You gotta love it when the person transcribing an interview doesn’t quite know what the people are talking about. From ComingSoon.net‘s account of a Q&A; between Harlan Ellison and Battlestar Galactica writer-producer Ronald D. Moore:
Q: The venue has changed and there is now a supernatural quality. Something like the force is at work. Can you talk about that?
Moore: Well, I sort of felt that as the religious aspects of the show were becoming more and more prominent and they were starting to dominate plot lines and certain character attributes, you had to sort of make a choice at some level of whether that was all bulls**t or not. Does it mean something? Is all this worship just about talk and about made up religions that don’t mean anything or is there possibility of something greater? It’s the extensionalism question. Is this all that I am? Is there something more? Why am I here? If all the characters on the show are asking themselves that, I felt that on some level I wanted to sort of give it a hint that maybe they’re not all fools. Maybe there is some greater truth that they’re all struggling towards. That none of them can see perfectly and so I started to fetter in ideas that could not be explained by rational means, but to never really come out and say, God is behind the curtain, you know. But, I wanted to add elements of it. I just felt like I think one of the things that I had noticed that working in “Star Trek” and science fiction was that mainstream films science fiction tended to shy away from this subject.
I assume Moore actually said “existentialist”. But who knows?
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