Imaginary Worlds - Under a Red Moon

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Ronald D. Moore is probably best known for rebooting Battlestar Galactica as a gritty political commentary in the early 2000s. His latest show For All Mankind on AppleTV Plus imagines what if the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. in the space race and planted the hammer and sickle flag on the moon. But Moore spins that nightmare scenario into a positive alternative history where a newly invigorated space race not only gives NASA the budget it wanted in the 1970s, but it forces the agency to be far more inclusive than it actually was in real history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Longtime listeners to this show probably know that I'm obsessed with all things having to do with the Cold War. That goes back to my childhood in the 1980s, when I was a nerdy kid who was fascinated by geopolitics. In fact, I did a whole episode about Soviet science fiction.

I'm also a big fan of alternate histories. I did an episode about the TV show Man in the High Castle, which imagined what if the Nazis had won the Second World War. So I was really intrigued to learn about the new show For All Mankind on Apple TV+, which imagines what if the Soviet Union had landed a man on the moon before the United States. And the opening scene of the pilot gave me chills. Everyday Americans are gathered around TV sets, in bars, offices, or living rooms, watching Walter Conkite's historic coverage of the moon landing. It's a moment in history that we've seen many times before. And if, like me, you were born after the moon landing, it's kind of hard to get into the state of mind of those people

who still didn't know what was going to happen. But this time, the man inside the spacesuit is speaking Russian. And the flag that he's holding on those flickering black and white TVs is the hammer and sickle. Okay, we have the translation now. These are the words that cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to set foot on the moon, spoke just moments ago.

I take this step for my country, for my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life, knowing that today is but one small step on a journey that someday will take us all to the stars. But what really got me curious about this show is the person behind it, Ronald D. Moore. Ron Moore is probably best known for rebooting Battlestar Galactica in the early 2000s. He took a show from the 70s that was considered a Star Wars knockoff and turned it into a critically acclaimed allegory for the war on terror. Ron Moore is also a lifelong Trekkie.

His first job in Hollywood was writing for The Next Generation, which was like a childhood dream come true. He was also an executive producer on Deep Space Nine, and he famously killed off Captain Kirk in the movie Star Trek Generations. So the question for me was not just what would happen if the USSR landed a man on the moon before the U.S. did? But what would Ron Moore do with that premise? I was able to reach him on the Sony lot in Culver City, Los Angeles, where he's starting to work on season two. And I began by asking him whether he remembered watching the moon landing as a kid.

Yes, I do. I was four or five years old, and we were living in San Clemente, California. My parents brought myself and my brother into the living room to watch the moon landing. And it was on our black and white TV. And my brother, who was nine months old at the time, actually, I'm not making this up, took his first steps that same night, which lived in family legend for many years. But I was very taken with the event. It was something big and special, and they were making us watch it. And there's men on the moon, they're on the moon. And I remember looking up at the moon that night and

other nights and asking my mom, why can't I see the astronauts up there? And she tried to explain it so far away you can't see them. But the image of looking up at the moon and trying to see them kind of imprinted itself in my brain. And then I was really interested in watching more things on TV. And I watched the other Apollo flights and landings and recoveries and all that. And then I was just desperate to see anything with a spaceship on TV. And that led me eventually to Lost in Space and then to Star Trek, which literally changed my life. And so my whole life kind of in some ways, certainly my professional life can date back to that night of when Neil Armstrong took the small step. And then I understand too, you wanted to be a fighter pilot too when you were a kid, but was it your vision was the problem? Yeah, I wanted to be a pilot, wanted to be an astronaut.

And like eighth grade, ninth grade, I had to wear glasses. And I discovered to my horror that at that time, in order to be a military pilot, you had to have 20-20 vision. And there was no way around it. They didn't even have LASIK or any of that stuff back in those days. And I was crushed. I mean, in retrospect, I look back and I'm like, I don't know that that would have been the path for me. I was terrible at math.

