Ron’s book contains numerous excerpts from Holmes’s great judicial opinions, correspondence, essays, and books.  Far from composing the book mainly of excerpts, Ron has provided very extensive commentary and background throughout.  Ron is steeped in the history of his subject and has a rich understanding of the law and theory of the First Amendment.  There is no better guide to help us understand Holmes’s work and thought as it relates to free speech.

I recently [...]]]> In his new book, The Fundamental Holmes: A Free Speech Chronicle and Reader (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ronald Collins guides us through the free speech writings of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.   Ron is the Harold S. Shefelman scholar at the University of Washington School of Law and a fellow at the Washington, D.C., office of the First Amendment Center.

Ron’s book contains numerous excerpts from Holmes’s great judicial opinions, correspondence, essays, and books.  Far from composing the book mainly of excerpts, Ron has provided very extensive commentary and background throughout.  Ron is steeped in the history of his subject and has a rich understanding of the law and theory of the First Amendment.  There is no better guide to help us understand Holmes’s work and thought as it relates to free speech.

I recently had a chance to talk with Ron about the book.

SOLOVE: What inspired you to write this book?

COLLINS: Long story.  It began when I was in law school and read Holmes’s 1919 free speech opinions.  And then, not long afterwards, I read Max Lerner’s The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes (1943), which fascinated me though it was quite dated by that time.  This was in the 1970s when I was an impressionable law student.  Several years later I met Max – incredible Renaissance man! – and befriended him and then helped him, in 1988-89, with a new and expanded edition of his Holmes book.  That combined with my work in the First Amendment made this latest book a natural for me, though I don’t worship Holmes.  True, he challenged my mind, and I like that sort of thing even when I disagree with someone.

SOLOVE: During the course of immersing yourself in Holmes’s writings, what is the most surprising thing you learned?

COLLINS: There are so many things; Holmes was such a complex man.  Long before I began my book, I knew quite a bit about his First Amendment work, including his pre-1919 Supreme Court opinions.  So, not much surprise there.  I guess I would say I was quite taken by his Civil War experience and how that had such a remarkable impact on his life, jurisprudence, and view of free speech, too. It was the dye that colored everything in the beaker of his thought.

SOLOVE: Personally, what would you consider to be the five most significant writings by Justice Holmes?

COLLINS: Hard call.  But here they are, in no special order:

* “The Soldier’s Faith” Memorial Day address (1895)

(Holmes’s most vivid statement about war and how he viewed it)

* “The Path of the Law” article (1897)

(a provocative statement of Holmes’s “bad man” theory of law)

* “The Natural Law” article (1918)

(Holmes’s attack on law’s “higher law” purpose)

* The Abrams v. United States dissent, 1919

(His most eloquent defense of free speech)

*  The Gitlow v. New York dissent, 1925

(Shows Holmes’s Darwinian like attitude to let the marketplace govern, regardless of dreadful the outcome)

Of course, I left out The Common Law (1881), which doesn’t wear well with time, and Holmes’s majority opinion in Schenck v. United States, which though important was also disappointing.  And I have, as in my book, confined myself to materials related to free speech.  Hence, no extended references to his other important writings such as his 1905 dissent in Lochner v. New York.  One more thing:  Holmes’s 1931 radio address to the nation, this on the occasion of his 90th birthday, was a rather remarkable moment in the oral history of the law.  Just listen to it.

SOLOVE: Beyond the classics of the Holmes cannon, there are many works by Justice Holmes that aren’t as well known.  Among these works, what would you consider to be the five most interesting writings by Justice Holmes?

COLLINS: Once again, it’s a difficult call – there are so many writings to choose from.  But in the free speech context, here are some of the more notable ones, at least as I see it:

* “The Gas-Stokers’ Strike” article (1873)

(One of Holmes’s earliest defenses of market competition and its relation to law)

* “Memorial Day Address” (May 30, 1884)

(a powerful speech with the great line: “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”)

* Vegelahn v. Gunther dissent (1896) (Mass. S.J. Ct.)

(an early Holmes dissent that championed the competition in the market idea as a tenet of law)

* United States v. Schwimmer dissent (1929)

(Holmes’s last significant statement on free speech)

* Holmes’s extensive correspondence to Sir Frederick Pollock and Harold Laski

(Among the most remarkable exchange of letters related to law and other things that matter)

SOLOVE: Justice Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis are considered to be the fathers of the modern First Amendment.  For Holmes, at least, this is somewhat ironic since for most of his career, he voted against free speech claims and few would have ever predicted him to go down in history as a champion of free speech.  Did his views change?  If so, what do you think accounted for this change?  What else might explain this irony?

COLLINS: Say what you will of Holmes, but he will always have his admirers and detractors.  Before 1919 and his awful opinion for the Court in Debs v. United States, Holmes’s showed little sympathy – as a scholar, a state high court judge, and a Supreme Court Justice – for free speech values.  And then he changed in early November of 1919.  Some scholars deny this claim, and I give them their say in my book.  Still, I think he did change and that what he wrote in Abrams and thereafter was due to several factors including the influence that Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Zechariah Chafee, and Harold Laski, among others, had on him.  His Darwinian-like take on life and law then co-mingled with the progressive mindset of the day and voilà! – he became the great pater of modern free speech.  Ironic, since he quite often distained those whose speech he defended.

SOLOVE: Thanks, Ron, for a fascinating interview. The book is The Fundamental Holmes: A Free Speech Chronicle and Reader (Cambridge University Press, 2010).  It is a wonderful volume to have — I recommend it very highly for anyone interested in the First Amendment, Justice Holmes, or the history of law.

CHAPTER 2 EXCERPTS ON UNDERSTANDINGS OF WHAT PLAINTIFFS WANT:

Chapter 2 explores and attempts to make sense of an issue fundamental to litigation in general as well as mediation in particular: What do plaintiffs want? Why plaintiffs sue, and their consequent litigation aims should have a marked impact on their objectives and experiences in litigation and litigation-linked mediations. Likewise, attorneys’ objectives, approaches to their cases and conduct throughout litigation and [...]]]> I want to provide some support for the claims made in my previous post, summarizing the main findings of my book Perceptions in Litigation and Mediation. Below are two of the many areas that support the “parallel worlds” theme relating to the different understandings of legal case processing and case resolution as between legal actors and lay litigants.

CHAPTER 2 EXCERPTS ON UNDERSTANDINGS OF WHAT PLAINTIFFS WANT:

Chapter 2 explores and attempts to make sense of an issue fundamental to litigation in general as well as mediation in particular: What do plaintiffs want? Why plaintiffs sue, and their consequent litigation aims should have a marked impact on their objectives and experiences in litigation and litigation-linked mediations. Likewise, attorneys’ objectives, approaches to their cases and conduct throughout litigation and mediation are affected by their basic understandings of what those who commence these suits want; that is, what the cases are about. Little is known about what litigants really want from the civil justice system and what they aim to achieve. Consequently we have little knowledge of whether litigants’ real objectives are met by the realities of civil litigation including litigation–linked processes such as mediation.

PHYSICIAN LAWYERS: IT’S ONLY ABOUT MONEY

Virtually all physician lawyers were of the strong belief that plaintiffs had sued for financial compensation alone. Even the two who mentioned that non-fiscal objectives might also have been involved put much emphasis on claimants’ primary monetary aims.

The following excerpts are typical of defense physician lawyers in answering the global question, ‘WHAT IN YOUR VIEW WERE THE PLAINTIFF’S AIMS IN LITIGATING?’

‘My view is the issue was money, to compensate for the pain associated with the deterioration, and to compensate for lost income associated with the surgery that was necessary. SO IT WAS MONEY ALONE? I believe so.’ Male attorney-50’s-prescription alleged to have destroyed bone tissue, resulting in 40-year-old plaintiff undergoing hip replacement surgery-litigating several months

‘To settle it. Their assumption was that this would never go to trial; that they would get money out of this beforehand. SO, YOU FEEL IT IS SOLELY AN ISSUE OF OBTAINING FINANCIAL COMPENSATION Yes, but I also think that they are of the view that if they obtain financial compensation it will make…them feel better. I think they’re misguided on that.’ Female attorney-30’s-abdomen not left intact after surgery litigating several months

‘I think in virtually all cases it’s directly driven by their desire for compensation…The sole aim, you know, in most of the cases it is to be financially compensated for the wrong. And I would say that’s in 99% of the cases I do, that’s what plaintiffs want.’ male attorney-30’s-child fatality case-litigating 4 years

PLAINTIFF LAWYERS’ VIEWS ON PLAINTIFFS’ LITIGATION AIMS

The bulk of plaintiffs’ lawyers viewed monetary recompense as their clients’ primary aim. Yet, they were more aware of extra-legal litigation objectives as compared with defense lawyers. Nonetheless, claimants’ monetary aims were prominent in most plaintiff lawyers’ parlance. In fact, a significant minority of both specialist and generalist plaintiff lawyers viewed financial compensation as their clients’ only aim. Yet, in comparison to most defense lawyers, they generally explained this on a less legal, more ‘human’ level. Of course, plaintiffs’ lawyers would generally be most likely to acknowledge other motives, as plaintiffs express their emotions directly to their legal counsel.

