Black Market

Last night, we watched Black Market (Battlestar Galactiac), which is on the first or second disk of season 2.5. It was the first episode that I'd seen since we started watched the series that I actively hated. I was wondering if I was alone, and so checked wikipedia. Sure enough, Ron Moore hated it too.

Executive producer Ron Moore openly disdains this episode, and from the beginning of the episode's podcast commentary simply admits that it failed as an episode. He then spends almost the entire podcast pointing out things he feels are wrong with it. The underlying reason Moore felt was behind this drop in quality for this episode was the increased workload of the series' second season; the episode's initial script looked good on paper, and only realized that it wasn't turning out well when (due to increased time constraints) it was far too late to rewrite the episode.

The number of things in it that I had problems with it were storytelling, the characterization, but also the economics of the black market. It's really hard for me to believe that black markets are bad things, when neither the crew nor the citizens can get basic necessities due to some kind of serious economic problems among the survivors. But the writers take the evil-ness of black market trading for granted, and so never bother to explain what exactly is so wrong about someone trading a gold bracelet to get liquor, or some other commodity to get antibiotics for their dying child. Since nothing is obviously wrong with those trades, it seemed like they just threw together a bit about child prostitution to really make their point. I kept telling my wife, that as far as I could see, the black market was helping move goods and services to those people who wanted them the most, and that if it didn't exist, things would undoubtedly be far worse since these rationings were resulting in serious health risks, among other things. But the storytelling was also really bad. We're introduced to Apollo's new girlfriend, who is a prostitute, and flashbacks to a woman he left behind, who we've never seen before, and is never explained in the context of the hour. It was all very confusing. Anyway, looks like its problems had to do with the writers' workload. I would've loved to have heard more about the black market idea, though, because this was potentially a very interesting thing to explore. These sci-fi shows tend to take utopian economies for granted, and the idea that Madame President is having to manage an economy, and doing a bad job of it, and dealing with crime at the same time as she's trying to keep humanity alive from constant Cylon attacks is really interesting.