RETROSPECULATIVE TV: Battlestar Galactica (1978): “Saga of a Star World” (Episode 1) Chapter 4
[LAST TIME (Yesterday) IN CHAPTER THREE WE PROMISED TO TELL YOU WHAT THE SECRET OF THE ENTIRELY SUPERFLUOUS MYSTERY OF THE FORBIDDEN SUB-BASEMENT (Of Mystery) WAS. WELL, HERE IT IS, BABY:]
The Ovions are eating their guests. They’re sticking ‘em in big hexagonal honeycomb-looking things, and letting their hand puppet larvae eat ‘em. They hear a scream, they run off to investigate, and find some Ovions cramming Cassiopeia into one of the tubes. They kill the aliens and rescue her, and run off without bothering to free anyone else in the containers. Granted, a lot of ‘em are dead and/or dying, but, geez, dude, you’re a hero: at least smash the glass so they can get out! (And by the way, how long did it take for them to get Cassie into that tube? Seriously, didn’t she disappear like two or three days before?)
There’s lots and lots of stray shots, and stuff is burning all over the place, and some looped dialog informs us that if these fires get out of hand, the tylium in the huge mines will catch fire and blow up the planet. They meet up with Boomer, and ride an elevator back up to the casino.
Uri: “…throw away our arms and live in a world where peace begets peace and love begets love.”
Apollo: “Everyone listen up! I want you to move quickly and orderly to the exits!”
Uri: “Stay where you are, I’m in charge here!”
[Cylons barge in, everyone panics, the lights inexplicably begin to strobe]
Uri: “Do what the man says, he’s in charge!”
Suddenly, we’re back in good movie mode: There’s a total panic, people are running and shouting, everyone is shooting, there’s a lot of carnage, a lot of shots of people injured, or clearly dead, including one memorable shot of an obviously-dead warrior on the ground and a woman kneeling over him crying and screaming, trying to drag him away. Then a whole bunch of Landrams show up and open up on the Cylons with their .50 caliber laser dealies. The music kicks in, the good guys rally, the bad guys are a bit confused, and there’s some genuinely exhilarating scenes of over-crowded landrams with people literally hanging off the sides of them while the gunners are blazing away, while spouting off exposition.
Jolly explains the whole (needless) subterfuge, and takes them to a field where all 68 of the Galactica’s fighters are parked (What? The Ovions didn’t notice this?), and with a cheer, Starbuck, Boomer, and Apollo rush to their fighters, but not before Starbuck gets a little face from Cassie (Which is funny, man, Dirk Benedict had some great timing) and Apollo gets a bit from Serina (Which is cloying. Boxey says “I wish he could be my daddy,” which prompted my youngest kid to say “Well. That seems like the kind of thing no kid would ever say.”)
The fighters take off, and not a moment too soon. In fact, actually, a moment too late, since the Cylons have launched about 300 fighters (Full compliment of a Base Ship, as we find out in a later episode), and they’re wailing on the Galactica. The Vipers take them totally by surprise, deal out heavy damage, and the Cylons break off. We were told that 68 Vipers survived the Apocalypse. We see one get destroyed here,
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Comments
27 December 2008
9 hours 33 min
>>>The original BSG seems to me to be an epic fantasy or biblical tale meant to show the nobility and yes divinity of man and not the postmodern humanist drivel that the new show became. In epic fantasy divine intervention is not only allowed it’s expected. Myths are not made of the life and times of Joe average and his atheistic politics.<<<
Yup. Also, this was at one time or another intended to be the underpinning of most of our modern-day myths and legends. For instance, at one point, "Lucifer" the Cylon was intended to be "Our" Lucifer - the devil. Our legends of the devil were based on this alien robot, who took Evil lessons from Baltar. They eventually moved away from that - they could never decide whether the show took place in the future, the past, or the present, though.
To be honest, I don't think it looks or feels all that dated, at least not in these early episodes. The only thing that's really screaming '70s' is the haircuts. The costumes and equipment and art decoration are all alien enough as to seem relatively timeless in the same way the original Trek is relatively timeless. Both are obviously products of their times, but they make enough effort to distinguish themselves from their times that they have a lot more shelf life than, say, Baretta.
Acting styles? I don't think it's any more dated than a TV show from the 50s, or the 90s. Of late there's a move towards a more cinematic acting style on TV, but that's a fairly recent thing, and still not amazingly common. The acting here is certainly no more stagey than "Desparate Housewives," and quite a bit more restrained than, say, "Dynasty."
27 December 2008
9 hours 33 min
>Question did the network interfere during filming or was it just a rush job?<
Both. They mandated the change from "Reptile" to "Robot" for the Cylons, "Crap" and "Damn" to "Frack" and "Felgercarb," a few things like that, but beyond that they kept a light hand. For instance, they didn't like the visual style at all - they wanted more closeups of the actors - but they let the director (Richard Colla) do whatever he wanted. They didn't hire him back for the series, but he'd established the visual style, so they still didn't get their way.
The rest was all shooting fast and wet. It was a rushed production - Dirk Benedict was hired like five days into filming - but it came together pretty well. There's plenty of periscopes from other earlier drafts of the script they didn't have time to polish out, however. F'rinstance Serena says the negotiations are taking place "ON the [Battle]Star Kobol," which was Baltar's ship, whereas elsewhere they're on the Atlantia, which is clearly not Baltar's ship.
27 June 2009
8 hours 11 min
One of the things that made me believe that the original BSG was a better show was they knew the story they wanted to tell and set out to do it. In the RDM BSG they tried to do too much, they wanted to be a space opera, explore the highs and lows of humanity under stress and be a PKD novel with questions about what it is to be human.
The original BSG was a straight up retelling of Exodus with a little ancient astronauts thrown in. (von Danken was very popular in the 70’s.) Larson did at times let his Mormonism come threw on the show but that was really a plus in my opinion because it let the audience know that their was some divine intervention going on instead of being cagy about it like RDM was for most of his show’s run.
I think one of the problems for new viewers is that the costumes and some of the set designs along with the acting style of the 70’s look dated but I bet that the new BSG will look just as dated 30 years from now when we are all wearing our silver jumpsuits with no pockets and driving peanut butter powered cars.
The original BSG seems to me to be an epic fantasy or biblical tale meant to show the nobility and yes divinity of man and not the postmodern humanist drivel that the new show became. In epic fantasy divine intervention is not only allowed it’s expected. Myths are not made of the life and times of Joe average and his atheistic politics.
27 June 2009
8 hours 11 min
The shooting of the movie with a script in flux does not happen on TV that often but in movies it happens all the time it's the main reason things go over budget.
One of the things that worked against BSG is in the 70's the networks seemed to be afraid to be to serious they almost always threw in a little camp.
Question did the network interfere during filming or was it just a rush job?