PLAINTIFFS: ‘IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY! IT’S ABOUT PRINCIPLES’

Of all respondents, plaintiffs’ views are arguably the most important in answering the question of what motivated them to sue and what precisely they wanted. Interestingly, plaintiffs’ articulations of their litigation objectives rarely correlated with legal actors’ perceptions. In fact, a regular and conspicuous occurrence was the failure to mention financial compensation as an objective at all unless probed (occurring in 65% of interviews). Instead, what plaintiffs recurrently repeatedly was a lexicon of non-fiscal, extra-legal objectives for litigation. The issue of ‘principle’ was prominent for plaintiffs as revealed in the various objectives they passionately spoke about. ‘It’s not about the money’ was a recurrent theme throughout. Many of the comments concerned dignity and respect after the injury, inability to be heard, refusal to listen, dismissal and victim blaming. Moreover, plaintiffs’ extra-legal objectives did not appear to be affected by the passage of time, as there were no marked disparities in the way plaintiffs spoke of why they sued and what they wanted from the civil justice system as between plaintiffs who had commenced litigation three to four months earlier (interviewed subsequent to court-mandatory mediations) and claimants who had been litigating for several years (interviewed after voluntary mediations of cases already on trial lists).

Claimants’ Descriptions Of Their Litigation Aims

Plaintiffs’ articulated litigation aims were thickly composed of extra-legal objectives of principle, with 41% not mentioning monetary compensation at all, 35% viewing it of secondary importance, 18% describing money as their primary objective in suing, and only one person (6%) saying it was money alone.

CHAPTER 5 EXCERPTS ON LAWYERS VERSUS PARTIES AIMS FOR CASE RESOLUTION AT MEDIATIONS

Plaintiffs’ mediation objectives were quite consonant throughout the claimant group. Plaintiffs agreed that financial settlement was one aim. However, they regularly stressed that they wanted numerous things from mediation apart from settlement Most wanted defendants to admit fault or accept responsibility (94%), aimed to hear defendants’ perspectives (65%) and sought answers or explanations of what had occurred (71%). All plaintiffs stressed the need to be seen, heard, and understood by the defense in terms of what they had been through and their present situations. This included obtaining acknowledgements of their suffering. Such objectives contributed to plaintiffs’ pervasive desires for catharsis and closure. These findings are consonant with chapter 4 data highlighting plaintiffs’ perceptions of mediation as a place for information, human communication and psychologically ‘feeling better’. Consequently, most plaintiffs also wanted defendants in mediation to show they cared (53%) and to assure them the events would not recur (59%). Importantly, plaintiffs’ articulated extra-legal mediation objectives for closure, catharsis, wanting to be heard, wanting answers, apologies, admissions of fault and defendants to show they cared were the same or similar regardless of whether mediations were mandatory (occurring within months of the commencement of legal suits) or voluntary (often years later). This suggested that plaintiffs’ extralegal needs did not change over time. Moreover, when comparing claimants’ discourse on their litigation aims with their mediation objectives, the findings here reinforce those in chapter two on what plaintiffs said they sought from the justice system through litigation.

Plaintiffs’ Versus Plaintiff Lawyers’ Case Resolution / Mediation Aims – The disparity in mediation aims of plaintiffs and plaintiff lawyers revealed important differences in what each planned for mediation in terms of how to resolve the same case.  Other than wanting settlement, the mediation objectives of plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ lawyers were diverse in all categories. For instance, though some plaintiff lawyers noted their clients wanted defendants to admit fault (37%), regardless of feasibility not a single one sought this at mediation. In comparison, virtually all plaintiffs (94%) sought fault admissions at mediation. Similarly, plaintiff lawyers never mentioned wanting to hear defendants’ explanations of the disputed incidents. Again this was something that most plaintiffs desired (71%). Finally, as compared with the bulk of claimants (88%) who sought apologies at mediation, only a minority (32%) of plaintiff lawyers did (though almost half remarked that apologies were important for their clients).

Defendants’ Versus Defense Lawyers’ Mediation Aims

Gross disparities in mediation aims were found when comparing the discourse of defendant physicians with defense lawyers, particularly in the areas of apology, explaining their perspectives, listening to plaintiffs’ viewpoints and showing care. Moreover, physician lawyers’ discourse of tactical mediation objectives contained little of what plaintiffs said they sought at mediation. For instance, only one physician lawyer (10%) intended to show plaintiffs ‘the defendant cared’ about what happened. This was in sharp contrast to defendant physicians’ aims, where most (83%) aimed to show care. Moreover, regardless of their case assessments, no physician lawyer intended to admit any fault or to provide explanations or answers to plaintiffs about defendant physicians’ perspectives on what occurred. This was despite virtually all physician lawyers’ questionnaire responses indicating that underlying issues were more important for their physician clients than financial compensation. Yet, none discussed relaying this information as a mediation objective.

The disparities in mediation aims between legal actors and disputants were particularly clear in the following case.

LOSS OF SIGHT CASE – VOLUNTARY MEDIATION – The plaintiff explained that she had asked her optometrist of 16 years to do a glaucoma test because her father had been inflicted with the disease, and she felt film on her eye. She said, ‘He told me he’d already done the test and I was negative . . . I then went to another clinic and tested positive for glaucoma and was told that the right eye was at an advanced stage and could not be repaired—and that it should have been detected many years ago.’

MALE PLAINTIFF -50′s ‘…I wish he or his lawyer would express some remorse…an apology…their acceptance of guilt. We received absolutely nothing like that…Dr…wasn’t there…He could express remorse some way….It was like “I’m here to write a check”…It’s much more than dollars…It’s my wife’s eyes…’

MALE PHYSICIAN LAWYER-50′s-‘WHAT WERE YOUR MEDIATION OBJECTIVES Only to get the case settled.’

MALE SPECIALIST PLAINTIFF LAWYER-40′s ‘APART FROM SETTLEMENT, DID YOU HAVE ANY OTHER MEDIATION OBJECTIVES No…If there had been no mediation and just a bilateral settlement between the lawyers, I don’t know if the clients would have felt any loss in doing it that way…I’m not sure…because I really haven’t asked them about that.’

I will speak in my next post on my current scholarship, on the very different topic of international human rights laws and norms relating to formal courts versus informal/quasi-legal processing of violence against women cases throughout India.

Around Mile 11, I was hurting and turned from a combination of Irish rock and random songs to some pod casts. After some short New York Times and NPR pod casts, I remembered that I had downloaded a series of C-Span interviews with [...]]]> Here is a sentence I never expected to write. So there I was on Monday in the middle of running the Dublin Marathon when I decided to listen on my Ipod to a C-Span podcast interview with Justice Stevens. I had traveled to Dublin to run the actual Dublin marathon and to co-host Antitrust Marathon IV: Marathon with Authority, a round table discussion co-hosted with the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the Irish Competition Authority.

Around Mile 11, I was hurting and turned from a combination of Irish rock and random songs to some pod casts. After some short New York Times and NPR pod casts, I remembered that I had downloaded a series of C-Span interviews with the current Justices and Sandra Day O’Connor.

I have a special fondness for Justice Stevens. We are both Chicagoans, Cub Fans, and Northwestern Law grads. More improbably, we even had the same antitrust professor (James Rahl) at Northwestern, albeit about 35 years apart. That plus the fact he was primarily an antitrust litigator before going on the bench was enough to get me to devote the next 30 some minutes, and about 3 miles, to the Stevens interview.

A lot of it was a fluffy discussion of his chambers and personal history. But mixed among the fluff and the questions for non-lawyers (What is certiorari?), there were a handful of interesting tidbits. Justice Stevens talked about the reasons and impact of not participating in the cert pool, the importance of writing his own first drafts, and his interest in having the court hear a few more cases than its current docket. There are no smoking guns or shocking revelations, but Justice Stevens does mention the need for Justices from diverse legal backgrounds, such as veterans and litigators, as an important mix for the Court to have on the bench. Justice Stevens is of course both and as far as I know the only current Justice to actually have made his living as a litigator.

The main thing I came away with was the genuine niceness of the good Justice which was my impression from the only time I ever met him. In 1993, I taught in a summer program in Innsbruck, Austria where Justice Stevens was lecturing. Instead of staying for the three days as promised, he stayed and lectured the entire week and interacted warmly with the students and the rest of the faculty. At one point, a student asked him to sign the packet of course materials which he did after class. Because he did not want to play favorites, he then stayed and patiently signed for more than a hundred students.

In the pod cast interview, Stevens demurred on picking a most important or favorite case. But when asked about a most memorable experience, he didn’t hesitate and proudly mentioned throwing out the first pitch at Wrigley Field before a Cubs game at the age of 85.

With that, I grinned, quickened my pace a bit, and headed up the next of an endless series of hills on my way around Dublin on a surprisingly warm and sunny late October day.

I have not listened to the rest of the interviews. But if anyone else has, please post if there are particularly revealing or interesting moments.

We are very pleased to be able to present a transcript of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Joe Beaudoin, Jr., the project leader of the Battlestar Wiki, transcribed the interview for us. We edited the transcript, but the bulk of the work was done by Joe. The transcript is also posted at the Battlestar Wiki, which has a ton of great information for fans of the show. In editing the transcript, we took the liberty of cleaning up grammatical errors and eliminating “ums” and other distractions in order to make it more readable.

In this interview, we explore the legal, political, economic, and social ideas raised by the [...]]]>

We are very pleased to be able to present a transcript of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Joe Beaudoin, Jr., the project leader of the Battlestar Wiki, transcribed the interview for us. We edited the transcript, but the bulk of the work was done by Joe. The transcript is also posted at the Battlestar Wiki, which has a ton of great information for fans of the show. In editing the transcript, we took the liberty of cleaning up grammatical errors and eliminating “ums” and other distractions in order to make it more readable.

In this interview, we explore the legal, political, economic, and social ideas raised by the show. If you prefer to hear to the interview, click here to listen to the audio files.

Below is the introduction to the interview and the transcript for Part I, which explores the legal system, morality, and torture. I couldn’t fit the entire transcript into one post, so Parts II and III are contained in another post. Part II examines politics and commerce. Part III explores the cylons.

