Battlestar Galactica: The Original, Not the Best

Having watched the 1979-1981 Buck Rogers show on Tubi TV, I decided I might as well watch the classic Battlestar Galactica as well.  Galactica actually came first from creator Glen A Larson with a miniseries in 1978 that led to a full season of episodes. 

The miniseries establishes the premise for the series:  in another galaxy (or whatever) twelve tribes of humans have settled twelve planets.  Everything was cool for a while but then a race of robots called the Cylons started attacking the humans.  A war raged for a thousand years but when the show starts, the humans and Cylons are reaching a peace agreement.

Except as Ackbar would say:  it's a trap!  Captain Apollo and his little brother fly their spiffy Viper fighters out into some asteroids or whatever and find a fleet of Cylons waiting to pounce on the human ships.  Their communications jammed, the Vipers have to fly back to their base, the titular Battlestar Galactica to warn everyone.  Apollo's brother is killed but he gets the message back.  Still the human leaders don't want to risk the peace treaty and dither around until it's too late--all except Adama aboard the Galactica.  Apollo is his son and so he puts more stock into the warning.

But then it's too late and most of the human ships are slaughtered.  The human colonies are razed as well, including Adama and Apollo's home of Caprica.  There Adama tells the survivors to get anything they can flying and with the Galactica escorting them, they'll look for the missing "thirteenth tribe" on a planet called Earth.

The miniseries introduces us to the other main characters:  Starbuck, who like Yossarian or Hawkeye Pierce is a noble coward, a talented fighter pilot who doesn't really want to be in the military; Colonel Tigh, Adama's executive officer, who's often the bad cop to Adama's good cop; Cassiopeia, a nurse/babysitter/Starbuck's sometimes girlfriend; Boxey, a kid displaced by the Cylons whose mother marries Apollo and then dies shortly after; Boomer, who is Apollo and Starbuck's black friend and wingman; and Jolly, the chubby pilot, aka the Porkins of the group--though he lives a lot longer.

While there are some comic moments (like the goofy robot-dog thing an engineer makes for Boxey to replace his dead dog thing) most of the first few episodes are pretty serious as the ragtag fleet struggles to find fuel and food and evade the Cylons.  It's kind of like Macross (later the first series of Robotech) where they're dogged by an enemy that probably could destroy them if they really pressed but instead comes at them with just enough so the good guys can survive.  If the Vipers could transform that would actually have been really awesome.

There are a couple of cornier episodes where they go to other planets, like one where Apollo crashes on a planet that's like the Old West only it's run by some Boss Hogg-type guy who uses a reprogrammed Cylon robot as his enforcer, Redeye--because the Cyclons have a red dot that goes back and forth through their visor.  Another one they have to make peace between settlers and some pig guys so they can get seed to grow crops.

About halfway through the first season the Cylons pretty much drop out as the Galactica gets far enough away from them to leave their territory.  An Earth-like planet called "Terra" and its various colonies called Luna 1-7 are introduced.  A sort of Nazi-ish group called the "Eastern Alliance" patrols the area with neat, sorta Gundam-looking destroyers.  There's also a mysterious group of advanced aliens who abduct most of the Galactica's main pilots and later try to guide them to helping Terra.

The Cylons return in the final episode of the season and--mostly because it was the end of the season and they needed something big--the Galactica makes a plan to destroy them.  It involves a captured Cylon fighter with Apollo and Starbuck inside to sabotage the Cylon mother ship.  In the end of course the heroes prevail and go on with their journey.  Unbeknownst to them, but knownst to us, they receive a signal of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

Like Buck Rogers, season 2 changes concepts--for the worse.  It's supposed to be 25-30 years later (I guess) and the Galactica is near Earth.  Adama is the only regular cast member who is back full time, though Boomer and Starbuck get guest spots.  Like the Dukes of Hazzard it focuses on two new dudes who are supposed to be like the old guys, in this case Dillon and Troy stand in for Apollo and Starbuck.

Since Tubi TV has the second season out of order, the first few episodes are really confusing.  Because it just throws all these new people at you with no explanation.  Near the end of the second episode, Adama calls Troy "Boxey," and he calls Adama "Grandfather" so I guess Boxey grew up and became a warrior?  And who the hell is the reporter on Earth who already seems acquainted with the Galactica?  And who's "Xaviar?"

It turned out that the last three episodes listed under season 2 were actually the first three that set up the new season.  The Galactica wants help from Earth but clearly Earth isn't ready so they send teams of warriors down to talk to scientists to offer technology to help speed up Earth's development.  Troy and Dillon go to find a scientist in Los Angeles (played by Robert Reed, the former Mike Brady) but wind up getting in all kinds of trouble and revealing who they are to a female reporter.

Meanwhile this Xaviar guy is a commander who wants to go back in time to give technology to Earth in the past to speed up its development in the present.  Because apparently they can go back in time now.  Um...wait a sec, if you can go back in time, why not go back to stop the Cylons?  Then you wouldn't need Earth at all!  But whatever.  Eventually Xaviar goes back to 1944 to work on the V2 rocket with the Nazis.  Dillon, Troy, and the reporter go back to stop him.  Then he escapes in the present so they have to track him down.

After those first three episodes, the basic premise of the second season is that mostly to save money, Dillon, Troy, and a group of kids land on present day (1980) Earth.  Like the security officers in The Orville, the people from the Galactica have super strength and super jumping and stuff because their gravity was higher than Earth's, which seems kind of silly.  Really it seems like it should be like The Expanse where people who grow up in space are weaker in gravity.

