Moore: Deep Space Nine’s Influence On Battlestar Galactica
2 min readBattlestar Galactica benefitted from some of the trials and tribulations that Ron Moore faced while working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
When it came to Deep Space Nine, Moore discovered that he liked the serialized nature of the show, particular as it got into the later seasons. “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 serialized structure,” said Moore. “I really liked that, and I discovered I really liked that style of storytelling.”
Moore wanted to make Deep Space Nine‘s Dominion War a bit more realistic, but ran up against the expectations of TPTB, who wanted a cleaner, nicer Star Trek. “…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,” said Moore, “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.”
That head bumping lead to frustration for Moore, who was later able to turn it into something productive to the benefit of Battlestar Galactica. “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.”
Moore’s battles with the network when it came to Battlestar Galactica were different than they had been when it came to Deep Space Nine. “My battles with the network were never really philosophical,” he said, “they were more about specific things, you know, tonal things: ‘How dark is this episode?’, ‘How much blood are you going to show in this scene?’, you know, ‘how grim is this particular story going to be?’. Then we’d have big fights: ‘You can’t do this, you gotta do that’, so we’d argue it out and find the best point of accommodation. I never really had any bigger macro arguments with them.”
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