Ron Moore Blog/January 20, 2006

==Transcript==
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"Are the Centurions sentient? If so, does their memory get uploaded to a new body when they die?"
No, the centurions are not sentient and their memories/experiences are not downloaded into new bodies when they die.
"Why does every one call the officers Sir even if they are women? I was in the military but I thought that every one knows to call female officers or presidents Mam."
This was something I took from Wrath of Khan. In that film, everyone called Saavik "sir" and I liked the way it played and the implication that the honorific had become gender neutral at that point. On Next Generation, we didn't encounter a point where a female officer had to be addressed with a "sir" or ma'am" until well into the run -- an embarassing moment for the entire writing staff, by the way -- and it started a fair amout of debate about which one should be used to address Troi during a crisis (I believe the episode was "Disaster"). My personal feeling was that there was something vaguely condescending about "Yes, ma'am" versus "Yes, sir" in context and that by addressing everyone as "sir" it made a point about the egalitarian nature of Starfleet. It's certainly a debatable point, and Jeri Taylor, the executive producer running the writing staff at that point, felt very differently about it. Ultimately, we decided to go with "sir" and follow the protocol from Wrath of Khan. When I was writing the miniseries for Galactica, I decided I wanted to use sir for all the female characters and I even toyed briefly with the idea of calling Laura "Mister President" but that seemed like a step too far. Billy does call Laura "ma'am" on occasion, so the term itself does exist in the Galactica universe, but the military invariably calls her "sir."
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