"Occupation" is the third season premiere and 34th episode of the re-imagined American science fiction drama television series Battlestar Galactica.
Four months have passed since the end of "Lay Down Your Burdens", where Cylons found the majority of the human population on a planet known as New Caprica, which had supposedly been hidden from DRADIS, and commenced their occupation.
Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) is continuing to work on a plan to free those trapped on New Caprica.
He is released when his wife Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon) performs sexual favors for the Cylon Brother Cavil (Dean Stockwell).
Now free, Tigh resorts to escalating their efforts, by planning suicide bombings against the Cylons and any human collaborators.
The resistance is given intelligence by an unidentified informant from the Cylon command structure, by use of a secret dead drop; flipping a dog bowl and hiding some documents inside the tent next to it.
Next, the resistance plans to kill the President of the Colonies, Gaius Baltar (James Callis), who is unwillingly collaborating with the Cylons.
Also, Jammer (Dominic Zamprogna) was originally considered the suicide bomber at the end, but was changed to Duck because he had less to live for after his wife's death.
In the original drafts, the resistance was not planning suicide bombings, but "freaking the Cylons out" by imprisoning many of them in a secret underground prison, torture them for information, and leave them alive instead of killing them, as they would resurrect otherwise.
Moore decided to reintroduce the space-bound fleet in the beginning of the third act, in order to establish the story on New Caprica, and make the audience happy and more excited to see Galactica.
Moore also decided to evolve one of the Number Eight Cylon models, Sharon Agathon (Grace Park) imprisoned on board the ship, where a year would allow Sharon and Admiral Adama to form a special relationship, eventually leading to Adama releasing her and allowing her to become a Colonial officer by the next episode.
He also felt it was a better premiere than "Scattered" from the second season, as it contained disparate story lines where the characters were not fully reunited with each other until a few episodes in.
[1] The episode began with one of the most extended recaps in the series, as the producers wanted to bring the audience up to date from the events from "Lay Down Your Burdens", which covered "quite a bit of ground" because of the large story development behind the finale.
And so of course I gave them like four pages of dialogue to cover.The crew had to film different versions of the prayer scene before Duck commits the suicide attack.
The ending for the episode was originally Leoben presenting Starbuck with Kacey Brynn, her "daughter," but for unspecified reasons, the scene was instead used for "Precipice".
After its original broadcast, the two-hour episode attracted a household rating of 1.8, equalling a total of 2.2 million viewers.
Eric Goldman of IGN rated "Occupation" a "masterful" 10 out of 10, stating "watching the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica is a great reminder that this is truly still the best show on television.