Trek. “The technobabble in Trek just got completely out of control,” Moore told reporters Friday at the opening of the Battlestar Galactica exhibit at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.

Moore said he used to put the word tech in his scripts as a placeholder, which led to stultifying dialogue like this:

Picard: “Mr. La Forge, I need you to tech the tech.”

La Forge: “But Captain, if we tech the tech then the tech will override! The tech main engines might tech too much!”

“It was maddening,” Moore said. “The actors hated it. I really tried to sit on the technobabble in Galactica.”

Moore wasn’t alone in his aversion to run-of-the-mill sci-fi. Actor Edward James Olmos, who played Galactica commander William Adama in the show, admitted he was reluctant to enter a sci-fi world.

“The last thing I wanted to do was Battlestar Galactica,” he said at the exhibit opening. “I thought, ‘I’ve done sci-fi. I did Blade Runner, I don’t have to do anything more.” Olmos even said he put a cliché-avoidance line in his contract: “The first four-eyed monster I see, I’m going to faint on camera, and you’re going to write me off the show.”

Wired.com caught up with Moore later to find out more about what it’s like to write a science fiction show in which science takes a backseat.

Wired.com: What was it like starting a new series that had all this original material that people already associated with it?

Ronald Moore: I approached the original in the spirit of, what we were going to make was going to be Battlestar Galactica. I wanted to keep the fundamentals of what the old show was about: The destruction of the human colonies, Galactica herself as an aircraft carrier in space, the ragtag civilian fleet and the basics of the fundamental characters.

But beyond that, I decided I would discard anything I didn’t think worked, and add pieces to shore up sections that I thought were wobbly. I sort of went at it from a, ‘OK, if it works, keep it in the show’ [perspective]. I felt very strongly if it was going to carry the name Battlestar Galactica, it should have a relationship to what the original was.

Wired.com: In some ways, the original series looks a little dated now. In 30 years, will there be things that people look back at for your show and say, “Oh, that was a product of its time?”

Moore: I’m sure they will. All these shows are products of their time. The original Star Trek is very much a product of the ’60s — the new frontier, optimism, the idea of bringing democracy to the galaxy. It’s still a timeless show, but it’s very much a show made in the 1960s. This will forever be a show made at this moment in the culture, when we were going through certain things after 9/11, dealing with Iraq and questions of security versus freedom, how far do you go in a time of war, civilian versus military. There were a lot of things that were very much at the forefront of the public consciousness when we were making this show, and the show was a really good venue to explore those issues.

Wired.com: That’s a thing science fiction does very well.

Moore: That’s why I like it. I wanted to make a show that took science fiction back to what it used to really be all about. Science fiction used to be a way to explore society. It was always about today, where the author was at that moment, and took the science fiction prism and altered certain things, [giving] a distance to the audience to examine interesting questions. Questions of morality, existential questions, where are we going as a people, what is technology doing to us, how is the human condition going to change?

I felt that science fiction, especially film science fiction, had gotten away from that. It had become almost solely an escapist medium. And there’s nothing wrong with escapism — I love Star Wars as much as anybody. However, it shouldn’t be the only flavor of this genre. There should be room for the shows that are about examining issues, really challenging the audience, pushing the audience in directions that they may not be comfortable with. I thought, if ever there was a moment to do that, it was at that moment of doing Battlestar Galactica.

Wired.com: We talked a bit about technobabble in the press conference this morning, and drama versus science. Can you speak a bit about that?

Moore: My experience in Star Trek taught me that technobabble could just swamp the drama in a show. Especially in a space opera, where you’re on ships in space and dealing with technical things, technobabble becomes a crutch to get into and out of situations. It just leaches all the drama away. The audience doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and you’re making it up anyway. You make up a problem with the Enterprise warp drive, and then you solve it with a made-up problem, too.

I just did not want Galactica to be about that. I really wanted it to be about the characters and the story. You had to deal with a certain amount of technobabble because of the nature of the world in which they operate, but I really wanted it to be in the background. I really didn’t want the show to be about that, to the point that sometimes I was overcorrecting and just making it simplistic to just get on with it already.

Wired.com: Can you think of an example of that?

Moore: At the beginning I had fairly complicated routines about how you launch Vipers, and all the little steps you went through. In the miniseries, I was at pains to show that, OK, this is how we launch Vipers, there’s all these steps and preps and tech. But you get into the series, and it’s like, we don’t have time for any of that. Just launch the Vipers.

Wired.com: At least then you’ve established that there is a routine.

Moore: Yeah. I had all these ideas, too, about the FTL drive, and how far Galactica could jump. Once they jumped beyond a certain point, the error margin in their equations would become so large that they wouldn’t be able to project a jump past a certain distance. In the miniseries, Adama has a line, “We’ve jumped way past the red line.” The red line was supposed to be as far as you could jump with the technology they had, and anything beyond that you were in unknown territory, you could end up anywhere. But the whole process of talking about it was taking up too much screen time. They just jumped, and we assumed they jumped as far as they could.

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Authors: Lisa Grossman

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