Anyway, Dillon, Troy, and the kids go around with the reporter's help trying to find somewhere to hide out while being pursued by an Air Force guy.  A message at the end of each episode says that the Air Force stopped investigating UFOs and found nothing, because I guess the Air Force must have been cheesed off about the show implying they were still doing that.  The time travel thing was never brought up again after those first 3 episodes.

In the 7th episode (which apparently was the last one) they finally say what happened with Starbuck.  He crashed on a planet and war marooned with a Cylon and a mysterious woman named Angela who shows up...somehow and is pregnant.  Starbuck is able to get her baby off the planet and the baby is eventually found by the Galactica and the kid becomes "Dr. Z," some kind of child super-genius.  Meanwhile I guess Starbuck is still on that planet.  As for what became of Apollo...?  They don't really say but the implication is that he's dead.

It was really a chore to get through the second season because it was so lame with changing the premise and most of the characters.  One episode where they help a Latino farmer would have been better as an A-Team or Knight Rider episode.  Not surprisingly after 10 episodes the show was cancelled until the reboot about 25 years later.

Fun Facts:  The first miniseries featured Jane Seymour as Boxey's mom, whom Apollo marries.  And then of course she's killed.  Also in that miniseries, 80s heart throb Rick Springfield plays Apollo's little brother, who gets killed by the Cylons.  Ed Begley Jr. appeared a few times in the first half of the first season as a Viper pilot named "Ensign Greenbean."  Seriously.  Greenbean.  In a 2-part episode, Lloyd Bridges guest stars as the commander of another Battlestar, the Pegasus.  He and the ship are never seen again but his fighter pilot daughter Sheba joins the cast for the rest of the first season.  One episode where they go to a planet to trade for seeds features Brett Sommers of Match Game fame as a former flame of Adama's.  I couldn't help thinking she was a precursor to Troi's mother in Star Trek TNG and DS9 with her royal bearing and throwing herself at the commander, who had no interest in her advances.

The episode "Experiment in Terra" has two fun facts.  First, the show was produced and sometimes written by Donald Bellisario who created Magnum PI, JAG, and Quantum Leap.  The Galactica episode is kind of a prototype of Quantum Leap.  The advanced aliens mentioned previously send Apollo to Terra, where they surround him with an "aura" that causes the people there to see him as a colonel from that planet.  One of the aliens stays with Apollo to help guide him, but only Apollo (and later Starbuck) can see or hear him--just like how Sam was the only one who could hear or see Al.  It just needed Apollo to say "Oh boy" to complete the comparison.  When Starbuck's Viper lands on the planet he encounters a patrol led by John deLancie, Q from TNG, DS9, and Voyager.  You can't see his face because he has a helmet on but I heard his voice and thought, "Hey, that sounds like John deLancie."  And, yup, his name was in the credits.

In the second season, Lieutenant Dillon was played by Barry Van Dyke, the son of legendary comedian Dick Van Dyke.  In the 90s they worked together on the mystery series Diagnosis Murder.

Wikipedia mentioned a lot of the Galactica sets were later used for Buck Rogers and in a two-part episode you can clearly see shots of an "alien city" that were later used as Buck's home of New Chicago.  Some of the actors were in both shows like the old guy who played Dr. Goodfellow in season two of Buck Rogers was a council member in the first few episodes of Galactica.  A couple of other actors also appeared in both.

Galactica has a really weird credit sequence in most of the first season.  The opening titles only introduce Apollo, Starbuck, and Adama.  But then there's a follow-up sequence that goes through other characters like Tigh, Boomer, Jolly, etc. before going on to guest stars.  It seemed really inefficient and the second season uses more conventional credits.  But the funny thing with the second season credits is they use footage from the first season but make sure that you never clearly see characters besides Adama so you just see Apollo from the back or the side or from a distance.

In the second season of Buck Rogers, they mention a couple of times that their mission is to search for lost tribes of humanity.  The Galactica's mission was likewise to search for the "lost 13th tribe" that went to Earth.  So conceivably the two shows could have crossed over--if you disregarded season 2 of Galactica.  A crossover movie might have been neat, especially seeing Vipers tangling with the ships from Buck Rogers and then joining forces to fight Cylons and Draconians or whatever.

For fans of MST3K and Rifftrax, shots of the ships and battles from the original Galactica miniseries were shamelessly reused in the completely awful movie, Space Mutiny.  Veteran actor Cameron Mitchell sports a beard and robe to look like a really discount Adama.  After Galactica, Richard Hatch (Apollo) appeared in the lame, tonally inconsistent fantasy Prisoners of the Lost Universe.  Roy Tiennes, the star of a pilot called Code Name Diamond Head featured on MST3K guest starred in a Galactica episode as part of a sort of Suicide Squad who have to destroy a Cylon weapon.

Language Lesson:  Like the later series, the show uses "frack" as an expletive that means shit/fuck, like, "Oh frack!"  There's also "felgelcarb" which means shit in the other sense as a noun like, "What a piece of felgelcarb."  There are words for time too, which gets confusing.  "Yahrens" are years and then there's one like "centon" that I think is hours.  I'd rather they just used Earth measurements so you'd know if they're talking about hours, minutes, or seconds for something to happen.

BTW, I have started watching the reboot series on Tubi TV and in most ways it's better.  But there is one thing I like in the old series:  the uniforms the warriors wear.  The brown jackets are really cool.  I'm not sure if they're leather or suede or just fabric but they look neat.  The padded tunics underneath less so but the brown pants with the gun holster are also nice.  The blue uniforms the bridge crew wears in the reboot series are better than the uniforms on the original series though, so clothing wise it ends up as a push.