Ronald D. Moore on Why Galactica Steered Clear of ‘Technobabble,’ Aliens

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Ronald D. Moore on Why Galactica Steered Clear of ‘Technobabble,’ Aliens
October 25, 2010
By Lisa Grossman
Wired

It’s hard to imagine Battlestar Galactica without techy effects like the whoosh of a spun-up FTL drive or the clank of a Cylon centurion’s step. But in series creator Ronald Moore’s eyes, Galactica didn’t have to be a science fiction show.

Moore, the force behind the reimagined version of Battlestar Galactica that ran from 2003 to 2009, says he deliberately steered the show away from classic science fiction tropes, partly because of his long years writing for Star Trek.

Ronald D. Moore on the red carpet at the opening of Battlestar Galactica: The Exhibition.
“The technobabble in Trek just got completely out of control,” Moore told reporters Friday at the opening of the Battlestar Galactica exhibit at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.

Moore said he used to put the word tech in his scripts as a placeholder, which led to stultifying dialogue like this:

Picard: “Mr. La Forge, I need you to tech the tech.”

La Forge: “But Captain, if we tech the tech then the tech will override! The tech main engines might tech too much!”

“It was maddening,” Moore said. “The actors hated it. I really tried to sit on the technobabble in Galactica.”

Moore wasn’t alone in his aversion to run-of-the-mill sci-fi. Actor Edward James Olmos, who played Galactica commander William Adama in the show, admitted he was reluctant to enter a sci-fi world.

“The last thing I wanted to do was Battlestar Galactica,” he said at the exhibit opening. “I thought, ‘I’ve done sci-fi. I did Blade Runner, I don’t have to do anything more.” Olmos even said he put a cliché-avoidance line in his contract: “The first four-eyed monster I see, I’m going to faint on camera, and you’re going to write me off the show.”

Wired.com caught up with Moore later to find out more about what it’s like to write a science fiction show in which science takes a backseat.

Wired.com: What was it like starting a new series that had all this original material that people already associated with it?

Ronald Moore: I approached the original in the spirit of, what we were going to make was going to be Battlestar Galactica. I wanted to keep the fundamentals of what the old show was about: The destruction of the human colonies, Galactica herself as an aircraft carrier in space, the ragtag civilian fleet and the basics of the fundamental characters.

But beyond that, I decided I would discard anything I didn’t think worked, and add pieces to shore up sections that I thought were wobbly. I sort of went at it from a, ‘OK, if it works, keep it in the show’ [perspective]. I felt very strongly if it was going to carry the name Battlestar Galactica, it should have a relationship to what the original was.

Ronald D. Moore, left, and Edward James Olmos address the audience at the opening of Battlestar Galactica: The Exhibition in Seattle.

Wired.com: In some ways, the original series looks a little dated now. In 30 years, will there be things that people look back at for your show and say, “Oh, that was a product of its time?”

Moore: I’m sure they will. All these shows are products of their time. The original Star Trek is very much a product of the ’60s — the new frontier, optimism, the idea of bringing democracy to the galaxy. It’s still a timeless show, but it’s very much a show made in the 1960s. This will forever be a show made at this moment in the culture, when we were going through certain things after 9/11, dealing with Iraq and questions of security versus freedom, how far do you go in a time of war, civilian versus military. There were a lot of things that were very much at the forefront of the public consciousness when we were making this show, and the show was a really good venue to explore those issues.

Wired.com: That’s a thing science fiction does very well.

Moore: That’s why I like it. I wanted to make a show that took science fiction back to what it used to really be all about. Science fiction used to be a way to explore society. It was always about today, where the author was at that moment, and took the science fiction prism and altered certain things, [giving] a distance to the audience to examine interesting questions. Questions of morality, existential questions, where are we going as a people, what is technology doing to us, how is the human condition going to change?

