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Hello, and welcome to the podcast for episode 14, "Black Market." I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. And today's podcast we're gonna be do something a little bit different, actually, than the norm. We're going to be talking about an episode that I don't particularly like (Chuckles) and discussing maybe the reasons why it doesn't work and the problems that I think are inherent in this particular episode. I think I should also make it clear from the outset that the criticisms and implied criticisms of this episode really should not be laid at the doorstep of the production team, or the cast, or crew, or the writing staff, or anybody else. It's really my responsibility as head writer and one of the executive producers. The decisions that led to this episode being something that I'm not as enamored with really can all be tracked back to decisions that I made at various stages in the creative process. So this is really a- a podcast devoted to self-examination and self-criticism, more than anything else, and going through why this particular episode doesn't seem like it fits as well within the- the pantheon of what we've established.
Ok. Here we are at the top of the show. This particular opening was not scripted this way. This was the ending. And it is- it's a flash-forward to the end of the show, with Lee facing down Bill Duke's character and the question of whether he's going to shoot him or not and then this provides, essentially, the frame for the entire episode. But this was not as scripted. This came out- this move of putting the confrontation of Lee pointing the gun at Phelan came out of desperation, more than anything else. I saw the cut of "Black Market" initially and I was depressed. I wasn't happy. I was really disappointed in the show and myself and what we had done and didn't feel like the episode really had anything going for it. That it started too slowly, that the initial scenes were not engaging, the story wasn't grabbing me and so one of the ways that we set out to try to fix the episode and to get the best episode that we could. I came up with this idea of, "Well let's take..." 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, one would hope, and let that pull the audience into the show so that they will then hang on- "Well, what was that confrontation about? Who was the Bill Duke character? Why is Lee pointing that gun? Is he gonna shoot him?" And that kind of tension undergirds the rest of the episode. I think the theory works, surprisingly. (Chuckles). It does provide a certain amount of tension throughout the episode. In fact it's one of the few things the episode has going for it, in my opinion, is that we do have that underlying question of, "What is that confrontation about and when are we going to get to it?"
The storyline came out of a lot of pretty interesting discussions in the writers' room about the black market and what would be happening in the Fleet. Our discussions centered around the notion of, "What is really happening out there economically? Where are people getting things? Who are they turning to? What criminal elements crop up at some point, if not well before now, at least it could be acknowledged now? And how do the people, and the government, and in the military deal with these kinds of problems? There is no (quote-unquote) "police force" that's been established in the Rag Tag Fleet and it doesn't seem realistic that there could've been a police force established in the Rag Tag Fleet to date. So Adama and the Galactica and now Pegasus are really the only enforcement that they have. And what happens when people on- the new arrivals on Pegasus having their own agendas, their own backstories, their own motivations, what happens when you move them into this mix and maybe the new man at the top gets involved with the black market?
I think one of the difficulties of the show, conceptually, is that the black market is a difficult concept, in this particular world, to get your mind around. In a world of Galactica where the Rag Tag Fleet is out on its own, there is no socioeconomic structure beyond the Rag Tag Fleet. There's no government. There's no social system. There's no nothing. Other than these particular ships. Isn't everything black market? Isn't everything to be bartered? One starts to wonder what the distinctions are that Laura is upset about. We gravitate towards place where we said, "Well the criminal element and the black market is essentially taking essential goods and holding them hostage and extorting other goods from other people and some kind of system of distribution for rations and for goods is being upset because people are starting to exert undue pressures in certain directions." It's a heady, intellectual argument. It doesn't have the visceral nature of, "Well, there's the thriving drug trade," or "There's a white slavery ring," or something like that. Which isn't really where we wanted to go. It was supposed to delineate forth the socioeconomic difficulties that the Rag Tag Fleet is dealing with while also at its core focusing, of course, on Lee Adama. This is a "Lee story". And the insp- the place that the "Lee story" starts from in this telling is from Lee classicly going up the river. That's an allusion to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which is the basis for "Apocalypse Now". It's a model that is tossed about a lot in writers' rooms in a lot of industry of discussion has to do with... My apologies. You're probably picking up a great deal of gardening noise today and sorry, that's the risk you run with these podcasts. Anyway, Heart of Darkness is one of those archetypes that is tossed about a lot in writers' rooms where you're taking a character and he is either literally or metaphorically going up a river of darkness, getting darker and darker and going to places that the character never really thought that he would go. And so this is Lee's journey up the river, ultimately finding Kurtz, as it were, the Bill Duke character. I think we were all in love with the notion on a character level, well, I'll get back to that. I was gonna talk about Lee and the prostitute.
This sequence is- this is what's wrong with the episode. This is far too conventional. I think if I had to sum up what's wrong with this episode in my opinion, 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 the cigar. You feel like this is a scene from another series. And I think that's what disturbs me the most is that it just- this doesn't feel as much like Galactica as it should. This feels a little bit more of television. Which sounds like a slap against television and it kinda is I mean 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 know where the story's going as soon as you tune in. And there's a- there's a familiarity and a comfort to that- that audiences look forward to on some level.
Act 1[edit]
In our case, I don't think that comfort and familiarity really 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 really is in keeping with what the show tries to do- it tries to be. Now, that said, we struggled mightily to try to bring a lot of unexpected quality to this show. Part of that struggle was to give Lee a more complex personality, to delve into darker waters with Lee using the escape sequence, rather, the ejection sequence from "Resurrection Ship" and his experience there as the jumping off point into his own journey, and to discover things like Lee has this girl. That was in the teaser and I love, I do like the idea that Lee is with this girl, and you're playing, he's got the girl, and she has a daughter, and it seems very sweet, and then he pays her at the end. And the idea that there's this- there prostitution is very common in the Fleet, and that it was probably legal back in the Colonies, before the attack, and that it's not a big- it's not a major deal. It's not like, "Oh my God! Lee is seeing a hooker." It's just dealt with.
