I *heart* Ron Moore

[ebonlock]

Atrios points to Ron Moore's blog today (yay, one of my favorite bloggers is a big old BSG freak too!), about an episode that (much as I loved it), really disturbed me. I'm glad it diturbed him too.

I firmly believe that what Kara Thrace did to Leoben in "Flesh and Bone" was wrong. I believe that a society which employs torture on the defenseless captives in its custody has crossed a bright shining line that civilized people should not cross. Likewise, I think that Laura Roslin promising a man freedom only to kill him in the end is abhorrent to the ways in which I want my president to behave. However, I also understand why each of them did what they did. I understand the emotional, psychological and moral quandries which can lead two moral, good people to take such ghastly actions. And, in the end, I also believe that it was true to who characters really are, and that trumps everything else.

A show that allows for moral ambiguities and lets its characters make the wrong choices because that's who they are and what they would do. *happy sigh*

Comments

[forkmonkey.livejournal.com]

What's really excellent, in my mind, is how the wrong choices they're making hilight the extremety of their situation. The survival of the species is at stake, and these good people are compromising their values because of it. Now, "survival of the species" is a dramatic cliche, used all the time, but the counterpoint of Starbuck's willingness to torture, of Adama's willingness to attack Colonial 1, of these good people falling on the sour side of necessity, is what really makes the tension of the show real to me.

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

What's really excellent, in my mind, is how the wrong choices they're making hilight the extremety of their situation. The survival of the species is at stake, and these good people are compromising their values because of it. Now, "survival of the species" is a dramatic cliche, used all the time, but the counterpoint of Starbuck's willingness to torture, of Adama's willingness to attack Colonial 1, of these good people falling on the sour side of necessity, is what really makes the tension of the show real to me.

Precisely, and what's interesting here is that it's a lot of the topics he tried to cover in DS9 but ended up finding the genre a little too stifling to really make it work. Not that he didn't do a fine job at making the Star Trek universe more gritty, desperate, and dark than it ever had been before. But rebuilding BSG from the bottom up gives him and the writers so much more to work with.

[ebongreen.livejournal.com]

I thought that episode made a good point of Kara saying (paraphrased), "I'm doing this to you for four reasons: you're a threat, you have information I need, I've been charged with getting this information by whatever means necessary, and you're not human." The last one is the most important - in the story, this is literally true, despite any and all revelations of the season finale in my mind.

In our world, the psychological dehumanization/demonization of one's "enemy" is generally a prerequisite for torture and killings of many kinds, and I thought the point was amply made that humans don't/shouldn't torture other humans. This is where morality fails and sociopathology takes over - when one stops seeing another as a Thou and begins seeing as an It, to cop some Martin Buber. One of the great gifts of science fiction is the literalization of the metaphor - the alien becomes the Alien, the inhuman becomes the Non-Human, and sometimes the Human becomes the Inhuman too.

Ah, sci-fi, how do I love thee? I cannot count the ways.

[psyfic.livejournal.com]

Funny you bring up that episode, because it's the only BG ep we've been able to watch (bad timing). That one ep was seriously intriguing. We can't wait for it to come out on DVD so we can catch up.