Why Star Wars needs Ronald D Moore, TV’s last great sci-fi visionary

In March 2009, a middle-aged man with an outdoorsy beard appeared on television reading National Geographic. For hard-core followers of cult sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica it was the final straw. They took to the internet shortly afterwards to voice their displeasure.

The man was Ronald D Moore, the producer and writer who had shepherded Galactica to the screen. And his cameo, which foregrounded a shot in which two characters walked through modern Manhattan, was received as the stinky cherry atop what would go down as the most divisive ever finale to a major TV property until Game of Thrones.

And yet, far from suffering a potentially mortal wound to his career – a fate the imploding Thrones has seemingly inflicted on its show-runners – Moore would rebound spectacularly. First, with time-travelling smooch-fest Outlander. And now with Apple TV’s For All Mankind, which retells the space race with a unique twist and rates as the best contemporary “prestige” series most people have never watched.

“Battlestar was the first time that I was watching people reacting in more or less real time,” Moore would later tell Slate, in a piece published following the end of Game Of Thrones (he could only empathise with its show-runners as a hurricane of fan vitriol made landfall). “Within an hour, within a half-hour, you were starting to see people respond.”

As he pored over those pre-social media hot takes, it quickly dawned on him that the mischievous final bombshell in Battlestar Galactica – in which a key character was revealed to be an “angel” from whom all of humanity was descended – was not going down as well as he had hoped.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Fans were gnashing their teeth, tearing out their hair and taking Moore’s name in vain. And then he popped up in that bizarre cameo. It was an insult too far. Imagine if Game of Thrones show-runners Benioff and Weiss had wandered through playing Tyrion’s bannerman, with Ed Sheeran along to make up the numbers. That’s how divisive Moore-reads-National-Geographic proved.

“When they don’t [like it], and they’re really angry about it, it does hurt,” Moore later stated. “It’s hard not to feel it. But, you know, I still look at the piece, or I did at the time and went, ‘I love it. I think it’s great. And I don’t care if they’re angry about it.’”

The incident would put a permanent taint on Battlestar Galactica which, much like the sputtering Game of Thrones, has not had much of an afterlife in the geek community (Thrones may of course be reborn with the forthcoming, Benioff and Weiss-less prequel House of the Dragon). And yet, as pointed out above, the backlash did little to detain Moore, who has gone on to become one of the most unique voices in television.

Moore is, in a way, the opposite of Kevin Feige, architect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where Feige has been obsessed with building a single brand, from the original 2008 Iron Man all the way to this month’s Ms Marvel, Moore has always chased something new. He’d cut his teeth in the writers’ room for Star Trek: The Next Generation after ambushing a runner on the series with a spec script during a public tour of the set. Moore had from there gone on to oversee the under-appreciated HBO drama, Carnivàle – essentially a big-budget Doctor Who set during the American Depression.

And then he’d torn up all the clichés around TV sci-fi and started over with Battlestar Galactica, which aired from 2004 to 2009. He was, it is true, building on an existing property: Glen A Larson’s supremely-cheesy 1978 rip-off of Star Wars. But Moore’s Battlestar Galactica was a negative image of that kitsch extravaganza.

Telling the tale of brutalised human survivors of an attempted genocide by a race of self-aware robots, the Cylons, Moore’s gritty vision tapped into the increasing divisiveness of American politics. And into the United States’ disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In one storyline humans enslaved by the Cylons stage a string of suicide bombings. Talk about putting your hand on the live rail. “It was really about capturing a certain mood, a certain vibe for the show, that I didn’t think anybody had done,” he would say.

“I was really in love with this idea of doing a sort of documentary style, making it much more naturalistic than science fiction is usually presented. And I was looking for something that was neither Star Wars-Star Trek, which I categorised in my head as a sort of the romantic side, or Blade Runner-Matrix, the cyberpunk side. I wanted a third kind of category to put the show in.”

Battlestar was landmark sci-fi – even allowing for its fizz-free ending and the unnecessary extravagance of Moore and his beard and their cameo. And what happened next could have been glorious.

Moore had already brought to the screen a short-lived Battlestar prequel called Caprica (which the SyFy channel unwisely cancelled before the first season had finished airing). Then came his next trick: an urban fantasy starring the holy trinity of BSG actors – Jamie Bamber (Apollo), Tricia Helfer (Cylon “Six”) and James Callis (Gaius Baltar) – and set in a contemporary world where magic exists instead of technology.

NBC rejected 17th Precinct after the pilot was made and the show never aired. The network instead commissioned the fairy-tale inspired procedural Grimm. Moore’s pilot later leaked anyway and revealed 17th Precinct to be a compelling mix of noir-ish thriller and urban fantasy (rather than dust a body for samples, detectives make the blood levitate and analyse the floating particles for evidence). Today, Netflix would be all over it.

Moore didn’t take the rejection personally. And so, having achieved success with his adaptation of Diane Gabaldon’s Outlander, he moved on to For All Mankind, his irresistible “what if?” series for Apple TV +. The premise is delicious: what would have happened had the Soviet Union put a man on the moon before Neil Armstrong? In what ways might the 20th century have been tilted on it axis?

From this starting point, Moore has brought us a gleefully remixed vision of the past 50 years. In his version of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, John Lennon is never shot, Maradona’s Hand of God goal is ruled out and Star Trek: the Wrath of Khan is the first big screen Trek film. That’s a lot to wrap your head around (especially if you’re a Star Trek fan) but Moore allows his alternative history to unspool with a perfect blend of seriousness and silliness.

And, at age 57, there is still more to come. While continuing to toil on For All Mankind he’s signed a deal with Disney+ to remake shipwreck classic Swiss Family Robinson. The ultimate goal may be to work on the studio’s golden child, Star Wars.

“I am old enough to have gone to Star Wars in the summer of ’77 and seen it originally and then you had to wait years to see the next one,” he said. “Now it’s just fun. I used to read the novelisations and the comic books in between movies and you saw what a rich universe it was and how many stories you could tell in so many different ways.”

Disney has its own team looking after Star Wars. But with the new Obi-Wan Kenobi series proving a critical flop – despite Ewan McGregor acting his space-socks off – the House of Mouse could do with someone who knows the Lucas-verse inside out and isn’t afraid to apply a unique perspective. And having brought a fresh spin to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, who would bet against Moore completing his bingo card and putting the force back into the farce Star Wars risks becoming?