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.