Ron Moore Blog/February 24, 2005

This entry of the Ron Moore Blog was published on February 24, 2005. It was titled "Accepted Error".
==Transcript==
Someone recently asked:
"In the mini series, when the Cylon fighters are approaching Colonial One (just before Lee saves the day with the EM pulse), Roslin refuses to run and leave the other civilian ships to their doom... Yet she articulated no alternative plan.
What was she hoping to do? It just seemed as though she planned to sit there and hope for the best, refusing to budge from the principle of not leaving defenseless people behind, even if that meant her own virtual suicide.
It was an odd moment, she had been so decisive and clear headed up to then, and after that.
What were her motivations, did she even have a plan? I still find this moment a little jarring and hard to explain away.
I guess it does serve as a contrast to her later decision to leave Cammy etc behind.
Thanks for your insights into this issue."
Can we talk? Let's be honest here. The show is not perfect. There are compromises made all the time; some for budgetary reasons, some are for political reasons, some are for no reason at all except that the writer could not, or would not, make the changes necessary to resolve a story point.
Such is The Case of Laura Roslin and the Incoming Cylon.
The above writer's observation is absolutely correct. Laura, by all rights and all sensible reasoning, should not obstinately stay when it's known for a fact that a Cylon missile is incoming, probably has a nuclear warhead and oh, by the way, she has no armament aboard her ship that would allow her even the remote chance of a possible last-minute, brilliant tactical move which might theoretically prevent the destruction of her ship and her presidency. Her refusal to leave, to Jump away from the impending, obvious threat can be interpreted as an irrational flaw in her character, a case of emotion trumping intellect, or it can be more correctly interpreted simply as a flaw in the script, an accepted error that the writer chooses to ignore in favor of other competing interests of character and plot which take priority in a given moment.
In this case, I felt that the dramatic moment required that Laura make a committment to staying with her people, and to her nascent fleet, heedless of the consequence and resolute in her decision, even though it meant her certain doom. It was her instinctive response to the situation, her id's judgement, so to speak, that I was interested in, as well as the simpler plot device of having Lee swoop in and save them at the last moment just at the point you'd forgotten he was even there. Neither impulse is wrong, per se, but the error is in my choosing not to expand the moment and its aftermath in order to play out her realization of just how stupid a choice that was.
If, at some point following the resolution of the crisis, Laura realized that she let her emotional reaction to the situation lead her into making a bad decision which was only saved by the providential intervention of Lee, then the scene would've accomplished everything I had hoped for in the moment as well as providing Laura with a character-building scene where the new president's first major decision nearly got them all killed. It would've been a way to both emphasize her fallibility and the fact that she can't afford to lead with her heart any longer. Her subsequent decision to leave the sublight ships behind, abandoning them to their destruction by the Cylons, would've also been informed by this experience and had a richer, even more textured component to it.
In the end, it's not a fatal error in the script, and the moment passes by without comment for the most part, but it is something that nags at me whenever I see the sequence and which, frankly, bothered me at the time. So why didn't I fix it? A variety of answers present themselves, from time pressure to budgets, but the truth is, I knew that the emotional, dramatic moment would carry the audience through the scene and that people would be more invested in watching Lee take out the Cylon missile than in examining Laura's decision-making, so I opted to leave it alone rather than make the necessary page cuts and possible budget cuts needed to accommodate additional beats on this one point. It was probably the correct decision in the end, because the moment works and you move on as you're watching the show. However, being a television writer means not only having to make compromises and less than perfect decisions all the time, but as an additional penalty you get to always be reminded of the errors you've accepted when you watch the final product.
Good catch by an attentive member of the audience.
Damn you.
==Sources==
Category:Ron Moore Blog