Battlestar Galactica

Episode #303 - "Exodus, Part I"

This document is ©2006, John Larocque. All rights reserved.

The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

The human race. Far from home. Fighting for survival.

Synopsis

Ron Moore's Commentary

7/27/2006 -- In another of our patented feats of editorial derring-do, we've taken what was to be episode 3, "Exodus" and crafted two episodes from it, thereby obviating the need to shoot one more show.

10/13/2006 -- Now you'll notice here that Tyrol has mysteriously lost his beard... In essence, this little sequence of Tyrol and Tigh and Ellen in the tent was a pickup that we added later. Once we were stretching this into two episodes we were about seven minutes short, I believe, on the first hour. And on the second hour we were only three or four minutes short. So we still had to go back and pickup some material to round out the two hours. This scene is one of them. Well, we were also shooting it after the fact... By then, Tyrol's beard had already been shaved off, because he had come back to Galactica... Here's a section where Tyrol's beard has been shaved, but this has a different reason for it being shaved because this was shot after we had done the flashback sequences which also had to be shot on the New Caprica sets. So there was a point where we just committed to the fact that he was gonna be without his beard in this entire episode. So there's several factors at work. Oh, who cares? It's Tyrol's beard, and it's gone. And we love it. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- Interestingly enough, in early drafts Jammer was killed in that sequence. He died in the firefight and then there was even a draft where Jammer died a little bit later on. And I ultimately decided not to do that. For reasons that will become clear in future episodes. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- Gunnery Sergeant Mathias. Again, I wanted it to be a woman, for whatever reason, and someone in her forties that looked like she'd been around the block a few times. And she's actually named after the high school superintendent that preceded my father at Chowchilla Union High. His name was Jim Mathias and I just decided to name it after him. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- This little beat here where [Baltar] asks [Caprica-Six] not to go, to me tells you everything you have to know about the relationship. That it really is a relationship. That he's scrapping at her. There's a lot of ugliness. There's a lot of darkness in what's going on between the two of them. But when she gets up and leaves and is about to walk out the door, he asks her to stay. And she comes back. And that's the relationship. They're together and they're trapped and they wanna be trapped. And they don't know what the hell to do with one another. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- Oracle is her title. Her name is Dodona Selloi. Which is the name of an actual oracle from ancient Greece, I believe. So I borrowed her name to use as our own... I liked the idea that the two theologies of faith, the polytheistic and the monotheistic, that they were starting to have certain points of crossover. That the oracle of the Colonials' religion was actually gonna get a message from the God of the Cylon religion and pass through, as a conduit, to D'anna. And that there was some kind of common point between the two. That the both religions and both faiths had some glimpse of the truth, had some idea of the eternal but neither one was exactly right. But that there were paths that each side could take or be on that would eliminate the truth of the universe to them... D'anna's journey and her arc as a character begins here. Her starting to dream about the child. What does the child symbolize? What is the meaning of God to D'anna? Why is she questioning God? What is she questing? What is she looking for? All those things propel her in subsequent episodes. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- She knew Jake. She liked to pet him, and that was something that neither Tyrol nor Gaeta were aware of and when the shit hit the fan in "Precipice" and Gaeta was coming out to try to warn Tyrol, he turned over the dog bowl, left the message, and then D'anna happened by. She saw Jake, petted him once more, started to walk away, turned around, and saw that the dish was upside-down and kinda [went], "Hmmm." And just turned it right side up and walked away. And that was why the message missed Tyrol. It was a complicated subtlety that got lost in translation. And once we moved the whole storyline down it didn't matter anyway. So now it's just a nice little bit of continuity that she knows Jake and keeps track of him. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- And this is a nice little bit of business here where he's describing that he was lying in the sun... and he had to open his own carotid. This was like an interesting little touch. Just to start implying that the more they download, the less pleasant it becomes. And that there's a sense of, like, pain. And that there's a sense of losing something. That these downloads are not just so free and easy for them. That they pay a little bit of a price in that doing it multiple times would start have an impact on them as people. That you can't experience death over and over again without it, in fact, impacting you in some way. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

10/13/2006 -- That is an homage to The Wild Bunch. David Weddle wrote a sterling biography of Sam Peckinpah, and one of the great lines of The Wild Bunch was Ernest Borgnine saying, "It's not the fact that you gave somebody your word, it's who you gave it to." ... This little gag at the end here where she shoots her in the legs and leaves, that's actually an homage to Terminator 2. That great beat at the gate when the Terminator and Ed Furlong are going to rescue Linda Hamilton and he's made the promise not to shoot- not to kill anybody. And then he shoots the security guy in the legs, and he collapses. Ed Furlong looks at him and he just says, "He'll live." (laugh) And he goes inside. It's one of my favorite beats in the movie... We wanted to play a little bit of The Longest Day, where they're all waiting for the word of whether they're gonna go to Normandy. And this beat right here is reminicent of the moment in the big airplane hangar when John Wayne hears that, "It's on." And he throws the coffee mug across the hangar. (source: Exodus, Part I podcast)

12/7/2006 -- Question: Helo and Sharon were able to have a baby on the grounds, allegedly, that they brought love into the equation. If Six and Gaius love each other, could they have another hybrid baby?

You would think. But clearly they have been having sex for a while, and we played with the idea on New Caprica that Baltar was having performance problems, and we used to even have some dialogue about her frustration about the fact she wasn't getting pregnant -- and she does want to have a baby. If Baltar is saying he loves her, and she's not getting pregnant, it seems to put the lie to what he has said. (source: EOnline)

3/5/2007 -- I absolutely love the fact that this has become its own cult. I must bring Jake back -- who was named after both an old dog of mine who died a couple of years ago and our current Australian Shepard.

Commentary