Battlestar Galactica (1978) 01-03: Saga of a Star World, Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still working my way through the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica movie, also known as Saga of a Star World. If you want to go back to the start of the film, click this link: PART ONE.

The film was written by Glen Larson, who was some kind of series-creating machine at the time. Battlestar Galactica was the 6th series he'd created (out of a total of 22), and his previous series, Sword of Justice had started airing the previous week. I feel like he's mostly known for Quincy, M.E., Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Magnum P.I. and Knight Rider, but I might be wrong and there could be a massive fanbase for Manimal, Automan and Night Man.

The film's credited to director Richard Colla, but Glen Larson had a bit of a rift with him due to creative differences halfway through filming and he was replaced by Alan Levi. The reason why Levi wasn't credited on the film was Larson had a bit of a rift with him as well. Apparently Colla shot about 25 days of footage and Levi then shot another 27 days, which is quite a lot for TV. As far as I know the average at the time was about 7 days per episode, so they put a lot of time into this.

SPOILER WARNING: Every single thing that happens in this movie is going to get spoiled.

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Previously, on Battlestar Galactica:

A fleet of Colonial battlestars travelled to an armistice conference to finally make peace with the Cylons after 1000 years of war. The Cylons turned out to be genuine in their wish for peace, unfortunately they wished for the kind of peace you can only get when all your enemies lay dead at your shiny metal feet. They attacked the Colonial fleet and their homeworlds simultaneously with overwhelming force and now all hope seems lost.

Battlestar Galactica's captain, Commander Adama, has sent his ship to rendezvous with the other surviving battlestars, while he takes a ride in his son's Viper spacefighter to the planet Caprica.

And now, the continuation:

Apollo's taking his dad down to the ruins of their home planet, which means they get to recycle the footage of a fighter going down the launch tube again! Though I am getting this bonus side view shot this time which really shows off the fact that there's only one seat in there. I guess Commander Adama has been stored in a cargo hold.

By the way, the Viper model looks great in this lighting. Sure you can tell it's model but it is a nice looking model.

While the two of them are off on a trip to Caprica, Galactica's presumably gone back to rendezvous with that fleet it left like Adama told them to. They never mentioned how many fighters the vessel launched during the fight with the Cylons but we do know how many are coming back: 67, 25 of them theirs.

It seems that a few of the other battlestars were able to launch fighters in the end and they presumably defeated all the Cylon Raiders. Unfortunately the battlestars were also destroyed. Galactica's now the only battlestar left.

They get a call from Starbuck, who's out flying a Viper and needs tech support. He's managed to get his fighter shot up to the point where he can't throttle down and he can't use his landing gear, at least I think that's what's going on. Oh plus we learn here that the woman on the right is called Athena, which is useful information as she seems to be a main character. (I already know the guy on the left is Colonel Tigh.)

There's a lot of technobabble here as they try alternating between different circuits one at a time, but nothing works. We do learn that this particular component was "made in USA" though. That's an interesting coincidence, as we have a USA on Earth as well! It's not exactly the first familiar name in the series though.

Colonel Tigh decides to have Starbuck come into the landing bay with the throttle on full, which sounds like a bad idea to me, but hey they're the experts.

The concept art for this landing bay has holographic lights projected into space, but they made do with a sequence of lights built into the floor instead. Behind them there's a backlit forced-perspective matte painting of the inside of the landing bay, which is pretty impressive to me considering that this is the same 6 foot Galactica model they used for all the other shots. You can even see the little Vipers parked on the left and the launch tubes along the right side.

Athena leaves the bridge and races down to the landing bay, undeterred by a crewman trying to prevent her from running straight towards a crashing Viper. I guess they have some kind of forcefield there to keep the air in then huh? Starbuck leaps out and they get a fire extinguisher down to it via a crane. This is a pretty expensive production!

Hey, 30 minutes in and we finally get to see what Galactica's corridors look like! They look very... military.

Starbuck is absolutely furious right now due to Athena's father abandoning them during the fight and I can see where he's coming from. Wait, Adama is Athena's father? Oh that's why she was crying about Zac's death earlier, he was her brother! Its kind of strange though for a guy called Adama to call his kids Apollo, Athena and Zac: one of them does not fit the pattern. Here's some trivia for you: Apollo was originally named Skyler, but they changed it. It's possible they thought it was a bit too close to Skywalker.

