The co-creator of the contemporary Battlestar Galactica wrote scenes for Darth Vader that have never seen the light of day — but now, Ronald D. Moore is finally revealing what Vader would have been doing in the unaired TV series, Star Wars: Underworld. And, unsurprisingly, it would have been badass.
“Vader wasn’t the central character of the show,” Moore tells Inverse. “He was going to show up for a big two-part episode where there was this big uprising happening, and there was a crack-down on things that were happening on Coruscant. Vader shows up and is kind of like, ‘We’re gonna stop all this shit right now.’”
Moore explains that he can’t reveal “all the plot mechanisms” of the unrealized Star Wars TV show, but the fact remained that he, and an “international writers’ room” of talent all worked on writing scripts for Underworld for a number of years before the project was shelved in 2012. “It would have been like The Sopranos,” Moore says.
Originally announced by Lucas in 2005, bits of information about Star Wars: Underworld have slipped out over the years, many of which corroborate Moore’s assertion that it would have been a crime show set on the planet Coruscant.
Though he is currently the showrunner for Outlander, Moore is equally famous for his years writing for various Star Trek series in the ‘90s, as well as running Battlestar Galactica from 2003-2009. George Lucas was also a big Battlestar Galactica fan. “He was very complimentary of the show,” Moore says.
Moore also fondly recalls George Lucas’s unbridled enthusiasm for the abandoned Star Wars: Underworld project. “His mandate on the scripts were: ‘Think big. Don’t have any worries. We’ll make it. Budget is no object.’ So we wrote these gigantic pieces.” Hopefully, some day, fans will see a version of a series, but for now, it’s not likely.
When asked if he would ever return to write a Star Wars project, Moore is unequivocal. “Oh fucking-a yeah!” he says*. “Absolutely.”