In the interview, Daniel Solove, Deven Desai, and David Hoffman ask the questions. We would like to thank Professor John Ip for suggesting some of the torture questions.

Our goal was to explore some of the themes of the show in a deeper manner than many traditional interviews. Ron and David graciously agreed to give us an hour of their time, and we had a fascinating conversation with them.

The new Battlestar Galactica, which premiered initially as a miniseries in 2003 on the SciFi Network, is only loosely based on the earlier show by the same name during 1978 and 1980. The new Battlestar Galactica is breathtaking science fiction, and it has widespread appeal beyond science fiction fans. Numerous critics have hailed it as one of the best shows on television. Time Magazine, for example, listed it as one of the top television shows and described it as “a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal.”

The show chronicles the struggle for survival of a small band of humans who escaped a devastating genocidal attack by intelligent robots called cylons. The humans created the cylons for use as slaves. The cylons rebelled and a war erupted between the humans and cylons. But a truce was reached, and the cylons disappeared. But forty years later, the cylons launched a massive surprise attack, destroying the human society (called the Twelve Colonies) with nuclear missiles. Only a small group of humans aboard spaceships survived.

Battlestar Galactica depicts the humans’ difficult fight for survival and the tough choices they must make along the way. The cylons have developed technology to allow them to take human form, and some of the humans within the group of survivors are really cylons. The show is heavily influenced by modern events, especially terrorism, war, and torture.

Battlestar Galactica was honored with a prestigious Peabody Award and twice as an official selection of the American Film Institute top television programs for 2005 and 2006.

Because the show explores so many interesting issues so deftly, it has attracted a large group of fans in the legal academy. We know of many law professors who count Battlestar Galactica as one of their favorite shows, and this is why we thought it would be fascinating to speak with the creators and writers of the show — Ron Moore and David Eick.

Ron Moore is a co-creator, executive producer, and writer of Battlestar Galactica. Previously, Ron wrote or co-wrote 27 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including the two-hour series finale “All Good Things,” for which he won a Hugo Award in 1994. That same year, Ron was honored with an Emmy Award nomination and was eventually promoted to producer. In 1994, Ron joined the writing staff of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as supervising producer and was elevated to co-executive producer the following year. Ron spent five seasons on the series until the end of its successful run in 1999. In the fall of 2002, he was named show-runner and executive producer of HBO’s critically-acclaimed one-hour drama Carnivale. In 2006 Ron was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series for his work on Battlestar Galactica. Ron studied political science at Cornell University, and he lives in California with his wife and three children. He has a blog, which he started during the Writer’s Guild Strike.

David Eick is also a co-creator, executive producer, and writer of Battlestar Galactica. Prior to his involvement in Battlestar Galactica, David was Executive Vice President of USA Cable Entertainment (USACE), where he was the company’s point person to the creative community and oversaw all aspects of the division, which developed, financed and acquired product for initial exhibition on USA Network and SCI FI Channel. While there, the studio produced USA Network’s critically lauded drama series Touching Evil, as well as the hit series Monk. Prior to his network experience, David spent six years at Renaissance Pictures, where he held a variety of positions and produced the hugely successful syndicated series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. David also co-developed and launched its successful spinoff, Xena: Warrior Princess. Additionally, David also produced many others shows. He recently developed The Bionic Woman for NBC. David graduated from the University of Redlands in California with a BA in political science. He resides in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

For readers unfamiliar the show, you should catch up by watching the DVDs of the first few seasons. Currently, the show is about to start its fourth and final season on Friday, April 4th at 10PM Eastern.

Additionally, you can watch the movie Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a made-for-TV movie that premiered in fall 2007.

PART I-A: LEGAL SYSTEMS

Daniel Solove: Greetings, this is Professor Daniel Solove of the blog Concurring Opinions with professors David Hoffman and Deven Desai.

We’re delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators of the terrific television show, “Battlestar Galactica”, on the SciFi network. “Battlestar Galactica” chronicles a small group of humans that survived the mass destruction of their society by a group of machines they created. The machines are known as the Cylons.

As “Battlestar” enters its fourth and final season, it enjoys tremendous stature. The show has been one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows. It raises many fascinating legal, political, economic and social issues. And we’re here right now with Ron Moore and David Eick, the two writers, co-creators, producers of the show, to talk about some of the issues with them.

Ron and David, thanks so much for being here with us today.

Ron Moore: Well, thank you for having us. It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Eick: Absolutely.

Deven Desai: Fantastic! So this is Deven Desai, and I wanted to kick off with a somewhat general framing question. At a very simple level–but from the mental level — I’m trying to get at exactly what role the law plays in the show. And I think the real question there is: Is it fair to say that “Battlestar” examines what happens to a social and legal system under extreme stress, and maybe even questions whether there is law at all in those circumstances?

Moore: Yeah, I think that is a fair way to put it. I think from the very beginning, one of the things we wanted to examine in the show is what would happen in a circumstance where civilization as we know it was literally wiped out, and you and a bunch of other survivors would gather together. What elements of the existing society would you choose to continue? What are the things that you would leave behind? What are the things you would try to retain?

It’s called “Battlestar Galactica,” so it has a very strong military component to it, but I felt very strongly from the get-go that there are other remnants of the civilization here, and [we needed to know] how they organize themselves, what kind of government they have. What the role of law was in that circumstance [post-apocalypse] was one of the key ideas we wanted to start talking about right from the mini-series.

In fact, in the mini-series you’ll see that one of the first questions that comes up is the line of succession for the presidency — what role the president has in that circumstance versus the military. By the end of the pilot, they settled into a bit of compromise between Laura [Roslin] and [Commander William] Adama.

President Laura Roslin

Eick: Right. It is also important to point out that [the military vs. government issue was] one of the things, I thought, Ron’s script for the pilot (the mini-series) [addressed] so well. In fact, [it] really intuitively circumvented some of the things that befall a lot of so-called genre sci-fi pieces when they try to examine or postulate legal precedents or refer to laws.

There was a show called “Century City” on a while ago which was a law show about the future. And I was friendly with some of the executives who made it. Not to pick on “Century City”, but I remember saying at the time: “You know, guys, the joy of a law show — I know a lot of people who watch law shows (I don’t) — and not that “Battlestar” is — but the joy of these [shows] is to match your wits against the characters in the piece.” [The joy of law shows is] to be able to go to yourself, “No, no! Brown vs. Board of Education you idiot, or whatever… [It is] to be able to have a common frame of reference. And the thing that I thought Ron’s script did so well was to essentially say their world is our world. And we’re not literal about that necessarily, but what I think we try to do is avoid the trappings of contrivance and deus ex machina to justify a story point when it hits against the reality of: “No, in our culture that wouldn’t be allowed, we have a law about those kinds of things.” We have things like freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and there are certain basics of the show that are essentially just transplants [from our society] that allow us to play fair with the storytelling and with the audience whenever a story point comes up that involves the law or the issue of morality or ethics.

Desai: Right. And I think, if I hear you right, that explains why there are remnants of the older legal system, but there are still — because of the stress — the military tribunals, there are criminal trials and civil actions. And it seems like lawyers lurk behind some of this. If I remember correctly, Adama’s father [Joe Adama] is a defense attorney, and then you later have Romo Lampkin. And I’m wondering, how do the lawyers and these ideals play out with those characters? And are you exploring what pieces of the legal culture and system you keep or don’t keep in developing a society that’s perhaps reinventing itself?

Moore: Well, for Adama, we gave him the backstory that his father was a defense attorney who specialized in civil liberties, primarily because I wanted to say that about the character of Adama. Typically the military commander in a fictional world comes from a long line of military commanders, going back to the [American] Revolution or something, and I wanted to set him apart from that tradition. This is a man that believes in a lot of the ideals that the uniform stands for, and [he] approaches it from a slightly different point of view [than Laura Roslin], and I wanted to set him up in a different way than Laura. Laura came to this position through a different process, and her ideas of the law and how she would wield authority would come from a very different place as a character.

I think that the lawyers in the show, [such as] Romo Lampkin [whom] we’ve used, and the lawyers, laws, and things [we allude to], are in service of the idea: Okay, this society is destroyed, [and] it’s very important for society to have a rule of law, to have a system that governs people lives — even in this circumstance — that they can rely on. There are ideas of justice and fairness within the society, but there’s still picking and choosing which laws they’re going to adhere to. We had a line in an episode that actually got cut: there was a press conference early on in season one where Laura’s assistant, Billy [Keikeya], was fielding various questions from the press about all kinds of things, and someone actually asked about income taxes and whether they were going to be filing returns.

We played it as a joke — you know, we’ll get to that later, but it was an interesting notion because it was symbolic of the [idea] that if we’re hanging on to this form of Republican government, and we’re not trying to hang on to all the things we used to have, how far does that go? How far is the point where it becomes absurd, given the circumstances that they were in? But the notion was that we’re going to try to hold on to as much of this democratic society as we can, that this was one of the founding beliefs of this culture. [It was] really, really important to them — to hold on to this form of government and hold on to as many of the forms and rituals (and symbols of it) as possible because it defined them as a people. It defined them in terms of how they chose to view themselves.

The trial of Gaius Baltar

Desai: So as a follow up then, when you talk about how they choose to view themselves, it seems like there’s a real contrast in terms of evolution of society. In [the episode] “Litmus,” you have these early almost Crucible-like interrogation boards or inquiry boards, and later on you get to [Gaius] Baltar’s trial and the acquittal, which reminded some of us of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission — where you examine something without prosecuting it. Obviously, as you develop stories, sometimes things take on their own life, but was there an evolving plan for these sorts of crucial moments of the story? Were the characters getting to these, “How are we really going to do it when we’re up against the wall here?” [moments]?