In some sense it goes to, actually, ironically enough, an element of the original Battlestar Galactica series. There was a character named Cassiopeia or Casssiopeia, depending on how you like to pronounce it, played by Laurette Sprang, who, of course, every adolescent boy that watched it in 1978, including me, had the hots for her, and she was what was called the socialator, which was essentially a prostitute, and it was legal on one colony and wasn't legal on another, and then she came aboard Galactica and became Starbuck's girlfriend. So we used that as a jumping off point, that ok, it's legal. It's something interesting about that in the world, and that Lee, the classic clean-cut good guy, is actually seeing this hooker on the side, and has been for a while. The implication is that he's gotten caught up with her, is having a relationship with her that he did not anticipate and is actually getting emotionally involved, and that becomes a vulnerability within the episode. That all seemed interesting. And what made it even more interesting, conceptually, was the idea that through this story there would be flashbacks not just with her, but that would actually delineate a relationship in Lee's backstory that we hadn't even hinted at. That there was a girl. That before the attack Lee was a man and Lee had relationships and why is that a surprise? That there was a girl that we didn't know about and that we would get hints of that and there would be images of her and (clears throat) there would be this whole other tale that would start to come up and we'd realize that Lee actually left somebody behind. That there was this tragic story of Lee and this woman and she got pregnant and he wasn't ready and kinda panicked in the moment or didn't react well when she told him and she left and he has all these regrets because then the world ended, quite literally, and that relationship was never resolved and is a hanging- it's a thread of Lee's life that hang- that dangles there and tortures him on a certain level and is informing his relationship with the girl in the present. It all sounds good and it sounded interesting when we were talking about it.
I think the problem is that when all is said and done we really didn't get deep enough into it. We didn't really use- we have these two contradictory impulses going through in this episode. One is the plot, which is the "up the river" aspect of it. Here's Lee, in this scene, Fisk's quarters. He's uncovering clues, clasically, he's pocketing a clue. Here's a suspect. There's a procedural aspect to this show that is driving the plot forward and sending Reef 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 as we go along and I'm still not quite sure on some level why that doesn't gel better than it does. 'Cause usually you try to marry up a good solid plot with a complicated, interesting character dynamic and usually that's a formula for success. In this particular exercise it feels like they- it's not that they really fight one another because, in strictly structural terms, the scenes lay out quite nicely in how it advances. I think it's more in how we've executed this and how we've actually chosen to those particular stories. The procedural aspect is not quite complicated enough. We don't quite have enough twists and turns on the procedural level to make the plot rocket forward and to give you enough, "Oh my God! I wasn't expecting that to happen," kind of moments to make the procedural aspect work. And on the character side of the street the revelations of Lee and his past are- never quite get beyond the teasing phase. In other words we tease you with knowledge of him seeing a prostitute. We tease you with knowledge that there's a blonde other woman in his past, but the tease never quite leads you to consummation. You never quite get at the satisfaction of truly having gone through a plot that you had no idea where it was gonna go and you're shocked where it ended up. And you're not really sitting back and going, "My God. Lee Adama is nothing like I thought he was." It just doesn't- it falls in between. It's classically standing on the two chairs and falling in between both of them.
And again, I have to keep going out of my way to say this is not really the fault of the writer, Mark Verheiden wrote this episode. He's our co-executive producer. He's incredibly talented. He's essentially my right-hand man on the writing staff. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Mark and his abilities and his write and- (to himself) his write... (chuckles) his draft and the rewrites of "Black Market" were guided by me. I gave notes on these episode- on this episode and I was very clear on what I wanted done. And I was very happy with it. That's the other aspect of this that sometimes is surprising. That you get happy with a script and you think it's working really well and you get it vaguely, more than vaguely, there were points in the process of this one where I was a bit defensive about criticism of this. I thought this was a- quite a good episode. And then you get to the place where you watch and you 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 was watching. The time that I wrote- I'm sorry- the time that I watched the first cut of this episode really depressed me and I was very unhappy with myself. I was unhappy with what I had done as executive producer. What the piece of material that we had produced and realized that all the decisions, all the fundamentals of why this show didn't work and what was wrong with it could all be laid at my doorstep and I wrote- there was a blog where I alluded to the fact that I was really unhappy and "Oh my God! This is terrible." I didn't really want to say that it was at that point, 'cause you know hope springs eternal and you hope that you're gonna turn it around and get it to a great place. But now the truth can be told.
In any case, all these scenes went through a great deal of revision and editing. We played around with structure quite a bit, where the flashbacks would take place, what order they were shown in. Oh. I should say that this scene, with Tigh and Lee, is my favorite scene in the episode and other people on the show agree. This scene works really well, 'cause 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 in Galactica. There's a whiff of corruption here and what does it mean? We're not gonna- 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 that, "Who knows what else Ellen Tigh is doing with Commander Fisk?" I'm not sure that's a picture I want in my mind, but, ok. 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 the medicine for the little girl and probably went outside official channels. And it's a personal, emotional, confrontation with people with conflicted and conflicting motiviations. And I think this scene worked particularly well. It's also extremely well acted and shot. And this is the- this scene changed very little in the editorial process. We were always proud of this scene and we always liked this scene and this would always be the moment when you would start- look at that. That look on Tigh's face. That speaks volumes about who that man is and the character of that man and he's a complicated, complex individual and you can love and hate him in the very same moment. And it's really- Michael Hogan has really developed a singular character within this series and within science fiction in general. There's- I don't know who to compare the character of Tigh to at this point. And it's in large measure due to what Michael brings to it.