And they like you to be an engineer or have a sound grounding in physics or hard sciences to go down that path anyway. But it was really the thing I wanted. I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to go into space, and it was a dream of mine. Do you think that's also affected, I mean, given how often you've worked on shows about space, that you sort of have lived vicariously through some of these characters in that way? Oh, absolutely. And, you know, my childhood, you know, obsession with Star Trek, you know, really defined a lot of myself, you know, as a young man and into my adulthood. And I dreamed about it and wrote short stories about it and fancied my, always thought about what it'd be like to be in space in the Starship Enterprise.

And then, you know, getting to actually write on the show and walking down the corridors of the set. You know, there were times I would walk through the set, through the corridors of the Enterprise and pretend I was really there. I mean, I've, it's part of me that's, I don't know I've ever, you know, really left that part behind.

I'm, God, I'm jealous just imagining. No, jealous. Just imagining you being able to walk down that set. I could go down and sit in the captain's chair on the bridge on my lunch hour. Let's put it that way. Wow. What's on the other side of that screen? Uh, it depends. I mean, on the other side of the screen, sometimes there was a big drop that was like a physical, uh, black piece of velvet with, uh, rhinestones imitating stars. And other times it was a blue screen. And other times it was just the camera crew. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. That totally makes sense. So I understand the inspiration for this show was that you were having a conversation with somebody and that they told you that the

Russians were much closer than we realized to landing a man on the moon. So who was that person? And were they involved with NASA? Yes, that person was Garrett Reisman, who was a former astronaut. And it was in the context of I had been already talking with Zach Van Amburg, who's an exec at Sony. He was at Sony Television for many years. And he and I had discussed briefly doing a project set at NASA in the 70s many years ago that never got off the ground. And when Zach went to Apple, he called me over and said, hey, let's sit down and chat. And he said, oh, I still think about that NASA show.

What if we do it now? What if we do NASA in the 70s and do like a Mad Men character piece? And I thought about it and said, that's great, but the story of NASA in the 70s, at least in my opinion, is kind of sad because it's smaller and smaller budgets, it's lower and lower ambitions. And what if we did the other story? What if you do the alternate story where the space program gets bigger and bigger and we get to do the things that I thought we were going to do as a kid and we do the alternate history version? Zach said, well, that's interesting, but why would the program have kept going past the moon? And I wasn't sure. So I called up Garrett, who I knew

from my days on Battlestar Galactica. Garrett was a fan of the show and we had met while I was doing that show and he was literally in space. And so I called up Garrett, who was working as a flight director at SpaceX at the time. And he said, well, a lot of people just don't realize how close the Soviets came to landing on the moon. And I said, really? Because I didn't know that part. I knew the US program really well, but I just never really read that much about the Soviet program. And he said, yeah, the truth is, even though the Soviets for years denied it, they denied for a long time that they'd ever even tried. The truth was in secret, they were trying really hard. They had developed a rocket. They actually built the lunar lander. They had developed the suits. They were trying to do it, and it just fell apart for a lot of reasons. And I realized as

soon as he said that, that the notion of the Russians beating us to the moon would be the catalyst for the whole show. Like, oh, then everything would change. And then I get why the Americans go into space, because now they have something to prove and they've been beaten yet again. And it all just, it was one of those moments of epiphany. I was just like, oh, that's the show. Well, it's interesting because you were saying how you were disappointed, you know, in the 70s as a kid, in terms of what ended up with the space program.

