Reality And Science Fiction

Ellison: The parallels to current events are obvious; in particular, I think that the analogies to the Iraqi War are very clear. Did the parallels come from you or from some Sci-Fi [Channel] exec?

Moore: Fundamentally, they came from me. I felt, in that first week of thinking about it, that, okay, this is going to deal with 9-11 and a lot of the things we were going through as a society at that moment. It was just part of the premise. It was always going to be in the show, and once we were on that path, it just felt like we were going to keep doing this and we're going to deal with things that are happening in our contemporary reality, but we were going to view them through a different prism.

Slide Show!

The show was never going to be a direct allegory; Laura Roslin was not going to be George W. Bush, and the Cylons were not going to be al-Qaeda. But they were going to share elements. And part of the opportunity of doing a show like this was the opportunity to sort of move the pieces around the game board a little bit and say: "Well, we've all experienced this set of events. What if I move this piece over here, and put you over there? How would you feel about it then?"

There was a Sci-Fi [Channel] exec that had a key impact on the show, surprisingly enough. His name is Michael Jackson (no relation to the singer.) He worked for the network, and while I was working on the script for the miniseries, he read a line from Number Six, the blonde Cylon played by Tricia Helfer. She had a conversation with Baltar, and at one point she says, "God is love." It was just something that I found on the page as I was writing it. And I wrote, and I was struck by it because it's an odd thing for a robot to say. I liked it, but didn't really know what it meant, and it wasn't a focal point of the script.

But when Michael read the script, one of his notes was: "That's fascinating. You already have elements of al-Qaeda and religious fanaticism hovering around the edges of what you're doing. Why don't you embrace that and go for that element because they don't typically do that in Sci-Fi." And my first reaction was: "Oh my God! Nobody ever gives you that kind of note, especially not an executive."

So I just ran with it, and it became one of foundational elements of the show: the religious conflict between the two civilizations; the monotheism of the Cylons and the polytheism of the Colonials; what is God, what is human, and what does it mean to be alive. All of these metaphysical ideas and religious concepts sort of groove from that one line in the teleplay.