Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-02: Valley Of Darkness

Taken from John Larocque's site: Documents on Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica

7/15/2005 -- "Scattered" in its initial draft was just much too big to sustain one episode, so we essentially divided it into two and created another action storyline for part two, which is "Valley of Darkness," which as you'll see at the end of this show, the Cylons are on the ship. The Cylons have boarded Galactica, and that's our cliffhanger ending for episode one. And that becomes the primary action storyline of part two. But all the other tales that happen in part two apart from the Cylon boarding were actually all supposed to be in "Scattered", and there was just no way that the show could really support that. It was too much to deal with, so we split them into two shows. (source: Scattered podcast)

7/22/2005 -- We wanted to add a little bit more texture, a little bit more pathos, a little bit more of humanity into the show. And we loved this storyline so much we knew it could sustain a little bit more discussion of Helo and what he's going through, and Kara's reaction to it, and a little bit more about their friendship. And it's moody and it's interesting. It gives you just a little more bit insight into the struggle that he's going through, and that she's just starting to deal with herself... This season is the first time that Katee and Talmoh have worked together since the minsieries. It's the first time Talmoh has worked with anybody except Grace for a very long time. It's just kind of fun to see that relationship. It's interesting to know now that Kara and Helo go back aways, that they had a relationship, that they were friends, that there's a pre-existing relationship between these two pilots. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- This sequence where Tigh tells them what the Cylons are after, when he says they are actually going here to aft damamge control and they are going to auxilliary fire control he says "I know where they're going." In the aired version of the show, you assume that Tigh's encountered these guys before. He fought in the first Cylon wars. This was a memory. It was more literal in the first script than in the cut... We did shoot a whole scene with Tigh and Adama that was set in the same period as the flashbacks that you saw in "Scattered," and it was a drinking scene between the two men... Tigh and Adama, on the night before Adama goes back to the fleet, are getting really drunk. And they're sitting there and trading stories.