Moore: Yes. There was a certain evolution in our thinking of the culture within the show, and I think it just grows out of the fact that, in season one, soon after the apocalypse and the destruction of their world, it’s sort of like everything is up for grabs at that point. Everything is possible. Tribunals can go far astray. Laura can pretty much rule by dictate.

A lot of it has to do with observing of our society in the post-9/11 aftermath, and how everyone was willing to do a lot of things that the government asked them to do in those early days without real question. So we wanted to reflect that into the show, but as time went on you start to settle in and say “Ok we’re not going to do that anymore” and “Wait a minute, maybe this was too far” and “Let’s really re-gather and decide what the rules of the society are.” And that happened in the writer’s room, as well as on the show. [When] we’re [no longer] a few months after the attack [and] a few years have gone by, and here’s a former president of the Colonies [Baltar] up on treasonable charges, [we] feel that this has to be examined in a different context than the earlier sort of tribunal-type formats would have permitted.

Eick: It’s funny you know, and this sounds to be more political than it is, but [in] the episode “Pegasus” in season two, a long lost ship [found the] small fleet and [was] helmed by an admiral [Helena Cain] who outranked Adama and who, as the story wove on, was a war criminal, basically, and was someone [to whom] human rights were utterly meaningless in the face of war and [who just] did what [she thought] needed to be done. And I felt like that epitomized a lot of what was going on with the culture [in America post 9-11]. There was a certain, “Whatcha gonna do about it?” that seemed to be in the culture. It isn’t so much to say, “Well gee, look at what our real life administration did” as much as it was to say, “What could it do? Where would the line be drawn? Would one be drawn?” There was this feeling of recklessness in the air [post 9-11], and I do think that it served [to some degree as a starting point]. [But] we said on a number of occasions that we don’t rip headlines to serve as starting points for storytelling. We’re not “Law & Order.” We’re not looking to do literal metaphors necessarily, and yet it was impossible to dodge the sense of what was creeping into our culture.

So [let’s] get back to your question, “Where did you decide to adhere to the strictures of our modern, contemporary legal system? Where did you decide to deviate?” It was more about: What would you buy? What feels real? What feels like: “Gosh, that kind of feels contemporary, that kind of feels resonant with what’s happening today”? I like a show where you’re making it up as you go, and you’re able to pull solutions out of your hat whenever you want because you made the rules up anyway. [But] this [attempt to be contemporary and resonant with current events], I think, maintained enough of a sense of reality and a connection to our culture that we didn’t feel allowed to do that. That there were repercussions, even in a situation like the tribunal, where the nature of the discussion was: “Well, hold on a second. You can’t do that.” And a part of you goes, “Well, why not? We’ve already done this!” And that seemed to reflect what was going on in the culture anyway. So in that way it felt real.

Admiral Cain aboard the Pegasus

PART I-B: TORTURE, NECESSITY, AND MORALITY

Solove: I’d like to explore some of the issues involving the show’s depiction of torture, which occurred at several points during the show. It’s obviously a huge area up for debate after 9/11. How did the United States experience of torture affect the way that you chose to depict it in the show?

Moore: It’s interesting [because of] the fact that there was actually a question suddenly, which in the first time of my experience in this country was actually a subject of discussion. There was a notion that [torture] was permissible under some circumstances but not others, or at least we should have a public debate about it. And that alone just felt like . . . well, okay then, just by having it in our show we would touch into what’s going on in America today. I think that given the circumstances of where they are, it was completely believable that people in different circumstances would choose to use aggressive, physical coercion on their enemies.

[This is] especially [true] in the circumstance [in the show] where we have the distinction [between humans and cylons.] [In the show,] Kara ["Starbuck" Thrace] and the rest of the Colonial officers did not view the Cylons as legitimate people. They were not accepted as [humans] — they were not human, and they did not have the rights of humans, and they would not be accepted as anything other than machines. So when we approached the first episode that really dealt with this, “Flesh and Bone,” one of the key concepts was: ”Well, it’s a machine.” Is there anything morally wrong about beating a machine? And torturing machines? And making a machine go through all kinds gyrations? It’s a thing, and if this thing in front of you screams and cries and bleeds, can you ignore that? Can you as a human being distance yourself from the visual, from the empathetic impulse, and say, “Oh, I have to keep reminding myself this thing is not real. It’s just a really good simulacrum. It’s a really good software program. It’s designed to fool me into believing it’s human”?

And we wanted to play with that [issue] in the show, and that no matter how much Kara told herself that, how much she told that to Leoben [Conoy], she couldn’t help but have a human connection. She couldn’t help but be affected by what she was doing within the show. I think when we approached that episode we were a little bit more interested in the dynamic between interrogator and subject — how does the emotional response reverberate back and forth? — than we were really invested at that point in legal questions. We took as a given that Kara could walk into that room and do whatever she felt she had to do. She could have probably chopped his arms off if she felt like she wanted to, because Adama essentially told her at the top of the show, “It’s a machine, don’t forget that. Don’t get involved.” But we were interested in this more character-oriented idea.

Kara tortures Leoben in the Season 1 episode “Flesh and Bone“

Eick: That episode remains somewhat notorious in that it probably represented the most extreme period of tension and disagreement between ourselves and the network. I know those stories are legion, and show people like to talk about how they weathered the storms, and put up a good fight, and saved the show from the cretins who’ve gotten their fingers. That has not been the case with this show at all. We’ve actually enjoyed a great deal of support and a lot of courageous spiritedness and boldness from this network.

However, in that particular case, there were drafts of the script that were pretty extreme in terms of what Kara was going to do to Leoben, and they were emblematic of what was going on at Guantanamo and places like that, and the connection to our own culture was probably a bit more literal and precise and less metaphorical than it had been [in other episodes of the show]. But as a microcosm, in and of itself, it serves as an example of what Ron was just talking about — which is that we would find ourselves saying things like, “But it’s not a person, why are you telling us to cut the scene where she gouges his eyeballs out?! No, there wasn’t that scene, but why are you giving us grief about this?” In a way, it became our argument because we were trying to take something real and force the audience to have the same trouble with it that the network was having. Anyway, it was just an interesting microcosm of everything you were saying.

Solove: I heard that the show’s ethos is encapsulated by the line, “It’s not enough to survive, one must be worthy of survival.” As you both talk about the depiction of torture and how extreme it is, there are views such as, “Look it’s just robots.” But there are also times when [humans such as] Gaius Baltar get tortured [in Season 3's "Taking a Break From All Your Worries"]. To what extent did you want to portray [torture] in a way that got so extreme that in fact it earned the audience’s sympathy, or got the audience to say, “Wait a second. This isn’t effective,” or “It is effective”? To what extent did you depict [torture] to try to illustrate certain points about torture, and its effectiveness or non-effectiveness, or the justifications for it, or the arguments against it?

Moore: I think our goal was to stay away from that, actually. We were sort of at pains in the story discussion room and at the script phase to not send [any particular] message [about torture]. We were trying not to say, “Hey, guess what, torture’s bad!” or to go through the rationalizations of why it should be employed in certain circumstances. We really just wanted to put the audience in the room and make them really uncomfortable. We really wanted them to struggle (we like to do this a lot in the show) — we wanted them to struggle with [the questions]: “Who am I supposed to be rooting for in this circumstance? Whose side am I on? I thought I was on her [Kara’s] side because [Leoben has] said he’s got a nuke somewhere in the Fleet, and that’s a pretty scary thing, and Kara, you better do what you’ve got to do to get the information out of him. . . . Okay, now I’m sitting here, and now I have to watch him be smacked around, blood flowing from his mouth, and watch him be, in essence, water boarded. And I’m starting to really feel uncomfortable with that. And I’m starting to feel like she’s going too far and . . . wait a minute . . . whose side am I on?”

We just wanted to ask the questions. We really just wanted the audience to have to get in that room and really search their own souls for how they felt about this, and what’s right and what’s wrong. [We wanted] to just let it live in the ambiguity of the circumstance. That’s something that television generally shies away from. Ambiguity is not something networks like. They like an answer. Give the audience an answer. Tell them who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy. Let them root for justice and boo at evil.

Our show, I think, is at its best when you’re just not sure, [when] you’re just uncomfortable because you can’t decide — should Gaius Baltar get off the hook or not? — when you’re struggling with these moral dilemmas. I don’t think we [as writers] need to have the ego that says, “Hey, guess what, I’ve got the answer to torture in 44 minutes or less, and here it is.” It was just like, “Okay, this happens, this is a real world circumstance. Here’s the classic ticking-bomb scenario, and here’s the guy [Leoben] who says he knows where it is. What are you going to do?” And here it happens, and he starts talking, and he [Leoben] gets into her [Kara’s] head. It just becomes this very complicated wash of emotions.

Solove: It’s interesting too in that you, to some extent, avoided the issues that have plagued the show “24.” There was a New York Times story about the politics of depicting torture in “24″ and criticizing the show for the way it depicted torture. To what extent do you feel that you managed to survive that kind of criticism? Also, more broadly, to what extent do you feel pressure at all from the Left, the Right, or others in terms of how you depict certain hot topics such as torture?

Eick: You know, I’ll just say briefly, that’s the great thing about science fiction. Exactly that point. I don’t watch “24,” I don’t know what their issues were, what kind of trouble they got into, but I would reckon that we’d probably be able to get away with exactly what they tried to do, and got in trouble for, in a different way because of the nature of sci-fi, and the fact that it tends to not, frankly, be taken as seriously. People can look down their nose at it, or say, “That’s just a fantasy” or “That’s just an escapist piece” — with the exception, of course, of the people who actually watch shows like “Battlestar” and they realize that’s not the intent. But I do think the genre has always served as an excuse or justification or a metaphorical way to talk about the issues of the day and what’s happening in the culture without necessarily having to be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny [that is directed at] something that’s doing it in a literal way.

