Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-17: The Captain's Hand

Battlestar Galactica

Episode #217 - "Captain's Hand"

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 Lee has to deal with the new commander of the Pegasus [This person is not the second-in-command whom we met during "Resurrection Ship" episodes]. It turns out the guy who had been in charge was deep into the black market. Another guy is put in charge, he's a bit paranoid. And he's really not up to the task of command. The Pegasus continues to be a troubled ship for the rest of the season. (source: Chicago Tribune)

Commentary

"In the short term he's going to end up with Dee (Dualla). Although he falls into a couple of other arms along the way. In the long term, I really don't know. Actually, there'll always be something between him and Starbuck. There's always a kinetic energy, something going on between them, but they kind of get together in the second half of season two and fireworks go off and it doesn't quite workout, so it's a relationship that will always be there, but whether they can actually settle into it and admit it to anyone else, I highly doubt. I think they're too charged and too mixed up about what the other means to them and there's too much back story and too many problems, so I'm not sure if they'll ever get together. Other than that, I don't know. From what I've learned about the character, he's got commitment issues, so I think whoever it is going to have a hard ride." -- Jamie Bamber (Apollo) on 10/6/2005 (source: EOnline)

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The whole notion of this episode revolved around acknowledging the continuing command problems aboard Pegasus which felt like a natural outgrowth of the idea that the battlestar Pegasus that showed up is a deeply flawed, almost piratical ship under the command of Admiral Cain. If Admiral Cain had run the ship the way we saw her run the ship, one would assume that there would be a variety of problems that would definitely outlive her. And so we wanted to play that as the season went on.

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In early drafts Garner was always named Trammel but legal as legal often does, came back to us with some whining about the name Trammel, about it being too close to somebody else's real name, and of course we had to change it over to Garner at the last second. We named him Trammel in an earlier episode in an offhand way in a line from Adama. We had to reloop that in ADR at the last second.

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The pilots and the crew had private signals among themselves to stay clear of the quarters when they got a girl or man or both inside, and they had a private signal. You couldn't quite see it, because we had to cut the clip off the head of that shot, but when Duck and the other pilot came up there was a pair of boots hanging from the hatch, and they knew as soon as they saw the pair of boots that that meant that somebody was in there getting a little something.

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We started talking about this idea in the first season, as a potentially interesting storyline because it dealt with a practical issue. What are the policies in the fleet going to be in terms of birth control and abortion [when] the population of the species was going to be hanging in the balance? And what would these people really do in these circumstances? And it was definitely an issue we wanted to deal with and wanted to play, and wanted to see how these characters would react in this circumstance.

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I think there was something interesting about Laura Roslin, whose politics on the surface seem to be probably moderate to liberal, and one of the ongoing threads of the entire series was watching as Laura is slowly changed by the responsibilities of being President. And this storyline was one of those key ideas. And I was fascinated with the idea of this softish-appearing woman who presumably has all these politically correct positions on these sort of matters being forced to grapple with the real responsiblities of her role. And I was always interested by playing against the expectations that Laura would be the dove and Adama would be a hawk and that would always provide very predictable expected conflict between the two. And I always thought it was interesting to subvert that at every turn and always put the characters in situations where they would have to grapple with them as human beings and not as stalking horses for expected political positions.

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She shot him in the last episode, and it felt like definitely something we definitely wanted to follow up on as part of the growing chasm between these two characters. You saw in "Scar" that they came close to actually sleeping together in a moment, and that Kara reached out to him in desperation to try to forget about Anders and then it all fell apart. There was something interesting about continuing to play these two becoming more and more estranged, especially because your expectation is these two are going to end up together, or there's some kind of romantic tension going on. I found it was much more interesting the further apart these two got, the more their relationship became more disfunctional.

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This idea, that Sarah Porter and the Gemonese would come a callin' because of their support to Laura when she needed it when Laura rose up against Adama way back when and declared herself a prophet earlier in the season, there was the implication then. Zarek saw it coming, ironically enough. Zarek was the guy who looked down the road and said this is a mistake. This is going to come back to bite you in the ass. And that Zarek was right, that Zarek is a smart political animal. He knows how these things work, and Zarek as the secularist saw the dangers of this, and saw that the religious people, the fundamentalist crowd as it were, within the fleet were going to want something for their support and that there was a political reality to that. And I thought there was something interesting about seeing Laura caught in that vise, where she needed their support, she wanted their support, and then their support came at a price, and how does she reconcile those two ideas.

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This is one of Jamie's best episodes. He just has this real interesting angst underneath all his lines. You get the feeling the character's really in turmoil. He's really struggling with a lot of different things, comes right back at her... In some ways these two are happiest when they are scrappin' at each other. I think in some ways, whatever love they have, whatever relationship they have, is really born much more in these scenes of conflict than there is in any outward acknowledgement or expression of affection for one another... There's a lot of internal and extenal debate about this little sequence here, about Lee calling her on the fact that she shot him. The question was, does it make him look petulant. My answer was no. It's honest, he's angry, he's struggling with something. I mean, she shot him, it's a pretty heavy thing to be shot by your friend, unless your friend's the vice president or something and then you got to get over it. But if it's not the vice president and you're shot by your friend, then it's probably a heavy thing that you have to carry the rest of your life.

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You'll notice that the helmets are changed subtly over the course of the last year. We've added some lights, they fit the actor's heads a little more snugly. There was internal debate over whether that was good or bad. The old helmets didn't fit quite well, they were always giving us sound trouble, they were hard to shoot in a lot of ways, they had different lighting problems. So we revamped the helmets quite a bit.

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This little sequence right here of each of them trying to leave the other one and turning to the sergeant of the guard, it's a straight homage to Crimson Tide, which is a very effective sequence between Gene Hackman and Denzell Washington. It was fun to write this scene, but it's also different in that Lee is the one taken away. Denzell Washington wins that argument on Crimson Tide.

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The term snipe is something that I got from the Navy when I was on the U.S.S. W. S. Sims, the Knox class frigate that I spent a summer cruise on ROTC. All the engineers were called snipes, an in-house reference to people that were in engineering.

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That little beat there with the watch came out of discussion with the director. He wanted something that was a signature of Garner's that Lee could pick up later. What if it's a watch, and it's a watch missing a strap?

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I like the fact that Rya had the abortion. She didn't have a last minute change of heart and say, "Oh, I'm going to have the child after all," which I think is TV's way of copping out with women that face these issues. Maude is probably the last major character on television who actually had an abortion on TV and didn't by the end decide, "Well, you know, I know that I believe in a woman's right to choose, but I've decided not to," which I just think is a total cop-out. That's trying to have it both ways, to have your liberal point of view and not actually bite the bullet and have the character actually go through with the procedure, which is a difficult procedure and carries a lot of heavy weight. I think you have to give it its weight and play the reality of that.

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I played around with variations of what's a better way to say that, and for lack of an imgagination, there isn't a better phrase that I could think of. Pound of flesh [from "Merchant of Venice"] says it all, and so I opted to keep it in.

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This was actually an adlib that Jamie came up with in the table read. "You have a brain" is something he just said in the table read and cracked up the whole room. It was also inspired because it broke the ice and broke the tension and yet he was still honest and true. And so we put it in the script.

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Baltar is now officially running for president. This will continue throughout the rest of the season. This will come into play bigtime in the two-part finale. This is going to lead us into some very interesting places.