Sunday, January 29, 2006

Has Battlestar Galactica hit a turning point?

Update: I just listened to Ron Moore's podcast about this episode. Although he wasn't happy with the execution, it appears that they were aiming for the affect I discuss below. Maybe I am not critical enough but I felt the execution was fine.

Today I was chatting with some friends and I made the comment that I think that episode 2.1.4 Blackmarket shows a potential turning point in the series. They all kind of disagreed but later I was over at Jaqueline Mackie Paisley Passey's blog and she had a thread up so I decided to lay out my reasons. I have copied the comment below, feel free to let me know what you think:

It might just be me, especially since I haven't listened to the podcast but it seems like this episode is a turning point. Up until now Apollo was always the President's man, he was also a moral anchor for the show. I don't know if it was intentional or not but they just shredded that.

When he went to the blackmarket ship he had a choice. He could have fessed up to his sins and taken the consequences and raided the ship with a bunch of Marines, fulfilling the presidents order. He didn't he went looking to try and salvage his reputation and maybe his girlfriends life and if he died in the process, Oh Well he wants to anyway.

A little bit of the old Apollo poked out when he decided that doing the right thing meant saving the kids, and that meant murdering the Marsellus Wallace character, but it was too little too late. From now on you always have to wonder where Apollo is coming from.

In a way this entire 2.5 season has been like that with the Cain / Adama assassination angle, the easy acceptance of aborting Sharon's baby (and this is completely outside the pro-life/pro-choice argument so please don't jump on me in either direction) which echoes the forced abortions given to mental defectives under the guise of eugenics, the splintering of the government with the Baltar / President fight that is brewing and the peace movement. What we are seeing is a society that is sliding into civil war.

Anyway now I need to listen to the podcast and see what Ron Moore has to say about it.






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