Moore: One of the hallmarks of our success is that we get glowing reviews from The National Review [and also] from Salon. I think that just says a lot. We’re not trying to play everything down the middle, where it’s just neutral. There are ideas and messages and themes strewn throughout the show, but I think we always try to make it really ambiguous, and let the audience take away from it what they will. Some people will see exactly what they want to see in the given circumstances, and I’m sure there are people on the Right who watched the torture scenes and felt like, “Well, absolutely! She’s justified in doing whatever she’s got to do to get that information out of that guy.” And there are probably people who on the Left felt like it was appalling and sympathized completely with him, and there were probably people on both sides who had their views challenged and felt vaguely uncomfortable about holding the position that they started with.

Solove: It’s a great testament to the show it does have fans both on the Left and the Right, especially when it tackles issues that have been hot button issues on both sides where there’s so little agreement. So I think that’s quite a testament to the show.

I’d like to shift a little bit to a related issue, which is the issue of necessity and morality. Throughout the show there seems to be a tension between instrumental necessity and moral principle, and we see characters doing things that they often find contrary to their own morality and principles. Examples would be Roslin trying to rig an election, people turning into terrorists to fight the Cylons [on New Caprica], the destruction of a ship [the Olympic Carrier] in “33” with over a thousand people on it. To what extent do you think these decisions have effects on the people that make them and on the human society? And how have you’ve chosen to depict those effects?

Moore: I always think it’s interesting when people run up against practical circumstances [and are forced] to try to go against things they’ve believed in their whole lives, and they find themselves doing that which they abhor, or that which they’ve sworn that they would never have done. I think it affects them in profound ways, and on some level it just brings in simple guilt and brings in a lot of self-loathing about certain actions, but it also makes them strive to over-compensate in some ways and to be more heroic next time.

I think the show is always interested in these barriers that people set up. “These are the bounds I will not step over. This is what defines me as a human being, and I’m going to hold that banner up high, no matter what, and I’m never stepping over this line . . . until I’ve got to step over this line.” That’s just human. To me, it’s always what people perceive as human failings. In a lot of ways, our defeats and our failures tell us more about ourselves as human beings than our victories do.

Solove: One thing the show often does is present us with situations where the military leaders have to act and make some very tough and sometimes very ugly decisions. I think the show is about these hard choices that people have to make. On the one hand, the show demonstrates the importance of deference to the military leaders. But on the other hand, there are also instances where there are objections to [the military leaders’] decisions. Lee Adama often engages in acts of civil disobedience, and we also have Colonel [Saul] Tigh’s rather unwise military decisions (as compared to [Commander] Adama’s mostly wise decisions). What do you think the appropriate level of deference to afford military judgments is? How do you depict the tension between the respect and understanding that should be given to their judgments versus the questioning that should be [given] to their judgments?

Eick: Were you asking about whether we feel a responsibility to depict it in a particular way?

Solove: Mainly just what your aims are, rather than your responsibility. Is this a question you thought of? Is this an issue that you think of as you present these choices?

Moore: Well, I think David and I are both students of history. In particular, I’m a student of military history, and I have always been fascinated by the fact that the military attracts a lot of different kinds of people in different eras and in different circumstances, but they’re all people. It always seems like there’s this tendency in popular culture or popular media when you’re doing a piece about the military. It splits into two broad categories. There’s this “put them all on a pedestal” [depiction] — that [military people are] just wonderful, amazing, heroic people. Even when they do terrible things they’re still doing it for the noblest of causes, with everyone’s best interests in mind. Or, [in the alternative depiction,] they’re committing the My Lai Massacre, and they’re degenerates, and they’re bloodthirsty, and they’re the cavalry guys in “Dances with Wolves” that can’t wait to kill those Indians. And it just seemed like the cliché — the truth is somewhere in between. There’s a lot of conflicting currents and cross-currents that happen in military service. In a time of war, a lot of actions are taken in very specific circumstances by very specific people. You have to have a lot of broad play there to try to understand what they’re doing and why, and it’s always permissible to question that. It’s always permissible to say, “Is this the right thing? Is this what we really want to do? Even though this is the smartest tactical move, is that the step that we as a people are willing to take?”

It seems to me the show wants to continually ask that question. I didn’t want the show to be a military piece about military people who just make all the decisions, and they’re unquestioned throughout. Typically, in TV if you were doing something like this, the military would. . . . Well, they did this in the original ["Battlestar Galactica"] actually. In the original show, the military was in charge, and there was a titular civilian government, but whenever they spoke up they were essentially just straw men. They stood up and said, “Hey, we don’t think that you should do that Adama!” And they were invariably wrong. They were always wrong. They were always out of line, and they were always portrayed as just fools or naïve, or something really stupid. The military was always the wiser, more paternalistic organization. I felt like that’s not really my society, I don’t want that to be my society. There’s a balance between trying to win and trying to win in a way that is worthy of winning. There are competing interests here. The military is an arm of politics, like the old saying goes, and it’s all about [this]: If you try to achieve a certain end, what means are you willing to go to do that? Just because destroying the village might be the smartest way to get from A to B, is it really worth it to get to B?

Eick: Ron was just talking about the human story beneath whatever the military issue might be. For sure, I think we’re about to see when the political season really gets going, a story about one of the candidates is going to be all about personal perseverance despite an abject military fuckup. That’s something we relate to, that’s something [like John McCain's story]: it’s not [about] John McCain the solider, it’s about John McCain the policy maker. It’s not John McCain the field general, it’s John McCain the survivor who, in spite of what was perpetrated on him, in spite of the illegitimacy of the war he was in the middle of, [or] in spite of the failings of his commanding officer, was able to eke out a survival and return home a hero. That’s just a story we as a people relate to.

Solove: Thank you so much. These have been fascinating answers. We’re going to conclude this first part of the interview and shift in the second part to looking at some issues about politics and commerce in the Colonies.

Click here to read the transcript for Parts II and III of the interview.

This post contains Parts II and III of the transcript of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Joe Beaudoin, Jr., the project leader of the Battlestar Wiki, transcribed the interview for us. We edited the transcript, but the bulk of the work was done by Joe. The transcript is also posted at the Battlestar Wiki, which has a ton of great information for fans of the show. In editing the transcript, we took the liberty of cleaning up grammatical errors and eliminating “ums” and other distractions in order to make it more readable.

Our interview explores the legal, political, and economic dimensions of the show. Part II (see [...]]]>

This post contains Parts II and III of the transcript of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Joe Beaudoin, Jr., the project leader of the Battlestar Wiki, transcribed the interview for us. We edited the transcript, but the bulk of the work was done by Joe. The transcript is also posted at the Battlestar Wiki, which has a ton of great information for fans of the show. In editing the transcript, we took the liberty of cleaning up grammatical errors and eliminating “ums” and other distractions in order to make it more readable.

Our interview explores the legal, political, and economic dimensions of the show. Part II (see below) examines politics and commerce. Part III (see below) examines the cylons. Daniel Solove, Dave Hoffman, and Deven Desai pose the questions to Ron Moore and David Eick.

Click here to read Part I of the interview transcript, which examines the legal system, morality, and torture.

PART II: POLITICS AND ECONOMY

Dave Hoffman: I’m going to explore with you some of the political and economic themes in the show. Just like the [topics of the] legal system and torture that we’ve been talking about, [let's discuss] the [Colonials'] political and economic systems under severe stress. I wanted to talk a little bit about the economy to start.

So in the [season two] episode “Black Market,” we learn that their current economic system looks like Soviet-era Russia with a state-run distribution of economic goods, supplemented by a black market [with] luxury [items] and medicines. [Earlier], in [season one's] “Bastille Day,” we learn that the Fleet has engaged in forced labor in the past. Finally, we know from [season three's] “Dirty Hands,” and maybe after “Dirty Hands,” that there’s a work rotation in place. All these systems imply an absence of a market economy. We know very little, however, about how the economy is supposed to work. Was this a deliberate dramatic choice?

David Eick: Before either of us answers, I just want to say that I’m sorry that [Dave] mentioned ”

Black Market.” I meant to sent a memo before this that no one was allowed to bring that up.

Hoffman: What’s wrong with “Black Market“?

Eick (laughing): Oh nothing!

Ron Moore: Not one of my favorites.

Hoffman: Ah. . . .

Moore: [Regarding] the economic system, we started from the assumption [that] the Colonial society that was destroyed was very analogous to our own [American society]. It was a capitalist society; it was a democratic society. The culture was very similar [to our own]. We wanted all those touchstones. We assumed that there was an economic system very similar to that in which we operate now. We then started thinking in broader terms: Okay, there’s Twelve Colonies. Each one is on its own planet, [and] they probably have a lot of variation [between] them. Probably more than the states [in the US] do between them, but maybe not [as much] as nations do between them. [The variation among them is] in some sort of middle ground between the two, [with] a certain amount of autonomy to each Colony, but they were in some federal existence.

Also, [they were] in some kind of trade partnership with one another [with] some commonwealth [like] notion. Then, after the apocalypse and the exodus from the Twelve Colonies, now [the people are] just in space, in just these ships. At that point, you had the top-down system. “Okay, we’ve got to distribute; we’ve got to divide up the supplies; we have to ration certain things; we have to make sure everyone is getting fed, everyone is getting clothed, everyone has fuel for their ships.” It just felt like there had to be this very strong hand of authority from above.