Oh, I just noticed that they to wear their boots over their trousers. That's good; all that money Starbuck dropped down the front of his pants earlier should still be in there. Though how much good that'll do him now that their entire society has been destroyed is unknown.

Man the full-sized Viper prop looks even better out on location.

Apollo parks his Viper next to the charred ruins of his dad's house on Caprica and Adama goes inside to find some photos of his wife and kids. He doesn't find his wife's body but he knows she's dead, and now he's finally crying too. Turns out Lorne Greene's pretty good at acting.

An angry mob starts to gather around Apollo fighter, but he's saved from getting shoved around when the news reporter from earlier speaks up. She wants to know why they never came to save them from the Cylons and Apollo replies that most of them are dead. Hang on, how does he know that? Galactica didn't find out that the fleet had been destroyed until after they'd left.

We get another blink-and-you'll-miss-it character name here as Adama comes out and calls the reporter "Serina." I suppose it makes sense that he'd know her name if he watches the news.

I'm beginning to suspect that the reverse angle side of this scene wasn't filmed out on location!

Adama decides to make a speech to the crowd and he goes old school with it, saying things like "Let the word go forth to every man, woman and child." He wants them all to make their way to any interstellar ship they can find and then set sail. 

Then we get more narration (by Adama this time not Patrick Macnee), as the various ships depart the burning colonies. 

I guess the Cylons are somewhere else right now and didn't notice any of this. Somehow the "word went forth to every outpost of human existence" but the Cylons were completely unaware of it happening.

Now there's a ragtag fugitive fleet made up of 220 ships packed with the last survivors of the Colonies and protected by a single battlestar. Sounds like a good setup for a TV show. In fact I'm surprised they kind of glossed over the whole process of bringing the fleet together.

Oh, the star filter's back on the camera. I was going to talk about how the Cylon centurions have a bit of Roman centurion in their design, and even carry swords, but you can barely even see them through all those lens flares. Another thing you can't see here is the camera reflected in their shiny armour, which shows the skill of the production crew. And the fact that the lens flares are brighter than the sunset behind them shows that they prioritised making them sparkly over making the lighting make sense.

Anyway it turns out that the Cylons picked up the traitorous Baltar and saved him from being killed on Battlestar Atlantia, and now he's ordering some of them around, telling them to go exterminate some humans. We don't know why he's such a dick or why the Cylons want him around, all we know is that he is a total and complete dick.
 

Hey we're finally back in the room with he big rear-projected window. Though actually it can't be the same room, as that was on the Atlantia and it blew up.

Anyway, Adama's brought in representatives of all 220 ships (I'm just going to take his word for that, I'm not going to count them) because he's going to tell them the plan. We also learn a bit more about their setting here.

Turns out that their recorded history goes back far enough to tell them that their twelve colonies were founded by another human civilisation that they lost contact with. They also know that there's a thirteenth colony located well outside their star system. In fact it's well outside their galaxy, though they don't know exactly where. I hope they at least know roughly where to look, as there are around 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way and that's the galaxy they'll be heading to, because the thirteenth colony... is called Earth!

Down in the barracks, Starbuck's come looking for Athena to apologise for yelling at her earlier. Athena doesn't really want to be seen right now though, as she's in her weird sci-fi underwear, so she ducks behind a locker door for a bit of privacy. Where she spends the rest of the scene.

The scene with Starbuck, Apollo and Zac earlier made it seem like they only had a tiny barracks set, but nope it's actually fairly big. Plus it's very monochrome and there's a lot of rivets, but that's true of everywhere on this ship. They were deliberately trying to make the Galactica look more like a modern battleship than the sleek futuristic USS Enterprise. In fact they even painted it battleship grey

And the scene's still going on. 3 minutes of this. That's like 7% of the whole story so far!

It's funny how this is the scene we get right after everything the loss of most of their pilots and the end of their civilisation. They even talk about Zac being dead and their homes being destroyed... while she's hiding behind a locker door in a costume designed to look like she's naked.

The scene kind of kills the pace and the story's really lost its momentum at this point. It feels like the story should've ended already, but it's still going. The movie had some real momentum building before the time skip when the fleet assembled but now the characters don't know what they're doing and it's stalled.

Alright I feel like some kind of plot is starting up again, plus we're getting properly introduced to Starbuck's buddy Boomer! I'm pretty sure he showed up in the space battle earlier, but now he's an actual character.

The two of them have been roped into going around the fleet checking on their damage and supply situation, and they're not all that keen on it. In fact when Apollo shows up checking for solium leaks they're ready to just walk away before they drop dead or explode, or whatever happens when solium leaks. No such luck though.

