Before the premiere of Virtuality (Fox, June 26, 2009), Ron Moore talked with reporters about the genesis of the show, how different Virtuality would be from Battlestar Galactica and Caprica, his evolving attitude toward reality television, and the problems with getting an audience for sci-fi on television.
One of the biggest questions people keep asking about Virtuality is how is it different from on Star Trek when you would have holodeck episodes and people would get lost in the holodeck. How is this different from that sort of scenario?
Well, it's a different concept. The holodeck is a physical space that you would go into and three dimensional forms were actually physically created in front of you that you could feel and touch and interact with, etc. The computer would generate them as long as you were in them. This is truly a virtual space, which is much more akin to putting on contemporary, sort of virtual headsets, but sort of taking it to the next level where you do have an experiential sort of ability to touch and sense and taste and smell things in your mind, so it's different sort of on the mechanical level.
In terms of the story level, we're not playing the idea that if you die in the virtual space you die in the real space. It's not ... from that sense. It doesn't have the safety programs like it did in the holodeck where the safety is off and if you get killed in here you get killed.
It's a very different thing.
So in Virtuality if you die inside the virtual headset you don't die in reality or you do?
You don't. No. It's more like how gaming is now. You go on-line. You play a game and you get killed and you're kicked out of the program because you're dead, but you're not dead in real life.
We're using these much more psychologically as well. It doesn't sound like you've seen the pilot, but essentially the experience is that the astronauts aboard the Phaeton have, in virtual space, are sort of things that just sort of are psychologically motivated. They go in there and they do things for entertainment and to sort of pass the time of day while they're on this very, very long-range mission, but you're learning things about them personally and about where did they want to spend their time and when things go wrong in that space how does it then influence them in the real world. That was the thing I was most interested in.
The concept was how the virtual space impacted the real story that was going on aboard the spacecraft and vice-versa. What's the sort of interaction between the two?
The nature of Battlestar, you had to be very serious dealing with the space ship and everything. Does Virtuality allow you to have a little bit more fun with the concept of people in space?
Oh, yes. It's a much less serious situation than Battlestar was dealing with. Battlestar was literally a post-apocalyptic show where the future of humanity rode on their every decision and death was stalking them continuously. So it's not set up in the same way. The crew aboard Phaeton signed up for what just seemed like a very straight-ahead mission of exploration and they were chosen with that in mind. They were also chosen to participate in this sort of reality show that's being broadcast back to Earth.
So there was a conscious attempt on the part of the people who put the crew together to sort of have an interesting mix of people. There are debates within the crew themselves who was chosen just for sort of their demographic content and who was legitimately supposed to be there. Now you've got a groups of 12 people stuck in a metal tube going in a straight line for a decade or so and that's going to just sort of produce a lot of tensions and frictions and manipulations and sort of cross problems between the characters. It has a stronger element of fun and suspense and sort of interesting plot terms in terms of what characters will do with one another than did Battlestar. Battlestar was very driven by the internal pressures of the huge weight that was on all of their shoulders from the beginning of the miniseries.
So a little more opportunity for humor maybe?
Oh, yes. There's definitely more humor. There's more humor probably in the first ten minutes of Virtuality than there was in the run of Battlestar, let's put it that way.
When did you come up with the idea of blending a sci-fi thriller with a reality show element to it?
It was sort of in stages. When we first started talking about the concept is was about a long-range space mission, which I was intrigued with. Like I said before, I was interested in the idea of what do you do with 12 people in a metal tube for that long. I thought there were interesting dramatic possibilities right there and, okay, what would they realistically need to do. What would NASA or the space confederation do at that point to keep them from going crazy? They'd probably have a really advanced virtual reality program to help them while away the hours and there's interaction between those two worlds.
Somewhere in those discussions we started talking about when they would be broadcasting pieces back to earth, obviously, like astronauts do today, and hey, what if they made a reality show out of that? Then it all kind of started to come together. You had these three layers of storytelling going on in the show where you had what was happening in the real world on the ship, what was happening in the virtual space and then what was the reality show that was seen back on earth. Were the needs of the reality show starting to impact what was happening on the spacecraft? Were people being manipulated in order to make better drama for the reality show? The astronauts themselves would start to wonder about are they telling us the truth about what's happening back on earth or is that something to just get us to be upset for the cameras. It did sort of become this really interesting sort of psychological crucible that they would all be put in.
