Battlestar Galactica

Episode #218 - "Downloaded"

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

49,579 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

9/30/2005 -- We will probably go back [to Caprica]. We'll be away from Caprica for a good chunk of the season, but we're talking about heading back there. I think part of the show will always have one foot on Caprica in some shape or form. It just feels like that's part of our tale as well. What happens back at the Colonies now that the Cylons have taken over? Who's left, who's not? What are the Cylons doing with the Colonies? What's their structure? What's their society? Why did they want the Colonies? I think it will always be a kind of interesting story to tell. (source: Now Playing)

12/7/2005 -- Question: Will we in later seasons see just how the Cylons are hierarchically organized?

We're going to see hints of that this season. (source: SciFi.com Behind the Scenes)

12/7/2005 -- Will we ever see if and how the different Cylon factions vie for power and supremacy among the rest of the Cylons?

Again, you'll see some hints of this before the end of the second season. (source: SciFi.com Behind the Scenes)

1/4/2006 -- There's an episode down the line that we're really excited about, the entire episode is told from the Cylon point of view: what their society is like, what they go through during reincarnation and when they're born again. We really get inside the Cylon [society] and get to view that for the first time. (source: Chicago Tribune)

1/18/2006 -- I've seen some speculation out there that we dropped the Cylon POV episode from the lineup this season, but I'm happy to report that it's untrue. The episode, "Downloaded" will be broadcast as number 18 and I just watched it last night. It's a good show and a very different spin on our story thus far, in that we're telling the A-story entirely through the eyes of the Cylons for the first time. This was something that I'd been wanting to do for a long time but it took a while to come to fruition. The confusion probably came from the fact that we had initially planned to do a clip show as ep 18, but then dropped those plans once we made the decision to split "Resurrection Ship" into two parts, thereby giving us an extra episode and obviating the need for the clip show (which was being planning for budgetary reasons).

2/23/2006 -- The lion's share of the reason [for the discarded clip show] was that it was strictly money [and] budget. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Part of it was also seeing the success clip shows have had. Desperate Housewives and Lost have been able to have entire clip shows, and they don't even have the pretext of some kind of framing device where characters think back or whatever. They just put up a whole bunch of [past scenes] and get really good ratings for it! For a show like this that has so many serialized elements to it and complicated stories, there is value to at least considering the idea of putting up a show that does nothing but catch up audiences. There's still costs because whenever you use a clip you have to pay the actor and director and the writer of that particular episode. So it's not a freebie, but it's certainly substantially less than a full-blown episode. (source: Now Playing)

2/24/2006 -- The Cylon point-of-view show is something I wanted to do very early in the season. I wanted to do an episode that was told almost entirely from the Cylon point of view, to really get inside their society for the first time, see how they operated one-on-one, with each other, without Galactica being involved... [It] was something we were all in love with. The network really liked it too. And so we kept talking about it. And then we came to this idea about following Caprica-Six, as she's come to be known, and Sharon, and follow them through the process of being downloaded and having them wake up and see what happened to the two of them and then constructing a story that took place in Cylon-occupied Caprica that was all about Caprica-Six and Boomer, the two heroes of the Cylon, as we call them in the show. And see how they would ultimately come together and settle on a different direction for the entire Cylon nation. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- Our first attempt at this was something called "The Raid." "The Raid" was going to be a story where there was a space station out there someplace where the Cylons were meeting... where the human problem was being discussed. What we started talking about was doing a version of the Wannsee Conference, which was the conference in the Second World War where the Nazis got together at a place called Wannsee and they came up with the Final Solution to the problem of the Jews... The problem was that the Cylons had already come up with the Final Solution. They'd already devastated the human race, committed a massive genocide so that the stakes weren't quite the same...

