Episode 214

Episode #214 - "Black Market"

Created by John Larocque on March 18, 2005
Last revised: January 31, 2006

49,597 survivors in search of a home called Earth.

The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

Synopsis

Ron Moore's Commentary

10/14/2005 -- One thing that has become apparent in recent days is just how committed we are around here to maintaining the quality of the show and our incredible dissatisfaction when those goals are not met. I found myself not only dissatisfied last night, but positively angry with myself at something I knew in my bones had fallen well below the bar I set for myself and for the show in general. I won't go into it now (maybe later) but it was one of those situations where I looked at something and had to listen to the voice inside my head say "You screwed this one up." Nothing pisses me off more than not making a show the best I think it can be and in this case, there was no one to blame but myself. The only solace I take from it is the knowledge that it does still piss me off and therefore I am still doing something I'm passionately engaged in. Far too many writers, producers, directors and actors I've known have been stuck doing things that they either didn't care about or actually loathed, and I've been extremely fortunate in always being emotionally engaged in the projects I've worked on.

Commentary

It's a classic device, this is not rocket science. It's take the end and put a piece of the end at the head of the episode so that you tease the drama. You're essentially setting up a jeopardy situation that's intriguing and compelling and we'll let that pull that audience into the show... and that kind of tension undergirds the rest of the episode. The theory works and it does provide a certain amount of tension throughout the episode. In fact, that's one of the few things that the episode has going for it in my opinion, that we do have that underlying question of what is that confrontation about, and when are we going to get to it?

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This is far too conventional. If I had to sum up what's wrong with this episode, it's that this time we went for a much more TV conventional tale, and execution. The murder of Fisk with the gadget, the reveal of the villain smoking a cigar, you kinda feel like this is a scene from another series. And I think that's what disturbs me the most. This doesn't feel as much like Galactica as it should. It feels a little bit more of television. A lot of television is very comfortable, very predictable. The stories are quite conventional. You tune into most hour-long dramas on the air and you kinda know where the story's going as soon as you tune in. And there's a familiarity and a comfort to that, that audiences look forward to at some level. In our case, I don't think that comfort and familirity work for us. I don't think it's helpful or useful that the audience knows where this story is going from the opening moments. I don't think it is in keeping with what the show tries to be.

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Heart of Darkness is one of those archetypes that's tossed about a lot in writer's rooms where you're taking a character. He is literally or metaphorically going up a river of darkness, getting darker and darker, and going to places the character never really thought that he would go. And this is Lee's journey up the river, ultimately, finding Kurtz as it were, the Bill Duke character...

We have these two contradictory impulses going here in this episode... There's a procedural aspect to this show that is driving the plot forward and sending Lee up the river. But on the other hand, we're trying to tell this more texturalized complicated backstory about one of our central characters and peeling away layers of the onion as it were and discovering things about him. I'm still not quite sure on some level why that doesn't gel better than it does... I think it's more how in how we've executed this, and how we've actually chosen to tell these particular stories. The procedural aspect isn't quite complicated enough to make the plot rocket forward and give you enough "Oh my god, I wasn't expecting that to happen." And on the character side of the street, the revelations of Lee and past never quite get beyond the teasing phase. But the tease never quite leads you to consummation... It's classically standing on two chairs and falling off both of them.

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Sometimes it's suprising that you get happy with a script and you think it's working really well. There are points in the process of this one when I was defensive about criticism of this. I thought this was quite a good episode. And then you get to the place where you watch and go, "Oh my God, what was I thinking?" In fact, I actually alluded to that in a blog I wrote around the time that I watched the first cut of this episode. It really depressed me, and I was very unhappy with myself. I was unhappy with what I had done as executive producer, with the piece of material that we had produced, and realized that all the decisions, all the fundamentals of why the show didn't work and what was wrong with it could all be laid at my doorstep.

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This scene with Tigh and Lee is my favorite scene in the episode. This scene works really well because this scene is actually Battlestar Galactica. This is two of our characters coming into confrontation over something personal. It deals with actual ethical issues. Tigh and Ellen and Ellen's involvement in the black market, and she's getting things for Tigh, who is a senior officer on Galactica. There's a whiff of corruption here, and what does it mean? We don't take the easy way out. Tigh isn't shocked at what his wife is doing, and promises never to do it again. He understands what she's doing. There is an implication of who knows what else Ellen Tigh is doing with Commander Fix. I'm not sure that's a picture I want in my mind. And Lee is also a bit dirty in this scene. Lee is also engaged in things that are probably not that above board. There's an implication that Lee helped get that medicine for the little girl and probably went outside official channels. And it's a personal emotional confrontation with people with conflicted and conflicting motivations.

