Battlestar Galactica Showrunner Calls Out Star Trek?
One of the more fascinating things about the Battlestar Galactica reboot is that it was a futuristic sci-fi show that deliberately used throwback technology. Sure, there were sentient robots and faster-than-light travel, but the Galactica herself relied on outdated technology, including corded telephones. Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore once explained why in a way that seemingly called out Star Trek, writing “high-tech ships with touch screens and computers that talk has been done to death in my opinion.”
The Plot Answer
What led to the Battlestar Galactica runner calling Star Trek out this way, especially when his big Hollywood break was writing for The Next Generation and its spinoffs?
It all started with the official blog he ran on the SyFy (then the Science Fiction Network) blog. Moore answered fan questions on that blog, and one fan was understandably curious about the outdated technology on the Galactica.
Cutting right to the chase, the fan asked “Why is everything so low tech when clearly these humans are so advanced,” noting that this kind of juxtaposition “seems incongruous.” Moore answered by first giving what he called “the plot explanation:” specifically, that after the “Cylon Uprising 40 years ago, Colonial society took a giant step backward to protect itself from the technological nightmare it had unleashed.”
The military had to fight “enemies able to hack into virtually any network, causing them to “rely on stand-alone technologies that we not connected to other components.”
The Real Answer
In this and many other ways, the world of Battlestar Galactica was very different from the safer, shinier world of Star Trek. And, as Moore explained, the Galactica herself having this old technology embodied “the old military philosophy of building equipment that will function even in the most dire of circumstances.”
This effectively explains the incongruous sight of Commander Adama using a corded phone: as Moore wrote, “You don’t want to be using cordless phones when the ship is hit by a nuke and power is disrupted.”
After giving this practical, in-universe answer, the Battlestar Galactica showrunner explained why the story he wanted to tell called for low-tech, and it sounded like he was calling out Star Trek. In addition to saying “high-tech ships with touch screens and computers that talk has been done to death,” Moore believes that “having magical technology that does all the work for you tends to take the human beings out of the dramatic equation.”
By making the show so low-tech, he felt he “could put people back into sci-fi” while illustrating that “this show is about our characters, not about the magical technology that they use.”
Moore And Star Trek
Before Battlestar Galactica, Moore was most famous for writing on Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spinoffs, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Somewhat infamously, he left Voyager after only writing two episodes, and he seemingly had his fill of Gene Roddenberry’s universe of high-tech wizardry. In his response to this fan question, Moore specifically addresses how he wanted to tell the kinds of stories that would have been impossible on Trek.
Variety
Before anyone sets their phasers to kill, neither the Battlestar Galactica showrunner nor we are claiming that Moore’s ambitious reboot is necessarily better than Star Trek. However, Trek has succeeded as a franchise for so long specifically because it keeps giving us high-tech shows in a very familiar universe.
Sci-fi fans sometimes want a change in their television diet, and Moore wisely traded in communicator badges for corded phones to create a complex story that we’re still digesting, all these years later.
The Real Important Question
With that being said, we hope Moore eventually answers our own question about Galactica’s primitive technology: did Commander Adama ever mess up his son’s Doom 2 deathmatches by picking up that corded phone and making the modem screech?