The B story was on Galactica, and Galactica was going to be aware of the space station. They were going to try to infiltrate a group onto the space station to raid the archives or the computers or something on that space station and get information about Earth. The idea was that the Cylons, like Sharon had said in "Home", the Cylons knew more about the Colonial religion than the Colonials did and may have ideas about where Earth was, and they were going to infiltrate that space station while the Wannsee conference, or a version of it, was going on at the same time. Caprica-Six was there and she's starting to have hallucinations about Baltar. And she was going to see the people coming on board and trying to infiltrate the station and ultimately she was going to let them go and they were going to come back to Galactica with more concrete information about Earth.(source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- One of the great ideas was the notion that Caprica-Six would be hallucinating Baltar in the same way that our Baltar hallucinates Caprica-Six. There was a delicious symmetry to that idea... Both had been changed in a fundamental way by their experience with one another. They were at the epicenter of this massive genocide, of this horrific event that had altered both of their civilizations forever in fundamental ways. And these two were at ground zero of that idea and that it would affect both of them profoundly. That Baltar's guilt and Baltar's psychosis, as it were, was born out of that event, and that it would also affect Six as well...

That the psychology of Caprica-Six would also be altered by that event, especially since one of the fundamentals of who and what she is was her belief in God, her belief in a loving God and her desire to be loved and what did it mean to that character to have participated in the destruction of all these innocent people, to have used the man that she professed to love in such a profound way. Her love for him and his growing infatuation, or possibly love for her, was used and twisted to commit this horrific event. How would that affect that character? And then that Sharon, when Sharon who thought she was a human all along, the ultimate sleeper agent came to wake up back on Cylon-occupied Caprica. How would she adjust? Would she become a regular Cylon like all the others or would she struggle with it? How would she fight against it? Could she ever integrate herself back into Cylon society? And it was a very provocative, very interesting idea. That's really the roots of this episode. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- I came up with this whole little sequence here of the Cylon centurions doing their version of Arbor Day, planting a tree. There was something so odd about that. I had to fight to keep it in the show. It was an expensive shot and everyone kept saying "Oh no, no. Why don't we just cut the Cylon centurions planting the tree?" and it would save us all this time and money. I don't know, I was tickled with the idea and kept insisting that it go back into the show. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- It's great that we brought Lucy back. That we've established Lucy's character in "Final Cut" as the Cylon that no one knew on Galactica. We definitely wanted to play her down on the planet. One of the questions that comes up in this episode is a legitimate one which is, "Why don't we see all twelve Cylons?" Because logically you'd see all twelve Cylons, you would think. And we just didn't want to do that. That would blow so much in the show and give away so many things about who the Cylons are and who all the other Cylons are in the fleet. All the surprise would be gone. So we took the conceit in this show that we would just concentrate on Dorals, Sharons, D'annas, and Sixes. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- There was whole subplot that was attached to this, where the Lucy Lawless character was also on Galactica and she was interviewing the President about the rumors that the child had been born. And ultimately she was going to help try to kidnap the child off of Galactica in collusion with Gina... I opted in the the cutting room to eliminate virtually all of that storyline and make the Galactica B story just the bare bones of what was necessary to tell that story. So the whole D'anna's attempted kidnapping of the baby, the Gina sequences, all that were cut. They just confused the issue of who's who and who knew what and the story plays much better now. Because now the focus is not so much in trying to keep the Cylons straight as it is to the drama that's happening down on Caprica. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- One of the big things that interests me about the Caprica storyline is this idea that there are different points of view within the Cylon, for the first time. That they're not monolithic. They are both similar to one another and different from one another. The Sixes all share certain commonalities of personality and archetype. The D'annas all share certain personality traits and archetypes. But beyond that they have their individual experiences and their individual motivations and their individual life experiences. And I thought it was interesting to then say, here's this society that is essentially gone on a relatively homogenous way, that while there are multiples of each of them and they have all had their own individual life experiences, they haven't really faced a situation where there was a genuine difference, where there was a model or two that stood out from the rest...

