Ronald D. Moore

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[00:00:29] Welcome back, listeners of The BIG Sci-Fi Podcast. Today, we are beyond excited to welcome a true legend in the world of science fiction. Someone whose storytelling has shaped some of the most iconic and groundbreaking sci-fi television of our time. We're talking about none other than Ronald D. Moore. If you're a Star Trek fan, you likely know his name. Ron Moore was a key writer and producer on Star Trek The Next Generation, helping to craft some of the series' most memorable episodes.

[00:00:59] He then became one of the driving forces behind Deep Space Nine, where he pushed Trek into darker and more serialized storytelling. And of course, he co-wrote Star Trek First Contact, widely regarded as one of the best Trek films ever made. But his influence didn't stop there. After Star Trek, Moore went on to completely redefine science fiction television with Battlestar Galactica,

[00:01:23] a series that took the genre to bold new heights with its gritty realism, deep philosophical questions, and complex characters. He also brought his storytelling expertise to Outlander, blending historical fiction with time travel in a way that has captivated audiences worldwide. And more recently, he's been at the helm of For All Mankind, which if you haven't seen it yet, you gotta see this. Stop now and see this. It's an alternate history of the space race that explores what could have been

[00:01:51] if humanity had never stopped reaching for the stars. Today, we are diving into his incredible career, his approach to crafting immersive sci-fi worlds, and what it takes to write compelling, character-driven stories in a genre often defined by spectacle. So buckle up. It's going to be an amazing conversation. Guys, let's give a warm welcome to the one and only Ronald D. Moore. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. We're really happy. Let's jump right in.

[00:02:19] And I'd like you to tell us a little bit about your background, just what drew you to Hollywood in general to start with. Well, you know, I'd always written, you know, growing up, short stories and things, and wrote a play in high school, which no one had done in my high school. I came from a very small town called Chowchilla in the Central Valley of California, like 4,500 people when I was growing up there.

[00:02:46] And I always liked to write, but being a writer wasn't a real job where I grew up, and I didn't know any writers, so it just kind of seemed like a fantasy thing, and then really take it seriously as something I wanted to be, until I just had nothing else. Like, I went to college, thought I wanted to be a lawyer, kind of quickly discovered that being a lawyer was not what I thought it was, and that I really wanted to be Perry Mason. I really wanted to make big courtroom speeches in dramatic ways, and that should have told me something right there.

[00:03:14] And I flunked out of college, I went to Cornell, I left in my senior year. If you just don't go to class long enough, eventually they said, you know what, you're not really in school here anyway, so go do something else. And so I started life over and moved to L.A. with a friend of mine who had graduated the year before as a film student, and started over, decided I was going to be a writer, you know, living in Hollywood, and just started again. Yeah. That's funny, your comment about the lawyers, because of where I met you last fall,

[00:03:43] was at the Beyond Earth Institute's annual conference, which was 90% lawyers. Yeah. I know a lot of lawyers are great people, but they work way too hard. It's just not that much. And space lawyers. It wasn't fun. Yeah, yeah. Space lawyers in particular. Yes. The space lawyers have, I found them kind of fun, as I've gotten to know a few. But yes, that was just kind of funny that you brought that up. I feel connected to you, Mr. Moore already, because I, too, had a college tell me,

[00:04:12] what are you doing here? You're not really. So that story resonates with me a bit. So were you a Star Trek fan before you were writing Trek scripts? And how deep of a Star Trek fan were you? I'm a hardcore Star Trek fan since I was a child. You know what I mean? SC937-0176. CEC is Captain Kirk's serial number. Let me just put it that way.

[00:04:42] Oh, that's amazing. I grew up in the 70s. My interest in Trek sort of came out of my interest in the space program, because I saw, I was a little kid, and I saw Neil Armstrong walking the moon. And it really sort of affected me, and I was just fascinated with rockets and space. So I watched the early Apollo missions, and then it was anything on TV that had a spaceship in it, which led to Lost in Space. And then that took me to Star Trek, and I was hooked, and I was a Trekkie.

[00:05:11] Totally, absolute Star Trek fan, fanatic. Growing up in a little town in the 70s, I didn't know there was fandom was out there. There was no internet. It wasn't until I started buying magazines, Starlog magazine was the first magazine I ever picked up at a drugstore and realized that there was a fandom and that there was this world out there of other people who loved the show as much as I did. And it just meant a lot to me. It was like, you know, it gave me a view on the world.

[00:05:39] It gave me a sense of ethics and politics and, you know, made me think about things and made me think about themes and ideas that hadn't occurred to me. And as I grew up, as I grew older, you know, the show just got deeper and richer to me, and I was in love with it completely, you know, well before I ever wrote for it. Yeah. You might say everything I learned in life, I learned from Star Trek. It's kind of true. Yeah, it's true about a lot of us. It was formative.

[00:06:09] It formed a lot of my thinking and who I wanted to be and who I admired and, you know, a future that I wanted to have happen and a future that I was invested in. And it was an optimistic idea of what could be. It's one of the very few science fiction pieces that says, hey, you know what? It's all going to work out. It's going to be okay. We're going to figure all this stuff out. We're going to solve war and racism, poverty and social injustice and disease, and we're going to go out into the cosmos together.

[00:06:39] And we're going to try to do it in a positive, peaceful way. And we'll be led by people that believe in great things and make good decisions and struggle with the great questions of our existence. I found that a noble idea, and I still do. I think Star Trek, for a lot of people, is something that was very formative in how they dream and think about the world, just like you said. I know for me, it was...

[00:07:06] I grew up watching the reruns of the original, of course, but was around for the next gen when it debuted. And I remember what a big deal that was for me and my dad in particular, who was my Star Trek buddy, all through next gen, Deep Space Nine, little bit of Voyager. I really give Star Trek a lot of credit for me and how any creative thing that's in me, that whole dreaming thing.