I get the impression this scene was filmed in a factory or an actual ship and they've disguised it a bit with the green lighting. Works for me! 

Then we see how people are living on the freighter Gemini and it's not great. They're packed into empty shipping containers and they haven't had water in two days. So that hints at how much time has passed since the first part of the movie.

Some are suffering worse than others. Like Cassiopeia here, who's hurt her arm and is having trouble with the neighbours as she's a 'socialator' and that's not a profession they tolerate. They even tear the blanket away from her as she gets up to leave for medical treatment on Galactica. I thought the Battlestar Galactica reboot made things a little darker than the original, but I guess not!

Cassiopeia was apparently intended to be more of a space geisha than a space hooker, a bit like Inara on Firefly, but they keep it vague. I suppose it wasn't something they wanted to explore in a 70s TV series aimed at the Star Wars audience.

Apollo's team bring the sick and wounded from the Gemini back to the shuttle and Apollo gets on the radio to discuss the food situation with Galactica. He's heard that there's bureauticians luxuriating in their private sanctuaries on the Rising Star, so he's going to make a stop there along the way.

But on the Rising Star he discovers something even worse: their food's been contaminated with pluton! In fact the Galactica crew have checked three ships so far and they all had contaminated food. This is probably the point where I'd freak out about how utterly hopeless everything is, but Apollo's as calm as ever. The guy is a pro at dealing with a crisis, even if it's a 'the entire population of humanity is packed into 221 ships and 220 of them might have no food' kind of crisis.

Hey it's the Imperious Leader again. It doesn't seem like he gets out much, just hangs around on his podium giving his subordinates neck strain.

It turns out that the regular shiny Cylons can have names, as this guy introduces himself as Flight Leader Serpentine. It's a little hard to tell what he said though, as the shiny Cylons talk in robot voices produced with a vocoder. The Centurion's here to report on the final assault and he's got bad news: a handful of ships escaped and rendezvoused with the battlestar Galactica.

Serpentine is given a new mission: to go find Baltar and offer him a choice between delivering the Galactica or his own head. That seems like a bit of an unfair choice to me, I mean how do you even deliver your own head?

Anyway, back on the Rising Star, Apollo is on a mission to investigate the elites in the upper levels, when he's side-tracked by Serina who wants him to check on her son Boxey. Right, so he's definitely her son then.

Boxey's sad because he lost his daggit and now Apollo has to try to cheer him up.

The story's really starting to slow down now, but this scene's not as awkward as it could've been. Apollo wins the kid over, then promises him the first daggit they find and tells him to eat his primaries. Oh I see how it is, rich Caprican kid Boxey gets to eat food while everyone else starves! Apollo's managed to win the kid's mother over as well, as it's clear that she's impressed with how he talked to her son.

The hallways are definitely a lot fancier on the Rising Star, they're making it very obvious that there are haves and have nots even in a fleet of refugees. In fact these guys even have a guard at their door! Boomer explains to the guard that they have authority to search this accommodation by pulling a gun on the guy and he's not about to argue with that.

It's nice to see the heroes showing some initiative and getting stuff done etc., but did he really need to have his finger right there on the trigger when he threatened him? I guess trigger discipline wasn't a thing in the Twelve Colonies.

Inside the two pilots find a guy called Sire Uri having a big decadent party and there's presumably some food in shot somewhere as well.

Apollo turns down Uri's offer to join them in the party and decides to have his food redistributed across the ship. Either that or he'll redistribute six decks of starving passengers into this room and see what happens.

The scene establishes Uri as being the kind of bastard who'd throw a party while others are starving, right after abandoning his wife on their Cylon-occupied world, and it also reveals that he's a powerful figure in the fleet. He's part of the newly-elected Council of the Twelve that's formed after the apocalypse, so there's apparently been even more of a time jump than I thought.

I'm a little surprised how much the series is sticking to its premise right now, and not introducing sci-fi weirdness and goofy aliens. It's not doing much to keep me entertained at the moment either, but it's not being campy and ridiculous.

Over on Galactica, the sick and wounded are being treated in the life station and Cassiopeia's broken arm has been repaired by a healing ray. Man, this series is 44 years old now and we still don't have healing rays!

