By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
In many ways, Ronald D. Moore was the perfect guy to reboot Battlestar Galactica. As someone who broke into Hollywood writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation, he knows a few things about the difficulty of appealing to older fans. Still, even he was unprepared for the extreme early backlash to his decision to make the Starbuck character female for his rebooted series. However, once the showrunner realized that all of these naysayers were creating some much-needed free publicity, he set out to deliberately anger them whenever possible.
Making Starbuck A Woman
The wild story of the Battlestar Galactica showrunner and his angry fans is captured in the Edward Gross/Mark A. Altman book So Say We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica. In that book, Moore recalls the complex relationship that he had with the hardcore fans of the original series who were annoyed at the changes he was making, particularly the decision to make the popular character Starbuck a woman. Rather than being angry at all the fan outcry, though, the showrunner soon realized he now had a source of free publicity for the reboot he was trying to get off the ground.
“Once it became a thing, then I was like, yeah, just stoke those flames, man,” Moore said. “We need all the help we can get.” By then, he was ready to encourage angered fans to “yell about it” and “get angry” for the simple fact that “I need the publicity.”
In a particular bit of cheekiness, the Battlestar Galactica showrunner claims he urged fans to “go to chat rooms” because he needed “more males demanding Ron Moore’s head.” Of course, part of what makes this story so ironic is that Moore didn’t genderswap Starbuck to make a statement about equality or anything. He just wanted to sidestep one of science fiction’s oldest cliches.
The original Battlestar Galactica show heavily focused on the friendship between two very different pilots: Apollo, who loved to follow the rules, and Starbuck, who loved to break them. That worked well for the original 1978 show, but Moore was worried that genre fans would be tired of this cliched trope by the time his 2003 reboot premiered.
Regarding making Starbuck a woman, Moore said he “just realized that would change everything,” including “the whole dynamic” between the characters. Plus, he was writing the show “right at the point where we were starting to get familiar with the idea of women in combat in the United States.” Therefore, making one of his most prominent and talented soldiers a woman allowed for the intersection of reality and fiction, a storytelling technique Battlestar Galactica would later perfect to the delight of its fans.
Angry Fans
Therefore, the Battlestar Galactica showrunner wasn’t trying to jumpstart the culture war with his genderbending of Starbuck’s character…instead, he wanted to change up sci-fi’s oldest cliche in order to make things seem fresh and interesting. Once he realized how much his creative decision had upset the hornet’s nest of angry fans, though, he didn’t hesitate to keep kicking that nest in order to generate the publicity that his show needed to succeed. Unfortunately, the current media landscape is now different…instead of negativity helping a show find an audience, there’s an entire cottage industry of hateful YouTube channels that try to destroy new franchises before they get off the ground.
The anger serving as an anchor for aggrieved fans, though? That’s nothing new. Fans angry at creators simply trying something different…as Moore’s Cylons would likely remind us, all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
