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Delve Into 'Battlestar Galactica'

Troy Wolverton

If the phrase "Battlestar Galactica" brings to mind a 1970s TV show filled with cheesy special effects, silly plotlines and Bonanza's Lorne Greene dressed in a flowing velvet cape, it's time to clear your head and flip on the SciFi channel on a Friday night.

There you'll find a dramatic reinvention of the original show. Greene is gone, and so is much of the cheese. What remains is a series that retains the core idea of the original: a space saga about the survivors of a surprise genocidal attack.

With the Cylon attackers reimagined from slow-moving tin-can robots to fanatical androids that look human, the result is a show with an intentional resonance to post-9/11 America. It's also one that numerous critics -- including Rolling Stone, Time and the Chicago Tribune -- are calling one of the best on television.

Ronald Moore, the creator and executive producer of the new "Battlestar Galactica," jump-started the franchise with a popular miniseries in 2003. In January of last year the show debuted as a regular series on the SciFi channel, quickly becoming the network's top-rated program.

With Battlestar on hiatus until October, Moore gave a keynote speech late last month at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Following his speech, Moore spoke with TheStreet.com.

Why did you decide to help revive "Battlestar Galactica?"

"Galactica" was a unique opportunity, in that it gave me a chance to do things that I wanted to do in science fiction; to change the tone of it, to do something more naturalistic, more realistic, to really make it grittier and a little different than how I saw a lot of the rest of science fiction.

	Ronald Moore

And it was this amazing chance to do something relevant and to really comment on the world around us. I could take science fiction back to doing what I thought it used to do.

The original "[Star] Trek" series ... dealt with a lot of hot-button issues at the time: It dealt with racism, and it dealt with war, and it dealt with a lot of ideas that were very, very timely and very important. And this was a chance to make a science fiction show that wasn't purely escapist, but actually dealt with the world that we live in.

Your version of "Battlestar Galactica" seems to have a negative view of technology. In the show, Battlestar Galactica the ship survived the Cylon attack, for instance, only because it was obsolete. How much of that is just a plot device, and how much is your own ideology?

A lot of it is a plot device ... As we got into developing "Galactica" ... and once we had gotten to the place of 'well, the Cylons were created by man' and this was going to be a Frankenstein-type tale of this coming back and biting them, we just kind of embraced that, and it became more cautionary about where technology is leading you.

And the thing about "Galactica" being old and retro in the way the ship worked was in a large part just ... to restore it to being more identifiable to the audience -- to make it function like an aircraft carrier in the way you and I know an aircraft carrier, as opposed to a place where people press buttons and there's ... really cool displays ... It was a way to take the technology and shove it into the background and move the human characters forward into the narrative.

I'm concerned about things that happen in technology because I feel, like many people, that the technology outstrips our knowledge and our ethics and our sense of what to do with the technology once we have it. So, in that sense, sure, it's reflective of that. But I'm not really that much of a Luddite. You know, I have a [Palm (PALM Quote)] Treo and my laptop, and I use all this ... stuff all the time.

You've already started selling DVDs of the series. You're selling episodes on Apple's (AAPL Quote) iTunes. How does that change the economics of the business?

Well, I don't know, because they don't talk about it ... Those dollars vanish off into the entity that is NBC Universal, never to be spoken of again, and god knows, I don't know how much they make on it.

It doesn't affect our budget. We don't get any more because it's doing really well on iTunes.

When you watch television, what do you watch?

Interestingly enough ... almost no [hour-long shows]. The only hour I kind of watch is the "Sopranos" ... I watch at least two episodes of "Seinfeld" a day, and ... I'll surf through a lot of sitcoms and documentaries. "Project Runway" is the only reality show I'll touch.

When I watch other hour dramas, I have trouble connecting with it as a show. I start analyzing it ... It becomes work. I'm deconstructing it. And sitcoms are just such a different thing that I don't go there at all.

One fan question: Are any of the other major characters Cylons?

Oh, I can't tell you that.

Escape and Get Up to Speed

With the show on hiatus, there's plenty of time to get caught up on the first two seasons.

SciFi is broadcasting reruns every Friday night. But for those who want select episodes to watch on your own time, everything is available on iTunes. And on DVD, you can find everything but the second half of the second season.

Here's a selection of recommended episodes: