Robot Claw

Back in 1978, right in the midst of Star Wars hype, a TV show called Battlestar Galactica aired. I recently bought the entire series and we watched it again, and it holds up quite well today. Sure there are a few too many episodes of Starbuck crash-landing on planets, and sure the logic of them doggedly crossing the universe looking for a Earth whilst leaving countless habitable planets in their way is questionable, but it’s fun.

The show only ran one season though, before being taken off the air. Fan response was loud, and even in those pre-internet days was effective enough to bring the show back in 1980. But the ‘second season’ was different, and not just in name. Here then, a review of the entire series called Galactica 1980.

Galactica Discovers Earth (episodes 1-3)

We start off about twenty years after the last episode of Battlestar Galatica. Most of the main cast are gone, seemingly replaced with duplicates. Don’t be confused thinking that’s Starbuck and Apollo in the show above, no-sir that’s Dillon and Troy. It must just be a coincidence that the actors could almost be stand-ins! The Galactica has now found Earth, but there is a problem: the planet is not technologically advanced enough to fight off the Cylons. A plan is soon hatched to advance Earth’s technology (Prime Directive be damned!) so the ‘Galacticans’ can feel good about arriving at the planet. Even a child could have pointed out the flaws in the logic of the premise.

The plot for this multi-episode arc is lunacy, and involves time travel (invented by the child ‘Doctor Zee’ and never before even hinted at in the series), the dad from The Brady Bunch, flying motorcycles, rescuing Jews from the Nazis (I wish I was joking), far too much use of invisibility technology and endless use of old footage to save money on special effects. KLS and I were slack-jawed as we watched, hardly imagining this was the next season in the ‘same’ series as we had just finished watching. The acting is wooden, the plots illogical and insane, the comedy (?) insulting and the special effects bad even by 1980 standards. It’s a travesty, and I wept a single tear as I quietly uttered “How did it come to this?”

Grade: 0 out of 10

The Super Scouts (episodes 4 & 5)

Close to the start of these punishingly bad two episodes is a lengthy scene in which a group of ‘Galactican’ students are taught about gravity. Seemingly endlessly, Apollo Troy drones on as if reading from a textbook. It’s mind-boggling until you realize the show had to include such nonsense to satisfy arcane requirements on educational TV content back in those days. Such inclusions (in every single episode) make what was already the worst sci-fi TV series ever made even worse.

But I digress. It’s hard to believe anyone kept watching this series after the three-part opener, but for those that did these two episodes must surely have tested their resolve. We learn the Galacticans are super powered on Earth due to the lower gravity (ie. they rip off Superman), Starbuck Dillon and Apollo Troy are tasked in setting up a colony of children on Earth and hijinks ensue. We have such wonderful scenes as comedy police chases (ie. they rip off Dukes Of Hazzard), wretched acting by talentless children most of which are named ‘Larson’ and scenes of tense (?) medical drama as the kids fall victim to poisoning due to a nearby chemical plant dumping waste into a river. Yes, it’s an ecomentalist fantasy involving kids, superpowers, flying motorcycles and nothing – nothing at all – that is entertaining to watch.

Grade: 0 out of 10

Spaceball (episode 6)

This episode answers the question no-one ever asked: “What if Battlestar Galactica was more like The Bad News Bears?” I can’t even bring myself to describe the feelings I had watching this execrable episode so let’s just talk about Doctor Zee.

In the first episode it is revealed he is a freak supra-genius mutation and it is him that not only invents time travel, invisibility tech and anti-gravity drives but he also provides Starbuck Dillon and Apollo Troy with a sonic-screwdriver like device to facilitate much of the above. Basically he’s Doctor Who as if played by a child cosplaying as John Denver. It would be easy to dismiss him as a character so utterly and inexplicably bad that even thinking about him is a waste of time, but then the creators of the show take things one step farther by recasting him (without explanation) as…

…that guy. Yes my friends, Doctor Who Zee actually regenerates! As the series moves on his omniscience seems to grow to the point where even Adama seems to be in his thrall and then in a predictable (for this show) move, everything we know about Doctor Zee is turned on it’s head in the final episode. But I’ll get to that, since right now I’m reviewing Spaceball, which I say with dreadful and sincere honesty is the very worst episode of any sci-fi series I have ever seen or ever will see.

