Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-16: Sacrifice

Battlestar Galactica

Episode #216 - "Sacrifice"

Created by John Larocque on March 18, 2005
Last revised: February 13, 2006

49,590 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 -- There's an episode where a bunch of people take hostages in a bar, and they demand that Adama [get rid of] Sharon. They feel like there shouldn't be any Cylons alive in the fleet. And they'll kill a bunch of hostages to get her. (source: Chicago Tribune)

Commentary

The biggest thing about this episode is the death of Billy and the exit of Paul Campbell from our main cast, and Paul's been there since the very beginning, established in the miniseries. He's been one of my favorite characters and he's certainly one of my favorite actors and one of the favorite cast members. Paul's very popular, very well liked, and was a really important part of the family. And the decision to off him was not made lightly. He really came more from a sense on our part that Paul was getting a lot of opportunities. Paul was being offered lead roles in other shows and features, and we were trying to accommodate that and trying to make that work out as best we can to give him these opportunities. But yet, we were holding him on the show in what is a supporting role. Ultimately we got to a place where were felt that it was mutually beneficial to everybody to let him pursue a career that he richly deserves.

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This bar was not a location. This was actually constructed by our department. It's a nice big bar. It was a pretty expensive big set for us.

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I like the notion that Ellen goes off to Cloud Nine periodically. And she probably gets laid and cats around and does all these things and Tigh knows about it. Tigh is aware that she goes go off and does all these things.

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It was always an interesting idea that there were going to be people out there in the fleet who would come to their own conclusions about what was really going on. That the civilians would talk amongst themselves and come up with different theories of what really happened and why Sharon would still be alive and what that meant. The episode says that clearly there are some people who believe that the military has been completely hoodwinked by this, that they're being fooled, that they're being taken over. I think it's interesting that it comes up later that Sesha tells Adama it's obvious that the defence ministry was infiltrated, and that there was a Cylon collaborator somewhere in the military's midst that allowed the original attack on the Colonies to take place. And of course she's right. That man's name is Gaius Baltar.

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David Eick is actually responsible for getting Dana on the show. He knew Dana personally and had approached her last season and started talking to her about doing an appearance on the show, and this season we managed to actually work out her schedule and ours and get her interested in material and she agreed to do it.

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Early drafts of the episode featured much more conflict between Tigh and Adama. I talked about last season that we were intrigued by the idea of getting to a place where Tigh and Adama were at loggerheads. That these two very close friends and trusted comrades got to a point where they were pointing guns at each other. Ironically that became "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down," the comedy. This season we tried to go down that road again, we tried to play a little bit more of that here. And again just ran into the same believability factor. What we were trying to go for in this episode is that Adama's refusal to turn over Sharon was putting Ellen's life in danger, and that there came a point where Tigh simply was not going to allow his wife to die for the sake of a machine. And it came to a violent confrontation when Tigh was going to hand her over, and Adama didn't want him to, and you had the two men came toe to toe. It rang false, it didn't work, and you never believed that Tigh could actually buy into the notion that giving the hostage-takers what they wanted, even if it was just a machine, was actually a good idea.

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Even though Adama was shot by a version of Sharon, Adama keeps calling her the thing, and keeps her in the brig and is very wary of her, there is definitely a part of Adama that is simultaneously drawn to Sharon, that he does look to her for information. There is an emotional connection between the two, as you saw in "Resurrection Ship." And that Tigh is much more skeptical of that connection and doesn't believe it's leading any of them to a good place.

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Somebody in a conference call came up with the idea of when Kara goes in there, what if during the shootout when this goes awry, what if Kara shoots Lee? It was always part of the script that Lee was going to catch a bullet in this sequence and that his life was going to be hanging in the balance as we went forward into the later acts. But the idea that it was actually friendly fire, that Kara is the one that shot him was posited late in the game, and I sparked to it immediately. I was in love with that idea. To me, now, this is my favorite part of the whole episode, is that Kara who we've established as the best shot in the fleet, and she's superhuman in a lot of ways, beacuse that's conceptually part of the Starbuck character, but that we've been showing more and more flaws of why that's not entirely the case.

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This is a very interesting scene. What is he here for? Is he taking Sesha seriously? Is he considering that maybe she's right? Would he hand her over if he thought she was right? She's got a legitimate point, he continues to save the ship time after time, and he has a legitimate point. She knows who the other Cylons are in the fleet, and she's not telling him, and that's clearly a problem. And the show works the best when they both got legitimate points of view, when you're actually playing it fair, when you're not tilting it one way or the other and you're forcing the audience to choose, and force the audience to consider the questions of who's right and who's wrong. I've always felt that the show is at its most effective when it presents complicated motivations and complex ideas and lets the audience draw their own conclusions rather than forcefeed them.

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It's worth mentioning that the previous act-out on Eddie where he hangs up the phone and he says "Cut the wire" and then we go to black, I don't know what the hell that means. I really don't. It's not even scripted, it was something Eddie said. In one of his takes, it's just a line that he threw out there, it's the equivalent of "cut the phone line" to the hostage takers. It doesn't really mean anything in context except "hang up the phone," which he just did. But he said it with such authority, it's really weird. Dramatically, it kind of works, and when we saw it, it was like "let's use that." It's a great act-out, even if we're not quite sure what the hell it means. It's just a really inriguing moment.

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I love this little beat where Dana raises that gun and shoots her in the head. That's like, whoah, what's up with that? I think that's a great powerful emotional moment. It's so shocking, it says vibes about who she is and what she came here to do, and that's really all it's about.

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I like the tone of this scene, I like Laura's emotional response. I like the fact that Adama's feelings in this scene are apparent. It's about their relationship, it's about Billy. It's a really powerful interesting emotional moment, and again, this is one of Mary's standout pieces. And then "was it worth it?" was an interesting thing to say. And he has trouble arguing with it. And there's something very powerful about this.

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And here we end in Sickbay. There's a lot going on in this moment. Here's Lee who doesn't know that Billy's dead, Dualla connected to Lee, but still feeling Billy's death, doesn't know how to tell him. Is she going to tell him right now what happened? Dualla trying to hang on to Lee because she's lost somebody else again. And then Starbuck in the background coming up and her guilt over shooting the man that she loves, and also having to watch him sit there with this other woman. So there's a lot of complicated emotional threads coming together here all at once.

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What is Sharon's motivation? What is she doing? What does she want? Can we trust her? Can we not? I'm glad that we end the episode on her, because it goes back to those fundamental questions. The whole episode is predicated on it. The episode is all about Sharon in some measure, though she's off camera mostly. All the events are driven by her presence and what she's about.