[00:07:35] I tend to be a big dreamer and vision guy in what I do for my day job. So it's just... Star Trek is a big piece of that, and I think there's a lot of people that have that story and even have careers like Adina does that were inspired because of what was demonstrated in this fantastic fictional series. It's just amazing. Yeah, it's extraordinary. It's a unique franchise

[00:08:05] that infected people individually and collectively and it's affected pop culture. I think it's affected the way we think of ourselves, the people that we want to be. I think it does sort of... If you ask people what they hope the future looks like, it generally looks like what they talk about in Star Trek, whether they believe it'll happen or not. That's kind of the ideal is, well, I hope it looks like that. Right. Right. Yeah, and did you have a particular character you identified with, say, for the original series? Oh, I was a Kirk fan. Like, all the way.

[00:08:36] All the way. One of the Kirk, idolized Kirk. That was... He was the captain. You know, that was... Ira Bear, who was a writer I worked with on Star Trek, Next Gen and Deep Space Nine, once said that, you know, Shatner's interpretation of that character was a little boy's fantasy of what it meant to be a captain. But it was such a perfect idealization of... Distillation of what it meant to be a little boy's idea of a captain. You know, he's heroic, handsome.

[00:09:05] He always gets the girl. He always makes the right... And he always makes the right decision. He always struggles with right versus wrong, and he never lets his personal feeling interfere with it. He always comes to the right place. He is surrounded by men and women that respect him, who laugh with him on occasion, but respect him, you know, and will follow him, you know, into the gates of hell. And he's a great captain. He's the captain that you want to follow. And I was totally enamored of him growing up

[00:09:35] and what he represented and who he was. And I loved all the characters, but, you know, I wanted to have friends like Kirk and Spock. I mean, like Kirk and... I like Spock and McCoy. I wanted to have friends like Spock and McCoy as my two buddies. Yeah, exactly. So is it an obvious connection that you were a Trekkie and you were a writer to get into writing for Next Generation? Or what was the path there?

[00:10:02] Or was it not as obvious as it sounds like it is in retrospect? It was a fair amount of luck and not knowing things, not knowing that you couldn't do things. And I was in L.A. trying to be a writer and taking a variety of jobs and sort of, you know, having very little discipline about trying to write scripts and I would write some specs and never finish them and, you know, sort of collaborate with friends. They're not going to do that.

[00:10:29] And on and off and never really sunk into it. And then I started dating this girl because that's how every great story starts. And she saw that I was a Star Trek fan. None of my stories start that way. Well, yeah. She came to my apartment and saw that I had Captain Kirk posters in my apartment. She's like, oh, really? A Star Trek fan? Oh, I, you know, I worked on Next Generation, which at that point was in its second season. I was like, really? Okay.

[00:10:58] And she had worked in casting to help cast the pilot. And she said, I still know people over there and they have a tour of the sets. Like, so many people wanted to see the Star Trek sets in Hollywood that the production finally said, okay, we're only going to do this once a week. Once a week, we'll have a guided tour down to the Star Trek sets. And you had to know somebody to get on the tour. You couldn't just, like, get a ticket or anything. And so she made a, my girlfriend made a call. And she said, okay, yeah, they'll do it.

[00:11:27] And it's in, like, six weeks. And I just decided, for whatever reason, this was my shot. This is my, this is my opportunity. So I wrote an episode. And I brought it with me on the set tour. And I managed to talk the guy who was given the set tour into reading it. He's like, man, I made a laugh. He hears this, he heard this a lot. Oh, I can't read your script. And I was like, oh, come on. And we joked and laughed. And he really could hear that I was a Trekkie and really understood it all. And he was like, all right, all right, I'll read your script.

[00:11:56] And he liked it. And he turned out to be one of Gene Roddenberry's assistants. Oh, my goodness. Nice. Wow. Yeah. And he gave the script to a woman that became my first agent. Agent submitted it to the show, sat in the slush, what they call the slush pile, for seven months. A new executive producer came aboard at the beginning of the third season. Desperate for material. Starts going through the slush pile, finds my script, buys it, produces it, asks me to do another one. I did a second one.

[00:12:24] And then I got a call a few weeks after that just saying, I just fired a writer. Can you come down tomorrow and be a staff writer? And I was like, yes. And I was there for the next 10 years. And it was just an amazing Cinderella thing. I mean, it was just really an incredible turn of events. And it can't be replicated until I can't do that anymore. Right. And I didn't know that you couldn't do it. So that's why I did it. And I just knew how to write that show.

[00:12:53] When I look back at it, I knew it. I knew the cold. I knew it cold. I knew what the Star Trek universe was. I watched all the episodes that aired of Next Generation. So I knew who those characters were. And even though I hadn't studied screenwriting formally with any training, I had consumed enough of the format of that show to understand its basic structure, act breaks and teasers and how to end it, what a scene was like and what the interactions to the characters and

[00:13:21] what the plots were like and A-B stories and A stories and B stories and all that. And I just sort of somehow soaked it all up. And so I was ready to kind of start. I mean, I had a lot to learn once I was on staff and doing it professionally like every day was a whole different level. But I knew enough to get in the door. And so I was just kind of ready for the break when it came my way. Do you remember what got you, what inspired the stories? I believe it was The Bonding was your first episode.

[00:13:51] Do you remember what like inspired that story or how you came up with those ideas? Yeah, because in the first season, actually in the first episode of Next Gen, they had said, well, the Enterprise D, which is a much bigger vessel than the original series Enterprise, not only had all these officers and crew aboard, but a lot of them had brought their families. And every once in a while, you would see like kids in the corridor or you'd see like a couple walking by, but they really didn't do much with it.

