Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-09: Flight of the Phoenix

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"Flight of the Phoenix" began life very early in the season. We were talking about initial story ideas for this season. I had this image of Tyrol waking up in the middle of the night, going down into the hangar deck, taking a big piece of tape, laying out a pattern on the floor, and deciding, "I'm going to build a Viper." There was something about it psychologically that I liked for the character. There was something about the series and the mythos of the show and how the fleet operates that I liked about dealing this bit of the reality of the situation. They are losing Vipers and losing pilots and none of these things are being replaced from home. They all have to make do with what they got. And so I really liked the notion of doing a show that was centered around that concept. If not addressing all the needs of the fleet, in all the many ways, let's just do a show that talks about the difficulty of building one fighter...

This was one of those really long shows that came in and a lot of choices had to be made, and through the varying cuts, the thing that we kept coming back to was this story, the gathering of the family to accomplish the one task that he set out to, and the father figure coming down to seeing it. It all kept circling back to tell the story about the family.

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What's going to happen when these guys meet? What's going to finally take place between Helo and Tyrol get together? We talked at length what they would do when these two finally got together. You start with the most obvious idea, is the one we ended up with, which is that they fight... On some level you knew that the thing that was most in character for these two men, based on the people that we had seen them be, Helo down on Caprica and Helo dealing with people on Galactica and Kobol, that there's a lot of rage and a lot of frustration and a lot of self-hatred and ambiguity in both these men over the choices that they've made, over the people that they've chosen to give their hearts to. And the fact that they now come face to face with the representational other of themselves, how could you not want to beat the crap out of him? The moment of [Tyrol] reaching for the wrench is interesting and telling about just how far the rage has built in these men. Actually, I got a note from Bradley Thompson and his partner David Weddle, who wrote this episode, and they objected to that moment. I must say, in their defence, I completely understand why they object to it, because it really says something pretty bad about Tyrol, which is why I like it. I like the fact that Tyrol, for a moment lost himself in that. He's been drinking, he picked up that wrench, and for a moment really thought about caving in Helo's skull with it. There's a seduction to that, and there's pull to that, and it's an emotion that I think the character would genuinely feel in those circumstances. There's a truth to it. Ultimately that's why I went with the fight.

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This scene with Laura and Cottle, there actually is quite a bit of dialog with this scene, but the director and the editor both decided to cut this scene silently and play all these emotional beats... You can tell this entire story visually, there's not that much dialog that's necessary for you to understand completely what's going on here. It was a really good instinct on the part of the director, Michael Nankin and Jacques Gravett, who cut this show. You gotta love it when Doc Cottle's feeling bad for you. When Cottle isn't messing with you and smoking at you and being a prick, it must be bad.

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This is the effects of hypoxia, this really happens. There's a lot of footage in various documentaries of pilot candidates being put into pressurized chambers where they have oxygen masks, and they slowly bleed the oxygen out of the room, and they're given various tasks. And you just watch the footage of these people slowly losing it. Some of them start giggling, some are just completely checked out of it, others get all panicky. There's a lot of variant reactions to the onset of hypoxia, which really gave us a chance to play the scene in a really disturbing key... The notion that Starbuck and Apollo did this together is something the actors came up with. They liked the idea of him steadying her hand to shoot out the window.

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There was a point where we were going to make "Pegasus" a 90 minute episode, and we were looking for ways to lengthen it... And one of the ways we thought about doing that was to open "Pegasus" with this scene. That you would open cold with Lee and Dualla in this combat thing and establish the relationship a little bit more for the audience, and show that there's something going on and then get into the "Pegasus" show... We had been talking about doing the Lee/Billy/Dualla triangle for most of the season. The notion of putting them together came up and we were shooting "Resistance" when we decided definitively to do it, because in "Resistance" there's that whole little subplot of Lee and Dualla, her coming and being the one that would walk with him down the corridor every morning and give him a report, and idle conversation back and forth between two somewhat intimates. What I liked about extending that as a relationship was there was a certain logic to it, there was a certain emotional truth to the idea that Dualla is the voice the pilots always hear. There's a special relationship between her and the pilots, the pilots look on her very fondly. I think they are a bit protective of her. She probably talks to Lee more than the other pilots. He's the CAG, there's probably a lot of wireless communication back and forth between Lee and Dualla on a day to day basis. And it stood to reason that there could be a relationship between those two.