But as things went on [the] black market would develop. Naturally, there would be the impulse to return to capitalist systems [and] that the market would assert itself. There would be a tension. The idea of the episode, “Black Market” — which was a little too complex for television (and certainly in the way we went about it) — was to try to illustrate that tension. Okay, here Laura [Roslin] is trying to guide them back to a market-driven system and introduce a currency [in an attempt to] move them off of an authoritarian scheme, but the black market was already getting more and more powerful. It was starting to devolve into power bases, and ruthlessness, and killings, and all these other things. It was supposed to be an episode to try to say: “The market will be heard even in that place, and you have to make some accommodation for the fact that people will be people. They will always try to trade what they have, and they will always seek out what they don’t have.”

A scene from the episode “Black Market”

Hoffman: So you guys don’t feel like that episode succeeded as dramatically as you hoped it would. Is that one of the reasons you haven’t returned to trying to figure out what daily economic life looks like on a civilian ship?

Moore: Partially, but also we were scalded by the experience dramatically. ["Black Market"] failed dramatically as a character piece and as a story. I just wasn’t satisfied with it. It’s also limited by the fact that, in a production sense for the show, production constraints are such that we have a great difficulty setting episodes aboard other civilian ships. It’s very, very expensive and requires a lot of resources. We’ve generally chosen to put those resources into other areas, instead of completely setting up civilian society and an economic system somewhere else and really explore it.

But we’ve done a little bit [in that regard]. In “Dirty Hands,” we went over and saw conditions aboard the [tylium] refinery ship and [explored the issue of] labor. [Also,] we brought civilians aboard Galactica in season three and put them downstairs in the hangar deck [a.k.a. "Dogsville"]. We wanted this [civilian group] to be its own little socioeconomic sub-group, but it just never quite pulled the drama for us as storytellers. We just kept on finding other things to do.

Eick: As Michael Rymer (our producer [who] directed the mini-series and [our] most memorable episodes) likes to say — he’s Australian — “when I do somethin’, I do it prop’rly.” It’s very difficult to do stories like that “prop’rly” because, as Ron was saying, [we have limited] production resources. And you’d be surprised [at how difficult it is to] cram the density of stories like this into 40 minutes. (That’s what an hour of TV is now — 40 minutes.)

Since it’s difficult, you find yourself left to make the decision to spend those resources [between] the areas [of]: “Let’s build a new ship. Let’s do this, let’s do that.” Then you get into the cutting room and the episode’s 20 minutes too long. Guess what goes? All the stuff you spent your resources building because the reality of the show [is that it] ultimately wants to be about these people in the places that the audience has been accustomed to seeing them. [By spending your resources building unique sets and other trappings] it just becomes a luxury you can’t afford either economically or time-wise. I think eventually we gave up trying to make that a staple of the show.

It’s worth mentioning that in the selling of the show, we had to go to great lengths to assure the network that the show would not be war-culture rooted. [We had to assure the network] that we would be exploring the elementary school ship, the shopping mall ship, the Disney Land ship, and the nightclub ships. None of that ever really happened.

Hoffman: It seems like that in the first and second season there were more forays into [life on ships in the Fleet], like the meeting ship [Cloud 9] or the movie theater ship. [Transcriber's Note: Hoffman is likely referring to "Downloaded" when the Cylons are watching D'Anna's transmission in a movie theater, which is presumably on the Colonies and not set in a ship.] [And this] didn’t really go through, [so the answer to my earlier question] is going to be no. You’re not going to do an episode from the perspective of ordinary Fleet members.

Ron, you’ve [worked on] both “[Star] Treks” ([The Next Generation] and [Deep Space 9]), and there are often these [episodes that] once in a while [were] not [focused on the] main characters.

Moore: Yeah, but the trick on those episodes (even in Trek) [is] that the point of view is usually [of] someone [who] is a low-ranking crewmember who is already aboard the Enterprise [like TNG's "Lower Decks"] or on board the space station. You’re just shifting the perspective slightly, but not literally taking it off the ship and planting it somewhere else.

Hoffman: Right. I guess the big question is: Why do people do any work on the Fleet? In the absence of economic incentive to do so, are they forced to work at gunpoint? Is everyone like the folks [on the tylium ship] in “Dirty Hands“?

Eick: We’ve had a lot of conversation about that in “33,” which is the first episode of the one-hour series. I remember boiling it down to a particular moment in which a mistake that Dualla had made [in losing the Olympic Carrier] had cost them dearly, and Tigh, walking up and down the CIC, was yelling: “We’re all here to do our jobs.”

I remember looking at the footage, and everyone’s exhausted. They haven’t slept in days and days and days. They look like they’re about to keel over, and there was a part of you . . . . (I can’t remember, Ron, if we talked about this in the story phase or the script phase, or edit phase. . . I can’t remember), but there was a part of you that was [asking]: “Why are they doing their jobs? Why don’t they just say, ‘Blow me!’ and throw up their hands and walk away?”

I remember the answer being [that] particularly when people are in dire straits, when it is all about survival, it’s surprising how they do take solace in having a purpose, in having a role to play in that community structure, in the idea that they’re a smaller part of a greater whole. That’s actually part of human survival, and we would talk a lot about things like [for example, the fact that the Jews in Germany] would still have Hanukkah in concentration camps [during World War II]. There were jobs. There was a social structure within even the most desperate situations.

It’s a really compelling question to me because I know that was a big question for us very early on. We all just said: “You know, they do it because to not do it is to die on some level.”

The tylium ship in “Dirty Hands”

Moore: There was an interesting line that [Tom] Zarek had in [season one's] “Colonial Day,” where he’s making his case for a collectivist approach to their government, and [arguing that] they should leave all the trappings behind [from] the old system. He was with some reporters, walking around on that ship that had a simulated outdoors [Cloud 9], and he pointed over to a gardener and said, “This guy gets up every morning and goes to work, and he gardens. Why? To what end?” He said, “It’s like we [are] all just repeating the motions. We’re just repeating these tasks we used to do. We have lawyers who are still pretend to be lawyers.” There was a sense of inertia, at least in those early days, that they all were going to continue to try to just keep doing what they used to do, because to give up that identity (to give up your identity as “the gardener,” to give up your identity as “the lawyer”) was to essentially cast [yourself] into the abyss. You would have no identity. So there were those pressures on these people as well.

Hoffman: I get that, essentially in the early seasons. I get that with the military and other collectivist sub-cultures. But after they have the interim on the planet [New Caprica] and then they go back to the Fleet, the question I’ve always had was: “Why are there journalists still?”

Moore: The society does have to do things like propagate information, so it seemed like there was an incentive for the government to want to have a press, to want to have ways of conveying information. If you believed in a free press, and if you believed that it was fundamental to a democratic society, you would allow the journalists to continue to operate like that and not appoint your own minister of propaganda.

Hoffman: I understand why the government would want it, but what do the people (such as the journalists) get out of it?

Moore: Yeah, one of the things that we’ve skirted around a little bit is how they are compensated. We initially were going to dispense with the idea of money, that the whole thing was going to evolve to a barter system. That became very awkward just for dramatic purposes, to continually just barter for everything. You’ll see some examples of that in the early days. Baltar bets his shirt in a poker [triad] game and et cetera.

We just defaulted to an idea that they’re still going to use currency. We want to keep using currency in the show for dramatic purposes. Let’s just assume that, somehow, the economic system has asserted itself. They still place value in money in some way, shape, or form. They all decided [to continue to place value on their currency], like we decide in this strange dream of a world where pieces of paper with dead presidents on it has real value. Somehow, they ascribe the same meaning to whatever form of currency they’ve got. It’s still scarce; it’s still buys you things; it still wants to make you accumulate it; it accrues wealth and status to you if you have it.

Once we’ve accepted that premise, it felt like somebody’s paying somebody in some fashion we don’t quite understand and we don’t want to examine. We don’t know what really stands behind it. There’s nothing of intrinsic value backing up the currency, but let’s just slide by that because if we look too closely to that aspect of the culture, it collapses and, darn it, we need them to be making bets in the poker game with something.

Eick: The journalist thing is so funny. I can’t remember what the first episode was that we introduced the press conference in, but I was on the set, and somehow or another, that question came up. It may have been Eddie Olmos who asked. He loves to provoke exactly this category of things. “Why would that do that!?” [And I would say], “Eddie, you’re not in the scene.” [And he would reply:] “I don’t care, why would they [do that]?”

I remember saying to the director, “You see those people over there? Those 8, 16, or 20 extras that we have? They were journalists back in the day, before the attack. It’s what they know.” It’s like what Ron was saying earlier: It’s a way they have of maintaining their identity. “You see those 4 people over there? They always wanted to be journalists, but they couldn’t get arrested before the attacks, and now here’s their chance! And you see those three people over there? They fucking hate journalism and think the whole thing is a crock, and they’ve basically infiltrated the room because they can see if they can somehow undermine it.”

Everyone went, “Ok, that works!” There was at least a system of logic, even though when you watch the episode there’s no telling the difference between the three categories.

Hoffman: But one of them [D'Anna Biers] was a Cylon, as we learn later. . . And I guess that makes a good transition to [what] Deven’s going to talk to you about the Cylons . . . although I can talk to you about the economy all day long.

PART III: CYLONS

Deven Desai: To loop back to some of the things we said earlier, you pointed out [one of] the liberating aspects of having Cylons is that you can explore things that [become a little more touchy] in other contexts [such as when just humans are involved.] In some ways it reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Electronic Sheep? and then the Blade Runner adaptation, where you seem to be playing with these ideas of implanted memories in Boomer, reminding me a little bit of Rachel [the Blade Runner replicant character]. The whole question out there is whether Decker is a replicant or not. At one level, it seems that you’re also looking at this question of what is it to be human. How do we treat those whom we see as different? Is that part of the lens that you’re playing with?

Moore (jokingly): First of all, what’s Blade Runner? It figured into our discussions from Day 1. Very influential.