[00:14:20] They kind of said it. And there were a couple of instances where they kind of played the fact that there were these families on the Enterprise. But for the most part, they just kind of did it and they were off camera. So I thought, well, that's interesting. Maybe there's a story in that. And what would happen? What happens to a kid whose single parent dies on an away team mission suddenly? Like, what do they do with that kid? And who takes care of him? And maybe there's a story in that. And that's where the bonding came from. And so I started with that as the premise. And then it was, well, who's in charge of the landing party?

[00:14:50] It's probably Worf since he's the security officer. And Worf is a Klingon. They hadn't done a lot. There had only been a couple of things done with Klingons at that point. And that too was interesting to me. Like, oh, well, here's an alien character they haven't done too much with. And that it seemed like, well, Worf as a Klingon would feel responsible for this child. Because his mother was under his command when she died.

[00:15:13] And so I thought, well, let's tell that story of Worf trying to bond with this kid while there's some alien story going on at the same time. I assume in that. Oh, go ahead. No, you go ahead. I was just going to say, I remember that episode. Loving it when I was a kid, probably a young teenager. Because that episode just was like, it was unique at the time on how it did focus on the kid in that story.

[00:15:45] And Next Gen had several episodes where they kind of did the kid thing. And they were all fabulous, in my opinion. And that one stands out to me as watching it originally and remembering how I felt when I watched it. It was almost like I could see myself in that kid too. You know what I mean? As a young kid watching it, it was remarkable. Yeah, it was definitely a moving episode.

[00:16:13] I also thought what was interesting was that the officer, I'm trying to remember her name. Was it Marla? Not Marla Astor? Astor? Astor sounds great. I think that's pretty close. Yeah, but I just love the idea that it wasn't like she was doing anything heroic in that time. It was, she just ended up being the last victim in a war that happened, I think, like centuries ago. And I thought that's such a cool spin on that. Yeah, I didn't want it to be, first of all, I wanted to get to it kind of quickly.

[00:16:42] Like you're on the bridge doing something else and there's an away team out of sight on the planet. And then just all hell breaks loose and they beam up and there's a casualty. And it's like, holy cow. So I wanted the situation to be able to be told very succinctly. Like very quickly, you just want to hear that she was dead and it wasn't, there wasn't some gigantic thing that had happened. Because I wanted to kind of get into the story. And also I just thought, you know, this is sort of more, the idea is a kid's mother dies on the Enterprise.

[00:17:12] In some ways, it's just kind of another day. It's like things happen. You know, this, this starship is up, you know, going to all these, you know, boldly, boldly going to all these places. And dangerous things happen and 18 people die. And this time it was, it was a single parent and it felt like, well, this time it has a consequence, but it's not because of the circumstances, just because of it, that's life. And this is how she died. And it's just one of those things.

[00:17:37] So what I'm curious about is my understanding, you know, so that you, you, you write the scripts and then they're purchased. And I imagine that there is some amount of change and evolution that happens as it gets, you know, refined and rewritten. And what did you, I know different writers have different thoughts and feelings about their material being changed and possibly losing creative control over it. How did that work for you?

[00:18:06] Although it's sounding to me like what you came up with is very close to what we saw on screen. Yeah, I, the bond, I mean, I haven't gone back and read the original draft in a very long time. Um, but I did look at it once about 15 years ago for some reason. And I was kind of surprised that most of the bones in the story there. I mean, the basic story and the structure is there. Uh, there were even lines that I wrote that actually made it on the screen that I was very proud of. And couldn't, you know, but yeah, they all go through rewrites.

[00:18:33] They all go through changes in the, in the process. And, uh, as a, I was a freelance writer, you know, I wasn't on the staff, so I had no part of it and didn't know why they were making choices. You know, I just had to see what, see what happened. And at that point in the process, I was just happy that it sold it. You know, you were just so happy to have gotten in the door at all. Once I was on staff. Now I'm the junior member of the staff and whatever I write is getting rewritten at times by more senior level writers.

[00:19:01] Sometimes the showrunner, sometimes just a more senior writer who's just more experienced and needs a polish or wants to restructure or has been told to restructure. And at that point you start having, yeah, it's, it's tough. You have mixed feelings about it. And that's, and that, you know, it's, it's just part of the game that you have to get used to in television is you're going to be rewritten. Unless you're, unless you're the showrunner, you know, um, someone's going to rewrite you and it's never fun. You don't like it.

[00:19:27] Um, you know, there's an invasion of your material, uh, but you accept that that's part of the process. And, you know, a good showrunner in my opinion will try to, even if it's a page one rewrite, you're just throwing it all out and starting over. You try to keep the presence of the original writer. And you try to like honor what they did, try to hold onto some lines, try to keep some things, you know, from that original draft so that they're present in the draft.

[00:19:52] Cause it's a merciless business, you know, and it's, it's, and you can just like in positions of power, you can just wipe them from the page, leaving nothing but their credit. Right. And, and that's a really unpleasant, difficult experience. So you try, as you move up the ladder, you try to sort of remember what it was like when you were rewritten and try to have, you know, empathy when you're in the, now you're in the position of rewriting somebody else. But you're doing it for a variety of reasons. You know, there's not, it's not just personal preference.

[00:20:22] I'd rather the scene was like this. A lot of it has to do with budget, stage limitations, visual effects. A director wants to do something different. Network doesn't like it. So there's like a long list of reasons why the material is getting, getting rewritten outside of just, well, I'd rather do it this way. I was going to say, it's not just because of, well, this doesn't really fit or you're not following the character exactly as it was priorly, you know, prior written.

[00:20:47] And it's more of the, again, you're working within the constraints of what can be made for television in the time that can be done and the cost that will be involved. Yeah, it's all of it. I mean, and sometimes it is. This isn't the character, you know. This isn't the way Picard talks. This isn't the way Worf talks. This is, the characters all have voices, you know. And part of the job of being on a continuing television series as a writer is to capture the voices of those characters. And that is a particular skill.

