Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-15: Scar

Battlestar Galactica

Episode #215 - "Scar"

Created by John Larocque on March 18, 2005
Last revised: February 7, 2006

49,593 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 -- We do an episode that's really about fighter combat. [Kara `Starbuck' Thrace figures prominently]. There's a Cylon raider that keeps coming, just keeps coming. He kills a bunch of pilots. It's their dark shark in the water, he keeps coming to get people. (source: Chicago Tribune)

Commentary

These are the dead pilots eulogized by Kara: "BB. JoJo. Reilly. Beano. Dipper. Flattop. Chuckles. Jolly. Crashdown. Sheppard. Dash. Flyboy. Stepchild. Puppet. Fireball." Flattop died after his thousandth landing in "Litmus." Chuckles and Fireball perished in "The Hand of God," and the episode was also the last appearance of Stepchild. Jolly was part of the ceremonial flyby at the decomissioning ceremony and died in the miniseries. Flyboy's last appearance was in "Valley of Darkness." According to to Doral in the miniseries, the Galactica's previous Commander was named Dash.

"It's a complete departure from whom she's been for two seasons. I went to Ron Moore and David Eick and said, 'I don't get it. I don't like it.' I thought, 'What happened to my character? She's drinking all the time.' The whole episode stems from her wanting to go back to Caprica and get Anders. The likelihood of him being alive is growing small, and she knows he's probably dead, and she loves him. It's a great episode." -- Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) on 1/4/2006 (source: Scripps Howard)

BT = Bradley Thompson. DW = David Weddle.

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BT: You had come up with the feeling you kinda wanted to get into the world of the fighter pilot. You wanted to see what it was like to sweat down on the deck, and what were their lives like. And David Eick came up with an idea he wanted to see, mano a mano between Kat and Kara. That Kara's been out of it for a while, and there may be a new top gun.
DW: That's something that Brad and I wanted to do. In some ways, "Act of Contrition" was the first stab at that. I knew from the first week we came on the show, Brad and I wanted to see the life of the Viper pilots, almost from the time they get up in the morning, to around the clock... One of our favorite World War II movies is Battleground, the war from the perspective of the grunts, which in this case Viper pilots are. And they're part of a larger mission, but they don't always know the big picture of what's going on, and they're caught up in just what their tasks are.
BT: There was one other task to this. We needed the enemy. Ron got this idea that he wanted only one battle in space. We weren't going to do a series of battles, a scorekeeping thing. So we had this box to work into, and so the question was, "OK, how can we set this competition up in the framework of one fight that's going to determine everything.

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This scene that you're seeing here in the tease of them gathering all of the possessions of the dead pilot into a box actually led to a scene that ultimately we cut in editing where they auctioned off the possessions of the dead pilot, which grew out of something that I remember from history and fictionalized history as well where, in the Royal Navy, back in the Napoleonic war era, when members of the crew -- officers or enlisted men -- died they would take all their possessions and they would take them up onto the deck after the battle and they would auction them off to the other members of the crew. And it was a way of saying goodbye in carrying some pieces of their memories forward. And also in a practical sense there was gear to be had... And we did shoot that aspect of the sequence. This scene was going to then cut to Lee holding up the skin magazine from Beano, and it was like, "OK, how much do I have for this?"

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BT: One of the mighty nice things that Michael Nankin brought to the show was the little moment you saw earlier with putting the tag of Beano on the new guy, JoJo... This thing that you just saw Kara do, this carrier landing, it comes from astronauts that we interviewed from another project we were on, where they would go to bars and literally dive across the tables.

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BT: [This beat] actually comes from a thing that Pappy Boyington used to do in the Second World War when he was flying with the Flying Tigers. The bad guys were always in the sun. And he just at one point he put his thumb up there and realized he could see around the sun. And he assumed that everybody else had already twigged to that particular thing. Nobody had... When we were doing the actual fighter tactics, and the things that Kara says or that Kat says about you'll have only two seconds to actually blow this guy away, so you've got to get close, this all comes from real fighter pilot concerns.

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It's interesting just to see the development of Kat, who started as just a day player in "Act of Contrition." I don't know that any of us anticipated that we were ever going to really do anything with that character again. And then bit by bit over the course of the first and second seasons, writers started dropping her in the shows and using her as another fighter pilot... It's nice because it creates a reality of the world, it really makes it feel like a continuing story with familiar faces, and the world just keeps expanding.

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In this episode, it's interesting that we take Kara down a significant peg here. She's really frakking up in this episode. She's not on her game, she's getting blinded by this competition with Kat and she doesn't know why. She's confused, she gets drunk. She tries to sleep with Lee for all the wrong reasons. She's a really confused, flawed character. And she's the top gun character on the show, and she's supposed to be perfect, and she's supposed to have all these abilities. This is one where we really put her through the wringer.

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I like this runner a lot between Helo and Kara. There's something very nice about it, and it is borne out of a throwaway line from "Kobol's Last Gleaming." Because you know Helo was separated from the entire cast for the whole first season. When he and Kara hooked up in "Scattered", I just had a line where she said, "Helo, you and I go back a long ways." But it was nice to say that there was a history between the two of them, and it's interesting that in the show, she's revealing herself in an intimate way with Helo instead of Lee, that there's this other person who is more of a friend, and that there is a camaraderie between the two that's really kind of nice.

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And this angle on Jamie, I love this when she says, "Why don't we?" And the look on his face, the dawning awareness. And then, right here, that's so great. He's so like caught in this scene. You can kind of feel it right away, the energy in this scene all wrong, if this is really the time where Apollo and Starbuck are going to finally get it on, which of course has been something we've talked about since the miniseries. When are these two finally going to get in bed, when's it going to happen? And I always wanted it to happen for all the wrong reasons, in a very screwed up way... It's a confused, angry emotional scene.

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BT: The diagrams that you'll see on the wall of the dogfight, the crosswalk, and all that stuff comes from a book called "Fighter Tactics," by a U.S. Navy pilot, which is one of the textbooks used learning to dogfight.

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DW: The whole thing about Riley's girlfriend started out as just a color. When we first put it in the script, we thought, "It's probably gonna get cut." It's just a color thing. But as we continued to do the rewrite, it became a central thematic throughline for the characters, because that's what Kara said when she confronts Kat, "You're afraid you're gonna end up like that." We never intended it in the beginning, to have that function.
BT: That's another one of those wonderful things that grows as we do draft after draft. Certain things fall away, and certain things take on much more meaning.

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BT: There was a final party scene that was written in there, and then Michael Nankin came to us up in Canada when we were in prep and said, "You know, I would think it would be nice to do the names here."
DW: He had the whole concept of Kara pretending not to remember the names in the rec room with Lee, and I could remember when he brought the note, and we were like, "No, we're not gonna do that, it's too sentimental. Who is this director coming in with these notes?" And then late at night we're thinking about it for a couple of hours and go, "You know, maybe he's right." And then you start to do it and realize, "God, this is good, this is really good." He brought the whole show up with this idea.

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It was a great concept, and I loved the notion of going through a laundry list of the names. I don't know if it's scripted or a Nankin thing that she falters, and kinda can't remember. It's great 'cause she doesn't run down the list, and they don't complete the list. She literally gets to a point where she just honestly can't remember. And the whole scene is about to just collapse because it's like "omigosh, I've ruined this great moment." And then she can't do it, and Lee steps in and saves it. It's one of the most heroic moments he has in the whole series, this little thing he does. It's such a bigger heroic moment than a lot of the other things.

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And this is a great beat too. The music is actually from The Dear Hunter, David Eick's [inspiration].