But that was fine. Because for Hatch, it was always about convincing the world that it made sense to bring back "Battlestar." And in fact, soon Universal would indeed be relaunching the Galactica -- although Richard Hatch would not be on board. In December 2001, David Eick, who was behind shows like "American Gothic" and "Xena: Warrior Princess," got a call from David Kissinger, president of the media conglomerate Studios USA, which controlled the Universal library. Over the previous year or two, the idea of reviving "Battlestar" had been floating around Universal. Now, Kissinger said, there was some new interest at Studio USA's sister company, the Sci Fi Channel. Would Eick be interested? Eick had his misgivings about the idea. But he had some experience sending out secret, under-the-radar cultural messages through pulp entertainment (in Xena's case, a nascent lesbian chic). He saw an opportunity -- what he called "a great potential for irony." As he told me, "If you could do a show called 'Battlestar Galactica,' with that title, that would harken toward the kind of sincere, dimensional, textured, emotional drama of '2001' and 'Blade Runner' -- oh, my God. You could blow everyone's mind."

Eick met Ron Moore a few years before, when Moore was consulting on "Good vs. Evil" for the Sci Fi Channel. But even though Eick didn't know "Star Trek" particularly well, he knew that "Star Trek" was exactly what he didn't want this new series to be. And he knew that "Star Trek" was not and would never be a subject that was close to Moore's heart. And so he called Moore and asked him if he was interested in bringing a second big spaceship show back to life. Moore knew the original "Battlestar," and after talking to Eick, he watched Larson's original three-hour pilot again. It surprised him. Here was a deeply somber story about a civilization that had basically endured genocide, and for the first hour it was elegantly told and strangely affecting. "They were trying," he told me. "It took a hard left turn to insanity when they reached the casino planet, but they were really trying."

Moore said he would do it, but he wanted to make some changes. After numerous meetings and a full script treatment, he wrote a two-page memo that laid out the basic tenets of what the new "Battlestar Galactica" would eventually become. "We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course, and a new approach is required," it began. "Call it 'naturalistic science fiction."' There would be no time travel or parallel universes or cute robot dogs. There would not be "photon torpedoes" but instead nuclear missiles, because nukes are real and thus are frightening.

"To this day," Eick says, "I don't think either of us could have anticipated how valuable the memo would be." It would repair everything that had been worn down to convention in a genre Moore had once loved. But "Battlestar" would be more than just an opportunity to do "Voyager" correctly.

"When I watched the original pilot," Moore says, "I knew that if you did 'Battlestar Galactica' again, the audience is going to feel a resonance with what happened on 9/11. That's going to touch a chord whether we want it to or not. And it felt like there was an obligation to that. To tell it truthfully as best we can through this prism." In the miniseries Moore wrote to introduce the new "Battlestar," the echoes of the war on terror were unapologetic and frequently harrowing: what happens when an advanced, comfortable, secular democracy endures a devastating attack by an old enemy that it literally created (which enemy, in Moore's version, also happens to be religious fanaticism)?

For a genre often derided as escapist, science fiction has a long tradition of social commentary, no small part of which comes from "Star Trek" itself, which embraced race and gender equality on the bridge of the Enterprise at a time when it was still largely being rejected in real-life America. But Moore wanted a show that would move between the idealistic fantasies of "Trek" and the hard moral pragmatism of the military -- that would embrace both the binnacle and the bat'leth, if you will. He listed for me some of the thornier questions the show evokes: "What does it mean to be free in a society under attack? What are the limits of that freedom? Who's right? Who's wrong? Are you rooting for the wrong side?"

Like Richard Hatch, Moore and Eick were taking "Battlestar Galactica" more seriously than it had been taken in a long time, though in a very different way. And for this reason, Moore thought he would be a hero to those who had rallied to Hatch's cause. At last there would be someone who would get a new "Battlestar" made and, what's more, who would be faithful to the original story's dark premise -- perhaps even more faithful than the original had been. As production progressed on the miniseries, details of the changes Moore and Eick had in mind for "Battlestar Galactica" began to circulate on the Internet, and to many fans they were deeply disturbing. The Cylons would look human, and they would be sexy. Even more troubling: Moore had killed the idea of any "continuation story," as Hatch had long been championing. All of the characters would be recast, including Hatch's own Apollo, and the story would start over.