It's interesting because so much science fiction at the time too was imagining all these things that were going to happen because they all thought, you know, I mean, I remember watching some of the footage of Arthur C. Clarke with Walter Cronkite and he's just telling him, well, this is what's going to happen in the 1970s, moon bases. And so did you look back at those plans that NASA had or any of the science fiction someone like Arthur C. Clarke had come up with back then? We definitely went back and combed through a lot of, there were a lot of plans at NASA and different proposals. And some of them have been published in other forums or on the internet. And it was astonishing how many proposals there were. And there were all kinds of things from moon bases and different launch vehicles and different orbital platforms and just tons and tons of stuff. So it was really

about sorting through those proposals, some of which were not attainable within the time frame of the show, which is set in 1969 to the early 70s. Some of those were bigger ideas that could only be accomplished after decades. And we had to kind of zero in on, well, what could they have done within this time frame? But it was very useful and it was fascinating to see how, you know, energetic NASA was. And they did have big proposals and big ideas. And, you know, when the Nixon administration began, they went into Nixon, I think not too long after the Apollo 11 landing, if I remember the sequence of events correctly, and said, okay, here's the big proposals. We want to do a moon base. We want to do space stations, and we want to do the shuttle, and we want to go to Mars. And Nixon said, no, getting none of that, except we'll do the space

shuttle. And that was the only thing that they greenlit at that point. But they had much bigger plans. One of the things I think was so fascinating is the way that everything's shaped by politics, which is something that had not even occurred to me, but it makes so much sense. How did you start thinking about, okay, Soviet's land on the moon, you're talking about the NASA aspect, but then the political aspect? Well, one thing kind of had to lead to the other, because the decision to go forward past Apollo is a political one. The decision to compete with the Soviets in a big way is fundamentally a political decision.

And then what are the trade-offs you're going to do to make that happen are political. Are we going to get out of Vietnam early? Well, that's a White House-level political decision. So the story kind of forces you to have to deal with that. And the choice we made early was, okay, we're not going to cast Richard Nixon. We're not going to build the Oval Office. We're not going to go shoot those scenes. Let's let those historical figures be

themselves. Let's show them in videotape and film archives and still photos and create our own dialogue to give it that sense of reality. Because none of the people at NASA in our show get to make those decisions. So let's keep those as real people, but keep them on the periphery a little bit, but have enough of them so you understand why they're doing what they're doing. And it's also part of the fun of just watching the timeline change. Yeah, I love the device of creating basically like fake tapes that sound like Watergate tapes that no one would have even heard at the time. I mean, they were really convincing. You know how the press is going to play this, don't you?

The New York Times is going to say that Kennedy started the moon race, Johnson ran it, and then Nixon tripped at the goal line. That's what it's going to be. They're going to try and hang us around my neck, but they're not going to succeed. No, sir. I'll tell you that right goddamn now. Not Nixon. to succeed. No, sir. I'll tell you that right goddamn now. Not Nixon. The way you've repositioned Ted Kennedy even is kind of fascinating and how the Nixon 72 reelection campaign, suddenly so much of the space race is dependent on that.

Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things I hadn't really realized was that the infamous Chappaquiddick incident took place literally just a couple of weeks before Apollo 11's landing. So it was pretty natural in our world that, well, Teddy's probably not going to that party. He's probably going back to Washington in this national moment of crisis to confer with other leaders, to have hearings, and so on. So once you make that decision, boom, a lot changes. Now he is a viable candidate for president in 1972. And we know from history that Nixon was very worried about Teddy running against him. So it would come up immediately in Nixon's sort of political calculation that if Teddy's going to these hearings, he's probably going to grandstand at those hearings on a platform

that basically saying, you know, my fallen brother started the space race and the Nixon administration frittered it away. That's a pretty, pretty decent platform and seems very plausible. And we sort of said, OK, let's go in that direction. So it all kind of spun out of just the historical, you know, coincidence of Chep Quiddick and Apollo 11. Well, one of the big storylines, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler since a lot of the show is about this, is that this new super pumped up version of the space race forces NASA to be more inclusive than it actually was in real history. I mean, in terms of putting women in the moon, people of color. When did you come up with that part of the show? That was very early.