[00:21:16] And you have to, you have to lock into what the show is. And if you don't know how Picard speaks and you can't imagine Patrick Stewart saying these lines, then it's not working. And then it's like somebody, well, okay, he doesn't, he or she doesn't get the voice of the character. Okay, make this more Picard might be a marching word for somebody. Yeah. So, yeah, I want to, you said, you know, as you move up the ladder and I want to use that as a transition point because you have certainly over the decades moved up a little bit.

[00:21:43] And I want to talk about my newest favorite show for all mankind and where the genesis for that and what your day-to-day involvement is like in the ongoing production of it.

[00:21:56] And just, I want to talk about everything with that show because it's going to be, as someone who works in the real life space industry, I am just blown away by how a combination of, you know, accuracy and projected, this feels very real and realistic. So, maybe just where it started, where did the idea come from?

[00:22:18] The idea came out of a conversation I'd had with one of the Apple TV Plus executives, Zach Van Amberg, who used to be president, one of the presidents of Sony Television when I was doing Outlander. And then he left Sony to go start Apple TV Plus along with his, one of the other executives. And Zach called me over and said, oh, let's talk. I just, you know, I got the new job. Let's talk about what we could do together.

[00:22:45] So, I go over there and he recalled a conversation that he and I had had years prior where Zach told me about his memories of growing up and remembering when Skylab was falling, you know, and burning up. And it was like a big deal, you know, Skylab. And he said, I just remember that era. And, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to do a TV show that's sort of like Mad Men, but you set it in like NASA in the 1970s. Wouldn't that be interesting? And I said, yeah, that's kind of cool. We talked about it for 10 minutes and then nothing ever happened, literally years go by.

[00:23:15] But when he took the Apple job, he remembered that and he called me up and said, what if we do that? What if we did Mad Men set at NASA? And I was like, oh, okay. You serious? Well, let me go think about it. And I went off and I thought about it. And from my perspective, I thought you can do that show. You can do Mad Men that's set in the mid-1970s and make it an office thing and about the culture and just really get gritty about the characters and really about that world.

[00:23:44] But in my opinion, the story of NASA in the 1970s is kind of a sad one. It's cutting budgets and pulling back on the ambition and getting smaller and smaller. And, you know, when I grew up at the zenith of Apollo, it seemed like all these things were going to happen. We were going to, you know, space stations and moon bases. We're going to go Mars. We're going to explore the rest of the solar system. It was just like this great vision that really dovetailed into what I thought Star Trek was about. And none of that happened.

[00:24:15] You know, I mean, the space shuttle was fine. Loved the shuttle, you know, but it was a truck. It was a truck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I went back to Zach and I said that. And I said, what if we did a show about the space program I thought I was getting and that could have been? What if we do the alternate version of the space program where it really took off and they did all the things that they wanted to do

[00:24:41] and how it would change the world, how it would be a different society and culture that we live in today? And he said, that's really interesting. But how would that have happened? Like, why would that have happened? What's the thing that makes that possible? You know, why would they just keep going after Apollo 11? You know, after 17, technically. But, you know, why would they continue to do it? I said, I don't know. Let me go think about it.

[00:25:04] But with that in mind, I then called up a friend, a real astronaut, Garrett Reisman, who I had known during Battlestar. That's a whole story in and of itself. But he and I had become friends during the Battlestar era. And he was like on Atlantis and he went to the space station and all that. And I had gone to see him launch once. And so I knew Garrett and I reached out to him to pick his brain. And he was working at the time as a flight director at SpaceX. And so I went over there and we had lunch in the commissary, which is super cool.

[00:25:34] And we talked and I said, OK, here's this project. And I'm trying to I'm wrestling with this idea. And I can't quite figure out what would have really made it go. Because the political, you know, priorities of the time and budgets and Vietnam, it was just all this reason why they didn't do what they did. You know, it was just like we did it and now we're moving on. And what would have changed that dynamic? And Garrett just kind of said, well, people don't really know how close the Russians came to landing on the moon.

[00:26:04] And that probably would have changed things. And I looked at him and I was like, what are you talking about? Because I knew a little bit about the Russian program, but not a lot. Like I knew mostly the American program. And to my recollection, Soviets kind of gave up early. Like they pretty much punched out of the race. And it wasn't really a race to the moon. Like they had sort of given up. And he said, well, actually, they really tried. Like they developed a moon rocket. They developed a space suit. They developed a lander.

[00:26:33] I mean, they were trying to make it work. And they just couldn't technically bring it off. But it was closer than most people think. And I went, OK, wait a minute. And with that in mind, then the whole thing kind of came together. Because I thought, well, if the Russians really had beat us to the moon and beat us to the moon at the last minute, you know, where we really think we've got it. If they had beaten us to the moon at that point, then I thought the whole thing, it changes.

[00:26:56] Then the country is so upset and so angry and so frustrated because now we would have lost all the milestones. First man in space, first duo in space, first spacewalk, like all of it. And then the moon too. And it would have caused the great overreaction that now we're going to double down, triple down on space to the exclusion of almost everything else.

[00:27:20] And that it would simultaneously boost the prestige of the Soviet Union at a point where it was like, you know, starting to get back on the ropes a little bit. And everything would be different. Suddenly Nixon, who was a genius political manipulator, would go, oh, yeah, we're doing that. And this is an easy way to get out of Vietnam tomorrow. And I'm going to be the new space guy. And it's just like I thought, oh, and the Cold War just changes like fundamentally after that. And then you can just play a whole different version of history.

[00:27:49] You know, when we had Mike and Denise Okuda on the show the very first time to discuss about Star Trek, Denise went off about how much we had to watch for all mankind. And I was being a cheapskate about spending another 10 bucks a month. But I finally broke down. I finally broke down and I started to watch for all mankind. And then I couldn't stop. I mean, the beauty of watching an episode. No, what's going to happen next? Got to watch another.