I felt that science fiction, especially film science fiction, had gotten away from that. It had become almost solely an escapist medium. And there’s nothing wrong with escapism — I love Star Wars as much as anybody. However, it shouldn’t be the only flavor of this genre. There should be room for the shows that are about examining issues, really challenging the audience, pushing the audience in directions that they may not be comfortable with. I thought, if ever there was a moment to do that, it was at that moment of doing Battlestar Galactica.

Wired.com: We talked a bit about technobabble in the press conference this morning, and drama versus science. Can you speak a bit about that?

Moore: My experience in Star Trek taught me that technobabble could just swamp the drama in a show. Especially in a space opera, where you’re on ships in space and dealing with technical things, technobabble becomes a crutch to get into and out of situations. It just leaches all the drama away. The audience doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and you’re making it up anyway. You make up a problem with the Enterprise warp drive, and then you solve it with a made-up problem, too.

I just did not want Galactica to be about that. I really wanted it to be about the characters and the story. You had to deal with a certain amount of technobabble because of the nature of the world in which they operate, but I really wanted it to be in the background. I really didn’t want the show to be about that, to the point that sometimes I was overcorrecting and just making it simplistic to just get on with it already.

Wired.com: Can you think of an example of that?

Moore: At the beginning I had fairly complicated routines about how you launch Vipers, and all the little steps you went through. In the miniseries, I was at pains to show that, OK, this is how we launch Vipers, there’s all these steps and preps and tech. But you get into the series, and it’s like, we don’t have time for any of that. Just launch the Vipers.

Wired.com: At least then you’ve established that there is a routine.

Moore: Yeah. I had all these ideas, too, about the FTL drive, and how far Galactica could jump. Once they jumped beyond a certain point, the error margin in their equations would become so large that they wouldn’t be able to project a jump past a certain distance. In the miniseries, Adama has a line, “We’ve jumped way past the red line.” The red line was supposed to be as far as you could jump with the technology they had, and anything beyond that you were in unknown territory, you could end up anywhere. But the whole process of talking about it was taking up too much screen time. They just jumped, and we assumed they jumped as far as they could.

Wired.com: The show draws a wide audience, but it’s a very geeky audience. Do you get in trouble with the fans?

Moore: You’re always in trouble with the fans. The internet was born when I was at [Star Trek: The] Next Generation, and we started seeing message boards and e-mails from fans, reading their arguments back and forth. You quickly realize how many errors creep into any TV show. There’s a relationship that a certain element of fan has with a show like this, which is to love how much you hate it. I can’t tell you how many messages I’ve gotten that say, “I’ve watched this episode three times, and I hate it more every time I watch it.” Well, that’s a fan. You keep watching it.

People made books of Trek just dedicated to continuity errors. There’s The Nitpicker’s Guide [for Next Generation Trekkers ]. They did that on Galactica, too. And at a certain point, I can’t engage in that. I have to sort of accept that a certain margin of error will always occur — there are things we’re going to miss, things we’ll screw up. What’s important is that the characters remain who the characters are, and we have an integrity to the story that we’re telling. Let the fans enjoy themselves picking it apart later.

Wired.com: I’ve been getting the sense that this was a science fiction show of convenience. This was a way to tell a story and examine social issues without looking at them directly, kind of looking off to the side, but it was not a science fiction show for the science.

Moore: Yeah, this was a character show. This is a character drama first and foremost that happens to take place in a science fiction universe. And we’ll try to live by the rules of the science fiction universe that we create, try to have an integrity to it, but it’s never going to be about that.

I had a list of “don’t”s at the very outset. We weren’t going to do time travel. We weren’t going to do evil twin stories. We weren’t going to encounter aliens that control our minds. There were all these tropes of sci-fi that we just were not going to do.

It was always going to be about these people, the moral choices that they make, their mistakes, their loves, their hates. I was more interested in a story about the characters than the sci-fi of it.

Wired.com: Yeah, I don’t think in the new series there are any aliens at all.