That was before we even got the pickup. It was part of the original pitch and conversation about the potential of the show that was very early that was before we even got the pickup it was part of the original pitch and conversation about the potential of the show because we started i started thinking about well how would it change the world and what are the ways in which it could change the world and i really and i was just mulling over the soviet program during the us program and remembered that the russians had put the first woman into space and that that was a thing. And I thought, well, if they put a woman on the moon now in this environment of we keep beating you over and over again, that the second blow would really fire up the Americans. They just beat us putting getting

on the moon at all. And now they've put a woman on the moon and that there would be people that would be up in arms. Well, hey, why don't we have any women astronauts anyway? What's up with you, NASA? And then that would be a quick way for the Nixon administration to try to score some kind of victory, some kind of political, hey, we do have women and here's one, you know, and that it would be done in a cynical way for a PR move, but that it could open the door to a larger cultural and sociological change in the United States at the same time, which was really kind of the great opportunity of the show to show how some of these events could actually move progress forward, even if they weren't intending to. Yeah, I love the dialogue in the scene where one of Nixon's

lackeys is talking to Deke Slayton from NASA. Can't just put a woman on the moon. She has to be an astronaut. There are procedures, training, tests. And I can't just train one woman. I'll need at least 20 candidates to find one who can pass muster. For God's sake, Deke, this is just something to throw the women's livers in the New York Times. You don't need to go through the whole rigmarole. Just find a nice enough looking lady pilot, put her in a space suit,

teach her to walk down the goddamn ladder and take her picture. Nobody gets into a spacecraft in this program that I haven't certified. The second that changes, my resignation will be on your desk. It's funny because when I was watching the show, I mean, I kept looking up stuff to see what was real and what wasn't. And I had never heard of the Mercury 13 program where women were seriously trained to be astronauts in the 50s. Did you know about that before you started working on the show? I did not.

But as we were starting to do research on the show, we discovered information about the Mercury 13, which was fascinating. And then by happenstance, while we were in development and we were working on those scripts, suddenly there was this documentary on the Mercury 13 that we discovered. And it was like, oh, here's more research for it. So it became like, this is just kind of the perfect moment because none of us had heard about this. It was a real thing. Now here's some real footage of it. Oh, this is just going to work so well. So it was just one of those happy, happy pieces of serendipity. And why was there so much, why was

this sort of a no-go, as they say in the space program, in terms of having women on the moon or in NASA for a long time? Well, Mercury 13 specifically was sort of an outside program that was putting women through the same tests as the Mercury astronauts and went through all the psychological and physical testing of them and was moving forward when it was killed. Like they stepped in and killed the program before they actually went to Pensacola for flight training. And there was controversy within the agency. I think it was happening at a time when I think the American program was already struggling to catch up with the Soviets.

There were hearings before Congress. There's a scene in the show where John Glenn is talking to Deke Slayton, and he says this thing about, well, you know, in the way our society is, women stay home and men go out and do these things, and that's just not what women are really about. There's a reason that being a test pilot used to be a requirement for this job. Experience actually matters.

You have to face the facts, Deke. Men go off and fight the wars and fly the planes. Women can't do what we do. It's just a fact of our social order. That's actually a quote, like John Glenn actually said. And he said that publicly in a press conference because of the Mercury 13. And he was explaining why he thought that that wasn't a good idea to do. How did you decide to make the decisions in terms of who, which real people to have kind of in the background, who to really create, turn into characters, and who to invent from scratch? Well, we kind of decided early on that we were going to, that the primary characters on the show, the series regulars, would be ours, because we wanted to have the most flexibility and, you know, the wherewithal to change them, to invent them. And you didn't

want to have to be tied to anybody historically in that sense. Then it was, okay, we're going to be at NASA. And one of the first questions you have as well as Neil Armstrong in this world, is the crew of Apollo 11 in this world. And we kind of quickly realized, yes, they have to be because it would be really strange to suddenly have Apollo 11 and have you know Frank Brown and Jim Thomas as the astronauts that wasn't going to work and it was going to take the audience out of the story okay so let's embrace that there are real people in this in this universe who are they okay they have the Apollo 11 crew now let's talk about mission control well Deke Slayton was the head of the astronaut office that's a great character and kind of the coach or you know father figure of the astronauts let's talk about mission control. Well, Deke Slayton was the head of the astronaut office. That's a great character and kind of the coach or, you know, father figure of the astronauts. Let's

