Sunday’s episode of Battlestar Galactica (don’t worry, no spoilers) brought back a nice little cadence between Adama and Starbuck that goes back I think all the way to the mini-series:
Adama: Mornin’ Starbuck, whadya hear?
Starbuck: Nothin’ but the rain.
Adama: Then grab your gun and bring the cat in.
It’s a little thing, but it always just displays a nice moment between the two characters who have a very deep mentor/mentee (mento/manatee) father/daughter warden/prisoner history together. It’s used particularly well in the most recent episode as it’s something that connects the character to who she was when we first met her. How much has she changed? Has she grown, or is she still just as frakked up (or more so) as she was from the start? From executive producer Ron Moore’s blog:
I came up with this in the miniseries, and it’s essentially a riff on contemporary marching chants or cadences used in the military called, “jodies.” You’ve seen them in films: the platoon is marching or jogging along and the drill instructor sings out something like, “Up in the morning in the rising sun/Gonna run all day ‘til the running’s done,” and the platoon either repeats the lines or adds the next line in the jodie. They range from the funny to the deeply profane and I remembered several of them from my NROTC days while I was writing the mini. In that opening scene, Kara is jogging through the corridors of Galactica and Adama greets her with a line that is a reference to an old jodie that presumably each of them remembers from their own training. So it’s kind of an in-joke reference that they share with each other which probably in turn has some even deeper private joke between the two of them. I never wrote out the entire jodie, but I liked the nonsensical nature of the lines and thought it was more effective to suggest the cadences without spelling them out.
This sort of thing is what makes that show so great. The characters have real lives that existed before the show started and continue to go on after the camera stops rolling.