“We have this fundamental belief in the Constitution, a fundamental belief in the Bill of Rights…. I wanted the ragtag Fleet…to mirror our society in that way but then I wanted…the situation that the Colonials find themselves in to challenge and provoke their notions of society and freedom….[T]hat sort of challenge to the fundamentals of the system is something that I think we’re going through right now….[T]he War on Terrorism, the assertion of executive power in all circumstances… the long march toward extreme authoritarian governance…those ideas are in the show because those ideas are in the culture right now.”

—Ronald D. Moore, developer, executive producer, and writer, Battlestar Galactica

“The best show on television,” proclaim Time and Newsday. “The smartest and toughest show on TV,” raves Rolling Stone. “Television’s most topical, incisive commentary on current events in our very troubled world,” declares the Chicago Tribune. “One of the top ten television shows of 2005,” according to the American Film Institute. A Peabody award. Respect and praise from the “mainstream.” For a science fiction show? How can this be? By enmeshing the viewer in a web of troubling doubles, doubts, and transformations that mirror our uncertainty amidst the War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq, Ronald D. Moore’s revised Battlestar Galactica has, improbably, become the signature show of our wartime era.

The immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks just one week later produced a paradoxical reaction in the American psyche. Americans, who enjoy  …