Recovering...

Friday night I had a kind of geek/irony overload, and my brain is just now recovering. Imagine how the people who listened to me preach this morning felt.

So Battlestar Galactica -- which is the best show on television unless there's a WKRP or Barney Miller rerun on, and there never is, so draw your own conclusions -- has returned with new episodes after a year away. But scheduled opposite it by those villains at Spike TV? The original Star Wars, technically known now as "Episode IV: A New Hope." It may be better known by you folks under 35, who may be more familiar with Episodes I-III, as "one of the three that doesn't suck."

Although I had some consternation about which to watch, it was quickly overcome by the realization that I have seen Star Wars about a hundred times and I own a copy if I need to watch it again. But the irony overload blew my my poor dorky circuits. Here, scheduled against one of the best Star Wars movies, was the modern Battlestar Galactica, a miraculously good remake of a horrible 1970s show that was itself derided as a poorly done Star Wars-ripoff! If you click on the first link, check out the snazzy high-tech computer Maren Jensen is about to type something on. Fortunately, this advanced civilization would soon let Maren and the other "girls" serving on Galactica be pilots 'cause all the men pilots got sick. This episode also featured a memorable performance by Ed Begley, Jr., as "Ensign Greenbean."

As bad as the original Battlestar was -- and in the opinion of noted TV critic Carl B. Graham, Sr., my grandfather, "Battlestar Galax" was as dumb a space show as had ever been since Lost in Space, a.k.a. "that silly robot show" -- it can't hold a candle to the sequel, proof that people who run TV networks are really not very smart. Galactica 1980 had the remains of the ragtag fugitive fleet find Earth, and try to improve its technology -- maybe offering them a Commodore 64 or something -- while protecting Earth from the Cylons. We never had to worry about what would happen when the calendar changed, since Galactica 1980 expired several months before the actual 1980 did.

These shows should teach us all some lessons: 1) Battlestar creator Glen A. Larson could sell snowcones to Siberians. After all, he sold this show to ABC twice! 2) Sometimes write-in campaigns to rescue your favorite canceled show backfire horribly and create new series in which your heros have to save Wolfman Jack.

Anyway, my brain has finally recovered from its geek/irony multi-parallel space-time inversion...well, it's mostly recovered, anyway.