MT: As I mentioned above, I consider Michael one of my mentors, but when I joined the Voyager staff, he was just a consultant on the show. It wasn’t till I joined the Dead Zone staff that I got to work with him directly. Like Ira, he was a consummate pro who was intensely engaged with the characters and stories he created, but who rewarded writers for thinking outside the box and avoiding anything that smacked of convention.

The first rule of Galactica Fight Club is…UNFINISHED BUSINESS

ProgGrrl: “Unfinished Business” (and even more so the extended cut included on the season three DVD set) really broadened the view of so many of the personal relationships between the show's characters. Other than establishing the reason for the drastic changes in the Lee and Kara dynamic that were first shown in the season two finale, what other major goals were on the plate when writing this episode?

MT: Well, in a general sense, we just wanted to fill in some of the backstory of that missing year, and to do it through the lens of some single eventful day in the lives of our characters. When I first pitched the idea of doing a Fight Club-like episode, Ron thought it would be the perfect present-day bookend to pair with those beats from the past. But there were no real “goals” beyond that general intent, apart from putting the Kara-Lee relationship front and center and taking it to a new place. The story also evolved in a very organic and unconventional way, partly as a result of production and scheduling issues. Because the New Caprica exterior sets had to be struck before this episode—the eighth of the season—was slated for production, we ended up writing and shooting the entire past storyline first, then returning a couple of months later to shoot the present-day boxing sequences. Given that this was my first bg episode, it was a bracing immersion in the unconventional BSG creative process that Ron Moore fostered (translation: Ron threw me in the deep end of the pool and laughed while I floundered), but ultimately very liberating.

"I don’t care who frakkin’ knows!" Baggage delivered in UNFINISHED BUSINESS

PG: In an interview you did around the time “Razor” aired you mentioned that the editor of “Unfinished Business,” Michael O’Halloran, was the one who campaigned for the longer cut to get on the DVD. What are your feelings about the broadcast cut versus the longer cut, now that both are available for all to see?