April 17th, 2007
The post-9/11 remake of Battlestar Galactica startled viewers who remembered the show from the fuzzy robot dog and the lunchboxes. Radically re-imagining the original '70s space opera, the new series was dark, controversial, and richly character-driven—largely thanks to Ronald D. Moore, the veteran television writer-producer who came to the show with a résumé including three Star Trek series, UPN's Roswell, and HBO's Carnivàle. His Battlestar Galactica regularly challenges and confuses its own cult audience, especially with the latest season finale, wherein [spoiler warning; the interview also has several spoilers. --ed.] four long-time characters were revealed to (probably) be robots in human form—but only after they all started singing "All Along the Watchtower"—and a lead character, Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck, abruptly came back from the dead. Moore recently spoke with The A.V. Club about the show's ambitious plotting, its political relevance, and how much he misses Star Trek.
The A.V. Club: How did you choose "All Along the Watchtower" as the song that triggered the new Cylons?
Ronald D. Moore: That's actually a song I've been interested in doing something about for a long time. It's one of Bob Dylan's really interesting pieces, and I've always been fascinated by the lyric and the imagery. When I was working at Roswell, there was a point where I was going to do an entire episode about it. And then as we got into Galactica in the first year, I was starting to think ahead about ways of saying that, you know, things that happened on Galactica were tied into our reality here on Earth in some way, in the past or the future, or some other connection. And one of the ways that I thought of making that connection explicit was at some point, to have a song we recognize playing in the background on one of their jukeboxes. It's another way of saying, "Well, why do they wear suits and ties? Why do they use many of the expressions we use in contemporary culture?"
AVC: The show has always taken place far off in an alien culture. Did you think this would be jarring for the audience?
RM: Sure, I knew it was definitely going to be a hard left turn. And that's one of the things that appealed to me about it the most—the fact that it would upset the idea of what Galactica was, and the things you thought you were comfortable knowing. Which is really what I like about the show, that it continues to push the envelope and that it never lets the audience settle into a comfortable routine.
AVC: The show has often been called "topical," and obviously from the beginning, it started in the wake of 9/11. At the same time, you've said you've avoided turning it into a specific allegory or a polemic.
RM: Right.
AVC: At the same time, a lot of really specific references creep in—like when a character is saved by the equivalent of stem cells, or Dean Stockwell's character almost quotes Dick Cheney.
RM: Oh sure. It's a very subjective line. And we play around with that line a lot. There's definitely times when we're tempted to make a very specific connection to today's events, and sometimes we shy away from it, and sometimes we seize on it. There's no real hard-and-fast rule for when we do it and when we don't. It's a gut thing, and I just kind of feel my way through it and decide almost arbitrarily what I think works and when we've gone too far.
AVC: You've said that President Roslin is partly inspired by George W. Bush, which makes perfect sense in terms of her situation, but it's hard to see in her character.
RM: Well, you know, the role of a president in the aftermath of this apocalyptic attack seemed like it was set up in a way that it would be hard not to draw the parallel on some level. And on some level, I wanted to extend sympathy for the person in that position. To realize that even someone like Laura Roslin, when they are thrust into the presidency in these circumstances, and literally have the fate of the human race hanging on their shoulders, there's going to be a transition, there's going to be a change. They're going to look at the world through different eyes.
And certainly George W. Bush went through a similar transition. The 9/11 attack was the seminal moment in the man's life, it was the seminal moment in his presidency, and he changed. And I think you can argue about the reasons for that, and was it a good change, was it a bad change, but on a human level, the change happened. And I wanted to dramatize that with Laura Roslin too, and say that anybody in that position's going to have certain reactions to that event, and they're going to take the responsibility much more seriously than they did before the event.
AVC: When viewers call the show "topical," do you think they have a consistent interpretation of exactly what they're seeing? A show like 24 has such a clear message: "This patriotic superman is going to save America." But with Battlestar Galactica, it's a lot trickier.
RM: I don't think ours has a direct message like that, and I think people come away from the show with different things depending on what their viewpoint was going into it. For some people, the show confirms what they already believe. For others, it challenges their beliefs. I think it pisses some people off.
One of the things that surprises me the most, and that I'm really gratified about the most, is that The National Review continues to be one of our biggest fans, and continues to support the show, and has said it's one of the best shows on TV. And their political agenda is certainly not mine. But I'm really happy that they like the show, that they see things within it that appeal to them.
AVC: Were you surprised when some of the things you've done lately—say, when the heroes condoned suicide bombings—didn't provoke more backlash?
RM: We saw a fair amount of heat for it. If the show was on a broadcast network and had a much bigger audience, we probably would have taken a much bigger hit. The fact that we're on cable and we have a smaller audience, I think, went a long way toward shielding us from a major media backlash.
And also just the fact that it's science fiction. We get a pass on a lot of things because it's science fiction. The religious stuff on the show, the political stuff on the show—a lot of people just don't want to take it seriously, because it's people in spaceships and robots running around. So a lot of the mainstream media just isn't going to really take anything in the show seriously. Which gives us a lot of freedom to do what we want.
AVC: It would be hard for Rush Limbaugh to start ranting about a show with killer robots.
RM: It would be pretty funny to hear. I sort of would like to hear that broadcast some morning.
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