How Ronald D. Moore Says BSG Would’ve Been Different if Made Today

Modern day space faring adventures, such as SYFY’s latest hit The Ark (catch new episodes every Wednesday), probably owe some recognition to one of the all-time great sci-fi shows that came before, Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore’s mind-bending 2004 series (another original series from SYFY, better known as Sci Fi back then), which itself owed a great deal to the 1978 original.

Of course, every piece of art is informed not just from what came before, but by its own zeitgeist, its own particular times. So what would a modern-day Battlestar Galactica look like?

Ronald D. Moore on what a modern-day Battlestar Galactica series would look like

Amidst the current political and cultural zeitgeist, Moore was asked that very question in July at San Diego Comic-Con, while sitting down for a conversation about his career with Mary McDonnell, who played President Laura Roslin on 74 episodes of BSG. 

“I mean, the story itself would probably be different because I wrote it at a specific moment in our lives and in our history,” said Moore (via Deadline). “I was approached to do the project just months after the 9/11 attacks. As it was developed, it happened and then there was Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and we were dealing with the Patriot Act and a lot of issues of freedom versus security with terrorism in the modern world and fundamentalism. I wanted the show to talk about who we were at that moment. So if I were creating Battlestar Galactica from scratch today, I don’t know …. it’s so hard to let go of what the show became.”

Of course, a lot of those same issues that came from 9/11 are still in play today, though perhaps they might be overshadowed by the divisiveness of politics in our modern age. Or perhaps the show would be more informed by today’s wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine, or the pandemic that rocked the world in 2020, or even the financial crisis that reworked the world’s economic fabric back in 2008. Regardless of the times though, some things would have stayed very much the same.

“I would still try to approach it with the same attitude that I had when I approached the original, which was I wanted to preserve the framework of what the original was,” Moore continued. “I want it to be recognizable as Battlestar Galactica. It’s still a warship and an aircraft carrier in space, guiding a ragtag civilian fleet running from the Cylons after an apocalyptic attack. It’s about their society. What are the pieces of their civilization they chose to carry with them? What’s important to them? What does it mean to be a democracy? Then I would have to get down into the weeds and then it would be different because it would have to be informed by the last 20 years of what we have gone through.”

Does that give us a clear understanding of what BSG might look like today? Perhaps not, but it does give us something fun to dream about. Come on, Mr. Moore, get frakkin’ writing!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for some great sci-fi informed by our modern times, check out SYFY’s The Ark, with new Season 2 episodes dropping every Wednesday. To catch up on the full series, dial up Peacock here, where all 12 Season 1 episodes are now streaming.