Greetings From Earth Part II Analysis
By Walt Atwood

STORY SYNOPSIS

In space, heading away from the Battlestar Galactica, Apollo and Starbuck suddenly hear voices over their commline. It seems that Lunar Shuttle Avion, the alien spacecraft they are escorting, is conducting a radio dialogue with Paradeen Control Center. The planet Paradeen is dead ahead. Cassiopea can't figure out where the voices are coming from. Michael (portrayed by Randolph Mantooth) awakens from his cocoon and checks the computer: everything is going according to plan. They land at an airstrip in a rural farming area. They are greeted by two clownlike utilitarian androids, Hector (Bobby Van) and Vector (Ray Bolger). The androids escort the Lunar 7 refugees and the Colonial warriors to their new home, a farm in the hills.

Once there, Sarah (Kelly Harmon) lashes out in grief when she learns her father, who arranged their passage to this new life on Paradeen, has been dead and buried for some time. The androids want to show their new family a photo album of the good life on Terra, but Sarah will not allow it. They do not need to be exposed to Terra because they can never visit there. It turns out that Michael and Sarah are from separate families; their spouses were each killed in the war and civil unrest on Terra's nearest satellite colonies. These satellites serve as farming centers for the agriculturally desperate motherworld. Terra, once a world of many diverse nations, has polarized between East and West. The colonies reflect this divisive trend. To make matters worse, those born on the colonies are biologically adapted to the thinner atmospheres of these smaller worlds. This bars the lunar farmers from ever returning to Terra.

Hector and Vector sing a musical skit to the settlers and the warriors, straight from the shows of Terra. When Michael thanks the androids for all they've done to entertain and safegaurd the children's lives, the androids admit they never destroyed the beacon to Lunar 7. The delays in the Avion's arrival confused the androids. Apollo sees this as an opportunity to follow the trail back to Terra. But Michael is distraught over the threat of Eastern Alliance destroyers tracking the homing signal and discovering their farm on Paradeen. While Michael and Apollo argue over the merits of visiting Lunar 7, Sarah tucks the kids into bed and sneaks out the back way into the night.

In space, the Commandant orders his ship to set course for Paradeen, Star Speed and battle-ready.

The next morning, Sarah approaches Apollo about staying on Pardeen. She feels safe with him around. Apollo tells her that he can't, that he must eventually return to the Galactica. She asks to what would happen if he couldn't return, but just then Hector and Starbuck return in a hovermobile from a nearby abandoned city. Starbuck is so excited, he looses his breath in the thin Paradeen air. It seems the city is intact, but the people are all gone. No doubt this Eastern Alliance introduced some neutron or biological weapon to wipe out the inhabitants and move back in once the war is over.

Apollo instructs Starbuck and Hector to return to this city and seek out libraries or science records which would tell them more about Terra. Apollo then tells Cassiopea to stick close to Michael while he takes Vector and the kids to the airstrip to signal the Galactica from his viper. As Cassiopea fraternizes with Michael, Sarah looks on from the house. Apollo's maneuver is having effect. At the airstrip, Apollo finds strangers snooping around the ships. The elder John and Aggie Mooreland (Frank Marth, Lesley Woods) and their hired hand Doyle (Gary Vinson) are shocked to discover a uniformed man with children. John tells Apollo he should go back where he came from. When the kids climb up to check out the viper, they warn Apollo: the equipment in the cockpit has been smashed.

In space above Paradeen, the Commandant orders scans of the planetoid's surface. He wishes to probe the rural hinterlands to find the unknown ships; if the pilots associated with the Lunar 7 refugees, they would not enter the city; "The survivors fear the invisible death that still lingers" in the urban areas, he recalls. Apollo and his party return to the farm. The captain is fuming about what he supposes the Moorelands did to the ships. Sarah admits to Michael and Apollo she did it; she wanted to keep Apollo on Paradeen. Hector pulls up in his hovermobile, alone. Starbuck is lost in the city. The two probed the underground archives, but the air was bad for the Colonial warrior and he refused to leave, sending Hector back for help. Apollo and Cassiopea join Michael and the androids in a search party to go to the city and find Starbuck.