And it turns out that Tigh was on a ship called the Brinnock, and the Brinnock was boarded by Cylons. They tried to decompress the ship and kill them all, and turn the guns of the Brinnock against the other ships in their escort fleet. It was his first taste of real ugly, hand to hand combat and saw dead people for the first time. And then it turned out that Adama had gone through something similar on the Galactica... In his backstory, I always felt that Galactica was the first ship that Adama was assigned to during the first Cylon war as a pilot. And that he went through a similar experience and Galactica lost a lot of men. A lot of good men died when the Cylons got on board. But it is essentially that flashback was what informed the audience how Tigh knows what theire plan is, and that the Cylon plan was, they didn't come right at CIC, they didn't go toward the magazines, they didn't even go towards the engines. They essentially went to auxiliary fire control and aft damage control. They went to the secondary places on the ship, went into aft damage control, destroyed the safeties, got into the computer systems and mechanical systems, and were able to take over the ship from that point, and use auxiliary fire control to attack the ships around them. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- This sequence I think is really great. I think there's some people that would be quite disturbed by this sequence. I think it's really interesting and really intriguing. It pushes the mythos forward in an interesting way. But this was a controversial sequence, this whole beat of Adama and the baby, and Adama drowning the baby. I think there was a lot of hesitation and nervousness, and "Oh my God, can we show this?" and there was a lot of arguing. And David and I just kept fighting for it and kept saying "this is important." This is about a threat to the child that Baltar is investing in. Your basically setting up a marker that Adama in some way, shape or form, is the threat that Baltar must face. Adama is going to be a major obstacle, between Baltar and fulfilling his destiny, vis a vis the child. So, this is a simple, visual, clear and brutal way of dramatizing that event. And I just felt it was great, and I felt that it was part of the show. That the show has a certain no holds barred, really brutal quality to it... I don't really have a hankering for infanticide, certainly, but we did kill a baby in the miniseries, and here Adama is killing a baby. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- This idea, I thought was really intriguing, that part of the myth of the Colonies' backstory is this notion that Kobol was a paradise, in the same way that Eden in the Judeo-Christian tradition was paradise, and that man left paradise and has been on a fall ever since. I think it was intriguging to go back to Kobol to find paradise, and to find out, far from Eden, some really nasty horrific things happened there. There was human sacrifice, there was barbarism, there was brutality. Man fled paradise, he was driven out by the wrath of God, for the things that he did, which in some ways, is a basic retelling of Genesis... These guys did some really nasty untoward things, and then they had to leave. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- This is my favorite scene of the season and it's one of my favorite scenes of the entire series. I love this whole bit of texture that we go to Kara Thrace's apartment. I love the way the two actors react to it. Katee and Talmoh actually went in there on their own and did a lot of this painting on the walls and canvases. And Katee was very involved in what Starbuck's apartment would be like. I like the fact that she painteed, in that she had this weird, bohemian existence that is antithetical in a lot of ways to what it is to be a fighter pilot in the military and that there is this other aspect of her. We've heard some not so great things about her mother. We've implied them in season one episodes. But then her father is a musician and plays piano, and that she still has his cassette tapes or discs and listens to them. In fact, this leather jacket that she's going to pick up in a minute and put on is supposed to be her father's jacket. It's mentioned in the script, it's not really mentioned in the dialog, it's just a bit of background texture on the character and tells you something about her. There's a mood about this scene. This scene doesn't move the plot forward, except in a tiny way later when they get the car keys. The character aspect of it, what it says about Kara Thrace, I think is fascinating. And there's something great about the fact that at the end of this scene, all they do is sit there and rest and take a break. Because these guys have been on the run pretty much since the pilot. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- There was also a significant story cut here. There was a whole bit of business here when Lee calls in to Tigh and tells him where he is and what he's doing, and Tigh says, "Where are you? What are you doing?" And he says, "We're down here, I've got these Marines with me," and Tigh mainly goes, "Let me talk to private Kelso." And Lee says, "What? What are you talking about? I'm in command of this mission." And he says, "No you're not, I'm relieving you as of this moment. Give me private Kelso." And Lee says, "What's going on? I'm the officer, you give the orders through me." And Tigh went off on him under the stress. "You have disappointed everybody in you're life. You can't be counted on. Now give me fracking private!" And Lee, shocked by that, told him, "This is my comand, you have orders, you give them through me," and Tigh had to acquiesce to that and finally give it to him. At the end sequence, when they're both next to Adama's bed, there was an exchange between Tigh and Lee, part of which is still there. Lee said, "Did my father really say those things about me?" because Lee assumes that Tigh is parroting something that he heard Adama say. But no, it's actually that the Old Man thought that "his sun rises and sets on you. And I don't know for the life of me why." ... It was one of those things that ultimately I was wrong about. When I saw it in the cut, I didn't like it either, felt it wasn't appropriate, and decided to cut it. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- At some point we had to decide, do they have cars on Caprica? Well, it is a sister world to ours, but what's a car gonna look like? Is it just gonna be just a Ford or something? There was lots of discussion, but finally we said, "You know what? Whatever." She's got a car, let's give her something tough, and a car I like, so we went for a Humvee kind of vehicle, and just went for it. Because it just became too tedious and annoying to try and come up with the futuristic car ("It's a Caprica car, it's not a recognizable car".) Who cares. This feels like something Kara would drive. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)

7/22/2005 -- I'm verry happy on balance of all the reshoots that we did, that we added them into the show, that it does provide a little more humanity into it, and just get to spend more time with these characters I think is the biggest plus that came out of the effort to go back and really keep working on this particular episode. Overall, "Valley of Darkness" now feels like a full meal, it feels like a richer meal, it feels like we've really expanded the language of what was really happening in this particular episode... I'm very proud of "Valley of Darkness". A tremendous amount of time and effort went into this piece by a lot of people to make it all that it could be. In the end, I think it's a really good one. I think it's a worthy episode, and it doesn't suffer from the sophomore slump. I think it really does carry forward, and it feels like season two is really going places and doing things that season one could only hint at. And the characters all seem deeper and richer and the show just feels like it's really hitting on all cylinders. (source: Valley of Darkness podcast)