Red moon

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Starbuck's Viper plummets onto the Red Moon.

The red moon is a rocky and mountainous world with no discernible life or water. It orbits a gas giant located a considerable amount of jumps away from the Twelve Colonies. The moon's thick, frigid atmosphere is composed mostly of carbon dioxide and methane with a small amount of argon. Dangerous high velocity winds dominate the upper atmosphere, and hydrocarbon clouds form an opaque screen around the moon.

Weeks after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, the moon is the site of a small skirmish between several Cylon Raiders and a handful of Colonial pilots in training. After engaging the Raiders, pilot Kara "Starbuck" Thrace finds her fighter falling out of control into the moon's atmosphere and ejects, parachuting to relative safety on the surface ^{(TRS: "Act of Contrition")}. As she struggles to maintain a limited oxygen supply and await rescue, she encounters the last Raider that she shot down during the battle. Thrace removes the dead biological material from the Raider's interior and manages to fly the Raider off the moon's surface and back into space ^{(TRS: "You Can't Go Home Again")}.

Notes

One of Bear McCreary's music tracks for "You Can't Go Home Again" is titled "Starbuck on the Red Moon."

Production

The episode "You Can't Go Home Again" was filmed at a gravel pit in Port Coquitlam, Vancouver, which was situated some twenty minutes away from Vancouver Film Studios.^{[production 1]} Art director Douglas McLean noted that the location effectively created a hostile and barren place for the red moon setting.^{[production 2]}
Director of photography Steve McNutt color-corrected the footage on location to create the strange, hostile alien environment, with visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel noting that they augmented some elements afterwards but most of the effect was achieved through McNutt's on-location work.^{[production 3]}
The Raider's biomechanical interior design revealed in "You Can't Go Home Again" would become foundational to later Cylon ship aesthetics. Production designer Richard Hudolin later explained that the concept for the interior of the Cylon Basestar in Season 3 was directly based on the interior of the Cylon Raider revealed in this episode, with Hudolin noting that the half-machine, half-living creature design established on the red moon informed the biomechanical feel of Basestar landing areas and other organic spaces.^{[production 4]}