If you loved Ron Moore’s version of “Battlestar Galactica,” you may want to take a moment to thank “Star Trek” for it.
Moore got his first job in Hollywood as a staff writer for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and cut his teeth on that series, writing many of the stories associated with the Klington mythology. When “TNG” ended, Moore moved over to work on “Deep Space Nine,” a more serialized “Trek” series (and one seen by many fans as the best of the modern “Trek” shows) for its last several seasons. And it was that time in the writers’ room that gave Moore the inspiration for “Galactica.”
“I think a lot of Battlestar was born at Deep Space Nine in that Deep Space started as much more episodic because of the nature of the show, it became more a continuing serialised structure,” Moore tells TrekMovie.com. “I really liked that, and I discovered I really liked that style of storytelling, and also particularly when we got into the later years of Deep Space, and we started telling the Dominion War story (1997-99), we would sit and argue and fight with the powers that be at Trek about making it a more realistic war, about making it grittier, and ugly; adding more ambiguity to the characters, and roughing it up a little bit, and I kept bumping my head against the strictures at Trek.”
“What ‘Star Trek’ is could not accommodate things that I wanted to do, so I started to have this sort of pent up frustration about ‘well if we were really going to do it right’, these ideas would sit in the back of my head so when ‘Battlestar; came along, I could now do all of those things that I was never allowed to do at ‘Deep Space’,” he added.
If you haven’t seen “Deep Space Nine” yet and you loved “Galactica,” you may want to consider picking up it up on DVD this summer. All seven seasons are currently available to buy on DVD or you can rent them via Netflix.
I can see that. I always thought DS9 should have been grittier, but the format of Trek was far too strict to allow that.
Dude, DS9 WAS grittier. Did you ever see the episode “In The Pale Moonlight”?
While I liked the earlier DS-9, when they got into the Dominion war I thought it went downhill rapidly. I guess I thought it was too much of a poorly done rip-off of B5.
Well, yeah, “In the Pale Moonlight” is one of my favorites, but it was still not as gritty as I would expect from a sci-fi series about war with a force that makes the combined Federation/Klingon/Romulan fleets cower behind their exploding warp cores. I mean, all we saw in DS9 was fleets of ships bashing against fleets of ships with Sisko looking grim and determined. Sometimes we hit the ground with rifles and troop tactics, but there was no feeling of the numbers killed, the emotions or desperation of the characters, or discussions of dwinding resources.
“We don’t have the ships to support you, Ben.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll find out in three episodes.”
Three episodes later, we find out that all these ships the allied forces are supposed to have were hanging out at some spiffy rendezvous point drinking tea and waiting for the right dramatic moment to stage an retaking of DS9. Meanwhile, Defiant’s out there looking all bad-ass, unexplicably taking down the enemy all by its little lonesome. Yes, she’s a tough little ship, but come on… seriously?
And what was the Cardassian/Dominion fleet doing? After all the ships each had, why did they just stop and chill at Cardassia for so long? You hear a throwaway that Betazed has fallen… okay, sure, but with that many ships and disposable soldiers, it was far more likely that the Dominion would have stopped at Cardassia long enough to regroup, and then attacked Earth directly. The point was made multiple times about how hard it was to get in to Cardassia, and with the efficiency that they routed Starfleet, Earth was pretty much defenseless.
Even stories about the core characters dealing with the psychology of war and survival — particularly Nog and his leg — were wrapped up in a single episode as if 42 minutes was enough time to recover and get back to business as usual.
Sure, Trek had never really done epic warfare before, but it was far too sterile. For me, it hurt the series a bit to take the same approach to storytelling — which works for the TOS/TNG/VGR style of “human exploration in a utopian society” stories — instead of bringing in fresh eyes and changing the game. Instead, Trek went the dramatic war route instead of the gritty, realistic route.
Yet, somehow, despite all those faults, I still love the franchise. It’s tough sometimes being a sci-fi fan. 🙂
So, Ron Moore was influenced by the better war story parts of B5 that DS9 couldn’t figure out how to use properly, then managed to write them very well in BSG, but then used a bit of sleight of hand to squeeze a thread of deus ex machina in as a fallback in case all of the pieces he’d come up with at the start didn’t quite fit by the time he got to the end?
It doesn’t really change how I feel about how BSG was wrapped up, but it sure calls into question some of the paths he took to write himself there.
I LOVED “In the pale moonlight.” Because Sisko knew what he did was morally wrong but it was war and i’m sorry but morals occasionally get thrown to the side. I loved that the episode is about the fact Sisko is actually trying to justify the actions that were taken, if nothing else to at least himself. That was just awesome.
Ds9 is probably my third favorite sci-fi series next to B5 and The original Star Trek series. Avery Brooks OWNED that role and when he cut the shag and grew the goatee in season two… WHOO… it was A Man Called Hawk in Space from then on. That series was bad@ss.