Battlestar Galactica Reboot Ship Ties To Original Series In The Perfect Way

The Battlestar Galactica showrunner revealed this surprising ship revelation on his official SyFy blog back when the show was new. He answered many fan questions on this blog, and one fan asked Moore where he got his inspiration to make big character changes. By way of example, the fan pointed out how he turned Commander Adama into “a veteran commander on the verge of retirement, instead of a Moses figure.”

In response to the Battlestar Galactica fan’s question, Moore first described how he saw everyone on the ship as connected to one another. This began with sketching out the archetypal roles the show would need to fill: “The commander, his son, his son’s friend, the loyal second in command, and the traitor.” After figuring out “how they interrelated and how they moved the show forward,” he had to answer headier questions about the character relationships, including “What are the issues peculiar to this relationship that set it apart and what are the common chords we all understand.”

In order to illustrate his point, the Battlestar Galactica showrunner pointed out that “Adama’s journey was tied to that of his ship.” This ended up influencing both the writing and the design for the reboot’s Galactica. “When it came time to think about what the new Galactica would be, I essentially felt like we should treat her like the original ship suddenly transposed to this setting–an old, proud, handsome woman about to take a well-deserved retirement after a long and successful career, only to be suddenly recalled to duty.”

Continuing this train of thought, the creator of Battlestar Galactica said that “Adama would reflect his ship–an old, proud, warrior about to fade away into retirement.” These comments make sense and perfectly contextualize the miniseries. Adama was retiring and the ship was going to be a museum, but after the Cylon uprising, both the ship and its commander were unexpectedly thrust back into battle.

While the Battlestar Galactica showrunner’s point about the parallelism between Adama and his ship is very insightful, we are much more interested in the idea that he thought of the “new” Galactica as the old Galactica, basically an older ship that must fight against a cutting-edge enemy. This response is particularly interesting because, in that same blog post, Moore revealed that he had no interest in telling a “continuation story” that took place “20 or 40 years later.”  

The entire reboot is structured to retell the old story from the beginning in a brand-new way, but Moore conceived of Galactica as a kind of technological continuation…a relic of the old war forced to fight a new battle. That would also explain why the reboot Battlestar Galactica still looks so much like the ship from the original series. Just as shows like Strange New Worlds want the Enterprise to look consistent with its classic design, Moore (a veteran Trek writer himself) wanted the new Galactica to be recognizable to old fans as it symbolically carries on the fight of an earlier era.

We’re huge fans of Battlestar Galactica (yes, that includes having duty blues in the cosplay closet, don’t judge us!), and Moore’s comments about the ship design have us looking at the reboot with brand-new eyes. Everyone always wondered what it would be like if the new show had been a sequel, so it’s wild to think that the showrunner saw the new ship as an artifact of the original series. This lends new meaning to the reboot’s frequent phrase: all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.