do that. And Gene Kranz is kind of iconic as the flight director. Wernher von Braun is sort of this interesting, complicated character that a lot of people don't know the real history of it. Let's do that. But let's play most of those characters as supporting characters so that they're not, we don't have to then reinvent who they are. We wanted to try to keep the historical characters pretty much who they were in real life. In a moment, Ron Moore discusses the hardest part of creating his alternate reality. And the thing that stumped him was not high tech. It was an everyday object from the 1970s that just doesn't exist anymore. That's after the break. Going into space and being the first person on a planet is an

epic quest. It's almost like a hero's quest from ancient times, like the legends of Hercules, Odysseus, or Beowulf. The Parcast Network's original series, Mythology, looks at stories like that, perilous journeys to face gods or defeat monstrous forces. Every Tuesday, Mythology delves deep into the history, origins, and meaning of myths. Each episode highlights a parable taken from ancient cultures and brings it to life with an ensemble cast of talented voice actors and high-quality audio production. Thank you. Discover the captivating and cautionary tales that shaped our modern day world in the Parcast original mythology. Visit Parcast.com slash mythology or search for mythology in the Spotify app and listen free today. Today's episode is brought to you by Skillshare, an online learning community with thousands of classes covering all sorts of creative and entrepreneurial skills, from creative writing to design to productivity and much more.

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I asked him once he started spinning off into this alternate timeline, what excited him the most as a filmmaker and as a kid who used to dream about what NASA could have accomplished? Doing a moon base was really an exciting idea. Like, OK, let's do a realistic version of what the first U.S. moon base would be. And how would they put it together? How big with it? How many people? You know, just starting at ground zero and not taking it as just a given. Because I think in a lot of alternate history scenarios or science fiction scenarios, you just, it's all just happened. And somehow it all magically came about. And there was something fun and interesting about walking through the steps. Okay, pick the landing site.

Okay, why this one? And are you going to look for water? Where would water potentially be? If you had to get a moon base tomorrow, how could you pull that off? Well, maybe you'd repurpose Skylab or you'd do something like that. And you try, it was really fun walking through the different scenarios and alternate history, uh, scenario and alternate history to kind of figure out how you get from here to there. And what was the production design like? Cause you're creating something that's kind of retro futuristic and that, um, you know, using 1970s technology to create something that doesn't even exist now. Yeah. I mean, it was, but that was the challenge. It was like, you know, we limited the production design to what was available at the time. And our production designer, Dan Bishop,

was very into the research and really sweated all the details about what was available, what were the materials available, was the technology available. If you had to put a moon base together, what does it have to have? It has to have this kind of life support. It has to have this kind of like, you know, energy requirements. It has to have an ability for where they're going to eat and sleep. And he walked through each one of the parameters and said, okay, how could you accomplish that in the early 1970s? And from that came the plans for our moon base. Did you have moments, you know, when you're saying you got to sit in the captain's chair, did you have moments when you created the moon base

and you're walking around? Oh, yeah. And you're like, this is pretty cool. The moon base was pretty great. It's a great set. And when you walked into it, it was fully enclosed. It was a 360 set. It had a roof on it and a floor.