Moore: No, I’d had enough bumpy-headed aliens from Star Trek. I thought the show would be less interesting if it was about that. Colonel Tigh says in one of the early episodes, the universe is a big empty place. There’s not a lot out there. A lot of rocks, a lot of gas giants. You’re lucky if you can find a planet that has any life at all. It would be about this barren universe that they were faced with, and how did they survive in this inhospitable environment.

Wired.com: They found a surprising number of habitable planets.

Moore: Yeah, there were a couple. Maybe one a season. Less than half a dozen. It felt like, if it’s going to be that tough to find a planet capable of supporting life, let’s just say that in the tiny sliver of the galaxy that Galactica is going to explore, they’re just not going to find any people.

Wired.com: That’s a very different view of the universe than from Star Trek.

Moore: It is. And a lot of the show was a reaction to Trek. I’d done so much Trek, and I really wanted to have a general rule that if Trek went right, we were going to go left. One of those was the populated nature of the universe, but it influenced a lot of other decisions. We weren’t going to have a bridge, we’d have a CIC. No captain’s chair, there’s no place for the commander to sit. All those things, we just thought, “Let’s wipe them away, let’s not do any of that,” because Trek had done it, and done it so well for so long. Other people were aping Star Trek’s style, and we thought, “Let’s try to do something different.”

Wired.com: Were there other things you were trying to mimic, or places where you got ideas for the feel of the show, how things would work?

Moore: Certainly Blade Runner was early in the conversation. We made an early decision to make the Cylons look like people. Once you do that, you’re automatically in a conversation: “Well, Blade Runner did that.” So how do we walk that line? Not just rip them off, but acknowledge, and think of what can we learn from what they did? “Skin jobs” was a total lift, but we thought that was an homage from Blade Runner.

Wired.com: Edward James Olmos said the end of Battlestar feeds right in to Blade Runner. [The final scene of Battlestar is supposed to take place around 2008. When Blade Runner begins in 2019, humans have once again built humanoid robots that are almost indistinguishable from themselves. Olmos suggested that the Blade Runner character Gaff is one of Admiral Adama's direct descendents.]

Moore: Yeah, I know. It’s a cool theory. I hadn’t thought of that until he said it.

Wired.com: Do you have a favorite episode?

Moore: Probably “33” [the first episode of the series, in which the humans have to flee the Cylons every 33 minutes]. It was such a great way to start the series after the mini. I think the expectation was, here’s the miniseries and they get away, and the first episode will be, well, they’re doing fine, and then the Cylons show up! And I thought, “OK, how can we subvert that completely?”

A lot of the show was about subverting audience expectation. You think you’ve seen this show before. You think you know what your hero’s going to do in this situation. You think you know how television is going to take you by the hand and say, “It’s OK, don’t worry! Your heroes aren’t going to become suicide bombers!” We have the heroes do that, and then see how the audience feels. Make them really think about their preconceptions, and think about the story that we’re telling. That was a lot of the guiding philosophy behind it.

Wired.com: I have two science questions before I let you go. What are Head Six and Head Baltar?

Moore: They’re representatives of an unknown and unknowable power that doesn’t like to be called God, and deals with our mortal plane in some way, and has some interest in it. I didn’t want to define it much beyond that, nor what Kara Thrace is, which is probably your next question.

Wired.com: Exactly.

Moore: The easy thing to say is, “Oh, they’re angels.” And Kara is a messiah, in a certain analogy to the Christ legend — she dies and is resurrected and leads them to the promised land, and then goes to join heaven.

But I didn’t want to define it in those terms exactly. I went out of my way to tweak it and subvert it so you didn’t draw that parallel exactly. I liked the ambiguity of it — if there is some greater power, if there is some life beyond our ken, we shouldn’t be able to define it. It’s impossible to know and understand, and yet the people in this series clearly had some relationship to something greater than themselves, and couldn’t define it, struggled with it, the Cylons struggled with it. All the people were trying to understand who they were.

One of the things television does badly is take complicated questions like that and reduces it to really simplistic answers by the end, so you have a nice tidy way to go home and feel good. I wasn’t interested in that. I thought the question was far more interesting than any kind of answer you could come up with.