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There was another scene that we cut where Dualla was following Lee out of the Raptor when Lee arrived back on Galactica earlier and they had a similar conversation in that she was hinting that there was something going on between them and he didn't want to talk about it. He was caught up in his own demons about the girl he left behind on Caprica... We cut and recut this scene. There was a lot more dialog here where Lee explained himself more, talked more in general terms about themselves. But ultimately it got to the same place, he didn't know what to say. And we chopped all of that dialog and stripped the scene down to its emotional essence.

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Bill Duke is a great actor, I so like Bill Duke. I've always liked his work. He's also a great director at this point, and having him on the show is a big plus. It's a big plus in the episode because he brings a presence and a weight and a threat that gives you a needed discomfort and a sense that something really terrible is going to happen.

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This scene works well, this scene with Baltar and Laura is nice. I like the fact that it's following up on the end revelation from "Epiphanies." That Laura knows Baltars secret, or at least knows in her gut, even if she doesn't have a shred of evidence. But there's not a single thing that she can do to actually out Baltar. What can she really say? ... Three's nothing to back it up. It's his word versus her word. It's also nice that we've innoculated Baltar from that particular charge in season one during "Six Degrees from Separation," the episode where the other Six, the Shelly Godfrey character show up and accuses him of just that thing, and is ultimately exonerated. If Laura came out and started accusing him of the exact same charge now, there'd be a sense of "been there done that," and I don't think she would get anywhere. Nevertheless, she doesn't trust him, doesn't like him, wants him to go away. So this is Laura's tack, to go to him one on one and try to get him quietly to go do something else, and to try to play to the fact that she knows he doesn't like being Vice President any more.

But it pricks Baltar's ego. That's the thing that I think anyone and everyone probably underestimates about Gaius Baltar, is the truly astonishing size of the man's ego. There's a very straight line that can be drawn from here to the season finale, the story of a disinterested political player who fell into the vice presidency for other reasons, to the point where he is going to be seriously considering a presidential run himself. It kind of begins here with this moment, where the character just cannot be insulted. The character cannot be told that "you're not up to the job," or "maybe you should do something else." Any implication that he's not capable of doing something, the man can react in extraordinary ways. You saw this at the end of "Epiphanies." The criticism from Laura's letter to him prompting this reaction to give a nuclear weapon to terrorists. The man is a dangerous man because of the incredibly fragile nature of his ego, combined with the amazing breadth of his intellect.

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This kind of tips us into a different territory. Now there's kids being handed around, and now there's kids being bought and sold is an implication. This is the only place that you kinda get to, "Oh, now I see why the black market's a bad deal, because have kiddies being traded back and forth." I don't think that's quite fair to the audience or the characters. It's sorta a cheap shot we've gone for here. "Its the kids." I always hesitate when we start doing it. When you do something like that in ordre to undergird the point, it's because you haven't really established the rest of it as clearly being bad enough. It's almost a desperation move.

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The convention of that particular story has always been, the good guy won't shoot the bad guy unless the bad guy threatens him in some way. But it's a complete manipulation because the audience's opnly interest is to see the bad guy get show. But the audience wants to have it both ways. But the audience wants to have their bloodlust satisfied, in that, "Thank God, I got to see Walker Texas Ranger shoot this guy, but, you know, his hands are clean, because the bad guy kinda reached for a gun, or flinched or he double-crossed him." And that's why the good guy is still good. And I was interested in subverting that, in that, "You want your bloodlust satisfied? Fine. The hero's going to shoot the bad guy, but guess what? The hero's just going to shoot him. He's just going to execute him, and how do you feel about that?" That's the territory that I'm more intertested in, and the show is presenting more complicated moral dilemnas to the audience, to not giving them the pure clean comfort of hero shoots bad guy because bad guy did something bad.

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This is an interesting callback to the end of "Bastille Day," which was a similar concept, in that it was an all Lee story which dealt with him wrestling with moral issues, and then gets to a place where he had made decisions and went back and had to tell the higher ups about what he had decided.

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This scene had a lot to do with Mark Stern. He is our network executive at Sci-Fi Channel. The interaction between Lee and Adama, I think he wanted more in the script [and] a more interesting beat at the end because there wasn't much there. This was his idea, and thank God he gave that note. A lot of times you hear writers/producers bagging on studio and/or network execs about intereference, dumb notes, or whatever. That's not always true. Sometimes they hand things that are quite valuable. If Mark hadn't of given us the idea of the scene and talked to us about the content of the scene, we wouldn't have a nice ending to the show. We have a great little ending to the show now.