Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-13: Ephinanies

Episode #213 - "Epiphanies"

Created by John Larocque on March 18, 2005
Last revised: January 30, 2006

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

49,598 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 -- Laura's health comes to a crisis point in ["Epiphanies"]. It opens on her being rushed into sick bay. Her time is almost up and Doc Cottle says she's not going to make it. This gave us the chance to do some flashbacks to Caprica before the attacks. We see the president she worked for and there are some surprising revelations about their relationship. We see where she gets some of her philosophy of governing. As the fleet prepares for Baltar to take over, he's actually the one who figures out a way to save Laura's life, at the last moment. It comes from his study of Sharon's unborn child, that provides the key to curing Laura's cancer. (source: Chicago Tribune)

1/20/2006 ---- Epiphanies is our biggest Laura Roslin show to date. We've been talking about doing an episode like this since way back in the first season. A lot of the roots of this episode come out of things that were in the backstory of character ever since the miniseries. Mainly, we wanted to deal with things like, who she was before the attack, what her life was like, and getting a glimpse into what she was like as secretary of education before she became president. Some of the elements of this episode were actually suggested by Mary McDonnell. In early conversations with Mary on the script of the miniseries, she started talking about President Adar.

There was a line in the miniseries where she was talking about how she got into politics and how she didn't really want to be a politician, but she had worked for Adar, and he was the kind of man that you just couldn't say no to. And Mary took that to mean, he was sort of a Clintonesque kind of figure that you couldn't say no to, and of course, being a Clintonesque kind of figure, also raised the possibility that perhaps there was something more between the two of them than just the professional relationship. And that stuck in everybody's heads, and whenever we would talk about Adar throughout the course of the first season, we always jokingly talked about the fact that she had an affair with him. And then it became something more than a joke, and we started to seriously consider the possibility that maybe she had had an affair with the President. And that that would be an interesting insight into the character of Laura Roslin. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- Galactica's been out on the run for a long time, they have a lot of people in all these ships, and we hadn't played anything that really dealt with various factionalization among the people, or different points of view, or people who might believe, for one reason or another, that the military was wrong, that they had all been betrayed, and that maybe they'd made bad decisions, and that maybe there was a way for them to get along with their enemy. So we went at this from the approach of, let's go with a radicalized element of that, of the peace movement as it were, and say that essentially, they're starting to sabotage the fleet itself. They're starting to get into places and do things and to actively promote an agenda that is designed to force the Colonial government and the military to stop making this all about war, and try to deal with their enemy, negotiate with them and achieve some kind of peace. What was interesting to me was, it's so antithetical to this kind of show to make the peaceniks, as it were, to make the peace movement the antagonists, to make them the villains.

A lot of the show feels very liberal in its output, there's a lot of political statements within the show that deal with the war on terror that you could take to mean as criticism of the right. But the show is not meant to be a polemic. The show is not a direct allegory to all the events that take place in the United States and in the world of Galactica, it felt like, the people that were advocating a peaceful resolution to the Cylon conflict, that were actively trying to stop the military from achieving that goal, would be the antogonists. And it's interesting to spin the expectations of the show and the political structure of the show in such a way that, I think you come out of this episode wondering what is the point of view of the show? What is the show really trying to say, what does it think in terms of its politics? And the answer is, the show is fairly agnostic, The show occasionally tilts you in one direction or another, but overall, the show is meant to make you think. It is meant to make you question things. It is meant to keep you off balance and unsettled more than anything else. And this is a good example of, you're kind of playing different parts of the political spectrum throughout this episode. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- Laura's decision to abort the Cylon baby is a pretty tough decision, but I think she felt rightly so that she could not leave this decision in the hands of President Gaius Baltar. And so, she moved to the edge. She's realized that time is short, I've got to make this call, I won't take the risk, I'm going to do this while I still can. It's a tough-minded decision. It's certainly in line with all the other decisions that Laura has made, and I think it speaks to the larger character movement of Laura Roslin since we saw her in the miniseries. She was the secretary of education and yet she was then thrust into this position where she had literally the fate of the human race on her shoulder.

