The Battlestar Galactica Episode Secretly Inspired By McDonald’s

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 18 seconds ago

Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot is one of the most grim and gritty sci-fi shows ever created. Every bulkhead is absolutely brimming with drama, including simmering tensions between the civilian fleet and the soldiers protecting them. There’s also plenty of erotic tension, like the kind fueling every single interaction between Starbuck and Apollo. Making everything that much worse is the general premise of the show: that most of humanity has been wiped out by evil robots, and everyone who is left must constantly run, fight, and run some more to keep the genocidal clankers hoping to finish the job. 

Long story short, the series is very dramatic, and it’s filled with one weird bummer of a moment after another. However, these are counterbalanced by moments of triumph and joy made all the sweeter by our characters’ constant struggles. A great example of this is “The Hand of God,” a Season 1 episode where the Battlestar Galactica crew finally took the fight to the Cylons and won a hard-fought victory. Understandably, it was an episode that made the fans quite happy. However, what most fans don’t know is that this episode had a nickname inspired by the pioneers of the Happy Meal: McDonald’s!

Big Mac, Big Bang

The premise of “The Hand of God” is that the Battlestar Galactica crew discovers an asteroid filled with tylium, which is necessary for faster-than-light travel. There’s just one problem: it’s being guarded by the Cylons, who are busy mining it for their own needs. Sick of running and hungry for the opportunity, Commander Adama orders the asteroid to be taken by force. This is a dangerous proposition, as the ship has only narrowly escaped earlier encounters with the Cylons. But thanks to a crazy plan from Starbuck and some hotshot flying from Apollo, the Galactica crew is able to score their first real victory against the toasters, boosting morale throughout the fleet.

Incidentally, the plot of this episode was written to boost morale among the viewers as well. As written in Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion, “The Hand of God” started when co-showrunner David Eick was taking inventory of the kinds of episodes they had already made. “I had done an interior courtroom drama, we had done an inside-Baltar’s-head episode, we had done a torture room episode and a somewhat absurd episode, and I thought we needed to remind viewers why the show’s called Battlestar Galactica, he said. “So I asked David [Weddle] and Bradley [Thompson] to give us a ‘Big Mac’—a big combat show.”

Smoke’em If You Got’em

What made “The Hand of God” a “big combat show,” exactly? Basically, Battlestar Galactica didn’t have enough of a budget to show extravagant space fights in every episode. Frankly, that’s one of the reasons so much time is spent on Caprica and aboard the Galactica. Nonetheless, Eick and the other producers knew how much fans loved the show’s killer space battles. “Big Mac” was a fitting nickname, then, as it referred to giving viewers much more of the action (i.e., the meat) than they normally got.

In this case, David Eick’s instincts were perfectly correct: “The Hand of God” ended up being a crowd-pleasing fan-favorite, largely because of the ambitious outer space battles. After watching our heroes get their butts kicked for so much of Season 1, this victory over the dastardly Cylons felt downright cathartic. This was an episode that set the bar for such scenes quite high; fortunately, the Battlestar Galactica writers and producers rose to the challenge, and the action on this show only gets better over time. If you’re as religious as Six, you might say this was because the series’ success was guided by the titular hand of god. 

Or, quite possibly, the white-gloved hand of a darker, much more Eldritch figure: Ronald McDonald!