Battlestar Galactica

Episode #217 - "The Captain's Hand"

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

49,584 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

2/17/2006 -- I'm travelling and couldn't get the podcast on "Captain's Hand" out in time for tonight's broadcast. I'll do it over the weekend and get it uploaded next week. It's a good ep and I'm very curious to see the reaction.

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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? (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/24/2006 -- 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. (source: The Captain's Hand podcast)

2/26/2006 -- There's a lot of weight in terms of people saying part of Laura's authority comes from the idea that she might well be the prophet that is talked about in some of their scriptural references. And if she's dying that sort of cements the idea, and if she's not dying that raises more questions about her legitimacy, about whether they should listen to her in the first place. So it does put things into a different light... We've established that people from the colony of Gemenon tend to be religious, and they have a sort of fundamentalist agenda. And that sort of political fallout [will be seen in] future episodes. In episode 17, which is "The Captain's Hand," a significant B-story is going on that has to do with abortion has to do with the [Gemenon people] applying political pressure because they supported Laura as a religious leader and now they want their agenda to be moved forward. (source: Now Playing)

4/18/2006 -- Question: In the podcast for "Captain's Hand," you mention that the Pegasus engineer was not used to leading outside of the engineering spaces and, well, it showed. But it seemed to me that he also exhibited some of the ship's company vs. Air Wing mentality that so plagues so many carriers, particularly in how he dealt with Starbuck. Were you are aware of that black shoe vs. brown shoe dynamic on a carrier, and if so did it influence the behaviors of this character?

I was aware of the blackshoe vs. brownshoe dynamics both on carriers and in the wider communities, so I definitely carried that over into "Captain's Hand." Even in my limited personal experience, I could see the (mostly healthy) rivalries among the different specialties, espcially during my summer cruise aboard the USS W.S. Sims FF-1059.

Commentary