And I had always thought that that experience of taking a person who never had ambitions to become president and had no greater ambitions on power and who had a series of fairly safe beliefs, a fairly locked in political ideology of her own that we assume was something of the liberal end of the spectrum, put her in the presidency, put all these positions on her desk and force her to deal with the consequences of her actions, and say, "Oh, by the way, if you make a mistake, the entire human race might be wiped out." That that would change that person, and that that person would start to make tougher and tougher decisions. And some of those decisions might be questionable, and she might start making choices that she would have been apalled at only a short time before. And certainly just aborting this child is one of them. But it's a logical extension of where she's been. Once she starts chucking people out airlocks because she's decided that that's how you deal with Cylons, this is simply the next step along that road. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- Some of the inspiration for this comes out of things in World War Two and other conflicts where there was forced labor that the Nazis used. And there were people who were working within the ammunition factories of Nazi Germany that managed to sabotage shells and managed to do things that would not get caught in the manufacturing process, that would ultimately blow up on the battlefield much much later. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- By and large, writer's rooms tend towards the liberal side, at least in my experience. And it was an interesting exercise and it was I think a healthy exercise to move against your own political instincts, and make the positions that you might personally be advocating in a similar circumstance the antagonistic ones. Which is not to say that I harbor hopes of sabotaging the military myself. But certainly to make the people who are advocating peace, the people that are asking for a better way, the people who are asking for understanding and dialog, to make them villains, is an interesting thing. It was an interesting exercise for us to go through, and I think it keeps the show honest. Because the show should be about these characters in their situation, and how they would really react givein their circumstances, rather than us trying to push a certain point of view. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- This is a great moment in the show. It's Sharon's reaction here, when she starts smashing her head into the glass and leaves the bloodstains. There's something so raw and naked about her. It's really a tribute to Grace Park and what's she's done with this character. She's been pretty fearless with what she's been willing to do and try, and nakedly show emotion and really go into places that I don't know that the character or the actress ever thought that they would go before. And Helo just watches. That's great. That's just so shocking. It's just so disturbing. It's not a human impulse to run into a wall and smash your head into it. It's very literally like an animal in a cage. And there's something so discomforting about that. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- This is a push that nobody recognizes her with the glasses, it's sort of the the Clark Kent disguise of the Cylons. I don't know what to tell you. You talk yourself into believing some things will work when you prep on them and when you're doing them, and then you see them in dailies and then the cut and just go, "What the hell was I thinking?" Somehow I talked myself into believing that no one would recognize Gina if we did her hair differently and put glasses on her. But you'd have to be a moron not to realize that that's the Cylon. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- We had initially written that Baltar and Gina would be getting it on in this sequence, but Trish had pointed out that she just thought that her reaction to being tortured and gang raped was going to put her in a place where she was not really going to be open to any kind of physical contact and was going to be rejecting him. And that already seemed like a more interesting place to put Gaius Baltar, who is all about sensuality. And surely, one of the reasons that he was interested in her at all was the physical. And so to not even be able to consumate that relationship was certainly a source of frustration and put him into an interesting character place. And it's also interesting to see that Gina's agenda is different than Six's agenda. Gina is all about Baltar taking over, Baltar getting control of the fleet and destroying humanity, and not so much about the baby or anything else. She's much more one note in terms of what she's after, because she does come from a specific backstory. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- I believe it was Anne Cofell our staff writer who came up with this notion that something from the Cylon child can cure Laura and that the discovery is made by Baltar who is about to become President. And Baltar sabotages his own presidency by figuring out the key to Laura's survival... We were going to use unborn Cylon baby stem cells. It was always going to be stem cells that saved her for obvious reasons. It's more provacative, it capitalizes on a current day controversy, it seemed an interesting way to go. But as we developed the script further, we discovered there were too many technical problems with it... and a lot more tech talk than I was willing to deal with. And so ultimately it became, you know what, just the ability to say the words stem cells in the show was completely outweighed by the need to get through this section quicker and more efficient and get to the meat of the drama. The show is not a whole debate about stem cell research, the show is about Laura Roslin and Baltar and the completing interests of the two. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- And what's up with Baltar. Why is he driven to do this? Is he so afraid of the presidency that he's willing to do anything, even cure this woman of cancer, in order to avoid it? Is he just not ready for it? What is it? I think it's intriguing that on some level, he ran away from it. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- If you really look back at the miniseries, Laura could definitely have done this all on the same day before she went to Galactica... But Baltar and Six on the day of the attack are actually back at Baltar's house. So that could not be the same day, which was a problem. But we get out of it by not actually, directly saying in the show that it is all the same day. The way all the flashbacks play out, you'll see that there is no direct reference to this being the same day. So it's not clear at what point all those events happened. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- Initially we were going to have a different idea of what the letter actually said, but now it plays much more deliciously. He's done this, he doesn't have to worry about being president, he's a hero in everybody's eyes, he's feeling good about himself. And then there's that letter, and when the letter takes him apart piece by piece, it's the look on his face that is unbelievable. And then he gives the nuclear weapon to the Cylon sympathizers. And he does so partly out of pique, partly out of simple rage at being hoodwinked, out of simple anger of having been affronted by Laura, this woman he just saved, to discover what she really meant. And part of it is driven by Six and her agenda and Gina's agenda and buying into the Cylon agenda, which is also moving him further along the darker aspect of the show... She just really didn't believe he was good enough, that he was up to it, and that really pisses him off. (source: Epiphanies podcast)

1/20/2006 -- It was fun to finally pay off the nuclear weapon. Back in season one when Six tells him to get that nuclear weapon, she says it in such a way that you feel like something's going to come of that. And it always nagged at us that we didn't have the end of that. We didn't have beat that told you why the nuclear weapon was given to Baltar in the first place. And we didn't like the feeling that it was just a dangling plot thread that was never going to pay off. And it was just such a moment of relief when we found the true payoff for it. When he gives it to the Cylon sympathizers here, to Gina, it sets up the place where the nuke does finally get paid off, and that will come in the final episode of season two. You will see how we actually do set up and use the nuke. And you could say that it was in a way that Six him to. Because it certainly helps the Cylons when it gets used. (source: Epiphanies podcast)