As the sun sets on Paradeen, the search party starts probing the darkened, subterranean archives in the city. The tunnels and chambers seem endless. Back at the homestead, Sarah lets the kids go out to the barn to feed the animals. As the youngsters tend to the animals, there is a noise in the night sky. The Eastern Alliance destroyer has landed on the farm. The Commandant leads troops to enter the house and take Sarah prisoner. But the kids see what is going on from the barn, and sneak out the back way to seek help from the Moorelands.

The Commandant tries to talk Sarah into explaining who owns the unknown ships, but even threats of harm to the children won't loosen her tongue. At the Mooreland homestead, the kids beg their new neighbors for help. In the city, Cassiopea finally hears tapping on a pipe: Starbuck. But it takes a while for everyone to regroup before they can find him. Once they do, Doyle and Josh Mooreland arrive to offer help. They bring news of the Alliance enforcers' arrival.

Back at the house, Sarah still won't budge. The Commandant is loosing patience when there is a noise outside. Michael, Apollo and Starbuck jump the Alliance guards outside the house. When the Commandant sends more troops to find out what's going on, the three burst in and take the enforcers prisoner. The Commandant threatens "we are the most advanced military force in the Galaxy," which brings chuckles from Starbuck. On board the Eastern Alliance destroyer, Apollo directs the pilot on final approach to the Galactica's portside landing bay. The pilot exclaims he's never seen a ship that large. The Commandant is awed. "It's called a battlestar," Starbuck gloats.

A Second Look

This outing serves as a stepping stone in BATTLESTAR's Terra anthology. While it does have its own story about these people and their history on the Terran colonies, it is weak because too many scenes are so poorly executed. Still, this anthology could've worked if each of its parts had been written and directed more effectively.

The androids, Hector and Vector, are easy to ridicule. In the tragic backdrop of refugees escaping government oppression, their alleged comedy simply trivializes the story. BATTLESTAR's makers seriously erred.

Another serious error came in the scenes involving the Eastern Alliance enforcers. The Commandant seemed to be more of a Nazi parody than a villain with teeth. His astronaut-navy troops seem too disciplined to be goons, yet their only available course of action is to storm the farmhouse and take Sarah prisoner. While this may have been the Commandant's only way to figure out what was going on, his destroyer's scanners could've continued to look out for life signs near the farm. So he came off as a little clever, though not very intelligent. If he were more intelligent, he would've taken Sarah aboard the destroyer. It would've been more interesting to see Starbuck, Apollo and Michael plot to storm the ship with laser fire than to watch the usual sneak-up-from-behind-and-konk-him-on-the-head clich�.

Of course, making this into a serious battle between clearly defined good and evil plotting is not what this story is all about. It's a stepping stone in the path that leads to Terra, introducing the Terran background a little bit at a time.

Even without these criticisms, there are some other graceless scenes which make this episode more farce than engaging, serialized drama. Cassiopea and Starbuck seem to step out of character in the show's most awkward scenes. Sexism and the worst of 70's funkobabble rear their ugly heads when Cassie laughably tells Michael "I'm completely available." The city scenes in which Starbuck and Hector probe the uninhabited ruins while engaging in some of the weakest philosophical banter on primetime television reach a new low when the lieutenant says he wishes the android could serve on the Council of the Twelve. And when the search party is in danger of getting lost in the basement, Cassie hits a home run with a very un-Colonial "Oh, swell." And BATTLESTAR's makers must've been completely distracted when they wrote the scene in which their own character, Michael, gives the entire series a slam by asking "Apollo, what is a centon?"

Add to Hector and Vector the cheesy non-family family and it raises the question: did BATTLESTAR's makers set out to make a cartoonish kid's show, or a more mature serialized space drama, or just a testosterone-packed action adventure flick for young couples who would be recuperating after a night at the disco? It seems that Glen Larson and company couldn't make up their minds.

Spectacle Value

The interior and exterior shots of the Eastern Alliance destroyer are simple, yet adequate. Too bad we don't get to see more of this ship. It just didn't make sense to create such a fine ship and then briefly use it only a couple of times.

The scenes of the Paradeen city above-ground were mildly effective. The subterranean scenes were the usual low-budget cannibalize-some-military/industrial-site fare that is common to this series.

