The man behind "Battlestar Galactica"

Ronald D. Moore, creator of TV's smartest sci-fi show, talks about the creative freedom of serialized drama and how to comment on the Iraq war in a story set in outer space.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Laura Miller, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features, Battlestar Galactica

March 24, 2007 | "Battlestar Galactica," the celebrated, Peabody Award-winning SciFi Channel drama, will conclude its third season on Sunday night, with a climactic human rights trial featuring some downright spooky resonances with today's headlines. Although the challenging and unconventional series commands a devoted following, its ratings have been anemic, and so fans received the announcement earlier this week that the SciFi Channel has picked it up for another 22 episodes with much rejoicing. Salon spoke by telephone with executive producer and show-runner Ronald D. Moore about what it's like to comment on the Iraq war in a show set in outer space, the fear-based mentality of the entertainment industry, and the difficulty of making TV that doesn't pretend to solve the world's most vexing problems in 60 minutes. [Warning: Spoilers for Sunday night's finale will follow.]

One of the things people like about "Battlestar Galactica" is the way it seems to touch upon the issues of our time without stooping to obvious connect-the-dots political commentary. In last week's episode, the lawyer prosecuting the big human rights trial in the season finale told an aide to President Laura Roslin to back off, and then added, "Of course, I do serve at the pleasure of the president." I thought you either had to be working much faster than is humanly possible, or "Battlestar Galactica" has become prophetic.

Wasn't that wild? We wrote and filmed that line months ago, before it became part of the current conversation. That was shot in November or October. It's a phrase I've been familiar with and I put it in the show because that's the expression used about people who serve for the president.

Do you often find the show echoing current events even when you didn't intend it to, or is that pretty rare?

It happens. It's an odd confluence of events sometimes. When we're working on a show and developing the story lines and scripts we're certainly keenly aware of what's going on in the world. You can project some things out to where the world might be when the show airs. But with some things, like that line, there's a bit of serendipity that happens.

What's especially weird about it is that the situation is so similar to the ones that led to the Alberto Gonzales scandal.

Yeah, it is. It's Laura trying to tell the prosecutor what to charge, what crime to prosecute. It's been interesting to watch that.

How hard do you try to link what's going on in "Battlestar Galactica" to real-world politics? Or do you find yourselves trying to resist that impulse?

It's part of the brief. The premise of the show lends itself to those topics so naturally. It's about an apocalyptic attack, a group of survivors on the run and they're dealing with issues that are inherently about freedom and security. There's the civilian and the military, and lots of issues it seems very natural for them to grapple with that mirror events in the real world. We talk about it at length in the writers' room and with the cast and directors, trying to figure out where the lines are for us. We never want to go into direct allegory for today's events because there's nothing really interesting about that.

What is interesting to you?

It's interesting for me as a writer when we can move the chess pieces around a little bit, when you're dealing with suicide bombing on the show but suddenly it's not those other people who are doing it, but your characters. You're able to examine the moral questions of it in a different context because you're not burdened by the direct analogy of saying, "If Laura is George Bush and the cylons are the enemy, how do you deal with it?" That to me isn't great drama because everything is so loaded and so apparent. Science fiction gives you the opportunity to mix and match the elements and the circumstances. You can deal with the deeper themes and issues because you've scrambled the chess pieces. You're coming at it from a different point of view.

I get the impression you want to avoid parroting a boiler-plate political position, whatever your own politics might be.

I do try not to do that. I'm not naive enough to think my politics don't influence the show. I'm certain that they do, but the show's mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: "And here's the way to solve Iraq!" I don't think that's helpful, and I don't think that's good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.

I like the show best when you get to a place where you're not sure who you're rooting for anymore, you're not sure whose side you're on. And you're confused and you might even be angry about what we're doing but at least it's forced you to a place of trying to define your own point of view on something.

Moral ambiguity is unusual not only in television, but in pop culture in general. You worked on several of the "Star Trek" series, which I associate with moral stances that are a lot more pat. What's difficult about making a TV series that aims for something different?

The challenge is that TV wants to bend you and your characters to neat moral decisions and arguments. Ultimately, the forces of television want your heroes to be heroic. It wants the leading characters to make the "right" choice each week and it wants there to be a clearly defined "bad" person in the show. Or at the most, the character does the right thing and maybe at the end he looks wistfully off-camera and ponders how it might have been different. There's a certain phony-baloney quality to a lot of the moralism on TV. It does serve up pat answers to difficult questions. And when you try to make it more morally ambiguous, you immediately run into the buzz saw of "It makes the characters unlikable. There's no one to root for. The audience won't like the character if they can't say he's making the right choice and that's what separates him from his enemies."

We set out to make a very different kind of show. The difficulty is that when you go into these morally ambiguous areas, you have to have morally questionable decisions and motives for all your characters.

Next page: Lessons from "Star Trek" -- and ROTC