Another from Walt Atwood's reviews from the classic series...

The Magnificent Warriors
By Walt Atwood

STORY SYNOPSIS

Blue Squadron serves as an advance interceptor force, to shield the fleet from a small Cylon attack wing. The warriors seem to have blunted the offensive, but a few of the attacking ships reach the fleet. To everyone's surprise, the Cylons do not engage military targets. Instead, the fleet's "agro-ships" (apparently mobile hydroponic greenhouses, used to cultivate nutrition for the fleet's population) are either damaged or destroyed. This forces Adama to seek out two things: an agricultural planet where new seed can found to restart the fleet's agricultural process, and an old, unmarked "energizer" to trade for the seed.

Apollo finds a suitable "energizer" aboard a Geminise freighter in the custody of a human woman who apparently has her eye on Adama: Siress Belloby (portrayed by Brett Somers). The only way the Siress will agree to part with her equipment is if Adama visits her and courts her. The old commander seems to regard this prospect with all the anticipation of a coffee enema. Still, Adama and the Siress accompany Apollo, Boomer, Starbuck, Boxey and Muffey to the surface of the frontier farming world of Sectar, setting down their shuttlecraft near the deceptively named village of Serenity. It seems Serenity's town constables have a hard time staying alive on the job. The problem lies with a cowardly populace that doesn't want to deal with a gang of piggish primates called Borays, lead by the Boss Nogow (Ben Frommer). At every showing of a full moon (Sectar seems to have several) Nogow leads his thunderous gang of Borays on horseback down from the hills to Serenity to steal supplies and turn the town upside down if anyone gets in the way. In need of a new constable, the town elder, Bogan (Barry Nelson) and his hired hands Carmichael (Olan Soule), Farnes (Range Howard) and Duggy (Dennis Fimple) try to slap the constable's badge on any drifter who happens into Serenity. When Starbuck and Boomer stumble into the Serenity saloon, Bogan targets the warriors as his next constables. The Geminise power source is stolen, and Starbuck is suckered into winning the constable's badge in a poker game. Boomer returns to the shuttle for help, and brings Adama and the rest of the party back to Serenity.

The Siress finds the Colonial dune-buggy with the power source hidden in the village. But then the Borays attack again, Adama decides he and the warriors will use their blasters to drive the intruders off, but Nogow abducts Belloby before retreating to the hills. Adama and party hop in the buggy and follow Muffey until the trail leads them to the Boray cave. Adama finds Belloby and tries to negotiate with Nogow. When that fails, Starbuck hatches a plan: make Nogow into the new constable and let the Borays move into town and run things. The raids stop, Nogow takes over, and the Colonists get their seeds. Belloby dumps Adama for a "real animal".

A Second Look

The only thing that redeems this farce is the chance to see Adama, out of his Fleet Blues, standing his ground on a planet surface with his warriors, with weapons drawn and firing. A little Ben Cartwright could've done this show some good. Too bad we don't see more of it.

The whole bit with Brett Sommers playing Siress Belloby was a disaster. Still, those who claim GALACTICA was just TV's imitation of STAR WARS may want to consider that Belloby was giving Adama heartburn a full decade before Majel Barrett-Roddenberry's Laxwana Troi chased after STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's Captain Jean-Luc Picard. There is some consolation in there, somewhere.

It makes no sense for such an advanced spacefaring society, even one that is on-the-run like the Galactica fleet, to be threatened by famine. While it is a foregone conclusion that the Colonists have not mastered matter replication technology (have they?) it still doesn't make sense for them to be so vulnerable. How do the Cylons stop the fleet? Just pick off the agro-ships. End of story. The delicacies most commonly seen in the series are a clear protein drink and "mushies". How difficult could it be for each ship in the fleet to use some form of crude energy-matter distillation technology to synthesize these substances? If the ships of the fleet can synthesize breathable air and useful gravity, and if at least some of their ships are capable of achieving the speed of light, it can't be that technologically infeasible for them to fabricate edible delicacies using processes divorced from agriculture. Think of it: how did battlestars sustain their crews in deep space without support ships?

That having been said, the appearance of agro-ships, lifted from footage of the 1972 sci fi motion picture SILENT RUNNING, look great and are probably the only other good thing about this GALACTICA outing.

We get to see yet another human colony that seems to carry on in perpetual night. No sunlight to be found, but then the characters don't stay here long.

Just how are the warriors going to stuff enough seeds into one shuttlecraft to re-seed the entire fleet's agricultural base? Leave the dune-buggy behind, maybe?

Spectacle Value

The point is legitimately made that GALACTICA's fighter combat metaphor made for a monotonous regurgitation of Cylon attack footage. This episode at least attempts to superimpose action footage over the SILENT RUNNING agro-ship images. While it gets the job done, it also reveals some issues:

1: The fighter combat metaphor, once introduced, stifled creativity. This is because combat footage consumes an episode's airtime and leads to a predictable "sameness" of the outcome. A viewer must know the Cylons are going to use their fighters to attack either the Galactica or the fleet, or both. They are going to use their turbo-lasers to break down the Colonial defenses somehow, often the very same way, time after time. There is nothing new or interesting about it. The only thing special about this episode is a change in target.