And, you know, when you looked out the window, there was a backing out there of the moon surface. So you felt like you were there. I mean, it was a very realistic environment. And when we were shooting in there, the cast really liked it because it really helped them get into the scene like you really were on the moon. Well, and I'm just curious, in making this show, what were some of the hardest things that you didn't anticipate

that once you started making it, you're like, I never thought of this. Wow, this is actually going to be really hard. It was harder and trickier to recreate one-sixth gravity on the moon than I thought, because I, like probably everyone else, has an idea of what that's supposed to look like, because you've seen the film and tape so often. But when you really start breaking it down, you suddenly realize that all those films that you're used to seeing look very different from one another. They move at different rates. There were different frame rates. There were different formats in which they were recorded. What's the light really look

like on the moon? How do people really move on the moon? And you can look at a lot of the actual historical footage and come away with very different impressions of what it is. On a more mundane level, we have all these characters with television sets in their living rooms and watching them in the bar and so on. And our set decorator was like, it's almost impossible to find an actual picture tube. And I was like, what? CRTs used to roam the earth like the dinosaurs. I mean, there were literally millions of them. And then an asteroid wiped them out. They're almost all gone. They're like collector's items. Even the junkyards don't have them anymore. They're fragile. Most of them are just shattered and broken.

And it was like crazy that it was really difficult for us to find CRTs to the point where we had to just use some flat screens and put like a piece of beveled glass over the front to make it look like a CRT. So now I know you have a pickup for season two already. I mean, how far is the show going to go into like the 1980s? Well, like I said, I don't want to say really where we're going. We're going definitely through the years. I think it's a multi-generational show. We're definitely going to get to the 80s and beyond. I think it's, you know, the show will continue to grow and expand because I think the concept is you want to see how the space program changes and expands and grows bigger and bigger and how it changes the world we know. And

you can really only tell that story if you're willing to jump through the years. But it won't be like Moonraker where the cosmonauts and the astronauts are shooting lasers at each other. Oh, one would hope not. I actually do. I do find Cold War alternate realities really interesting. And especially one of the idea of the Soviet Union pushing further into space. Has it ever been done before? Because I think 2010, the sequel to 2001, is the only time I've seen that before. That's the only one that I'm aware of. I mean, I know there have been graphic novels that did similar things where they pushed like a Soviet future where the Soviets were still around and they were

into deep space and building empires. I remember seeing something like that years ago. But that's like the only one I can think of that. And yeah, 2010. Are there do you think are there things about alternate histories like certain times that go wrong that bothers you where you're thinking, yeah, why do they always do this? And we're definitely not going to do that in this show. I think the thing I thought the most for this show was I just wanted to do an optimistic spin on it. What they don't typically do is they don't usually change the timeline for the better.

It's usually the timeline has changed in some way, shape, or form, and it becomes much, much worse. Yeah, the Nazis win the Second World War or something horrible happens and we have to live with those consequences. And I was intrigued with the idea that our change, while initially a failure, was actually going to make a better future and make a better world. And I thought that was a great concept that I hadn't seen before. And that was always the thing we kept tacking back to again and again. Yeah, did you also, another thing that I think this showed us really effectively, and I know if this was on purpose or not, but by making an alternate history, I was like on the edge of my seat, like Apollo 11. I had no idea if they were going to land or not. I mean, I, I mean that,

that I wonder if also something like this brings back just the excitement and drama that, because so many, uh, there's so many 50th anniversary specials that have tried to do that, but I feel like this did it the most for me in a way. Yeah, because you've seen the story a thousand times and it always has a happy ending. Well, when you change the timeline of what we did and you start playing with it, suddenly everything's on the table again. Now those men really are in jeopardy. We really could have killed them. The audience, I think, was holding their breath. I'm hoping holding their breath in that last sequence going, those crazy guys, especially that Ron Moore, he killed Captain Kirk.

