Battlestar Galactica & Caprica Reviews

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BSG TOS 1978 - Season 1 - Episode 07

BSG TOS 1978 - 1x07 - The Long Patrol - Originally Aired: 1978-10-15

My Rating - 2

Fan Rating Average - 4.1

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# Votes: 28 2 4 3 7 17 11 2 2 5 10

Synopsis
While testing out a new ultrafast spaceship, Starbuck loses the ship to a crafty renegade and suddenly finds himself marooned and imprisoned on a mysterious planet where the prisoners serve terms for the crimes of their ancestors. [DVD]

Problems
- Apollo says to Boxey: "We're leaving our star system, Boxey. When we get through this asteroid dust field there'll be a whole new galaxy. One no human in this fleet has ever seen before." Okay, so which is it? Are they leaving their planetary system (which is the correct term, not star system) or their galaxy? Even Tigh throws around the terms loosely. As does Starbuck.
- A man on the Rising Star says "this reminds me of the old days, before the war." But the war started 1000 years ago...

Factoids
- The Galactica leaves the colonial home planetary system in this episode.

Remarkable Scenes
- Starbuck regarding the ship he was left with: "It's like trying to fly a museum."
- The dogfight.

My Review
Back to its old ways, BSG 1978 produces an episode full of plot holes and technical problems. Once again, there's a habitable planet... er... well, asteroid found. And gee, it looked like a hunk of airless rock from space to me, but what do I know. Once again the show becomes the adventures of Starbuck or Apollo with the fleet taking a backseat. Once again, we get cookie cutter scenes aboard the Cylon Basestar. Baltar and Lucifer are getting so generic now that they could probably start recycling their plotting and scheming scenes in addition to viper dogfights. The biggest error though is what I've discussed in the problems section. The writers apparently didn't know the difference between a planetary system and a galaxy, and throwing the terms around so loosely makes the episode embarrassing to watch, among other details. I concede an extra point for the nice bits of humor in the episode, however.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Gary on 2021-08-31 at 11:51pm:
    In addition to being generic, the scene on the base star completely ignores that two episodes ago, Baltar was trapped on Kobol, and Lucifer had betrayed him. And since the Baltar/Lucifer interplay was probably my favorite part of the whole series, this really grated.

    The science is just hopeless, but it's true that nearly every episode there's some line that makes me smile at least, and sometime chuckle. This episode was funnier than most (two or three smiles!).

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