Moore Compares Trek to Galactica

"Star Trek’s style is so specific: the way Klingons speak, the way Romulans speak, etc. With BSG, this show is going to feel like 'us' and be contemporary in terms of character and dialogue, which will encourage more colloquialisms, a more natural way of speaking," said Ron Moore, the former Star Trek writer who's now executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. "[Our] characters’ voices have been set only to a certain extent by the miniseries."

Speaking to About.com, Moore said that his goal was to work the science fiction angle of Battlestar Galactica in a new and different way. "One of the things we’re trying to do is reinvent the space opera, from the way we shoot it to the way things behave," he noted. "Things have become very stale in the genre. We know what the characters are going to do. They're going to sit in a big fat chair and look at the viewscreen, and so on...the space opera has been defined." When executives hire science fiction writers, he added, "The way this business works right now, studios say, 'Star Trek is what works – give us another Star Trek.'"

With Galactica, however, Moore wanted to do something else. "Sci-Fi has developed so many well-worn grooves," he observed. "Sometimes we get something different, like Roswell or Buffy – but even Buffy had to be so ironic about itself." He said that for him, a good story is "something I haven’t seen a million times on Magnum PI, something that takes the narrative a different way."

Interviewer Julia Houston suggested to Moore that his re-visioning of the original Battlestar Galactica reminded her of the way fans write fan fiction, trying to "fix" elements of the original to make them better. "I never looked it at that way, but it’s certainly possible," Moore conceced. "I watched the original as a kid and loved it, but there were things that bothered me...I always sort of thought that the original series was a bit at odds with itself - very dark, but now here we are at the Casino Planet. The show’s a product of its time. It’s ABC; it’s the 70s; it’s coming off of Star Wars. There’s a real internal contradiction."

Moore described his team as "a corral of writers, somewhat as with Star Trek", and said he wanted the series to be "a vehicle to comment on us today" like the original Star Trek. "The Enterprise was encountering an alien, but it was always a metaphor for something that was happening in our world. Now, it’s harder to write sci-fi that will wow you with science and technology. Society’s caught up."

For more on the series, see the interview at About.com.

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