Starbuck's still there with her, claiming that he's hanging around to give her a ride back to the Gemini. Though he offers her the possibility that he could take her to a better ship instead. It's clear that he's falling for her a bit here, like Apollo is falling for Serina. I must have read that scene he had in the barracks with Athena wrong because I was under the impression the two of them were together and had been for a while now.

Hey, it turns out that the all-new Council of the Twelve looks a lot like the old one and they're getting right back to having bad ideas. Adama wants to take the fleet to Carillon, but Uri wants them to go to Borallus, because it's obviously the best place for them to go. Everything they need can be found there... which makes me wonder why there's no human outpost or colony on the planet already.

Adama points out that the most obvious destination is also the most obvious place for the Cylons to ambush them, but he doesn't seem to have a good counter for 'Carillion's so far away that we'll all starve before we get there'.

Fortunately Apollo's there and he suggests taking a shortcut through a minefield.

These days the trend is for holographic displays that get added in post-production, so actors have to point vaguely at nothing and hope the visual effects expects can make sense of it afterwards, but back in the 70s actors had an actual prop to point vaguely at!

Apollo's plan is for them to send some Vipers ahead of the fleet to destroy the mines... and he's volunteering Boomer and Starbuck. There's a running joke here about the two of them trying to escape before Apollo can give them jobs, but they're two slow once again.

Adama's against the idea, but Uri's all for it and so is the rest of the council, so they're going through a minefield!

Now we get to see Adama's quarters, and they're a bit plain. It works though; I like the window.

Adama's furious that Apollo volunteered for this and made him look foolish in front of the council, but Apollo points out that he wasn't coming up with anything himself!

The dialogue has gotten a bit more formal now these are the only characters on screen, as they talk about how Uri was once an 'architect of dreams', and how decay and corruption go hand-in-hand with defeatism. I'm not sure what point Adama's trying to make though, as he defends his failure to come up with a plan in the council chamber by saying "It is sometimes prudent to steer away from the flames once you’ve been badly burnt." Is he saying the fleet should stay clear of dangerous minefields or he should stay clear of coming up with ideas?

Apollo has a good comeback though, saying that "You’re nursing wounds while we’re still in the fire." I was expecting this episode to be kind of goofy, but it's got some good stuff in here.

Oh no.

It probably seemed like a really good idea at the time to combine Chewbacca and R2-D2, but they've done the implausible here and made a sci-fi robot I don't like. Even if I do respect the work that went into making the suit and giving him animatronic ears.

The fleet is in a desperate situation with hundreds of people without food or water, but they went to the trouble to make this kid a robot daggit anyway. They claim that they used daggits on alien worlds to watch over warriors while they slept, so it was only sensible to make a robot daggit now that they're travelling deep space and all their daggits are dead, but Muffit Two here totally exists just for Boxey.

Wait, all the daggits are dead? There isn't a single daggit in the entire fleet? Damn. Having the villain hurt an dog in a story is an easy way to demonstrate how evil they are, as no one likes people who mistreat animals. So killing all the dogs must make the Cylons really evil.

I've just realised how small Muffit Two is compared to Boxey and I'm now worried they stuck another kid in the suit. There's got to be a photo of it with the head off somewhere...

Holy crap! Either that's a dude in a very convincing chimpanzee mask, or they literally put a chimp in this hot uncomfortable suit. What was I just saying about mistreating animals!

The chimpanzee was called Evolution, or Evie for short, and they were apparently able to train her to play Muffit in pretty much every shot the drone appeared in. Honestly I just thought it was a dude in there, I had no idea. 

Anyway, getting the kid a dog means Apollo's scored even more points with his love interest. In fact I think he's probably in the lead over Starbuck right now. I miss the Cylons though. And the Vipers.

Okay, now we're back in Adama's quarters as he puts his dirty boots up on a chair and has a chat to his daughter this time. I like his tiny TV, it makes me wish I was watching something happening right now.

The pacing has really come to a crashing halt so it can deal with the characters instead of the plot for a while. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but unfortunately this particular scene is kind of unnecessary. Adama's depressed because of all the people they left behind and the burden that lies on his shoulders, and he wishes he could give it up. That's pretty much all that's said in it. Athena's main contribution is to say lines like: "Father? Father are you all right?", "Father, don't", "Father", and "Father?"

Alright I've hit the halfway point of the movie! This is a much more important scene as it introduces the word 'felgercarb' and its meaning is made apparent by the context it is used in. I'm still waiting to see if the classic series has 'frak' in it though.

