Ronald D. Moore sells a new show to Syfy that kind of sounds like something you've seen before

By Sean O'Neal | March 8, 2013 | 4:48pm

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Other than his recent success with selling an Outlander TV show, Ronald D. Moore’s post-Battlestar Galactica career has been littered with false starts—the aborted BSG prequels Caprica and Blood And Chrome; projects that were never picked up like his Coast Guard drama, the Western Hangtown, the "Harry Potter for adults" supernatural procedural 17th Precinct, his remake of The Wild Wild West. Still, he can always count on a still-grateful Syfy to take at least an initial chance on him: The network has just ordered 13 episodes of Helix, “a thriller about a team of scientists from the Centers for Disease Control who travel to a high-tech research facility in the Arctic to investigate a possible disease outbreak. There, they find themselves in a terrifying life-and-death struggle that holds the key to mankind's salvation or total annihilation.”

The Hollywood Reporter has already drawn parallels to The Walking Dead—and indeed, it has the “apocalypse on ice” vibe of AMC’s own recent attempt to double-down on The Walking Dead with The Terror. But more specifically, it sounds very similar to The Thing, the 2011 prequel to which featured a first draft by Moore that was scrapped but presumably had some ideas Moore thought were worth salvaging, in keeping with Moore’s role as your friendly neighborhood genre junkman. “Ayyyy, who threw away a perfectly good premise here?” Moore probably says at the start of every script, whistling the Sanford And Son theme while he works.