[00:28:19] Oh, got to watch. OK, where are they going? OK, oh, season's end. OK, now where are we going from here? It was unbreakable. And so when we had them back on the show again, we spent time talking purely about for all mankind. And what I love about it is the fact that not just have you said we went to the moon, we went to Mars. You changed the situation of who were presidents. Ted Kennedy becomes president.

[00:28:48] Where did that come from? You expanded upon that so much and took it in such interesting directions that you took reality and twisted it. I can't get enough of it. And come on, season five. Where are you? You want it now? Now, now, now. I appreciate you saying that. I mean, we take great pride in everything you're talking about. It is, again, it is amazing.

[00:29:15] And my fellow space industry colleagues who also watch the show were all in amazing awe at the detail. One thing, though, when you talk about the, you know, divergence point and it being, OK, well, what if the Soviets got to the moon first? I read. So please confirm if this is accurate or not. I hope it's accurate because I use this in my, like, law paper last semester.

[00:29:39] But the actual divergence point is the fact that Sergei Korolev, who is the father of the Soviet space program. And so in real life, he passed away in 1966. And that is possibly seen as one of the reasons why the Soviets wound up not advancing. And so my understanding from what I read was that the actual divergence point for For All Mankind was that he survived. And so he's still there pushing them forward. Is that? That's absolutely true.

[00:30:09] We were trying to figure out. Once we had sold them on the concept, then myself and Matt and Ben, who are the fellow creators of the show, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nadivi, we then started figuring out, OK, where is the divergence point? Because it's fine to play it from the American point of view that the Soviets just suddenly, boom, you know, they've got this rocket in there. They're on the moon because it's a great opening. It's really fun to just make it a big surprise.

[00:30:36] But how did it happen and why did it happen, given the way history played out? And, you know, we just kind of tracked back and did some research. And Korolev had died in this operation, like he had some intestinal operations, I recall, in Moscow. That was, depending on what you read, either it was a botched operation or it was doomed from the start or whatever. But essentially, he dies in the surgical bay. And after that, the program never really recovers.

[00:31:04] Then there's like rivalry between, you know, two camps about which way to go. The technical issues with the, I think it's the N1 is their big Soviet rocket. It blows up on the pad a couple of times. You know, it's just like, they can't solve these technical issues. And then the political support at the Kremlin is starting to fade. And the whole thing just kind of comes unraveled. Whereas Korolev was really able to hold it all together.

[00:31:32] So our premise was, yeah, he survives. And because he survives, they surmount the real engineering problems that they had. And he keeps the political support in the Kremlin. And he's able to, like, snatch victory at the last minute. Is it harder, the further you get from that divergence point, harder to keep the narrative going or harder to make it feel like it feels real or feels like it could happen? Yeah, you know, you start facing that challenge the further out you go.

[00:32:02] And, you know, we really wanted to keep the timeline as close to the one as people remember for as long as we could. Because it really helps the audience hold on to the concept. So you want the 70s to look like the 70s. You want the 80s to look like the 80s. You want pop cultural touchstones. You want some of the music to be present. And you want some of the fun of like, oh, okay, but these people got divorced and these people didn't. Or things like John Lennon survives the assassination attempt.

[00:32:31] And all that kind of like roots you in the period. But you're right. The further you go along, it just goes like this. It just keeps diverting further and further away to the point where even the presidents stop. You can't like just shuffle the nominees anymore. Now it's really a completely different world. It's a different political environment. And it gets harder and harder to maintain those kinds of touchstones. But, you know, we do the best we can. You try to just like keep the audience with you.

[00:32:59] And by the time we start, you know, catching up to where we are and surpassing it, hopefully we've got such a narrative momentum that the audience just kind of pulled along to the story anyway. At what point did you and maybe the whole team kind of go, hey, we have something really cool here? I mean, is it when you get renewed for a second season or a third season?

[00:33:25] Or was it pretty early on when you're like, oh, I think this could really take off? Because I know there's always a risk, right? And with any new show or project. There's always a risk. And it took a little while. I mean, I think internally we were just true believers. We loved it. We thought it was amazing. I think it took the audience a minute to figure it out. The initial reviews were not kind. You know, I remember reading the initial reviews when it first dropped and it was like, oh, a lot of people don't like this show. They're bored by the show and don't get it.

[00:33:54] And I think the show didn't really, I think, connect until the second season. Once we started jumping time and we started moving a decade at a time, that's when I think it clicked over as like, oh, I see what they're doing. This is really different. This is not what I thought it was, you know. And then we're going to jump a decade ahead again and like, oh, wait a minute. That format is just unique. I mean, nobody's done a format like that.

[00:34:23] And it really sort of made our show stand out. And people started really getting interested in it and wondering what had happened in between the time jumps. There's a whole bunch of fans that are fascinated with all the little breadcrumbs we drop. And then we started doing bonus features that did news reports about certain events that had happened in between the seasons. And it just started to really gather the momentum and become a thing.

[00:34:48] Were there any particular storylines or episodes that you remember really struggling with when you and the team were just like, okay, we got to do this, but we're just not figuring out how to make it happen? Well, you know, first season is, you know, so much of that because you're figuring out just what is the show, you know, where to concentrate, where to spend your resources in terms of time and money, you know. And one of the big things we wrestled with in that first season was the first moon base.

[00:35:14] How big that base was going to be, how much time we were going to spend there, how many characters lived there, what was realistic, how expensive it was. You know, it was not a cheap thing because we had so much else going on. It's a period piece and the period keeps changing. You're having to change costumes and you're changing sets and, you know, changing models and changing, you know, visual effects work. There's all these pop music. So it's not a cheap show. And then we were going to go, we wanted to do a time jump in the middle of the 70s and just have a big ass moon base.

[00:35:44] It was much bigger than the one we ended up doing. And we wrote some scripts and it just, it was just too much. It was too big of a leap to take that soon in the story. And then it was just, it felt like suddenly it jumped into science fiction because it was a big moon base with a lot of people involved. You had to reintroduce that whole concept of what it was and what its function was. And we just, it was way outside of our, our reach just in terms from a budgetary level. So we had to kind of reset and come back.

