Battlestar Galactica (TOS)

The Geek vs. Cool dichotomy was already well-established by fourth grade.  In that 1978 you could love Star Wars or you could love KISS, but it was not culturally acceptable to love both.  I think, at the time, I had the sense that liking Gene Simmons was akin to rooting for Darth Vader, which was of course exactly the point.

The original Battlestar Galactica premiered in September of that year.  All of us nerds were primed for it:  the commercials had been running all summer, there was already a comic book adaptation, and we were all, although no one would admit it, a little tired of seeing Star Wars for the eleventh or fifteenth or twentieth time.  (Twenty-two, actually.)  In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that they were able to produce and mount a ready-for-TV knock-off of Star Wars’ unimaginable success in little more than a year.  Who says the world moved more slowly back then?

The night BG premiered, it was interrupted and delayed by TV news coverage of the actually very important Camp David Accords.  There’s still a part of my brain that believes that science-fiction television might in some way someday be responsible for peace in the Middle East. 

When the show finally showed, we all loved it:  Cylons were creepy, Galactica was mighty, and Vipers were zippy and cool.  Nevertheless, this was 1970’s television, and there was no way it could measure up to Industrial Light and Magic even when both were still stuck using models with wires and drawing lasers by hand.  While BG may have been something of an achievement by TV standards, there was still a severe clunkiness about it.  Cylons were obviously off-brand Stormtroopers, and Vipers never really had the elegance and style of X-Wings.  (It’s worth noting that Air Force pilots at the time adopted “Viper” as the unofficial nickname of the F-16, a mid-budget jet fighter that never really compared to its F-15 big brother.)  The show was formulaic.  Its characters were flat.  It had a robot dog that would have embarrassed Sid and Marty Krofft.

Most of all, BG lacked the full-fledged vision of a Gene Roddenberry, who genuinely believed that SF would bring peace to the Middle East, and that this was in fact its role.  BG fell into most of the traps of TV crime and adventure shows, seldom allowing anything like a theme or character arc to jump the boundary between episodes.  While the extended plot of the search for Earth was something new in SF TV, the gnawing desperation of fading humanity’s grim situation never seemed to affect the characters themselves.  And when they did at last find Earth—well, the less said about that, the better.

Nevertheless, there it was, and there it went.  BG was cancelled after one season.  While no one really missed it, it had marked out its position in geek history.  If nothing else, it served as a counterpoint and a placeholder while we waited for The Empire Strikes Back.  I doubt that anyone expected that Battlestar Galactica would be revised and reborn as a new world of television a full quarter of a century later.

But now, look.  Here we are, and it’s something altogether different from what the nerds in 1978 thought possible.