Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-06: Home

Here's this week's podcast excerpts. Portions spoken by David Eick are indicated with "DE".

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This couple of episodes now is the culmination of all the arcs that began in season one. And in a very real sense, "Home" is the completion of the entire first season. After the conclusion of "Home, Part 2" you'll see that we begin different stories, there's more self-contained episodes, different story arcs begin. This is where it all comes to a conclusion. There was just too much material to wrap up. What we kept running into was, we could get through the plot in a one hour script, but you were missing all the fun of doing it. You were missing seeing Starbuck and Apollo reunite, you were missing Laura and Adama reunite, you were missing all the character interactions that the show is about. And it was a universally held feeling that we were just trying to do too much in one episode. And the network and the studio agreed, and so we had enough time to split this into two parts.

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The kiss was Jamie's idea. Jamie was watching me do a rewrite on the set. That's how pathetic this process became. I was sitting on the set with my laptop doing rewrites while we were shooting episode four. Jamie was standing over my shoulder reading the return scene, [and] he said to me, "I should kiss her, we should kiss" or something like that. And I went, "oh my god, that's great." And so, I just wrote a version of it, and it made it all the way through the process. DE

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It's a very untradiional kind of storyling that we're following. It's not that Adama is facing a crisis back on Galactica. He's not facing down the Cylons, the ship is not going to explode, he's not even going through an internal crisis or something. He's trying to move on, and representative of him trhing to move on is that someone has to be the new CAG, and bring in this guy who seemingly is everything you want the CAG to be, and he falls short.

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This scene had a very literal godfather, which was a great moment in history, actually, where Al Haig takes the microphone at the podium, "I'm in charge." Here's a guy who's not in his right element here, and it was really just intended to speak to the absence of Laura Roslin. This is what she normally does. (DE)

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The only inspiration for the [scene] was my wife and I took a trip to Alaska a year ago, and there was a bridge where we stood on and looked down on in the salmon spawning area. It was one of those really evocative images, you're looking at a very shallow river bed, and there were so many fish you couldn't even deal with it. It was just really bizarre and strange, and half of them were dying and spawning, and it was just like this weird life and death kind of place. From that, there was a sense of looking out at this other, these fish, that weren't really like you, and had this whole other world going on. I think it was interesting to suggest that Baltar is moving into a place where he was starting to look at humanity that way, where he was starting to look around and go, "I'm not really part of these guys any more."

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What we're starting to say about Laura is that she's willing to say whatever she has to, to the Cylons. Again, she promised another Cylon, "Oh, don't worry, if you just do X, Y and Z, you'll be fine." And as soon as the guns come down, it's like toss her out the airlock. And Mary bridles a little bit against that because I think Mary is a person would never do that. She's not someone who would lie to your face and kill you. She's also concerned that Laura not be portrayed as duplicitous. But it felt right that you want your president to do ugly things every once in a while. There's a sense that we elected this person to make decisions for us that maybe we're afraid to make for ourselves.

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And [Elosha's death is] really necessary in a way, because you're telling a story about the costs in blood for Laura to make this decision to go to Kobol and divide the fleet... And because Laura's role as the "prophet", or seer in the story, is about to reach a conclusion and spin the character in a different direction, back to a position of governance, and back to a position where she's got a more supportive dynamic with Adama, it seemed right that metaphorically you would kill the person who represented that chapter of her life. The priestess who she had depended upon, who had been her guide through this experience is someone she is no longer going to have in her life. DE

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I love this leather jacket that they dug up for Tom Zarek. That's such a great little piece of wardrobe that just has added quite a bit to his character, in some sense. It's so anti-Apollo. It's vaguely sort of Nazi. You can put an SS cap on and it wouldn't look too out of place.

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The thing about Richard is that he really is a completely different character in this. He's someone who is, as many of you know, was a very outspoken opponent of the reimagining of this show, and came full circle and elected to embrace it. And it didn't hurt that he was given a very compelling role that started last season. This guy shows up, he's the consumate professional, hits his marks, knows his lines, takes direction well. He may not be seen again for several episodes. You never hear from his people, you never get complaints, there's never any questions about "why aren't I in more of them?" I think he understands that in some respects, a little of his character goes a long way. (DE)

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There's a scene coming up later where Adama is in his quarters with Dualla, and they're having a sort of heart to heart... It was supposed to be an escalation. It was supposed to be heart to heart scene with Dualla, and then he goes into CIC and the whole Birch thing blows up. And David said, we really didn't want that scene to be the straw to broke the camel's back any more. And it felt better that Dualla, the more heartfelt scene is the one that tips him over the edge ultimately. So we swapped the scene order in the editing room.

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We forced the sound mixers to reprise a music cue we used one time last season and hadn't used at all this season, which is this Irish brogue from episode 110 ("The Hand of God"). And it seemed to me that it would be useful to do a simplified version of that starting here. So where you start with the drums you, and you start to hear the men humming, I just wanted this very masculine quality to his decision, because it is a magical thing we're doing. We're saying Adama of his own volition arrives at this very profound conclusion about what they're going to do. And it felt like it earned the right to have some sort of martial theme to it. (DE)