Episode 212

Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-12: Resurrection ship p2

Episode #212 - "Resurrection Ship, Part 2"

Created by John Larocque on March 18, 2005
Last revised: January 18, 2006

49,604 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

1/4/2006 -- The destruction of the resurrection ship impacts the way the Cylons deal with Galactica and the colonial fleet the rest of the season. It alters their tactics. They stop trying to make full-blown, all-out assaults on the fleet, they retreat and go into a hit-and-run mode while they figure out a way to replicate the ship. (source: Chicago Tribunte)

Commentary

"He gets into a very dark place and almost does away with himself. He gets lost in space for a bit and thinks nobody's going to rescue him and goes to a very dark moment which then affects everything else that he does. He questions everything that goes on and holds everyone else at a distance. Basically falls apart a bit and in that, he falls into many different arms, so it's gonna to be interesting. It's a really good story for him in the second half of the season, and I think he ends up then commanding the Pegasus as well for a bit. He's got a lot to do." -- Jamie Bamber (Apollo) on 10/6/2005 (source: EOnline)

I knew that from the word go that I did not want to destroy the Pegasus. That was very important to me. When the audience approaches this show, when see that there's another battlestar showing up, and it's another battlestar with an admiral on board, it's much more powerful ship than the Galactica, the one thing the audience probably takes to the bank is, "Of course they're going to destroy the Pegasus at the end of the episode." And so I just was determined that we were going to subvert and undercut that assumption on behalf of the audience.

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When we went back and shot scenes, it felt like, Helo and Tyrol are now on Pegasus, and aren't they really hated and detested over there, and what's going to happen to those guys that are in the cluthces of Pegasus? And it just quickly came up, that the Yeehaw Boys, the Sunshine Boys as they are called in the script, may have something to say, too, and it may not be very pleasant... We played around with the exact incident that happens here quite a lot. Some of this is inspired by Full Metal Jacket, where they're beating on one of the recruits with a bar of soap and a towel, and the scene in the Grifters, where Anjelica Huston is briefly threatened that maybe she's going to be beaten in the stomach with oranges wrapped up in a towel.

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Well, is she a machine or isn't she? She looks, walks, talks, smells, seems to be a person, but she is a machine. And if she's a machine, can you rape a machine? It's another way of always providing the sense of imbalance, of the audience never being quite comfortable in their assumptions of what's going on and who to root for, and how they should deal with a very complicated situation, which is one of the things that I enjoy about the show.

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This scene was also an additional scene that was written and shot after the fact.

When we were viewing the original episode, we realized that Cain and Starbuck were really sparking off of each other really well. It was an interesting relationships. Michael particularly liked the way the two actresses played together, and it seemed like there was an opportunity to do at least another scene between the two of them, to take Cain a little further down the road of bonding with Starbuck. You see a little more humanity of her, but at the same time, getting a little firmer handle on her philosophy.

The great irony of the scene, of course, is that her philosophy that she's espousing is essentially telling Starbuck to kill her, that there's hard things that have to be done. That you can't flinch from certain ugly matters that have to be done in order to ensure the survival of the ship and its crew, and in a larger sense the human race. Inevitably there is a moment where we all face a great sin, and we have to decide whether we will act on that sin or not... All of us face sin and all of us face compromises and things that we may or may not do for larger goals. It's a question of how you respond to that, and Cain's philosophy is that you don't flinch from that moment. You don't turn back, you move forward, particularly in a wartime context.

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This was also an additional scene that was shot after the fact... There was another nmoment where after [Lee] had learned from Starbuck what she was going to do, that he would have a moment where he could question his father or at least make clear that this is so antithetical to everything that he himself stands for, and that he thought his father stood for, that it just felt that he had to put words to that.

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I'm very fond of this callback to the miniseries and the sentiment that Adama expressed. It's one of the fundamental underpinnings of the show that Adama wondered why they were worth saving... That is one of the key tenets of the show. It is not enough to survive. You have to be worthy of surviving, and if Galactica has a certain point of view, and as much as I think it doesn't, Galactica in a very real sense tends to posit questions and make you the audience think about it and question and come to your own conclusions. This is one of those moments where it does have a point of view, and that point of view is that you have to be worthy of survival.