2: There was no alternative to the fighter combat metaphor. While the Galactica would see action later on, in "Experiment in Terra" and "The Hand of God" (recycling footage of the Pegasus engaging Cylon basestars from "The Living Legend, Pt. 2") the limiting of action to just the vipers both cuts off avenues of advancing a plot and leaves a gaping hole in the viability of the fleet. While the use of fighters is inevitable in the GALACTICA format, over-reliance on them in light of no alternative metaphor for either confronting Cylons or exploring space hurts the show's ability to renew itself each week.

3: In the previous episode, "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero, Pt. 2," we see Baltar's forces pursuing the Galactica with not one Cylon baseship, but three. In the entire series run, we never see a basestar attack the fleet directly. They are obviously capable of it. It would've been more plausible to see a basestar targeting the agro-ships directly before being driven off by reinforcements from the Galactica. Granted, this kind of footage would cost more, but it would break up the monotony.

Unlike the Runabouts of STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE or the Eagles of SPACE: 1999, the shuttles of GALACTICA don't seem to provide as interesting or versatile a setting for excursion scenes. We seldom see more than the "hind-quarter" of the ship or the cabin. Glen Larson's crew did little to make these sets look interesting. The aforementioned Runabouts and Eagles were more logically presented as viable ships in their own right. Each kind of ship offered better lighting, more compartmentalized interior, and better creature comforts to allow passengers and crew to endure longer voyages. Both also allowed for the use of firepower. Colonial shuttles, on the other hand, seem incongruous to the situation they arise from. They seem to be fragile, air-bus type vehicles.

The use of hard-to-read, 1970's-style eccentric computer keypunch lettering, similar to that used in the first year of SPACE:1999, as a caption to introduce the planet Sectar and the village of Serenity, looked odd and seemed unnecessary in light of Adama's "Captain's Log"-like oration.

IF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA WERE NEW TODAY:

Alternatives to the Cylon fighter combat metaphor would have to be found. There have to be other ways to show confrontation and attacks. To that end:

Two new kinds of ships would be needed desperately: a small starship (a little bigger than a Cylon tanker) for excursions away from the fleet without the danger of never making it back (something that could destroy any Cylon patrol it encountered, and be able to support vipers), and some smaller, shuttle-sized "bomber" craft. These ships would support the Galactica and the refugee fleet, while not altering the show's premise. Both the small Colonial warship and the "bomber" would have to be packed with automatic blaster-turrets to make them less vulnerable than viper-fighters alone. They would not be as maneuverable as fighters, but could easily outmaneuver larger ships. Maybe the small warship could even carry a very limited contingent of craft, say, a handful of vipers and a couple of shuttles/"bombers".

The show could never get away with the kind of demeaning display personified by Siress Belloby. A story like this would have to deal with more serious implications and issues, such as:

1: How the Galactica keeps the fleet going, in the event the Cylons attack civilian ships in the fleet. (I guess nobody ever thought of what would happen if the Cylons disabled the engines of even one or two ships.)

2: How the Cylons could pursue the fleet, and yet not expose nearby human-settled planets to any danger.

3: How these human settlements could use a language and culture even vaguely similar to that of the Colonists. ("My name is A-da-ma. What is your name?")

4: How Adama and the governing council handle catastrophic failures in the fleet, and still keep things running.

5: How the warriors remain on call to keep the refugee ships in shape. This notion was abandoned after the pilot episodes. We never see why.

TIDBITS & NITPICKS

Some would say the plot from this episode was lifted from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (MGM/UA, 1960). Not me. I wouldn't insult a Yul Brinner motion picture like that.

Another little techno-question pops up in the story: the "energizer". Apparently, this portable power unit can be handed over to primitive inhabitants of this farming world with little or no support or fuel needed. (We don't see any tanks of tylium being handed over, do we?) We can assume that technology exists for both starships and planets to tap into some kind of zero-point, or other renewable, power source that requires little or no fuel. Surely this makes sense for indefinite journeys in space. And chances are that if it doesn't take in much, it won't put out much in the form of pollution/waste. This makes a great deal more sense than the notion of mining a planet for a flammable mineral to be used as a chemical propellant in rocketships.

How could three agro-ships grow enough food for a fleet of 220 ships? If the scenes in "Saga of a Star World" were any indication, it is not unreasonable to assume that each ship in the refugee fleet carries perhaps and average of, say, 500 residents. That's a rough guesstimate of 110,000 total refugee population, not including how many people the Galactica could hold. It's hard to understand how the space inside three agro-ships could grow that much nutrition.

If Blue Squadron was flying an "advance intercept" outside of the fleet to keep the Cylons at bay, where were the fighter-escorts to protect the starships themselves?

One would think that, at the very least, the refugee ships would be fitted with at least some form of automatic defense. Why wouldn't the agro-ship pack at least a couple of strategically-placed automatic blaster-turrets?

Adama complains he's been cooped up on board the Galactica "for sixteen quattrons", whatever they are. Adama did briefly spend time on Caprica before departing with the fleet. It raises the question: just how long have they been in flight from the Colonies?