[00:36:12] And then it was like, okay, back to basics on this show. You know, part of the mantra was always keep it real, keep it real, keep it real. What could they have really done? What were the actual spacecraft at the time? What were they capable of? What did NASA have? And if they suddenly had to have a moon base, because Nixon's decided we got to have a moon base, what would it be? And said, well, you know, Skylab came out of them almost the same thing. What are we going to do with this, this extra Saturn four, this extra third stage Saturn rocket?

[00:36:41] Well, let's turn that into Skylab. Okay, let's do it. We're NASA in the seventies. We can do anything. Same philosophy. We said, all right, now they're going to say, screw, screw, screw Skylab. We're going to turn that same thing into a moon base. And then it became, all right, so let's do research. Let's do exactly, you know, how big that, that vehicle would have been. How would it get to the moon? How many people could live in it? We were at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington for the premiere of season one.

[00:37:10] And we were very happy to sort of walk through that, that they have a big mockup of Skylab. And we walked into it and we were like, this is actually what we've created. This is actually good. This is, this is, we did it. This is. It's interesting that you did that after and not as part of research for. I kind of forgotten it even existed. I'd seen it as a kid. I just had forgotten that there was an actual, like, mockup of it on the other side of the country. But we had, you know, we were doing intense research.

[00:37:38] Our production designer, Dan Bishop, was famous for doing that kind of stuff. You know, he sweated all the details on all the vehicles that we did, real and projected ones like that. I mean, Dan recreated Mission Control on our soundstage and he was, like, obsessing about the number of ceiling tiles and making sure that the ceiling tiles in our set matched exactly the ceiling tiles that were in the real Mission Control. And so, yeah, we felt confident that we were doing it right.

[00:38:05] And how much did you, how much with that did you look to NASA's Artemis program vision for inspiring what you were doing at Shackleton Crater? We, basically nothing. I mean, we really weren't focused on it. We knew that they were talking about going to the South Pole. But it was so far removed from where the science was in the 70s and the early, late 60s that we were trying to, like, focus on, okay, what did they think at the time?

[00:38:34] You know, when did they, when could they have discovered ice? You know, what probes were still circling the moon in this period? And we were trying to locate, figure out, well, okay, then later they think it's going to be the South Pole. Let's have a story where they figure it out too, but only kind of using the tools and sort of theories that were available to the program at that point, which really influenced a lot of things.

[00:38:59] You know, just to say, like, you know, Sea Dragon is this big rocket that we introduce as a vehicle on the show. And I just stumbled across that as I was doing research and, you know, what were the things, all the plans that NASA had for vehicles and for projects that never got off the ground? And it was fascinating. I was like, went down a rabbit hole for, like, days looking at all these things I'd never even heard of where, you know, the Jiminy spacecraft at one point was projected.

[00:39:24] They were going to have an orbital space station that was basically somehow, you know, concocted on a Jiminy craft. And then I found this thing for Sea Dragon. And I was just blown away by the size and scope of it. Oh, that's super cool. It launches in the ocean? I mean, hell, I want to see that. And it just became like, okay, here's another great idea that's just sitting gathering dust on the shelf at NASA. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:51] I got to say there's two sequences in the series that I always have loved about it. Number one, growing up loving Bob Newhart to have him honored on your show with their tag. Hi, Bob. Hi, Bob. Bob, I, to me, that was, that was the most kindest thing you could do for Bob Newhart because I do love him. Grew up listening to him in the 60s and all that.

[00:40:17] But the other sequence, I think, is the most hilarious moment when they're all racing to Mars and they unfurl the, the sail. The sail, the solar sail. And then you start playing music from Pirates of the Caribbean. To me, who thought of that idea? Because first off, kudos to Disney that got upset about having done that. But number two, who came up?

[00:40:45] Those are the kind of gems about the show that are, that make it so, so good that your writing staff did such a great job coming up with these characters and so on. But who, who thought of the Johnny Hodge? I couldn't tell you exactly. It wasn't me. But I'm pretty sure it was influenced by me because I'm a big Disneyland park aficionado. And I take, I took the whole staff to Disneyland one day as like, let's all go to Disneyland and enjoy ourselves.

[00:41:09] And, and I, you know, I've taken people on the Pirates of the Caribbean and, and lectured them about the history of it and how, you know, how, what Walt's involvement was and what the original idea was. And so Disneyland was like something that was present in those writer's offices. I had a big map of the park on my, on my wall. So I kind of feel like, well, I put them in the environment. And then somebody came up with that idea when they were, when they were constructing that episode. Well, it was, it was genius. It was absolutely genius.

[00:41:39] And I, I just, I can't, I've never forgotten it because it's so, so well done. So thank you for that. And, and, and again, thank you for the whole series. I mean, just everything about it, right up to the last moments of Dev standing on the Martian surface, looking out. It was beautiful. Just, and the music you chose for that, the, the sequel, you know, the pop music and so on, just, it all fits so very well. Thank you. Thank you. Yep.

[00:42:06] I was also a holdout originally being cheap, not wanting to sign up for yet another streaming service. But yeah, now Apple can have all my money. They have all the good shows. Yeah. I'll tell them that. Good. Yep. Hey, as long as they keep making good stuff, y'all keep making good stuff. I'm in. I'm in. Yeah.

[00:42:48] You do, you go out and you speak and sometimes you're at conventions and all these things. Have you had any interesting fan moments now that you're on that side and are talking to us? It's always interesting. You know, conventions are great. You know, they're these big, gigantic conclays of love, you know what I mean? There's people do this out of complete love of the show and love of the characters, whatever show it is, whether it's Outlander or Battlestar or Star Trek or Mankind.