Grade: <0 out of 10

The Night The Cylons Landed (episodes 7 & 8)

Anyone still watching in 1980 must have been a sucker for punishment or had only one channel, because Spaceball would have driven any living human away from this show. And yet, the terror continues in a story that introduced strangely human cylons (the guy in the above photo) and is extensively written around a Halloween party at which the (real-life) radio DJ ‘Wolfman’ Jack is a guest. Capers ensue. New lows include Starbuck Dillon and Apollo Troy dancing in a pantomine whilst evading police and the usual nonsense involving flying motorcycles and comedy based around how utterly stupid the two pilots Adama chose to basically save the entire Earth are.

That said, this is a rise in quality for one reason: It’s got a cylon in it. And I don’t mean that dude in a grey suit that no-one actually believes is a cylon, I mean the classic silver-suited cylon with the red eye. When I watched this episode as a child I bet I loved that part. Watching it as adult, it only helped to slightly dull the pain.

Grade: 1 out of 10

Space Croppers (episode 9)

Surely the creators were just having the viewers on by now? This would be the final episode of the series to feature most of the main cast, and is an edu-drama simultaneously teaching students about the evils of bigotry (against Latinos) and such riveting facts as seeds needing molybdenum in the soil to germinate! Even as I type these words, I can barely believe they are true.

The Galacticans need food badly, so Starbuck Dillon and Apollo Troy – Bad News Bears Super Scouts in tow – essentially take over the imperiled farm of a lovely mexican, saving him from the cruel ministrations of a Boss Hog-like landowner. Not once do we ever get any sort of explanation as to how a single farm can feed the entire fleet, nor why it was ok to leave the children in the hands of a female reporter who was presumably introduced (way back in episode 1) as a love-interest that never came to fruition due to the 7 pm time slot. Not once do we actually care, since this is an almost unimaginably bad episode, packed to the gills with awful dialogue and ‘action’ scenes written by someone who just no longer cared (such as when our heroes plough a field in seconds by using their lasers). In the last scene, as the flying motorbikes streak off into the sunset, it’s hard to imagine any viewer ever wanting to see them ever again.

Grade: 0 out of 10

The Return Of Starbuck (final episode)

Dirk Benedict, who played Starbuck in the original series, famously dodged a bullet by being unavailable when Galactica 1980 started. Even his charm couldn’t have saved the awful scripts and constraints put on the series by the network (educational content, kids, Earth-based episodes). And yet he returns here in the series swansong, and somehow it works.

The episode starts with Doctor Zee describing a fever dream he recently had, and this frames a story about Starbuck crashing (surprise, surprise) on a planet, repairing a cylon, befriending the cylon, finding a mysterious pregnant women and eventually building a ship (!) to save her and the child. It is eventually revealed the child is none other than – drumroll please – Doctor Zee! Which means either Adama was a big fat liar back in episode 1 or the scriptwriters were so strung out on coke by now they just didn’t give a damn.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a dreadful episode of a dreadful show. But in the Galactica 1980 annals, this is by far the best episode. Starbuck is back! There’s cylons! They talk and make jokes together! It’s a buddy comedy in space! Nothing about it is believable or even plausible but to an audience beaten senseless by 9 weeks of the worst TV they had ever seen this must have been like a message from God.

Grade: 2 out of 10 (or 10 out of 10 by Galactica 1980 standards)

This last shot is not the third actor who played Doctor Zee, no this is myself, from around 1978 or 1979. About the age I was when this show originally screened. I had never seen it since, but watched it all when it was first on. And you know what, I remembered a lot of it! Even before we started watching I was telling KLS about dim memories of Wolfman Jack and invisible spaceships and even Starbuck befriending a cylon (not to mention a mysterious story involving a cylon painted black, but we’ll ignore that for now). I wonder if I watched it with a twinkle in my eye, half-plastic cylon model ship in hand, dazzled by the fantasy and charmed by Starbuck Dillon and Apollo Troy?

As bad as this show was – and is – I truly wonder what I thought of it as a child. Did I like it? Did I love it? Did I go and see the film ‘Galactica Discovers Earth’ that was edited together from the first three episodes and only shown in cinemas in Australia and New Zealand? I wish I could use Doctor Zee’s time travel technology to go back 35 years and ask myself 🙂