He could do anything. They might really kill Neil Armstrong. And that's going to bum me out, man. That is literally what I was thinking, except I forgot about Captain Kirk. Yeah. Well, I'm perfectly willing to lean into that, you know, because I think you want the audience to feel the jeopardy. You know, space travel and space exploration is inherently dangerous. But we've now watched you know over and over again what really happened and it always has a happy ending you know it's over and over again but they're okay even apollo 13 but it has a happy ending and we wanted to restore some of the tension and jeopardy you know and true danger that those missions had and that you know then i think

lets the audience lean forward and give themselves over to the drama and feel the suspense and root for their heroes and be afraid and cry when things go tragically wrong and feel elated when things go wonderfully right. Well, I mean, the big action now in the space race is billionaires. Is that something that excites you? Or do you think this is overall a good thing? I think it's a great thing because I think it's rekindled public interest. The billionaires are doing things that no one else is doing. I mean, they're doing brave things and they're testing

new technologies and they're doing dramatic things like when SpaceX launched those two rockets side by side and landed them back on the platform side by side. It's an amazing piece of video. It looks like something out of a movie. And putting the car in space is a brilliant piece of PR. That's a brilliant move. And I was very taken with that image of that astronaut sitting in that car floating off into the cosmos. Because space travel is fundamentally on some level about inspiring people. We lift our eyes in a very literal way. We look up to the heavens. We look at those stars. We wonder what's behind them. We dream about what it would be like to go to these distant, distant places. And the billionaires space race at the moment are the only ones who seem to be actively pursuing that flight of imagination and inspiration. And it seems to have caught the public's, you know,

attention and the public is kind of into it. And I think that's all a great thing. Do you hope that it may spark also more kind of positive sci-fi? You know, maybe. I don't know that I look to make a big creative change because then I don't need those competitors. I'd rather that we were the only positive sci-fi out there so we could corner that market. But yeah, I mean, it's good to have a variety of pieces. And certainly you could argue that, you know, sci-fi has been a bit dominated by the dystopian view of the future and that it's all really dark and grimy and horrible. And there's certainly always going to be, you know, interest in portraying that. I love Blade Runner, you know, and I love Alien. I love all those worlds. But

you don't want them to be the only take on the future. There should be room for places like ours or places like Star Trek that do present a more positive and optimistic view of where we could all go someday. I was thinking about your career and I was thinking about how most of your shows have been on these smaller niche networks. The Star Trek shows were on UPN. Battlestar Galactica was on the SyFy network, Outlander was on the Starz network, and this is on Apple TV. And I was also thinking about The Expanse, which got canceled by the SyFy network,

even though it was critically acclaimed. And then Jeff Bezos saved it because he loved the show and he put it on Amazon Prime. So I guess my question is, do you think it's hard to get sci-fi TV shows made on a TV budget given that sci-fi is inherently expensive and often has a more limited audience? Yeah, it's always tricky. I mean, it's certainly hard. Television budgets are nowhere near a feature budget, so you always have to make those compromises.

But I don't think that's really the key factor. I mean, arguably one of the best science fiction shows of all time is Twilight Zone. And another one is Star Trek, the original. And neither of those shows had huge budgets for the time because they were about ideas and they were about concepts. And they were, you know, they stoked people's imaginations. And that's what science fiction does best. I think a mistake that does happen in this town, both in terms of television and feature film, is that when you say you're going to do a science fiction piece, then they think, oh, it has to be Star Wars,

or it has to be a huge action-adventure, and you have to have elaborate special effects and lots of things blowing up, because that's what sci-fi is. And sci-fi at its best is about ideas and concepts and ethical dilemmas and questioning the nature of what it is to be human. And to do that, you don't really require a gigantic budget. Not that I'm turning down a big budget, because I want more money to do my show, just like everybody else is.

But it's not about that at its core. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. And special thanks to Ronald D. Moore. that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. And special thanks to Ronald D. Moore. When I talked to Ron, I decided not to mention the fact that we had actually talked before 10 years ago. I was working for the show Studio 360 at WNYC, and I interviewed him for a series called AHA Moments, where artists would talk about the work that inspired them. And he talked about his childhood love of Star Trek.

And as they say on Battlestar Galactica, all this has happened before and will happen again. So hopefully I will get to talk to Ron Moore again someday in the future, either in this timeline or an alternate one. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emulinski. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.