Before prestige TV convinced everyone it invented storytelling, Battlestar Galactica was already out there juggling space opera, philosophy, and a surprising amount of polyester. This is a show that took a wagon-train premise, launched it into the stars, and dared you not to get invested in humanity’s last, very tired road trip. These reviews dig into the charm, the cheese, and the occasional flashes of something genuinely thoughtful hiding beneath all that 1970s sci-fi swagger.
It may have only run one season, but Glen A. Larson’s sprawling saga of a ragtag fleet of ships fleeing genocide was must-see TV back in the 70s. I had my Battlestar Galactica lunch pail and a toy chest full of action figures and spaceships, and my friends and I would have heated arguments on who would win in a fight, Starbuck or Han Solo. (I hadn’t gotten around to watching Star Trek yet, so Kirk wasn’t even in the running) Sure, the show was immensely derivative of Star Wars, only with a Mormon slant, but that didn’t stop it from being fun escapist fare. Unfortunately, being an insanely expensive show, and with a producer who should have left more of the writing to others, the show was not built to last. Below you will find links to my reviews of the adventures of Commander Adama, Apollo and Starbuck as they look, “For a shining planet known as Earth.”
These reviews pick apart the highs and lows, but they also make it clear why this series still lingers in the cultural bloodstream: it tried, it stumbled, and every so often, it actually soared. Simply click on the links below to dive into this space saga.
In the series’s pilot “Saga of a Star World,” the evil race of Cylons attempts to wipe out humanity, but a ragtag group of ships flees across space in the hopes of finding a new home.
In “Lost Planet of the Gods,” fleeing from the Cylons forces, humanity’s last hope seeks clues to the location of the 13th Colony.
In “The Lost Warrior,” Apollo crash-lands on a planet that resembles the American Old West and will have to face down Red-Eye, a Cylon gunslinger on the payroll of a local thug.
In “The Long Patrol,” Starbuck gets lost on a patrol…again, and finds a group of Space Irish who make booze from their prison cells.
In “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero,” a team of commandos from the Galactica must take on a deadly pulsar cannon before it can destroy their fleet as it passes Ice Planet Zero.
In “The Magnificent Warriors,” with the fleet’s agro ships destroyed or damaged, our heroes must find new seeds, and the closest place is a human settlement that is beleaguered by orc-like pigmen.
In “The Young Lords,” Starbuck crash-lands on a medieval world that has been conquered by the Cylons, and his only hope rests in the hands of a group of renegade child warriors.
In “The Living Legend,” the Galactica, while suffering from fuel shortages, finds the supposedly lost Battlestar Pegasus, led by the legendary Commander Cain.
In “Fire in Space,” a Cylon kamikaze attack leaves the Galactica a raging inferno as our heroes struggle to survive.
In “War of the Gods,” the crew of the Galactica finds themselves caught between the forces of good and evil when they encounter a mysterious stranger on a desolate world.
In “The Man With Nine Lives,” Hollywood legend Fred Astaire appears as Chameleon, a man who just may be Starbuck’s long-lost father.
In “Murder on the Rising Star,” Starbuck is accused of murder, and Apollo has ten hours to prove him innocent.
In “Greetings From Earth,” the Galactica encounters a strange ship that may be from Earth, but must first deal with moral qualms and Space Nazis before they are through.
In “Baltar’s Escape,” Baltar, the Borellian Nomen, and the evil Eastern Alliance stage a prison break that threatens the peace on the Galactica.
In “Experiment in Terra,” Apollo takes a “Quantum Leap” to the planet Terra in the hopes of stopping the Space Nazis from starting a global thermonuclear war.
In “Take the Celestra,” Starbuck’s deadliest enemy turns out to be the girl he once loved as our heroes face off against the dangers of space mutiny.
In “The Hand of God,” this last episode of the series, the Galactica goes toe to toe with a Cylon base star while Apollo tries to determine where a strange signal has come from.
In the end, Battlestar Galactica stands as a strange, earnest relic from a time when television aimed for the stars and occasionally bonked its head on the studio ceiling. It’s messy, repetitive, and often looks like it’s one budget cut away from staging space battles in someone’s garage, but there’s a sincerity running through it that modern, hyper-polished sci-fi sometimes forgets. Beneath the rubbery Cylons and recycled effects is a show genuinely interested in survival, identity, and what people cling to when everything familiar is gone.
Battlestar Galactica
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Series Rank - 6.9/106.9/10
Summary
Glen Larson managed to wrangle together a great cast and crew, but with such a limited budget and some dodgy writing it was not bound to last. On the plus side without it we would never have gotten the badass Ron Moore series