Battlestar Galactica 1.12: “The Living Legend, Part 1”

Airdate: 11/26/78

Looks like I picked the wrong week..

The Galactica’s patrol pilots run into an old friend of Apollo’s, a friend he’d assumed dead many moons ago. He’s actually part of the “Fifth Fleet,” a group of colonials that engaged the Cylons in a battle where no humans were thought to have survived – they defied the odds under the command of the legendary Commander Cain, an old colleague of Adama’s. Cain’s battlestar, the Pegasus, rendezvous with Galactica, and the two old war cronies have a lot of years to catch up on. Adama, however, begins to suspect that Cain’s war mongering ways may pose a threat to the stability of the Galactica and its unarmed civilian fleet; the two come to loggerheads over Cain’s headstrong ideas of attacking the Cylon base star Gomorray, ones which Adama overrules when he learns of Cain’s rash attack of Cylon fuel freighters, which were meant to be intercepted, not destroyed. The show ends with a full-fledged Cylon attack (under Baltar) on Galactica (as Adamaa predicted), and Pegaus’s rushing to its defense.

Series is finally improving, and it’s no small coincidence that the drama is becoming more character-oriented. And of course, one of them, at least in this two-parter, is played by none other than Lloyd Bridges – his recklessly arrogant Cain is right within his wheelhouse, and it’s a pure delight to see him uttering the type of lines he would parody just a little over a year later in Airplane! You can absolutely see he end of this story coming, as the only way a TV drama like this can drive home the caution of Cain’s belligerence is through his own destruction. I just hope they don’t send gorgeous Anne Lockhart, who plays his daughter, with him, but they just might as it looks like she may fulfill the role of Starbuck’s must-be ill-fated love interest. Well, you can see hr in two seasons on Buck Rogers.

Observation – they seem to like starting off each show with a Cylon/Viper dogfight. Is this the intergalactic version of The Dukes of Hazzard’s weekly opening chase between Roscoe and the Duke boys?

Rating:  ***