This was a situation where there two distinct models who had done something definitely heroic, in their point of view. That Caprica-Six had been a key player in the downfall of the Colonies and she had helped bring about the Cylon plan and had been wildly successful and was a hero to her race. And Boomer is looked at in the same way. She had been on Galactica. She had been a great sleeper agent. She had shot Adama, he almost died, and she had carried out her plan even though she was struggling with the fact that she thought she was human all along. And that that fundamental distinction between them and the rest of the Cylons was going to cause a problem. It was going to cause the body politic of the Cylons to react and try to move those viral ideas away from the rest of the body and that the plan would be to put them together in some way that would eliminate both of them. That ultimately Sharon would get boxed and Caprica-Six would be driven mad by the knowledge that the man she loved, Gauis Baltar, was actually still alive. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- All of this is made up, as the character says in the scene. This was the life Sharon Valerii had accepted as her own. She lived in this apartment on Caprica. She had her things, her photographs, a family that she thought she loved. And none of it was true. It was all this lie that she had been programmed with to carry out this mission to then kill and betray the people that she loved. And Boomer was having an incredible amount of trouble with that. She couldn't break away from that thought and she naturally gravitated back to what she knew. She went back to her apartment and tried to resume that life, even though she knew it was impossible. She stubbornly was not going to just move on and become one of them, and that too was causing a problem with the Cylons. They didn't want to have this person in their midst that was acting differently, so they would send in somebody to try to talk her out of it. But they still had not quite crossed the threshold of killing her or just taking harsh measures. There was still this idea that they love one another, that they're better than human beings, that they're something special. They're the children of humanity and they're not like us. They would deal with their problems in a different way. They would let Sharon continue to live in her apartment and then they would try to work with her, they would try to talk with her, they would send in this Caprica-Six to go deal with her. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- This little gag here I like a lot, which is something I came up with in doing my pass. She throws the picture, the shard of glass hits her on the cheek, and that creates a moment where she could bond with Six. But, it's actually another piece of deception. I never wanted to lose track of the fact that this was Six. She was manipulative. She was duplicitous. She was a woman of secrets. A woman who is capable of a lot of lies and she was sent here to deal with Sharon and get her out of that apartment. She very coldly and calculatingly in that moment when Sharon threw the picture frame against the wall, she determines that this is a moment that she can manipulate Sharon's human emotions. Her conscience, her Baltar, calls her on it and then helps her one step beyond that. Baltar knows how to manipulate human beings and that is part of Six. It's the part of Six that understood how to manipulate Baltar, is now talking back to her. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- I love that she's just lying to her so much. She's really still working for the Cylons. She's trying to manipulate poor Boomer. Caprica-Six is trying to get back into the good graces of her people. She wants to be a good Cylon. She thinks of herself as a good Cylon. She did a good thing. She was a hero and now she's trying to be a hero again. And it's just this little hiccup here where suddenly she realizes something else is going on. "Wait a minute, Baltar's alive?" (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- This relationship between Helo and Sharon is a lovely relationship. It's gone much farther than I think aybody ever thought it would. As I've openly admitted to, I didn't know where the hell this was going when we first decided to bring Helo back to the show, and marry him up with Sharon down on Caprica. And I'm so glad we did. I just think it adds so much to the show and it's just become one of the fundamental threads of the entire series. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- I believe this came from Gattaca. One of the things they had done in that movie is to use Eastern European-looking cars, things that were recognizable as motor vehicles, but still has a slightly different aesthetic than what you're used to seeing on American television. And that's the way we opted to go. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- Lucy gives this wonderful other dimension, she's not a mustache-twirling villain, she's coming frmo a place where it seems like she's trying to help, where she actually cares about Sharon, she's not just coming and saying, "You will be a good Cylon or we wlil box you." But Baltar's starting out to assess out the situation, that there's more to it than that. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- And again, Boomer's dedication to human life, and Caprica-Six hunting for a reason not to kill him. Why not kill him? It's about guilt and it's about responsibility and it's about right and wrong. Caprica-Six is one who talked a good game. God is love. Well, what does that mean? If God is love, how do you justify doing what she and the Cylons did. She's suffering through that internal contradiction of who and what the Cylons really are, because she fell in love with Gaius Baltar. For good or for bad, Gaius Baltar was the man that she actually gave her heart to and actually wanted something back from him, and if you can love and be loved, what does it then mean to kill. And you can argue they are two sides of the same coin -- love and death and murder. I think human being struggle with a lot of the same problems, the horrific things we do, I think, do weigh at our conscience. The best of us are capable of the worst things, and the worst of us are capable of the greatest things. I think that's one of the interesting things that this show continues to play. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- There was dialog between Helo and Tyrol here, where Helo thanked Tyrol for coming and being there for him, and Tyrol saying "No problem, man. It's the least I could do." Ultimately we cut the dialog because it seemed unnecessary. We were also fighting times, we were looking for nips and cuts all the way through the show. And there was something more powerful about just the fact that Tyrol was there. It speaks volumes about the fact that he's still connected with Sharon, he's still connected to that storyline. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- Giving the child to this other woman, Maya, to replace the baby that she lost, and to do it in secrecy and to put the child away, there's obviously echoes here of the Moses story. It's metaphorically putting the babe in the basket of reeds and floating it down the Nile to be picked up by somebody else to be raised in secret. And it did seem like the only way that Laura figured out of this box. If the child remained on Galactica, they knew they would become this magnet. Every Cylon in the fleet would have designs on getting to it. God knows what Sharon would be trying to do, it was a dangerous element. The safest way in Laura's mind was to convince the Cylons that the child was dead, but she just didn't want to kill the baby. She couldn't quite bring herself to go to that moral place and this was the best solution she could find. She would keep an eye on it, she would see what happens. Laura is a human being and she couldn't quite commit infanticide. This seemed like an interesting compromise, to see what happens later. And this will continue to be a storyline for us. This will definitely play into the next season with the baby being with Maya. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- "Say the things that you know to be true." And isn't that the fundamental contradiction in what she said and what she believes? Murder and vengeance, aren't they sins in the eyes of her loving God? (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- It would have been easy for to have Anders actually shoot her there. But that's not really the point of the story. The point of the story is the Cylons turning on one another, the division within the Cylon ranks, ultimately providing the answers, not that the human character pops up and solves it for them. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- The Cylons are a very young people. They don't have thousands of years of history behind them. They don't have this massive cultural history to back on. They are figuring out who and what they are in many ways for the first time. And as they grow older and as they have more experiences, they start to question the world in ways that we question the world. And this pact that is borne in this moment between Caprica-Six and Boomer, and their determination to change, to try a different tack, to actually uphold what they think God wants them to do, will have profound ramifications into the next two episodes as you will see. It will fundamentally change a lot of things about the Cylons, and lead to some very unexpected directions for themselves and for the series. (source: Downloaded podcast)

