By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you had to describe Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot to someone who had never seen it, you’d probably use terms like “brooding,” “serious,” or even “prestige television.” Probably the last descriptor you’d ever apply is “funny,” as this show dealt in very blunt and bleak terms while telling a story about humanity facing utter extinction. The one exception, though, is the bizarrely hilarious Season 1 episode “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down,” but it turns out this broad comedy was originally going to be a deadly serious episode inspired by the hit film Crimson Tide.
Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
If it’s been a while since you watched this frakkin’ episode, here’s what happens: in “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down,” the A plot concerns Dr. Baltar’s newly-completed Cylon detector and the B plot concerns the surprise discovery of Colonel Tigh’s estranged wife. These could have been very heavy plot points, but they are mostly played for laughs…for example, the version of Six in Baltar’s head keeps sexually stimulating him, causing Starbuck (who very much cannot see the other woman) to assume Baltar is masturbating. And Tigh’s wife is hilariously weird, rubbing young Captain Adama’s crotch during dinner and generally acting like a hot (and very drunk) mess.
At the time, it was very surprising that Battlestar Galactica did a comedy episode at all amid all the grim horrors of Season 1. And “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” is even more notable in retrospect because the show never tried to do another comedic episode again. We couldn’t help but wonder what happened here, and as it turned out, this episode was originally conceived of as Galactica’s own homage to the paranoid submarine thriller Crimson Tide.
Originally, the episode’s chief conflict was going to come down to Adama and Tigh both suspecting the other one of secretly being a Cylon. Baltar’s detector would likely have played a part in such a storyline, and the version of “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” has an echo of this original idea when we see how Commander Adama and President Roslin are each quietly suspicious of each other. Fittingly enough, this episode had a different title back then: “Secrets and Lies.”
Things Change
So, what happened to the idea of doing a deadly serious homage to Crimson Tide? According to Ronald Moore, “we had just come out of a very heavy, very dark, very disturbing episode”–this was “Flesh and Blood,” in which Starbuck violently tortures a Cylon for information that could save many lives. If he had stuck with the original plot of “Tight Me Up, Tigh Me Down,” it would have been “a very disturbing, very dark, very (sort of) unhappy episode where our two…lead characters started pointing guns at one another.”
Staring at the prospect of having two insanely bleak episodes back to back, Moore made the kind of hard command decision that would have made Commander Adama proud. “I just decided, well, let’s just punt. Let’s not do the dark and brooding episode,” he said, deciding that this was the perfect time to “try a different tone.”
It was a solid decision, and the laughs provided by the final version of “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” were a great counterpoint to the torturous (in more ways than one) plot of “Flesh and Bone.” But like the Cylons, Moore had an ulterior motive. In addition to wanting audiences to chuckle, he wanted to “see if the show can withstand something lighter.” And he decided that the best way to conduct such a test was for the show to “try something that’s closer to a comedy, or as close to a comedy as Galactica can withstand.”
Obviously, Battlestar Galactica did more than withstand this story. The show went on to deliver three more seasons of (yes, it has to be said) prestige television after this. Granted, those seasons were more in line with the bleakness of “Flesh and Blood” than the lighthearted laughs of “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down.” That makes us all the more grateful that the show had at least one that made us laugh balanced against an entire series that mostly made us cry.
