raider, and we were going to build a Heavy Raider interior, and put the characters piloting the Heavy Raider back to Caprica. We were way over budget on this two-parter, just monstrously over budget and then we had to make some hard decisions and started cutting sets, and visual efffects, and the interior of the Heavy Raider was something that I cut at the last minute. "Let's just lose this set. It's not that important. We'll put them all in Raptors and we'll just move the computer off the Heavy Raider onto the Raptor and just go with it." And you know what? You don't miss it in the story at all. So it was actually a good decision. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- This little beat with the presidential debate is influenced a lot by presidential debates, and all the small, detailed observation of them down through the years. The podiums, the crowd, the way the moderator talks, the traditional walk across the stage so that Laura and Baltar can shake hands, and that they always seem to be saying something to each other up on the stage that the audience never got to hear, and I thought it'd be fun that she would tell him, "I'm going to wipe the floor with you." "Oh, you must have lost your mind." And her confidence is such that she grins at that and tells him, "You must really be in trouble." And there was Baltar's self-acknowledgement of that, that he really does think he's going to lose is evident in this scene. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- The Cally-Tyrol storyline will be controversial. It came out of something that David Eick actually suggested about Tyrol seeing a psychologist or a therapist in the show... In the first draft of this, I did start it in this therapy session. He was talking to Cavil, and he was describing what had happened, and it was all had taken place off camera. I think it was a David note, later, on the second draft... He said, "Let's see it. It's just such a shocking thing he's describing, it's so horrific. We should see it... Let's start with Tyrol having just completely had some kind of psychotic meltdown or break in between episodes, and you're coming into this guy who had some kind of really, psychotic lapse, and did something outrageous. Either tried to kill himself, or try to kill somebody else, and what would that be?" It would be a peeling back the onion as you look back and try to figure out where his problem came. And he started talking to Aaron Douglas about it fairly early...