2/24/2006 -- That's the final thought of the episode, and it harkens all the way back to the very beginning of the miniseries. The very first question that Caprica-Six asked was, "Are you alive?" What does it mean to be alive? (source: Downloaded podcast)

3/8/2006 -- My assumption has been that the Cylons created Sharon's eggs and presumably the eggs for all Cylon females. This could change, obviously, but the idea was that the Cylons were attempting to create a virtually perfect replica of the human form, right down to the reproductive system, but that they had been unable to actually reproduce on their own.

4/18/2006 -- I'm happy with the fact that we crossed each Sharon over into the other world and I'm not planning to reswap them again. There's also no plan at the moment to destroy either one.

Commentary

"D'anna leaves me lots of room to be twisty. Sharon and Six are really having some real crises of faith with the Cylon ID, and my character finds that just so repugnant... Her agenda doesn't jibe with Sharon's or Six's. She considers herself the pure form, so everybody else needs to come into line with her.... She's like the ultimate narcissist. She has all the hallmarks of a friend, but there's no warmth to her. So, instinctively, you find her menacing... She's one of those people you watch because you don't quite trust her. You can tell she's got an agenda, but you're not sure what it is. This is all made even more interesting because she's a reporter... There's a supposed role of the media to be the good guys and to tell the truth, and she does that. It's just that D'anna's description of the truth isn't human." -- Lucy Lawless (D'anna Biers) on 2/17/2006 (source: scifi.about.com)