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You can see that we've moved the construction of the fighter in fairly big leaps. We could have chosen to parse out the building of the Viper over many episodes. This could have been a running B story that took three or four episodes to ultimately pay off. But there was something about doing it in one in one episode that seemed to really speak to the larger emotional arc of what's going on in the show. These people that are starting to have gotten to a place where Adama says everyone is depressed because they've realized this is what it's going to be for them... So it felt right to then do an episode that was centered around one man's effort to do something about that... The true timeline of how long it would really take Tyrol to actually build one of these things from scratch, it would be weeks realistically. But you'd rather tell the story in one package. You'd rather tell the story, hold the viewer in the moment of the scenes, make themselves invest in the effort and pay it off. You can fudge the timeline, there's no definitive statement in the episode of how long this is all taking. It's kept purposely vague... It's more important to tell the story than it is to really get bogged down in the details of exactly how long it takes him to build the thing.

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Technobabble has its roots in science. We try to be very faithful to what could really happen and to what most reasonably could happen but it's stuff we're making up as we're going along.. And it's trying to serve a dramatic purpose within the show. And if you're successful you deliver on that promise of having it make sense while at the same time not getting so bogged down in the explanations and trying to cover every base and trying to deal with every possible ramification of a given problem.

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We got to go out on a limb, we got to do something different. I want to have a different sequence here, I don't want to just deal with some stupid space battle again. So they put their heads together, and I think I was in a room with David and Bradley and I think I said just off handedly, I don't know if I want her like standing in CIC shoving conduits in her arm, as cool as that might be. We started joking about it and laughing and it just sort of happened. Let's do it, let's do something freakishly weird with her and remind the audience and ourselves that she is a machine. That she's not a human, that she is something quite different, that she operates in ways that we don't always understand... There was this interesting contradiction in [the Cylons] that they were machines that had tried very hard to emulate the human form, down to the microscopic level, that they were virtually indistinguishable from us. But logically, as incredibly advanced sentient beings that have evolved on their own and have evolved themselves in certain directed ways, one would think and expect that they had other methods of data sharing, that they chose to speak to us and to one another out of something more philosophical and more theological than technical necessity... They have other options but they choose to be human. They choose that this is what they think their God wants their form to take.

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We kept calling it the turkey shoot. There was an air battle in the Second World War in the Pacific. I believe it was in the Marianas. Essentially the Japanese sent one of their last great throes of aircraft at the American fleet, but the pilots were very green and the Americans were much more powerful and experienced then they were at the beginning of the war, and they just simply slaughtered the Japanese. They shot down hundreds of aircraft. It was called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, and it was a similar idea.

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This idea of it being a stealth ship instead of a fighter grew out of internal discussions of what they could realistically build. Having them build the Viper from scratch was a bit of a stretch, but I didn't think he could really build a combat fighter like a Viper. If he built an actual Viper, it seemed like we pushed it too far. So it seemed like, they could build something that would have a different purpose. And what would be a craft that would give them an advantage that would be useful for them to have, that maybe they didn't have sitting around already? If it was a stealth ship, that would be interesting and useful, and it's another way of connecting to the audience, because the audience is familiar with stealth technology at this point.

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This scene used to take place before the test flight of the Viper and we swapped it in editing, because this felt like the emotional climax of the show. Whereas in the story, we thought the emotional climax was the first test flight, and that's the way we wrote it. You watch the film, and this is the emotional high point of the show. I was there when they shot this scene, and I haven't been on the set a lot this season, not as much as I was last season. So, it was a rarity to be there to watch them shoot something with virtually the entire cast... I just became very moved by it, and I was just very touched by it, and I just was very much in love with these people and the show. You have these moments where you suddenly connect with the people doing the show, with the actors, with the crew. You're just so proud of being associated with these people and what they're doing, and it's such a privilege to be able to work on a show like this.

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There was a bit of dialog where Tyrol talks to Sharon for the moment, and essentially says something like "I'm ashamed" and she says, "Of what?" and he says, "I'm ashamed of still loving you" was the idea... That was Michael Nankin and Jacques Gravett again, who came up with cutting out before we hear anything. And it doesn't really matter what they say to each other. We really don't want to know what they say to each other in a real way. All we really want to know is that he went down there and faced his demon, decided to talk to her, somehow, someway. And that that was the journey of the character. The character had started off the show by scrapping things, by being obsessed with this woman, about fighting with an officer about this woman, about all this pent-up emotional frustration that he chooses then to build a Viper with. Then he accomplshes that goal and does this successfuly, but that what really he needs to do is really needs to walk down to that brig and pick up that phone and say something to this woman.
 



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