[00:43:18] You know, the love in those rooms is profound and it's tangible and it's incredibly gratifying to feel that and to answer their questions. And yeah, they're a wacky group at the same time. They'll come up and do strange. They're wearing weird things. You know, it's just really fun and funny. I don't have a – the biggest fan moment that does stand to mind is Garrett, Garrett Reisman.

[00:43:41] Because we were doing Battlestar and Universal reached out to David Icke, who is my producing partner, and I saying, you know, NASA has this thing where if there's an astronaut in orbit who wants to make a phone call to somebody on Earth, we will figure out how to make that happen. And it turns out there's two of the astronauts on the space station right now are huge Battlestar Galactica fans and they'd like to talk to you. And we went, what? They were like, okay.

[00:44:06] And the first video conference I was ever in before this – before Zoom was a video conference in a conference room on the Universal lot with me and David at a big table. And there was a giant TV at the end and static, static, static. Suddenly, there's Garrett. And I can't remember her name. I think she was the commander of the station at the time. And there they are. And they're like floating. I mean, they're literally like doing this thing, you know?

[00:44:31] And they want to talk about Battlestar Galactica and I want to talk about real space. And it was a trip. You know? It was so amazing. And I'll never forget Garrett talking to me about – he took his laptop with him and he had DVDs of Battlestar. And he would watch Battlestar on his laptop.

[00:44:54] And I just remember thinking, oh my God, this guy is watching my fake space on his laptop right out the window. It's like real space. Real space. And that kind of blew my mind. That's so cool. That's amazing. Mutual appreciation society. And later, he came – after that mission, he came. He visited the set. Everyone was really excited to meet him. And we put him in the show.

[00:45:19] He's an extra in the show in one of the raptors that gets destroyed in the final battle. And then he's also – he's a consultant on For All Mankind. And he's also plays the – a shuttle commander in one episode. Like, he got to fly the space shuttle. He was always bitching. He never got to fly the shuttle when he was on the show. So we let him fly the shuttle, like, in an episode. Nice. That's amazing. That's excellent. So I do have one question.

[00:45:48] It's sort of shifting gears, but I'm a big Mission Impossible fan. So I was just curious about what it was like working on Trek and doing a lot of sci-fi and then going on to Mission Impossible, which is a very different genre when you did Mission Impossible 2. Yeah. It was a kick, man. I mean, it was like Brandon Braga, my writing partner at the time. He and I had done the two Star Trek movies. And we get this call from Paramount, which also did Mission Impossible. It's like they were having trouble with the MI2 script.

[00:46:17] Would you be willing to come over and meet with Tom Cruise and talk about it? We're like, sure. Okay. You know, we're kids. They're like, yeah, fuck yeah. We're going to go do that. So we meet with Tom Cruise. And, you know, we're talking about the script. And he liked us and he hired us. And so every day for like, I don't know, a month, six weeks, Brandon and I went off to Tom's house. And we would sit there at his house, you know, and talk about this story and work out the details of the story. And it was an amazing experience.

[00:46:46] He was really fun. He was a great person. He's very kind. He's very funny. Very personable. You know, and we just we had a ball. It was one of it was one of the great, great experiences I got to have in this business. I'm actually actually live in Brandon's hometown of Canton, Ohio. Is that right? Yeah. And realize that because of a college professor that had him in high school.

[00:47:11] It talked about this kid that could write like nobody else, you know, and he had this dream of going to Hollywood. That was the first time I ever felt like I knew anybody, even though I didn't know. I still don't know Brandon at all, you know. But yeah, I want to kind of shift gears, too, and just say Chris and I both are the big Deep Space Nine fans on the podcast. OK. Not that we're not. Yeah. No. We know more.

[00:47:40] We know more than Steve and Adina do about it. But yes, that that show was I'm so glad it's finally start. People are starting to say, wait a minute. That was one heck of a Star Trek show way deeper. Yeah, it was darker, but it explored things Star Trek never had before. And its adventure was a little bit different.

[00:48:08] And I just it was so exhilarating watching it in real time when it aired and then to go back now and watch it and go, my goodness, that's it still holds up like it's really good. And to hear new fans, new generations of Star Trek fans discovering it and going. This might be the best Star Trek is really cool.

[00:48:33] And that's that's got to be gratifying for you and the whole team that that was around producing that show. Oh, it's it's very gratifying for us. And we told ourselves at the time, you know, when because we were kind of overshadowed by the end of Next Generation and the beginning of Voyager and everyone. It was like, yeah, they don't love us now. But one day, one day they're going to they'll they'll they'll see what we did here. And we were we were again, we were true believers of what that show was.

[00:49:00] We were very proud of the idea that we were going to challenge what Star Trek could be, what it was about, the structure of the show itself, the morality, you know, to make the characters more ambiguous, to start doing serialized storytelling. And we were just willing to go places and we were going to take big swings. And it's still it's still stand. It's the most unique Star Trek, I think, of all of them. I mean, it's you know, you can't touch the original because it's the original. And deep next gen did an almost impossible task of like, well, we're going to do it again.

[00:49:30] Right. You know, 100 years later with a French bald guy is the captain. And you think, well, this ain't going to work. And it worked. And it was like an amazing series. But the brilliance of deep space was it just to sit and we're going to do something completely different. It's a station. It doesn't go anywhere. We're going to do religion. We're going to deal with terrorism. We're going to have a big wormhole out there. We're going to have characters that are not so squeaky clean. And we're going to like do much more ambiguous stories. And we're really in complex stuff.

[00:49:59] And we're going to start tying these threads together. It was an amazing thing to be part of. It really, really was. You know, for me and my personal development as a writer, I felt like I got my bachelor's degree at Next Generation. And then I went to graduate school on Deep Space Nine. And it just really, it was a different level of writing. It was a different level of creative challenge. And I'm enormously proud of being part of Deep Space Nine. Do you have a favorite episode? Do you have a favorite episode? It's hard.