Anyway, Starbuck has brought Cassiopeia down to the flight deck to see the Vipers, but she knows what he's really after and they go into a launch tube for some privacy. There's some tension here as Athena returns to her station on the bridge and starts checking the security cameras.

And then she switches to the launch tube camera and finds the two of them in there. Her hand goes over to a button labelled 'steam purge'...

And she steam purges Starbuck's dick off.

It's probably not much fun for Cassiopeia either, but Starbuck's the only one we see punished. So Starbuck is in a relationship with Athena then, at least as far as Athena's concerned.

Later on in the barracks Apollo tells Starbuck and Boomer what they'll be doing and we learn that the Nova of Magadon they're travelling through is a star field so bright they have to seal their cockpits to avoid being blinded. I'm not sure that actually makes any sense, but okay. Sounds like a good setup for a tense action scene.

And then we get the same fighter launch clips for the 300th time. You better believe we're launching these damn fighters again. Though actually this time we get special edition versions of the shots with the model's windows covered up.

The three pilots are going to rely on sensors and sweep the mines with their turbolasers. They make it sound so straightforward it makes me wonder why the Colonial fleet didn't do this at any other time during the war.

I would show some screencaps of their daring mission to shoot down mines, but there's pretty much nothing to it. There's a bunch of shots of the pilots looking concerned in their dark cockpits, a bunch of shots of mines exploding (or the same shots repeated), and Starbuck gets a bit concerned when his canopy starts melting. Then three minutes later the job is done and the fleet makes it through the swirly red field of blinding stars. (Though surely the light here can't be that blinding if the hull of the ship is still darker than the lit windows.)

Alright, they've successfully made it through the shortcut to Carillon before they starved to death! Adama gets the landing operations going so they can start getting some fuel from the site of the old mining expedition. Man, it's all about mines in this part of the story.

Now we're back with the Imperious Leader again, and Baltar's here too! It seems that he's delivered his head instead of Galactica. To be fair they didn't give him much time.

Here we finally learn what Baltar was getting out of the extermination of all humanity: they promised him his colony would survive and he would be its ruler. Somehow Baltar actually believed them! He's as gullible as he is sociopathic. The Imperious Leader points out that Baltar missed the whole point of the war. Their goal was to eradicate all the humans, including his colony, and including him. Now they're going to lead him off to public execution... which is a bit weird I reckon. You don't see robots publicly execute people all that often. Anyway, that's Baltar gone from the story!

Hang on, is the Imperious Leader just a dude in a robe with his arms resting on the sides of a chair? I've never quite been able to figure out what his deal is. I mean I've seen a picture of the Imperious Leader toy and he looks like a reptile with an afro, but that just raises further questions.

I need to do some research here.

DVD doc

Alright this is what the Cylon Imperious Leader looks like. He's a reptile in a sparkly hood and a scaly robe, sitting with his arms out. And there's a tiny lizard crawling on his arm!

There was no actor underneath though. The Imperious Leader was an elaborate animatronic that cost $50,000 to build, the same amount as the Galactica model. We were clearly intended to get a good look at him at some point, but they never actually showed his face in the series.

Meanwhile Galactica sends down some all-terrain vehicles called 'landram's to scout Carillion's surface, which is pretty awesome. Star Trek never had ATVs! Well, except for that one time.

They're supposed to be looking for fuel, but Starbuck and Boomer's landram comes across something a bit more interesting, and they climb out to investigate. Eventually. The landram's got awkward doors so it's a bit of a struggle for them.

They draw their weapons to be safe and walk closer to the lights... scaring the life out of a Tauran who was headed out of the party to go on a moonlight cruise.

It's a little over halfway through the story and they've officially reached the casino planet!

There's nothing all that weird about finding a space casino in this setting, as they had a civilisation spanning twelve planets. I've played space games before, I've ran into some out of the way space casinos myself. What is a bit weird is that the writer decided to make this the first stop for the desperate last survivors of that civilisation.

Starbuck and Boomer decide to spare her from the bad news for now and go inside to investigate further. Starbuck's very curious about this place as he was sure he knew about all the gambling dens in the star system. Hang on, are they still in the same star system or is this a different one now? They did fly through that bright star field to get here, and you tend to only have one or two stars in a star system.

Meanwhile Apollo is out in another landram, looking for tylium fuel. And he's brought Serina, Boxey and Muffit Two! Wow, I only just noticed that mysterious figure spying on them in the foreground. That's really subtle.

