Season one of Buck Rogers featured the titular 20th Century hero waking up five hundred years in the future and then helping to protect the Earth from menaces both human and alien, with the help of a diminutive robot named Twiki (and also Colonel Wilma Deering, but as I mentioned in my review, poor Erin Gray seemed to get shuffled out of the limelight rather a lot). It was amiable light entertainment in the form of an episodic science fiction TV show.
I don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but season two jettisons series creator Glen A Larson at the same time as it pillages his earlier Battlestar Galactica for ideas. Buck, Twiki and Wilma are now crew members aboard a space ship, which is venturing out in search of Earth's lost colonies (in Galactica, the survivors of the "12 colonies" were looking for Earth) and running into all kinds of myth-inspired weirdness like satyrs (Galactica also drew heavily on such themes). Really all that's missing is a race of implacable robotic enemies.
Alas, this change of direction doesn't gel at all, and is accompanied by some truly dreadful scripts. The season kicks off with two tiresomely drawn out and tedious two-parters, and while none of the remaining episodes are anywhere near as dull as those ones, they're frequently very silly in their efforts to be 'more serious' than season one. It's easy to see why ratings plummeted and the show was cancelled.
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