Techtite Feature Article!

"The premiere implied that insect-like creatures and lounge singers with 6 eyes was a typical sight in this part of the galaxy. Then they start going further and further into space and...nothing!"

---from the article

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Sidebar :

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The Good Details Just to reiterate: there was a lot to love about Galactica too. Be sure to read the positive list, too.

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Feel free to contribute. As always, review submissions are accepted!

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Sure, as stated (or was it overstated?) in this article's more optimistic counterpart, there were a lot of cool parts of this 1978 series. However, let's be realistic: it lasted one season! What went so horribly wrong? Here is the same former ten-year-old, back again to offer another batch of ideas; ten snafus that should all be suffixed with the cry, "Oh, brother!":

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The Biblical Story Arc. Someone apparently thought it would be cool if Galactica was inevitably assisted by "heaven," which was a crystalline spaceship! By mid-season, the Galactica gangs even confront "Satan" himself, who's apparently an alien or something. Give me a break.

The Chase Never Stops. As many people have stated many times in the past 25 years, there was a problem with how quick Galactica had to be going through space. It was like they could never stay in one star system too long, leading to every episode having a sense of "Hello, goodbye, gotta go!"

The Cylons Were Cool, BUT... Come on; even Star Trek had Klingons and Romulans, not to mention other "little adversaries" that popped up planet to planet. This series seemed to constantly have Clylons, clylons, and more cylons. They were cool enemies, but come on; what about some variety?

Athena was Underused. This was an intriguing character: the daughter of Commander Adama, sister to Captain Apollo. Yet they never seemed to give her any plot development aside from "Gee will Starbuck choose Cassiopeia or Athena?" Well, how is he to choose Athena if he rarely has any time with her, and she rarely gets any screen time? Athena was barely seen in the series at all. She was cute, guys! Have her run down a hallway, shoot her blaster at a Cylon, or...something.

Since When Did Hookers Become Nurses So Easily? The writers obviously needed to give Cassiopeia --a former prostitute-- a role in the series which would explain her recurring appearances so close to Starbuck, aboard the Galactica. However...head nurse?!? Many R.N.'s were pretty upset at the time, how this implied that even a hooker could be trained to do their job in a matter of days. They had every right to be so very upset. The very thought is silly.

Maps? We Don't Need No Steeenkeeng Maps! How exactly did Adama know where he was going? Sure, at the onset of the voyage he knew to go into the dark void, but how did he know he was headed in the right direction from then on? The Earth colonists could've gone left, right, up, down, or even gone "serpentine!" It made no sense that he knew exactly where he was going.

Baltar. Badly acted and even more badly characterized, this was a nemesis as intriguing as he was unintentionally humorous. When the moment came where he flew in a Cylon fighter himself --with his own chrome helmet, no less!-- all bets for this series' survival were off.

Aliens for the premiere and...that's it? The premiere implied that insect-like creatures and lounge singers with 6 eyes was a typical sight in this part of the galaxy. Then they start going further and further into space and...nothing! Instead, we saw little more than a human colony that resembled a disco wild west, a human colony that looked like a disco middle east, and yes even a Disco Castle (gotta love the post-Saturday-Night-Fever "need" to make everything look so...disco!). However, no aliens. Weird, isn't it?

High Budget, Low Budget...No Budget! The first 5 or so hours of the series were fantastic visual frenzies, mostly thanks to every dollar put into them; a quintet of hours originally meant as the first 5/8ths of a mini-series. Then the go ahead was given for a full series, and as a result, the budget was visibly spread thin, over the remaining 19 hours. Sure, they got a substantial fee for each episode, but it's obvious they spent their top dollars on the original 5 hours, and it shows. Computer readouts, space battles, and other clips were recycled so many times in the rest of the season, most of their reuse didn't even make any sense.

The Lame Scripts. Spreading a mini-series concept over a whole season also meant that the first episodes made far more sense than later ones. In addition to the aforementioned lack of any aliens, the biblical space opera story arcs and quite frankly, the overuse of Cylons, the good scripts were thrown out the airlock as soon as Galactica left its own solar system. It's too bad that when it comes to TV budgets, the script department is always the first to be downsized!

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