Eick: And yes, Deckard is a replicant, for the record.

Moore: You’ve really put your finger on it. That’s something David and I have discussed from the moment we decided the Cylons were going to look like human beings. It raised all these questions which I just thought were fascinating. It just felt like that’s really what the show’s about. What is it to be human? What does it mean to be a person? The Cylons say they have souls. Can we say they don’t? How do we grant them status as people? What does it mean to be human? What are the attributes of being human? How would you know if you’re human [or] if you’re a Cylon?

All these questions felt fascinating, and it felt like the deeper we got into the series the more they came up. The more the Cylons exhibited human traits and human characteristics, the deeper and tougher the questions [became]. In the pilot, [the Cylons are] mostly off-camera. We only really meet a couple of them — they are pretty much the faceless enemy. They’re the enemy from beyond. They come; they destroy; they kill; they’re chasing [us]. They’re just implacable, they’re monsters. They’re literally machines, and they’re after you. There are hints along the way that there’s something more than that: that they have deeper interests.

[Like] Number Six in particular: she wants to be loved, she expresses a faith in god. Then the punch comes at the end [of the miniseries] when one of the characters you come to know and love–Sharon–turns out to be a Cylon. As the series went on, we started to develop the Cylons more and more deeply. We started treating them as simply human. They were human in all but name. They had a specific cultural history. They were a new civilization that had only been around for about 40 years, and they had very different ideas of truth and justice. They had different ideas of the cosmology of the universe and their place in it. They saw us as the enemy. We just started to play those ideas off against each other.

A cylon, model number six

Desai: Right. It seems like [that has been the case] all the way through then. If I remember correctly, even when Leoben is ejected in space [in "Flesh and Bone"] you have Starbuck pray for him. It was a great moment, I thought. Once you come into direct contact with something you set up as other, it becomes harder to not think of it as such, especially when [Cylons] look so much like humans. [The show develops] this dichotomy [between a simple] ruthless civilization [and a civilization with something of value to offer, perhaps with some attempt to mimic human civilization]. Is the humans’ belief system starting to have to construct the notion of: “Are our principles broad enough to encompass a group that is empirically not human, yet seems to mirror a lot of what humans are about?” Or are they going to be able to draw that line and say, “No matter what, that’s the dividing line. Our principles don’t apply. Our notions of what it is to be a sentient being that matters cuts off [at] this stage, because their spines glow red and they tend to wipe us out”?

Moore: I think that is the question of the show, which they’ve struggled with throughout. [William] Adama in particular has tried to draw a very bright line and say: “There are us, and there are them, and there’s no crossing of [that line].” Like I was talking about earlier, Adama gets to a place where he accepts Sharon ["Athena" Agathon] as a person. He does it because of a human interaction he has with her in particular, and most of that occurred off camera (which is a bit of a cheat), but most of it occurred during the missing year [between "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II" and "Occupation"] where the [Colonials] are on New Caprica. Our back-story was that Adama used to go down and sit in that jail cell with her because he had a lot of time on his hands. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around what this being was, and he found himself confessing things to her, talking to her, listening to her. Over the course of time, he just, at some point, stopped thinking of her as a machine and started to think of her as a person.

If you asked him, he would probably say [that] she’s different or something. He would probably not be willing to really extend that idea to them as a nation, because it just raises a host of other issues. It challenges some pretty basic assumptions. It challenges the ways they do business. It challenges the righteousness of their cause and how they view themselves.

Laura [Roslin] has to believe that [the Cylons] are just machines in order to contemplate in taking a genocidal act and even in that episode [season three's "Torn"], Adama’s in a place where he’s hesitating. He doesn’t really want to do it, even though he can’t come out and say, “Well, we can’t do it because they’re legitimate people, and they have souls like we do, and therefore we can’t wipe them out.” It doesn’t feel right to him. His heart, his instinct as a human being [is that they] feel like they’re about to cross a line. He himself is actually already crossed the line to accepting them as something more than he thought.

Desai: So on the Cylon side of that equation, they have their own culture and society. The religion seems to play a large role in their culture, in this rather unique and directed vision of what they’re about. That seems to rub against the humans’ vision of the world. I’m wondering what was happening with the Cylon perspective in terms of how they felt they had been treated by the humans, and whether or not there could be a peaceful solution to the friction. Or [was their view] “we’ve just waited until we’re ready, and we [will] just come at you”? It seems as though their religion plays a part in that role, but is there something else at work in the Cylon society?

Eick: One of the subtexts of their agenda, and it did go back to the earliest conversation Ron and I had about this area, was that there would be an agenda to take the baton from humanity and pursue the next phase of evolution — that it was the Cylons’ time. Therefore, we could dispense with what typically seems to have accompanied antagonists in stories like [the old "Battlestar Galactica"], where they have an axe to grind, a bloodthirsty agenda, a grizzly destiny that they’re trying to perpetrate — and somehow [if] we can just get away from them, we’ll be okay.

That all seems so old hat, and it felt like maybe you’d do that in a movie, but in a series you needed somehow — we’ve talked a lot about this — to emphasize with the antagonists, to feel that their point of view was justifiable, that it had legitimacy, that you could not only relate to it, but also sympathize with it. So we talked a lot about different cultures that found themselves faced with questions like that. How do we press on? How do we move forward? At one point, I remember we were talking about “Planet of the Apes” because [it] had that notion, that story about [apes vs. humans]. Human beings just sort of assumed that: “You guys [apes] are done. You had your time, and now it’s our time.” Then what would happen is that the apes just wouldn’t go away. In this story, we’re the apes. We’re the ones who were not as evolved and who won’t go away.

So I think in that regard, it always allowed us to continue to… It’s not that we haven’t depicted the Cylons as misbehaving. (laughter) We tend to maintain a sense of their having a reason for what they’re doing beyond bloodthirst and ennui.

Moore: Another thing about what’s happening on the Cylon side is that they’re a very young culture. They really have not been around that long, but they’re a full-blown society of sophisticated, thinking beings that are at a level of human understanding of what society is, and [they have] concepts of morality and philosophy. In some ways, they’ve evolved past us, but they’ve only been around for a few decades.

[In the beginning] they [are] very much in lockstep with one another. There’s unanimity among the models about what they should do and how to carry out the plan. As the series goes on, you see that start to fracture. You see that the models begin to assert independence, first from one another, then within the models themselves. They begin to assert a certain independence of thought. I think the challenges of that dynamic will inform very strongly the things that happen in the fourth season.

Desai: Right. Dan had some questions building on this because what you just said really gets into some of the parallels between what we’re seeing with the humans.

Daniel Solove: Yes. We start to see a little bit about how the Cylons start governing themselves, especially in season two and even more in season three. It is somewhat vague as to how the Cylons operate and how they govern themselves. There are some hints of democracy [in their government], but it’s not entirely so. You’ve explained the past that [the Cylons are] a very young society and you’ve deliberately kept [their modus operandi] somewhat vague. Can you elaborate a little bit on how are they starting to govern themselves? How do they envision their political system?

Moore: They started with sort of a democratic idea, but it was always unanimous. They always agreed on everything. In the backstory, the Cavil models — the Dean Stockwell models — objected early to certain ideas, but always went with the majority view and were always willing to acquiesce to that concept. In many decisions, they were in lockstep with one another. Once you got to the New Caprica experiment, then you can see there was open dissent. There were open arguments. The Sharons and the Sixes had unified as a bloc to treat the humans differently (to have a different relationship), and they convinced a majority of the Cylons to go along with that idea. They were all in it together, but you were starting to see that there were fractures forming within them. They were starting to line up on different sides, and those agendas would carry forward. [They] still [adhered to] the idea that there was no one that was superior [amongst them]; they had an egalitarian system where there were no formal leaders. There was no executive. There was no legislature. They were all together. The models were all equal to one another, and they all proceeded as a group. That was one of the defining characteristics of them as a society: that we are together.

[The Humanoid Cylons believed: "We were created because] God wanted us to go forward, and He has imbued us with souls, and He has given us this mission, and we are humanity’s children and His children. We are all on the same page and equal to one another.” Then you would see that as time went on, the characters (like the D’Annas) would start to assert themselves, even though no one else [among them] wanted them to. The D’Annas would start to take de facto control of situations and make de facto decisions without even consulting with the others. The Cavils started to get a little concerned about this dynamic.

The cylons, aboard a cylon ship

Solove: We definitely see — especially from the interview — that you both are students of history and have done a lot of thinking about political science and philosophy. So that raises the question: What are the political, legal, philosophical books that most influenced you as you were thinking about the show and writing the show?

Eick: Machiavelli, for starters. For me, [I mention Machiavelli's work] only because it seemed like that it dealt with one of the themes we’re talking about right now — about the morality of dissenting during a time of war and about the duties of leadership. The one I remember us talking about was Helter Skelter. (laughing) Well, maybe I was the only one talking about Helter Skelter, because it dealt with a similar idea of subculture leading itself to being in the position to inherit the mantle, as it were, [and to] take the baton and evolve forward. Of course, they were crazy, and the Cylons are deeply sane, but [indiscernible].

Moore: Yeah, I’m trying to think if there were specific books. There were a lot of books that came up, and I don’t remember if there was anything in particular. I’ve read a lot of Henry Kissinger’s work, and, in my mind, there was a lot of bubbling up of realpolitick, and making decisions as a president, or as a military leader, balancing the practical versus the idealistic. I remember his volume on diplomacy. I was reading, at some point during the process The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. It was fascinating because it was all about the birth of the American republic. I was fascinated with the young culture [of America at the time] and how they sort these things out. Everything was up for grabs [back then], I remember that being a really interesting idea early on. Neil Sheenan’s A Bright Shining Lie was on my bookshelf during a lot of the early going. [It explored] hopeless causes and realism, and tried to suss out what the truth was in a difficult situation.

