Several years ago, I watched a Q&A with legendary genre author Harlan Ellison who praised the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.
Ellison proclaimed that Ron Moore took one of the worst science fiction shows in TV history, and turned it into one of the best, and indeed, Moore adopted what was essentially a cheesy knock off of Star Wars and reinvented it in fine style for modern audiences.
In addition to having great hair that would make any ‘80’s rocker jealous, Moore also wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Roswell, and now he’s got a new show in development called Helix. This show will be on SyFy, and Moore is setting up a deal for a 13-episode order.
So what’s Helix, exactly? Well, according to GiantFreakinRobot, it’s about a bunch of people working at a research facility in the Artic who discover a disease that could get out into the world and potentially destroy it. Yes, it does sound like The Thing. In fact, you may recall at one point several years ago Moore was going to do a prequel to The Thing.
As Deadline reports, Syfy wants to make Helix a direct to series deal instead of making a pilot episode and seeing if it takes off from there. Helix came to Moore from an unknown screenwriter, Cameron Porsandeh, who wrote the script on spec. There’s currently no date when the show could be on the air, all we know so far is, as Deadline tells us, “later this year.”
After the triumph of Battlestar, it’s definitely good to see Moore back in action with something new. As io9 tells us, Moore has had several projects he’s tried to get off the ground since the end of Galactica that went nowhere, and the site lamented, “We miss him…Moore’s work on BSG was revolutionary – even coming after Firefly…You just have to rewatch a few of his episodes of Trek, Roswell and especially BSG to remember the strengths Ron Moore brings to television…”
