By Chris Snellgrove | Published
One of the things that makes Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica reboot so successfully that it was basically everything Star Trek wasn't. While Gene Roddenberry's classic show was about the hopeful exploration of the cosmos, Moore's series focused on the great fight for human survival after a genocidal attack by the Cylons.
Apart from the differences between franchises, Battlestar Galactica was actually inspired by Star Trek to create Cloud 9, a human spaceship whose interior looks like a fertile, alien planet.
How Star Trek Created Cloud 9
I Battlestar Galactica the reboot introduced Cloud 9 in the episode “Colony Day,” a political episode that required a slight change in setting. Showrunner Moore wanted to introduce some outer spaces to the show to keep it from feeling too claustrophobic, but he also wanted to avoid Galactica visiting a new planet every week, a la Star Trek. The solution was to launch Cloud 9, a civilian ship whose interior looks like the planet's exterior.
At this point, you may be wondering why Battlestar Galactica the show and other producers think the series needs Code 9 in the first place. The short answer is that if the show never takes its characters to new places, viewers will start going crazy just like the characters they love. This is one of the main reasons that Galacticaa show about characters living in space 24/7, has still found plenty of opportunities to visit Caprica and other planets.
A lot of that exploration happened later as Ronald Moore got comfortable with having these characters explore strange new worlds. However, the Battlestar Galactica the show wanted to create Cloud 9 in Season 1 so that the writers didn't have to take a giant ship and its heroes to a new world every week, like this. Star Trek: The Original Series or The Next Generation. Thanks to Cloud 9 (the ship inside of which looks like a planet), the show can provide a visual change of speed as needed without forcing the subject ship to make any deviation.
If only the presenter was like that or anyone otherwise, we probably wouldn't have gotten a new ship. Our heroes can simply visit a new planet every week, a formula made famous by Kirk and Spock. However, Ronald Moore got his start in show business by writing Star Trek: The Next Generationand he got that job in large part because of his passion The Original Series (he even became a TNG Klingon expert due to his love of TOS). When he started running his own show, Moore seemed to want to do something different, so Battlestar Galactica introduced the Cloud 9 to bite off Trek's style.
As hardcore Battlestar Galactica fans know, Cloud 9 didn't come to the end of the series. Instead, this strange ship is destroyed by a nuclear device at the hands of version Six and its separation from Dr. Baltar led to the downfall of our heroes. But we wouldn't have this ship on display everything if not for Star Trek and its “planet of the week” trope that Ron Moore desperately wanted to avoid. Ultimately he succeeded (so we all do!) in creating a standalone sci-fi series that boldly went where Trek had never gone before.