I'm still trying to work out if I've ever seen this part of the movie before, because I'm sure I would've remember these landrams if I had. They look like they should be out of Warhammer 40,000 or something, they're great.

Boxey does actually serve a purpose here, as he doesn't know anything about Battlestar Galactica, making him the only character in the series who can ask 'what's a Cylon?' with a straight face and get an answer.

It turns out that Cylons were a dead race of reptile people who decided that humans had more practical bodies and designed their machines to look like them instead. They died off thousands of yahrens ago, so now the Colonials call the robots Cylons instead. Wow, I don't think I actually knew that. Though hang on, Apollo says "thousands of yahrens" here, but at the start President Adar said "a thousand years". Choose one and stick with it!

The reason that the Cylons became robots instead of reptiles was because it meant they could keep killing them on screen without ABC Standards and Practices telling them it wasn't suitable for family viewing. Oh, this must be why they never showed the Imperious Leader! They spent all that time and money building a reptile alien and then afterwards they decided that they were all robots. Whoops.
 

Starbuck and Boomer are still investigating the casino and Boomer's a lot more suspicious than Starbuck is right now. You'd think the fact that the odds are obviously stacked in their favour would be a big clue that something isn't right here, but he's won a ton of money so he's happy enough.

Then Starbuck starts talking about the singers and how he should become their manager, and Boomer's left utterly baffled by the turn this conversation's taken. They're trying to find food and fuel so that the last remnants of humanity don't die a horrible death in space, and he's talking about hiring a vocal group. I mean where would they even sing? Are there alien civilisations out there untouched by the Cylon war?

Oh, by the look of the singers I guess there probably are.

What amazes me about these aliens is that they look just like the concept art. This wasn't a case of the producers asking for one thing and getting something horrifying instead, they wanted them to look like this.

Meanwhile Apollo's group finally detects some tylium, but Muffit darts out the door the moment they open it, followed by Boxey. Serina isn't actually all that worried about her son running around an alien world however, as she's just happy that he's not lying in bed depressed anymore.

Turns out that she probably should've been worried though.

Okay, here's a glimpse behind the Sci-Fi Adventures curtain for you: I was fully intending to watch this movie in one sitting, but I'm going to have to take a break here on account of me being bored out of my mind. I need some days off to regenerate my enthusiasm. This has to be around where episode two ends anyway, so it seems like a good place for me to stop.

I don't know what happened; the first part was interesting enough but then the movie really lost its way in the middle.

Alright I'm back and hyped to watch more Battlestar Galactica.

Apollo and Serina go after Boxey and are met by more of those aliens who bring them underground to this very dark painting of their tylium mine. Fortunately Apollo brought a universal translator so he's able to talk with them and ask them what happened to Boxey. Though in this the device is called a "Languatron". Or maybe that's just the brand name.

The aliens tell them that Boxey is safe and opens a door to the casino where Starbuck and Boomer are hanging out with the kid. So that all worked out! In fact the Ovions are happy to share whatever the fleet needs.

Adama's not so happy though. We get another scene of him in his quarters, talking to Tigh this time, and he's just learned that Sire Uri has given permission for half the people in the fleet to go down to the planet. We still don't know how many people that is exactly, but even if there's only 100 people on each ship that's still over 10,000 people. I don't know if the Ovion casino's going to be big enough!

Then we get a proper captain's log entry, as Adama records his concerns about Carillion. An outpost on a planet like this isn't that weird, but it's apparently strange that it's built right over a tylium mine and stranger still that it's so far off the trade routes.

At least they've started to get fuel, though it's coming in slowly. And everyone in the fleet would rather stay at the hotel than go back to being packed into shipping containers at the bottom of a freighter, which will be a problem if the Cylons find them here and they need to leave in a hurry.

It doesn't seem like Starbuck's even left the casino yet, and Athena and Cassiopeia have come down to the planet to join him... separately. Starbuck does the best he can to avoid pissing either of them off, but Cassiopeia quickly becomes aware that Athena believes she's his girlfriend and decides to leave them to it. And she tells Starbuck that next time they sleep together, he'll be paying her standard price.

Honestly, I think that could have gone worse, and Starbuck probably deserves worse.

Hey I've just remembered something. Their entire civilisation and most of their loved ones were just wiped out in a horrific attack! It's easy to forget things like this when the characters are dealing with a love triangle in a casino.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART THREE

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COMING NEXT

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the final part of the epic Battlestar Galactica movie Saga of a Star World.

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