TV

Battlestar Galactica [2004]
3x09 Unfinished Business [extended cut]

I had thought I was going to watch the broadcast version of this episode -- I usually do with things, first time round (see: Neon Genesis Evangelion. (I say "see" -- I watched that before I started this blog.)). But goodness knows when second-time-round might be, and this particular extended version makes a regular episode feature-length, with 26½ minutes of added material.

According to executive producer Ronald D. Moore, this is "an 'editor's cut'... the starting point for cutting down the episode to the standard length... while it offers a lot more details on the characters, it is a rough cut (unlike the Pegasus extended cut). He considers some scenes better and some worse than in the final cut, sometimes preferring story points only being told by implication and not spelled out. He thinks some scenes may be too long, with the ideal cut maybe somewhere between the two." (There's also an odd situation with the episode's music score, which you can read about in a little more detail here.) So my decision to watch the longer version was based on the premise that if neither's perfect, I may as well see the one with more material.

It certainly felt like quite an epic episode -- in character terms, anyway -- dealing with a lot of long-standing issues (even if the viewer didn't know about all of them yet). Moore also notes that there was "a faster pace in the aired version", so it would be interesting to see the contrast. Hopefully someday there'll be a second-time-round and I can watch it then.