[00:50:28] It's because I wrote a bunch of them, you know. And on Deep Space, there's an episode I did a rewrite on that I don't have a credit on. It's ironically the one I'm proud of called In the Pale Moonlight. And it's Cisco is talking to Cameron, recording a captain's log. And he's talking about the things he did to save the Federation in the middle of a war. And he did some terrible, terrible things.

[00:50:56] And it's just a really challenging episode. And, you know, ambiguous and, you know, difficult. And the character, like, at the end, he's like, I did those things. And I killed men. I had men killed. And I lied. And I cheated. And I think I could live with it. And then he erases the whole thing. And I was like, yeah, let me get away with this. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah, yeah. And also some of the more like, like I did an episode called It's Only a Paper Moon, which was a holodeck episode with Vic, who was the lounge singer, and Mog, who had lost a leg in the war.

[00:51:26] And I loved that episode. It was, you know, the Rat Pack era. But it was also about reality and fantasy and, you know, what that meant to people and to lose yourself in fantasy. And isn't that OK to lose yourself in fantasy? And, you know, and I love that episode, too. It was a totally different flavor than the other one. And besides doing TV, you were involved in this little film called First Contact, I think.

[00:51:52] And this guy over here, my buddy Brian and I, when we had our, you know, choose our top Star Trek films, we chose First Contact as being our favorite of all time. Oh, thank you. That's high praise. And, you know, now, you know, speaking to you and learning about your love of NASA and the transition, was that really part of when it came to creating the script for it, that

[00:52:16] the fact that you used an existing nuclear silo and a Titan missile to launch the Phoenix, that you really wanted to do that transition from where we are now to where we would be in the future. That's exactly right. I wanted it to be possible. I mean, Star Trek's technology and science is always much more speculative. And, you know, it's much more make-believe science in a lot of ways than what a warp drive is and what a transporter can do.

[00:52:45] You know, we try to stay within the rules of what we've established. But this was an opportunity to kind of tie it to things that are real. And how would somebody create, you know, a warp drive in a spaceship that can actually do that at that time period in, you know, in a post-apocalyptic setting after a world war. And it felt like, well, it had to start with something. It wasn't just like making this thing in his basement. You know, he wasn't like making metal and putting it on something. So it had to be an existing rocket at least.

[00:53:15] And it just felt like, okay, well, these silos, maybe there's still some of those ICBMs that didn't get fired off during that war are still around. And that would be like, you know, that would be the structure that you would try to build your spacecraft on. So we started from that point. Yeah. And just everything about that movie. And to me, one of the most enjoyable things is to listen to Jonathan's commentary while watching the movie and listening to that audio is absolutely hilarious.

[00:53:44] So you pick, he did a wonderful job with that. And I've thanked him many times for his work on that. But really, it came down to the beginning, which was the script and the story. And you build upon that. And congratulations for such a wonderful film. Thank you. It was a lot of fun, that film. If we're talking about audio commentaries, I have to say, the audio commentary you did with Brandon on Generations is something that I go back to all the time. I love this. Yeah, really? Yeah. It's really fun.

[00:54:11] I remember when I first listened, I'm like, this is just so cool because it's insightful. And there's little things I always remember, like the pretty big margin of error. I always find that amusing. I love that little story. That's just so crazy. I loved it real quick because we're coming to the end here. But I loved it in your commentary. That guy, Data goes, yes. Oh, yeah. But that guy in the background does the fist. And you guys are like, what an idiot. Like, what's he doing?

[00:54:41] What's he doing? He's stealing a moment from you. He's like, what? Fantastic. So since we are coming close to the end of our time, I guess the last thing to ask is, so what's upcoming? Obviously, season five for all mankind. Anything else that we should know about? Star City. I'm involved in it. I didn't create it. Matt and Ben created Star City. And that's happening. And it tells the story from the Soviet point of view. So it's a different show.

[00:55:08] It's set in Star City, which is like their version of NASA or their version of Houston. And it has, you know, how you're dealing with the KGB and totally different political environment, much more cloak and dagger stuff. Stakes are very different of what happens in the Soviet Union. But it's really interesting. You know, it's sort of a window into that program, which is astonishing with what they did with the tools they had at the time and their willingness to take huge risks and just

[00:55:38] do it. You know, there's a very bold, bold program. So I think that's a lot of fun. Outlanders has one more season to go. And then there's also a spinoff series of Outlander called Blood of My Blood that's coming. And at the moment, I just started work on a new series for Amazon that is based on the video game God of War. Oh, wow. That's really exciting. A lot of fun. And we're in the middle of writing that. And it's like, it's great. It's totally different from anything I've done before.

[00:56:08] That's so cool. I'm really having a ball doing it. Yeah. Nice. Excellent. Well, Ron, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. This has been a blast. I feel like we've only just scratched the surface because we really did not get into Battlestar Galactica much or Outlander. But and I feel like we could continue to talk about Star Trek and For All Mankind and anything else forever. I'd be happy to come back and do it again. OK, well, it's on record. Yes. Well, we'd love to have you back. OK. Great. Thank you.

[00:56:36] So, everybody, this wraps up another incredible episode of the Big Sci-Fi Podcast. You heard Ron. You know, we'll talk again because there is so much to go into because Ron has shaped some of the most thought-provoking and beloved sci-fi stories of our time. We are very grateful for your insights. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. And so, listeners, thank you. Listeners, thank you, too, for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, share, subscribe, do all the things to the Big

[00:57:06] Sci-Fi Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. Join us on Facebook and let us know, hey, if you could rewrite the history of any sci-fi franchise like Ron did for all mankind. Or rewrite history. What would you change? And then until next time, keep exploring new frontiers, questioning the nature of reality and dreaming of the future. Live long and prosper and never underestimate the power of a well-told story. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Big Sci-Fi Podcast.

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