The scene where Apollo draws his sidearm and blasts a stack of barrels was effective, if hilarious.

One would think at least one scene where Apollo sends a quick signal to the Galactica to report their planetfall on Paradeen would've been in order.

We actually get to see what a viper cockpit looks like by looking down into it. Too bad it had to be a busted-up set.

We get to see the entire full-size mock-up of the Lunar Shuttle Avion (Michael's sleeper ship) on the airstrip.

The scene in this episode that was the most fun was when Apollo was coaching the pilot to land the destroyer aboard the Galactica. Effective.

Why don't the Lunar 7 refugees ever change out of their spacesuits? Are they going to harvest the crops wearing those silvery jumpsuits?

IF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA WERE NEW TODAY...

As with Part I, this episode would not be viable. A whole new approach would be in order.

The notion of Apollo, Starbuck and Michael repairing one of the vipers so it could subdue the destroyer while still on Paradeen would be more expensive, but also a more interesting way of foiling the Commandant. Or maybe the warriors could dismount one of the vipers' laser guns to use in a ground assault on the Eastern Alliance enforcers. Whatever the strategy, the cheesey fisticuffs would be out of the question.

Please, no more clownlike robots or aspiring child actors who just want to be seen smiling on-camera.

TIDBITS & NITPICKS

In this outing, Apollo seems to infer that there are six thousand people in the Colonial Fleet. While he was making an emotional statement when he said this, it does raise the question again about how many people there are aboard those 220 ships, how long they've been in flight, and whether they can handle any more capacity. It would be believable if his claim applied strictly to the Galactica crew, but not to the entire Fleet. Distributing 6,000 people to live in 220 ships would mean an average of less than 28 persons per starship. Even at six times 6,000, that would still be less than 164 persons per vessel. That still seems too small for the level of implied activity and commerce aboard the Fleet.

There is an annoying jump-cut at the beginning of this episode that could only be described as amateurish production values. The first act opens with a shot zooming in on the Battlestar Galactica. Next, we cut to an image of Cassiopea napping on the Lunar Shuttle Avion's control desk. This makes it look like the Avion is back aboard the Galactica, when the continuing story dictates it is supposed to be in flight. This kind of blooper is inexcusable.

Recalling the precautions taken when Starbuck took the suped-up "Starchaser" recon viper to investigate a nearby star system in the new (supposedly Krellian) galaxy in "The Long Patrol", why didn't Starbuck and Apollo take a few microns to slip into something other than a Colonial uniform after even what little Michael told them about the Eastern Alliance?

Why did Starbuck refer to the planet Paradeen as a "land mass"?

The notion of atmospheric pressure being reduced significantly is one thing, but the idea of it being reduced 80% is quite another. If a planetary body's gravity is that low, it's hard to understand how even simple plant life could survive. Take a trip to the Rocky Mountains, or any other great mountain range, and you'll see that vegetation stops growing above a certain altitude where the air gets too thin.

The only way to explain how the Terran people could have so many farming planets is to assume that Paradeen is actually in a neighboring star system, part of a multiple-star group or cluster. These stars may be very close together in galactic terms, and yet still be a long haul for sublight spacecraft like those seen in the first two installments of the Terran anthology. Such a multiple star/planet system would also explain why the Galactica could not be certain where the sleeper ship came from or where it would be headed.

The Battlestar Galactica's interior sets and other regular characters are completely absent from this episode. While this kind of change does spice things up, and should've been done more often throughout the series run, it also diminishes the role of the Galactica in this interesting chapter of the Terran anthology.

Those who watch too much television in the last twenty years (maybe this is a confession) will recognize Kelly Harmon from those "Tic Tac... the one-and-a-half-calorie breath mint" commercials.

Just what does "Star Speed" mean? Maybe this is getting mean to BATTLESTAR fans, but when a show resorts to this kind of vaporously vague technobabble, it becomes a farce.

You have to love some of the corny names used for people, places and things in this episode. The planet Paradeen, to mark BATTLESTAR's first foray in comedy/parody... the Lunar Shuttle Avion, which looks like a great red sitting duck, in space or on the ground... the Moorelands, a name for a farming family... and Commandant Leiter: what else would you call the enforcers' commanding officer?