I thought it was a really interesting idea, and I wanted to incorporate it into this show. And it became a question of, "What is that about, and what does he do?" And the first question was, "Well, what does he do?" And instead of starting with the therapist, I wanted to start with Tyrol. And I literally just started playing the beats in the teaser. I was just writing the sequences. He's asleep. The Hangar deck's empty. And then this moment happens, where he comes awake... I remember just making up the story as I was writing it, and it was waking up and shattering Cally's jaw... And he beats Cally. It's him and it's her. And that sort of nightmarish "What have I just done?" quality, and "Oh my god," her lying there with the blood all over her, and then this next shot of Tyrol carrying carrying Cally through the hangar deck. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- There was something really interesting about writing the priest who didn't believe in God... Here's the priest who comes to aid you on a spiritual matter who thinks that prayer is a waste of time and that praying to the gods isn't going to do a damn thing for you and the real problem is that you're just screwed up, kid. And I thought that was a fun, interesting character. To put that character and pair him with Tyrol, the one guy that's the son of a priest that has the religious beliefs, one of many people that has the religious beliefs, seemed like an interesting idea. And then we started looking for an actor, and Dean Stockwell's name came up, and it was immediately we all went, "Well, that'd be great, but you're never going to get Dean Stockwell." And, sure as shit, we got Dean Stockwell... I don't think he had seen the show until it was pitched to him, and then he either read some press on it or he might have seen an episode, then he read our script and went, "I want to do it. I want to play the character." ... Michael Rymer, the director, talked about what an incredible professional he was. He impressed all the cast members, he was prepared, he knew his lines, he had a specific take on the character, he really breathed the script in. I didn't get a single note from him, and he did the script as scripted... He basically took the part as read and ran with it. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- I like this idea of Baltar is hitting her on the religious thing. That Laura has positioned herself as being the religious prophet and Baltar's hitting her on that charge, and that it's sticking, and he's getting some traction on it, but it's not enough. I love that line. "The mob is not usually in the habit of electing ungodly apostates (laughs) who denigrate people of faith." (laughs) ... I did write that, and sometimes I'm tickled by my own things... It's interesting pairing Zarek with Baltar. I mean, there's something great about that. And let the hand of God change his fate, and of course, the very next scene, we do see that the hand of God reaches in and changes the fate of them all. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- I wanted to bring as many things to the table for the finale as we could. All the little plotlines that you've been following, and maybe thinking that we had dropped and weren't thinking about anymore, everything from Gina, and the nuke, and the baby, and Caprica, and the election, and Tom Zarek, and Cally, and Tyrol and their relationship... I want to just play as many of the continuing plotlines as we possibly could into the finale, because I think those are the times when the show really lives best for me, when the show is really touching on all the different lives of all the different people, and showing how they're all intertwined and how they all are involved in a single overarching story. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- It was really fun to be able to leave Racetrack behind in a complete accident. There's nothing underhanded here. So whatever conspiracy theorists there may be out there, there's really no other explanation for this except an accident. They are going off on a mission, and the Raptors all jump, and one jumps into the wrong place. And shit happens. Sometimes there's just a software glitch. And this happens all the time. In the real world, carrier strikes are sent out, and oft times a plane has to go back to base because something's gone wrong or they went the wrong way, and this is just one of those times when they just had a hiccup in their software and so these guys are stuck in this nebula and it's just sheer blind luck that they blunder into this planet. And the great thing, though, is that I had a character like Racetrack that I could play that with. Here's a character you've sort of been following intermittantly over the last year or so and she becomes your window into that storyline instead of just inventing a whole new redshirt-type character who's just going to come in, do one function, and leave and never be seen again.... And so you're a little bit more invested in her story then you are with just a faceless or nameless guest star of the week. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- The first draft was all about the therapy session, and Cavil telling Tyrol that he wanted to strike out at somebody who was trying to screw with his mind, and he wanted to kill himself in his dream and Cally had woke him up and stopped him from carrying out his desire to kill to commit suicide, and then we decided to show the act itself. And then Mike Rymer said, "Well, I still don't understand why he's doing it... It just seems like the most obvious thing is he's killing himself because he thinks he's a Cylon. Right?" It was a brilliant suggestion, because he's afraid he's a Cylon, just like Sharon was a Cylon. It's literally haunting him, and the thought that he might hurt somebody is tearing him up inside. He might be a sleeper agent like Sharon and do something like that is so frightening to him, he'd rather kill himself. And then the irony of that being that he wakes up and indeed does hurt somebody. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- When I was restructuring this in editing, I decided to marry up all these scenes in a row, that you go from her finding the planet, straight into the Galactica scene, straight into the Pegasus scene, straight into the next one and so on, and make this like a run of scenes, instead of interspersing these in and among other storylines. This is always intended to telescope the time frame and get them down to exploring this new planet and getting some initial reports back because the important thing was to quickly get a sense of that everyone in the fleet is excited about the planet, and everyone is starting to go, "Hey, I can't wait to get down there. I'm looking forward to shore leave." And everybody's starting to have dreams of what it is to stand on solid ground again, and have blue sky above your head, and get out in the open air, because up until now the only people who've really been down on a planet are the people who were either back on Caprica, no fun, or the people who were on Kobol, no fun, for the most part. And everyone else in the fleet, the vast majority of people, have been cooped up and stuck in these metal cans ever since the miniseries. And the thought that, "Here's a planet, hidden in a nebula, that the Cylons haven't found, that can support human life," would prove to be an irresistable pull, so I wanted to telescope all that very quickly and get to the place that they are in this scene. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- Word has gotten out, everyone is excited about the planet, and what do you do with it? That Zarek comes up with this notion that permanent settlement on the planet. Well actually it's not even really Zarek who comes up with it, truth to tell, it's really something Six says to Baltar, then Baltar offhandedly says, "Oh, I was just thinking about what it'd be like to live here," that then makes Zarek come up with the idea. So one could say it's the angel of God at work again. But I like that it's Zarek's political acumen that does actually give Baltar this campaign. That he realizes that the thought of this world has touched a chord out there, and that if you could give voice to that in the campaign, if you could actually grab onto that issue and put yourself in opposition to Laura Roslin that maybe, just maybe, you would turn enough people to come down on your side. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- It's an interesting question. There's a line there where Tory says, "I believe people vote their hopes and not their fears." And David and I actually had a bit of a debate about that, about whether that was true, whether people vote their fears instead of their hopes. And the question was, of course, in the last presidential election, were people voting their hopes or were they voting their fears? Ronald Reagan would tend to argue that people vote their hopes... The Reagan school of politics is that you offer morning in America, you get people to vote their hopes and not their fears. And then the W. Bush school of thought is that you scare them and you get them to vote. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- "Maybe I'm a Cylon." "I've never seen you at any of the meetings," is a callback to the miniseries, actually... Sometimes we throws these things. Just to catch people, and just to amuse ourselves. Mostly just to amuse ourselves. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- The idea that one of these guys jumped inside a mountain by mistake, is such a horrifying idea, but it is an outgrowth of something we talked about in Star Trek and never quite were able to pull off in a satisfying way, which was that a transporter accident would be that you would be beaming someplace and beam somebody inside solid rock, where you would say all the time, (Scottish accent) "Oh, Captain! Captain... If the coordinates are off by so much as a half a fraction, they could beam inside solid rock." (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- And then there's this lovely bit. "Why don't you go frak yourself..." Maybe a vice president would say that, on the Senate floor. But you know a president would never say that... It was a Cheney reference. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

3/3/2006 -- We are placing a large bet on the finale. I pushed for it, it was my idea, I stand by it, but is a risk... It's gonna throw you. But it changes a lot of things about the show, it's going to send us in some interesting directions into the third season, certainly, and I think it's the kinda thing you gotta do on this kind of show. This show is about risk. This show is about not playing it safe. This show is about not doing things because that's the way it's always done in television, particularly in science fiction. And next week we really hang it out there, man. We really, like, go out on a limb and say, "You know what? We're just gonna do somethin' here," because there's a lot of logical reasons to do it, that make perfect sense in the storyline, that we'll get into next week, but ultimately, it was time to throw a hard six, baby. (source: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I podcast)

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