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I should talk a little bit about the inspiration for this ejection. This was something that came up very early in the development of the entire Pegasus Resurrection Ship storyline, in our effort to find a different way to tell battle sequences... Part of this notion came out of a true story from the Second World War. In the Pacific, there was a Navy flyer whose name is Ensign Gay. and he was a pilot for a TBD Devastator torpedo plane in the battle of Nidway. And he was launched from the U.S.S. Hornet, and during the American attack on the Japanese aircraft carrier, his entire torpedo squadron was wiped out, every single plane was lost. And Ensign Gay was the only survivor, and he survived because when he went down, he got out of his sinking aircraft and stayed in the water with his little life jacket, but he was in the very heart of the Japanese fleet, and he had a ringside seat to watch the battle of Midway play out all around him, and he saw American dive bombers sink three Japanese aircraft carriers, he saw the entire attack. And it was such a unique perspective that.

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This whole beat with Baltar and Gina and Six is of course a callback to the first episode where she talks about sports... There was something delicious about the notion that he would then steal that story and the heartfelt nature of that story and the vulnerability of that story and use it to get the woman he now wants, in defiance of Six hanging on, literally on his shoulder... They're both versions of the same woman, and yet he's robbing from one to get to the other, and he's doing it for complicated reasons of genuine feeling he has for Gina because she's a real woman. And yet it's all based on a lie.

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Tricia had a very astute observation. Gina is a victim of gang rape and torture, and that she just would not as a character be open to a lot of physical contact, that she would be very standoffish, that she wouldn't want to be kissing Baltar in any way, shape or form. And as soon as she said it, I knew she was right. And it really spun a different direction in terms of how we would play the relationship between those two.

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We have this whole sequence of "will she, won't she kill Cain," and "will he, won't he kill Adama." And that's really where we've been leading for a full hour. Even though the battle sequence is traditionally the high point of the drama, the biggest flashiest thing where you would traditionally end an act four, in this particular case this was better. This is what the show's about. What are these people going to do? Are they really going to do this or not?

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I'm sure there will be many questions on how did Gina get off the ship. And frankly, I don't know how Gina got off the ship. Baltar helped her get off the ship. You can make up your own fifty different ways come Sunday of technobabble of how Baltar overrode security protocols and hid her in a storage box and got her off. Who knows and who the frak cares?

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Suicide is a sin is another interesting idea of the Cylons, that they have notions of sin. The Cylon view of life is that life to them is precious. There is something very special about life. They do not cavalierly give up their lives, as it were. They do not cavalierly destroy life. It's that inherent contradition that makes the Cylons interesting, as it makes human beings interesting. Our own conflicted feelings about when to take life, and the preciousness of life is a constant battle in our own society. I like the fact that it's a contradictory element of the Cylon civilization as well.

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This funeral sequence is something we shot after the fact. The funeral of Cain seemed like a great opportunity to take one more step in through the complexity of what she was and what she meant to all of them. Starbuck, who almost killed her, speaking at funeral and coming to the conclusion that she didn't flinch and that we flinch a lot around here, and the hard thing to hear is that we were probably safer with her than without her. The audience is essentially left to ponder what they really think about Cain at the end of the day. Cain did pull back. Cain didn't shoot Adama. She is human. There is something of value in there. She did keep that ship together. She did make them all survive. She got them to this point. She took out that resurrection ship. In fact, as you look at it, Cain succeeded in every single thing that she set out to do. Admiral Cain was successful in all the ways she wanted to be successful, with the exception of not surviving herself.

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[Lee] had gone through this experience lost in space, and seeing this battle and getting to a place through the hypoxia, through his own observation and moral struggles had gotten to a place where he didn't want to come back. And then what happens to that character is the interesting thing we wanted to play. And you'll see in subsequent episodes, particularly in "Black Market," the places that is sending him. It informs who he is for the rest of the season.

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She promotes him, she gives him the admiral's stars... I think it's an unexpected end to the show. The other thing that's nice in the scene -- it was written in the script and I wrote it -- was the affection between the two characters. That she's giving him something but she's on her way out. There's a valedictory chord being struck here and she's giving him his last gift as it were before she dies, and his refusal to accept that... The moment at the end where Eddie kisses Mary, is something I believe Eddie improved in the moment. I think he just did it because he felt it. And you can kind of see her surprise.