Back on October 14th, 2005, Ron Moore posted on his blog:
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.
In his January 27th 2006 podcast Ron makes it clear he was talking about "Black Market". The podcast is an extraordinary thing to listen to, because Ron so expertly examines the episode, to explain why he thinks the episode didn't work, and failed to meet their goals. His honesty is refreshing. His detailed examination of what went wrong with "Black Market" is really interesting to listen to.
"Black Market" was a rather unusual episode. Ron is right, that it often feels like it's from a different show, not Galactica. (That said, "off format" shows can often be quite good.) But, in this case, Ron is essentially correct. The episode gave me a creepy feeling of vertigo. Everything seemed out of place.
Even still, it was an interesting episode. If the writing had been tweaked in a few places, it might have worked much better.
But, it wasn't an entirely bad effort in the end. It was just more than a little surreal.
1 comment:
Certainly I hope that, nor do I think they will be, "off format" shows will become the norm with BSG like they ended up being for seasons 6 and 7 of The X-Files.
-D
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