Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore recounts his divisive series finale, says the Game of Thrones hate "was sort of predictable"

Slate

"I thought, going into it, people were going to hate it," Moore says of the Game of Thrones series finale. "They were just primed to freak out about it in various ways—and primed to enjoy the fact that they were angry about it," adds Moore, who created the Battlestar revival in the 2000s and the Starz TV adaptation of Outlander. "So none of it surprised me. Personally, I thought it was great. And you can quote me. I was very satisfied as a viewer. I thought it was the perfect ending to all those characters and I thought that it made sense in the arc of what they had been doing. When you’re doing a finale for a show, you’re thinking about it at least a year previous. At the minimum, the final season is dominated by the thought about what’s the endgame, how are we moving characters and story to get to this particular endpoint? Nothing that happened in the finale of Game of Thrones was not thought out, was not discussed, was not part of George Martin’s universe. It was all very carefully laid out, and it felt to me like it was all consistent with pretty much everything they had been doing." Moore also recounted the divisiveness over Battlestar Galactica's ending 10 years ago this March, when Twitter was still in its infancy. "I was surprised a little bit with the vehemence of it," he says of his Syfy series' ending. "I was a Star Trek fan before I joined Star Trek, so I had been around fandom for a very long time, and there was always a certain viciousness within the fan circles. Only the true believers can be vicious. There’s always part of fandom that thinks, 'We know better than the people that run the show!'"