What would Battlestar Galactica look like if it were launched today?
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That was the question posted to Ronald D. Moore, the uber-producer who returned to his native habitat on Thursday — San Diego Comic-Con — to discuss his life’s work with former muse Mary McDonnell.
McDonnell, who played President Laura Roslin on the sci-fi series, wondered if Moore’s 2004 reimagining of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica series would look and sound any different today given the state of politics and our culture.
“I mean, the story itself would probably be different because I wrote it at a specific moment in our lives and in our history,” said Moore. “I was approached to do the project just a months after the 9/11 attacks. As it was developed, it happened and then there as Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and we were dealing with the Patriot Act and a lot issues of freedom versus security with terrorism in the modern world and fundamentalism. I wanted the show to talk about who we were at that moment. So if I were creating Battlestar Galactica from scratch today, I don’t know …. it’s so hard to let go of what the show became.”
“I would still try to approach it with the same attitude that I had when I approached the original, which was I wanted to preserve the framework of what the original was,” he continued. “I want it to be recognizable as Battlestar Galactica. It’s still a warship and an aircraft carrier in space, guiding a ragtag civilian fleet running from the Cylons after an apocalyptic attack. It’s about their society. What are the pieces of their civilization they chose to carry with them? What’s important to them? What does it mean to be a democracy? Then I would have to get down into the weeds and then it would be different because it would have to be informed by the last 20 years of what we have gone through.”
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Moore also looked back at the hubris he demonstrated as a young and ambitious writer, who thought nothing of handing over a spec script to a guide who was giving him and others a tour of the old Star Trek sets. That guide ended up being an assistant for Gene Roddenberry, who did, in fact, receive the script.
“It’s hard to pin down why I felt that confidence,” admitted Moore, who originally attended Cornell University because he thought he wanted to be a lawyer. “I just had this believe. I was gonna do it. Once he turned in that script, I fully believed it was going to sell. I was like, just kind of waiting for the call coming any day now. It’s such a stupid thing to say, but it did work. But I didn’t have any logical reason to believe it would. But it did.”
Moore, whose genre credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Outlander , said production began this past week on season five of his latest series for Apple, For All Mankind . The streamer also recently greenlit a spinoff series titled Star City , which is also from Moore, as well as Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi.
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