RETROSPECULATIVE TV: Battlestar Galactica (1978): “Take the Celestra” (Story 16)

Much as I’m enjoying reconnecting with the original Galactica (And I am, brother, believe you me, I am), it’s hard to work up any enthusiasm for these last two episodes. The show has passed its creative peak (As of last week, actually), and this episode seems oddly out of place. There’s nothing you can point to as specifically *wrong* about it, in fact there’s a lot of good stuff in here, and it’s not like I’m not used to digging through crap to get to the diamonds in this series - I actually kind of enjoy it, truth be told - but this time out, somehow, it just doesn’t work. They’re coasting, which is a bit disappointing following the Terra arc.

And in the next episode, the show will be actively backpedaling.

And then they’ll be dead.

PLAY BY PLAY

Long, long ago, when Adama was a junior officer, he served as the aide to Commander Kronos, aboard the Battlestar Rycon. Kronos is extremely spit and polish. His credo is “The first rule is that there can be no deviation from regulations. The second rule is to make sure there is no deviation from the first rule.” A couple years before the Cylons attacked the colonies, the Rycon and its fleet are involved in a massive battle at the Cosmagora Archipelago (Whatever that is), and Kronos took a grievous wound. They won, however, and took out three Cylon Base Ships. Afterwards, Kronos is retired. Presumably the Rycon was retired, too, since it clearly wasn’t a going concern when the series started out.

Starbuck is reputed to be a playa’, despite never actually having sex during the course of the series, insofar as we can tell. (A possibly unintentional running gag that I missed the first time through this series as a kid, but it’s pretty funny now) Despite his reputation for having lots of women - including the daughter of his commander/best friend’s sister - and despite our repeatedly being told none of these except Athena were much more than physical relationships, we now have it dropped on us that he was serious about a girl named Aurora back in the day. The night the Cylons raided the Colonies, he went to Aurora’s house to look for her, but it had been completely destroyed. She was dead, he was devastated.

(Seriously, how does this track with anything we saw in the first episode? Starbuck is clearly semi-seriously involved with Athena, he’s willing to make it permanent, evidently out of shock, but times it badly, recovers quickly and he’s flirting and joking around with Cassiopeia, eyeballing women left and right, and trying to find a new source of income so he doesn’t have to fly fighters anymore. There’s not a lot of room in there for another dead serious girlfriend, either emotionally or in terms of narrative)

Kronos ‘comes out of retirement’ during the evacuation of the Colonies, and Adama puts him in charge of the Celestra, the fleet’s electronics ship (It’s the hammer-headed one we see in a lot of the fleet scenes). Kronos commands the ship with his typical efficiency, but appears to leave most of the day-to-day running of stuff to his executive officer, Charka. Or Chaka. Or maybe Chakra. It’s hard to be sure. Everyone pronounces it differently, and everyone kinda’ mumbles through it. Let’s call him “Nick” instead.

Anyway, “Nick” is kind of a bastard, he makes everyone on the Celestra work double shifts all the time (Including, we’re told, families, though we never actually see any kids aboard), cut rations if quotas aren’t met, draconian punishments. It kinda’ sucks. The crew is disgruntled, but what can they do? They’re refugees, they’re under constant attack for the first half of the series, there’s food shortages, they just naturally assume the entire fleet runs this way. And maybe it did at first - things looked pretty dire there for a while, you know? But the crisis eventually improved, and “Nick” never bothered to tell the crew.

The Crew grew to see a class structure in the fleet, with the Warriors at the top, ship officers in the middle, and “The little people” at the bottom. Aurora - surprise, surprise, not dead - is miffed that Starbuck never searched the fleet for her after the exodus (Which is kind of selfish, you know? It’s not like she tried to find him either, and he clearly has more crucial duties than her. I mean, he blew up a planet and saved