By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the things that sci-fi fans love to argue about online is what makes their favorite characters truly heroic. For example, some fans like characters who are flawless paragons of virtue, while others prefer less-than-perfect characters who must overcome their flaws and rise to the occasion. Battlestar Galactica reboot showrunner Ronald Moore prefers those flawed heroes, which he detailed to a fan asking why shipboard discipline hadn’t gotten much better in the first few episodes of Season 1. According to Moore, “these people [are] more heroic in their actions just by the nature of the obstacles they have to overcome in their day to day existence.”
Battlestar Galactica Heroes
Moore’s blog response to that question is unlikely to surprise longtime Battlestar Galactica fans because the show went out of its way to portray its heroes as more flawed than the protagonists of other sci-fi TV shows and movies. In this particular instance, the fan had written to ask the showrunner why discipline was so bad and why Commander Adama made things worse in “Litmus” by declaring himself to be above the law. Moore clarified that “this was a deliberate creative choice” because he found it more heroic to show ordinary people overcoming extraordinary circumstances.
The Battlestar Galactica showrunner emphasized that this show doesn’t revolve around the kind of heroes we normally see on TV. “It’s one thing for the finest ship, with the finest crew to deal with the end of the world and a long flight from a relentless enemy,” he said, and “it’s quite another when you were just a bunch of people trying to get by.” This observation is particularly true when you consider that the Galactica itself was about to be retired and turned into a museum at the beginning of the miniseries, and now its complacent crew is thrown into a constant fight for their lives.
Ronald Moore clarified for the fan that “I find it a more challenging and interesting environment to tell stories in.” This is likely due to the fact that the showrunner began his television career by writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that explicitly featured the finest ship and finest crew in the galaxy neatly solving problems week after week. When he started running his own show, he deliberately created a writing challenge for himself by placing perfectly imperfect characters in a seemingly impossible situation.
While Battlestar Galactica is now rightfully considered a masterpiece, some critics at the time thought it was weird for the show’s heroes to have such flaws. For example, Colonel Tigh is an alcoholic, Doctor Baltar is a fraud, and Starbuck is just downright self-destructive. But Moore clarified to the fan who wrote in that “I find these people more heroic in their actions just by the nature of the obstacles they have to overcome in their day to day existence.” Simply put, it’s more compelling to watch an everyday Joe struggle with a nearly insurmountable obstacle than to watch a flawless person overcome the challenge with zero difficulty.
Hearing how the Battlestar Galactica showrunner sees his heroes is quite eye-opening because it basically outlines Ronald Moore’s approach to the entire series. He gambled that audiences were ready for flawed characters rather than flawless paragons of virtue, and the gamble paid off: he successfully created one of the best sci-fi series ever made. Now, we can only hope that future showrunners are willing to roll those dice and make another gamble that transforms the entire genre.
Those future showrunners need to channel the wisdom of Adama when it comes to that gamble, though: “sometimes, you have to roll the hard six.”
