Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica is regarded as one of the best shows produced for television in recent memory. The science fiction drama touched on everything from human emotion to politics, after a devastating attack wiped out the majority of the human race. But what would it look like today?

“It’s hard to say. We did Battlestar in a very specific moment in time. There was a consensus or marriage of what was going on in the world and the inherent story of the apocalyptic attack was very reticent because it was a post 9/11 attack,” creator Ronald D. Moore said at the Battlestar Galactica reunion panel at the ATX TV Festival.

“If we were doing it today, we would probably have a lot of those elements to it, but it would look very different. TV has changed since we did it. When we did the show, serialized TV was really unusual and it was frowned upon. Networks didn’t like it. If you look at the first season carefully you’ll see it was kind of an episodic show, we were trying to do one-off episodes ‘cause network was terrified that people who didn’t watch in order would be lost…they wanted each episode to be standalone,” he continued. “Yes we would take advantage of the current political situation and talk about the world and how it’s changed…I don’t know. It is hard to imagine doing it today because you would have to start at zero with a blank page…What would we have to say if we did it all over again?”

Moore reunited with his stars Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, James Callis, Grace Park and Michael Trucco for the panel and the cast recounted audition stories and favorite memories—including the moment McDonnell and Sackhoff feared they were going to be fired.

“One of my favorite moments that I lately have been thinking about was, ‘I’m coming for all of you,'” McDonnell said about an iconic moment. “And the reason I loved it because we finally got to touch on Laura Roslin’s rage and that was liberating.”
But her favorite memory was a funny one. “Katee and I were shooting one of our first scenes together and we almost got fired…because we literally could not stop laughing…It was horrifying,” she said. And it wasn’t a funny scene, they were supposed to be serious. “We were backstage crying because we couldn’t stop laughing. We promised each other that we wouldn’t laugh and we would laugh and laugh and it wasn’t funny at all.”

“We almost got fired but it was a good memory. And that was why we didn’t have too many scenes after that,” McDonnell said.

Another moment that stuck out for Sackhoff was when her character, Starbuck, was killed off. The producers told her they wanted to keep it all a secret that the character would return. Her name was removed from the credits, the cast and crew were told she was done.

“The problem was that I was lying to everyone,” she said.

“This was one of the stupidest things David and I did in the entire run of the show,” Moore said.

So Sackhoff decided to tell Olmos because, “If I tell Eddie, he’s telling everyone,” she said. “I felt like such an asshole.”

And Olmos delivered and told everyone. The rest? Frakking history.