I know that there weren’t a lot of direct correlations between any of these things [and what] we wrote. But [all these works helped us] deal with complicated issues, helped personalities [within the show] emerge, and provided answers for good and for bad. It’s a macro-level of watching the ebb and flow of history more than any specific story that was emblematic of what we were trying to do.

Dave Hoffman: Well, I think we’re out of time. We’re so grateful that you took so much time to talk with us. It was pretty fascinating. I know that there are lots of lawyers and, as Dan says, law professors who love the show and find your vision of the legal system’s reaction to catastrophe both frightening and motivating. I know that we are all looking forward to the next season. I guess the only question left is: Do you have massive spoilers you’d like to drop now?

(laughter)

Moore: Well, it’s going to be a rocky ride! It ain’t going to be an easy road to the end, let’s say it that way.

Desai: I guess the answer is “no” then.

Moore: No. (laughs)

Hoffman: We’re really grateful for you guys taking the time. Thank you so much!

Click here to read Part I of the interview.

Dave Hoffman, Deven Desai, and I are pleased to present Part III of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the hit television show, Battlestar Galactica.

Part I of our interview explored the role of law in the show, exploring topics such as the legal system, lawyers, trials and tribunals, torture, necessity vs. moral principles, and deference to the military.

Part II of our interview examined the political system and economic issues.

In Part III of our interview (the final part in this series), we discuss the cylons. How do the humans view the cylons? As mere machines? As quasi-human? Are the humans heading toward a recognition of more humane treatment of the cylons? Why did [...]]]>

Dave Hoffman, Deven Desai, and I are pleased to present Part III of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the hit television show, Battlestar Galactica.

Part I of our interview explored the role of law in the show, exploring topics such as the legal system, lawyers, trials and tribunals, torture, necessity vs. moral principles, and deference to the military.

Part II of our interview examined the political system and economic issues.

In Part III of our interview (the final part in this series), we discuss the cylons. How do the humans view the cylons? As mere machines? As quasi-human? Are the humans heading toward a recognition of more humane treatment of the cylons? Why did the cylons choose to try to annihilate the humans? How do the cylons govern themselves? What role does the cylons’ religion play in all this? We explore these questions and more, including what political and philosophical books most influenced Ron and David in their creation of the show. We learn why Adama changes his views about Boomer and accepts her as a person. And we try to coax out spoilers for the upcoming season.

Part III of the interview is 16 minutes, 15 seconds long. You can access it, along with Parts I and II, here.

UPDATE: The interview has now been transcribed. You can read Part I here, and Parts II and III here.

Dave Hoffman, Deven Desai, and I are pleased to present Part II of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the hit television show, Battlestar Galactica.

Part I of our interview explored the role of law in the show, exploring topics such as the legal system, lawyers, trials and tribunals, torture, necessity vs. moral principles, and deference to the military.

]]>

Dave Hoffman, Deven Desai, and I are pleased to present Part II of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the hit television show, Battlestar Galactica.

Part I of our interview explored the role of law in the show, exploring topics such as the legal system, lawyers, trials and tribunals, torture, necessity vs. moral principles, and deference to the military.

In Part II of our interview, Dave Hoffman interviews Ron and David about politics and the economy. How did the political system of the Twelve Colonies work prior to the cylon attack? After the destruction of the colonies, how does the economy work aboard the fleet? Why do people still continue to do their jobs without compensation? How does commerce work? Why do people still use money? Dave examines these fascinating questions and more.

Part II of the interview is 13 minutes, 57 seconds long. You can also access it, along with Part I, here.

Check back Tuesday morning, when we plan to post Part III of our interview — the final part — which addresses issues involving the cylons.

UPDATE: The interview has now been transcribed. You can read Part I here, and Parts II and III here.

We are thrilled to offer readers of Concurring Opinions an interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, creators of the hit television show Battlestar Galactica. Daniel Solove, Deven Desai, and David Hoffman ask the questions. We would like to thank Professor John Ip for suggesting some of the torture questions. Our interview lasts a little over an hour, and we’ll be providing it to you in several parts over the next few days.

Our goal was to explore some of the themes of the show in a deeper manner than many traditional interviews. Ron and David graciously agreed to give us an hour of their time, and we had a fascinating conversation with them.

Our interview is structured in three parts. [...]]]>

We are thrilled to offer readers of Concurring Opinions an interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, creators of the hit television show Battlestar Galactica. Daniel Solove, Deven Desai, and David Hoffman ask the questions. We would like to thank Professor John Ip for suggesting some of the torture questions. Our interview lasts a little over an hour, and we’ll be providing it to you in several parts over the next few days.

Our goal was to explore some of the themes of the show in a deeper manner than many traditional interviews. Ron and David graciously agreed to give us an hour of their time, and we had a fascinating conversation with them.

Our interview is structured in three parts. Part I, available in two files (see the end of this post to download), focuses on the issues of legal systems and morality. It examines the lawyers and trials in the show. It also examines how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security.

Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans’ political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet.

Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans’ treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically. Additionally, Part III will explore the religious issues involved in the show.

The new Battlestar Galactica, which premiered initially as a miniseries in 2003 on the SciFi Network, is only loosely based on the earlier show by the same name during 1978 and 1980. The new Battlestar Galactica is breathtaking science fiction, and it has widespread appeal beyond science fiction fans. Numerous critics have hailed it as one of the best shows on television. Time Magazine, for example, listed it as one of the top television shows and described it as “a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal.”

The show chronicles the struggle for survival of a small band of humans who escaped a devastating genocidal attack by intelligent robots called cylons. The humans created the cylons for use as slaves. The cylons rebelled and a war erupted between the humans and cylons. But a truce was reached, and the cylons disappeared. But forty years later, the cylons launched a massive surprise attack, destroying the human society (called the Twelve Colonies) with nuclear missiles. Only a small group of humans aboard spaceships survived.

The show depicts the humans’ difficult fight for survival and the tough choices they must make along the way. The cylons have developed technology to allow them to take human form, and some of the humans within the group of survivors are really cylons. More information about the show is here.

The show is heavily influenced by modern events, especially terrorism, war, and torture. In a time of emergency, how should we balance security and liberty? How do we deal with enemies who may be burrowed in among us? How does a society decimated in a war reconstitute its political, economic, and legal systems?

Battlestar Galactica was honored with a prestigious Peabody Award and twice as an official selection of the American Film Institute top television programs for 2005 and 2006.

Because the show explores so many interesting issues so deftly, it has attracted a large group of fans in the legal academy. We know of many law professors who count Battlestar Galactica as one of their favorite shows, and this is why we thought it would be fascinating to speak with the creators and writers of the show — Ron Moore and David Eick.

Ron Moore is a co-creator, executive producer, and writer of Battlestar Galactica. Previously, Ron wrote or co-wrote 27 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including the two-hour series finale “All Good Things,” for which he won a Hugo Award in 1994. That same year, Ron was honored with an Emmy Award nomination and was eventually promoted to producer. In 1994, Ron joined the writing staff of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as supervising producer and was elevated to co-executive producer the following year. Ron spent five seasons on the series until the end of its successful run in 1999. In the fall of 2002, he was named show-runner and executive producer of HBO’s critically-acclaimed one-hour drama Carnivale. In 2006 Ron was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series for his work on Battlestar Galactica. Ron studied political science at Cornell University, and he lives in California with his wife and three children. He has a blog, which he started during the Writer’s Guild Strike.

David Eick is also a co-creator, executive producer, and writer of Battlestar Galactica. Prior to his involvement in Battlestar Galactica, David was Executive Vice President of USA Cable Entertainment (USACE), where he was the company’s point person to the creative community and oversaw all aspects of the division, which developed, financed and acquired product for initial exhibition on USA Network and SCI FI Channel. While there, the studio produced USA Network’s critically lauded drama series Touching Evil, as well as the hit series Monk. Prior to his network experience, David spent six years at Renaissance Pictures, where he held a variety of positions and produced the hugely successful syndicated series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. David also co-developed and launched its successful spinoff, Xena: Warrior Princess. Additionally, David also produced many others shows. He recently developed The Bionic Woman for NBC. David graduated from the University of Redlands in California with a BA in political science. He resides in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

For readers unfamiliar the show, you should catch up by watching the DVDs of the first few seasons. Currently, the show is about to start its fourth and final season on Friday, April 4th at 10PM Eastern.

Season 1 on DVD

Season 2.0 on DVD (episodes 1-10)

Season 2.5 on DVD (episodes 11-20)

Season 3 on DVD (not yet available, but coming soon)

Additionally, you can watch the movie Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a made-for-TV movie that premiered in fall 2007.

In this interview, we explore the legal, political, economic, and social ideas raised by the show. Our interview is structured as follows:

PART I-A: LEGAL SYSTEMS

Topics: The legal system, lawyers, trials, and tribunals.

Length: 11 minutes, 51 seconds

File Size: Approximately 11 MB

PART I-B: TORTURE, NECESSITY, AND MORALITY

Topics: Torture, necessity vs. moral principles, deference to the military

Length: 18 minutes, 1 second

File Size: Approximately 16.5 MB

PART II: POLITICS AND ECONOMY

Topics: Politics and commerce

Length: 13 minutes, 57 seconds

File Size: Approximately 13 MB

PART III: CYLONS

Topics: Cylons and humans, cylon rights, cylon society and governance, religion

Length: 16 minutes, 15 seconds

File Size: Approximately 15 MB

Read the Transcripts — The interview has now been transcribed. You can read Part I here, and Parts II and III here.