BSG: Black Market

All of thirty seconds in to the commentary for "Black Market," Ron Moore confessed that he didn't think too much of this episode, and since I frankly preferred this one, flawed though it was, to its immediate predecessor, the Deus-ex-Machina-infested and yet Moore-approved monstrosity that was "Epiphanies," I knew that this was going to be the subject of today's review.

Moore's commentary, even though it's drowned out by background noise, is certainly insightful and does touch on some of the episode's flaws, most notably the fact that it feels more like a police procedural than an episode of Battlestar Galactica. But if you want my opinion, and since you're reading this that's a fair assumption to make, my issue with this episode has to do with the fact that it tries to be too much of a stand-alone episode instead of part of a greater whole.

As I mentioned back in "Bastille Day," Lee "Apollo" Adama is my favorite character on the show, and since "Black Market" is the most Lee-centric episode since then, maybe that's why I'm more forgiving than Moore is. But still, in this episode we're introduced to two more women in Lee's life out of literally nowhere and expected to care about them.

Okay, before I go much further, I guess a synopsis is in order. After "Pegasus" came "Resurrection Ship," a two-parter in which Cain died and Fisk suceeded her as the commander of the Pegasus. Also in that episode, Lee had to punch out of his ship and got stranded in space. A deleted scene showed him turning to drink for the first time (I think) and generally harboring much darker thoughts than we'd previously seen. At the end of the episode, Lee confesses to Starbuck (and also to Dualla, who happens to be eavesdropping) that he's not happy to be alive.

(There's another deleted scene in this episode where Dualla tells Lee that she wishes she died back on Caprica. There's enough Lee/Dee interaction onscreen to be able to guess where all this is heading, but yeah, I can see what the fans mean when they complain about just how much of their relationship got left on the cutting room floor.)

So in this episode Fisk is killed by some thugs running a black market. Roslin demands that the entire operation be shut down, and Adama appoints Lee to the job. (Gotta say, Bill, you do a terrible job when it comes to picking stable pilots for critical missions. First you had Starbuck interrogate a guy, then you had a clearly-distraught Boomer blow up a Basestar, and now you think Lee's got his head screwed on straight enough for this sort of investigation. Hell, Tigh may be a drunk, but he's never openly defied you...)

Meanwhile, Lee's doing the whole "Heart of Darkness" thing (Moore says as much in the commentary). In addition to the fact that he wishes he hadn't been rescued, he's apparently been having a long-term relationship with a prostitute.

Yeah this came out of literally nowhere, and while it wouldn't be surprising for him to do a onetime thing after his near death experience, it's implied that this has been going on for a bit longer than that. Or perhaps in the BSGverse, working girls regularly let their clients talk to their daughters. (Hell, when you get right down to it, the prostitute's daughter is the lynchpin of the problem. See, the Black Marketeers needed to do something so evil that warrants Lee shooting their leader at the end - as if killing a Colonial Officer wasn't enough* - so they kidnap the daughter for some nefarious purpose that, thankfully, isn't explicitly spelled out.

*Yeah, Fisk was a snake. But saying that diminishes his murder undermines what the writers were going for. More on that in a second.

Anyway, Lee's been seeing this prostitute because apparently he needs a stand-in for a girl whose heart he broke back on Caprica. And speaking of breaking hearts, he pretty much shoots Dee down in this episode (no, not in the dogfighting sense). We can see that he's clearly not the same person he was back in "Bastille Day." He's no longer so confident about the moral and ethical ground that he's standing on. This is called "Character Development," and Lee got more of it in a season and a half than certain DS9 characters got in seven years.

But this is still a tremendous amount of stuff to drop on us in the span of one episode, which is the main problem. See, the whole idea is to get Lee to the point where he basically kills a (bad) man in cold blood. Now if you're a longtime reader, chances are you know I'm pretty much cool with that. If you don't feel like reading that whole rant, the gist of it is that there's a huge difference between killing an innocent and killing a killer. (This is why it doesn't matter that Fisk was a snake, incidentally; if we're supposed to feel that Lee has crossed some horrible line in killing the black marketeer, then we should probably also care about Fisk.)

But Lee, who had a chance to do something similar in "Bastille Day" and didn't take it, apparently needs an extra push. Never mind the fact that he respects/respected Zarek, but clearly feels nothing for the black marketeer here. Never mind the fact that his sense of right and wrong has been crumbling ever since his father ordered him to help Starbuck put a bullet in Cain's head (at the very most recent).

So... why did the writers feel the need to introduce two more women in the life of Lee Adama, both of whom clearly mean something to him, without any warning or hint of this in a previous episode? (Answer: the dead girl from Caprica was originally going to be seen back during the spacewalk in "Resurrection Ship," but apparently someone on the BSG staff thinks viewers are stupid and would lose the plot thread before it came up again here, which only begs the question of why this episode didn't immediately follow "Resurrection Ship." It's not like Lee had anything to do in "Epiphanies," and it's not like Roslin, Helo or Sharon have anything to do here. In fact, swapping the two episodes around would a) draw out Roslin's cancer story, and b) give Sharon more time to develop a baby bump. As broadcast, it just looks like she swallowed a watermelon between "Ressurection Ship" and "Epiphanies.")

Two more things I want to discuss: One, Starbuck isn't in here at all. Obviously, she can't be the girl who gets in over her head with the mob, because it would be totally untrue to her character for her to have to be outright rescued by someone else. But her absence - and Lee's apparent rejection of Dualla's advances - only highlight how odd it is that he's gotten involved in this other relationship completely offscreen.

And finally, Tom Zarek. I love the multiple levels of his character and his interaction with Lee, but seriously, the "Old Apollo versus New Apollo" thing is starting to wear off. In both of his appearances thus far in Season 2, he's focused on Lee. In "Home," he contemplated killing him, but he ultimately backed off, and here he basically shows up to point Lee in the right direction. But back in "Home," he could rest secure in the knowledge that Roslin's cancer effectively made her a lame duck. To bring back Tom Zarek without acknowledging the fact that his goal of obtaining the Presidency just got a lot harder doesn't do his character any favors, and is another reason why this episode should have come before "Epiphanies."

Ultimately it's a problem that I've heard in a lot of commentaries: they just don't have enough time to tell all the stories they want to. Neither this nor "Epiphanies" could have been reasonably stretched into a two-parter, but among the many things the show excels at, one is cleverly inserting plot threads for subsequent episodes into earlier episodes. So basically, in a nutshell, the problem with "Black Market" is that it is too much of a stand-alone episode in a show that frankly thrives on story arcs.