Moore considers the episode to be mainly a character piece about "Galactica"s crew. He said that the subplot focusing on Palladino's threats against Tigh serves only to inject what he considered was a baseline level of tension required in a television episode and admitted that he was never satisfied with it. The first draft had Palladino shooting himself at the end of his confrontation with Tigh, but the writers considered this "gratuitous" and rewrote it to have Marines arrest him instead.