So here we are, plodding through “Spaceball,” another fine Galactica 1980 episode. (Confused? See yesterday’s post for concise explication of the various Galactica series).

“Spaceball” is the personification of hell on earth, in that it’s a whole episode devoted to the premise that everyone loves precocious children playing baseball against a formidable opponent and winning at the last minute. In this case, it’s the Super-powered Galactica Children who need to win the big playoff game to save a baseball camp run by an earthling named William “Billy” Ayers.

The name of the team is the polecats.

Seriously.

Ayers is played by Paul Koslo, who has appeared in pretty much every cheesy 70s and 80s show ever made at least once. It’s impressive. You should click on that link and look for yourself. Go on, we’ll wait here, just be sure to come back!

Wasn’t that great? I love the fact that he even played Jesse James in that episode of the Dukes of Hazzard that’s presented as a flashback to the Old West while Uncle Jesse reads from an old a diary and all of the characters in the flashback are played by the actors who play the characters who are supposed to be those characters descendants.

See also: tropes that are only one step to the left of a full-on time travel episode.

See also: sweeps week stunts.

See also: we didn’t just jump the shark, we caught it, skinned it, ate it and wore it’s hide as a disguise so we could eat in the studio commissary without showing our faces.

So, back to Galactica 1980 – William Ayers only has one arm, it’s implied he chewed it off to escape the set of this show. Maybe I implied that. In the episode I think they explained how he lost his arm and why it ended his career, but I spaced out and missed the explanation.

Any episode with Starla and Moonstone and the other allegedly darling Galactica children makes my teeth itch.

And yet, this is also the best episode we’ve watched so far. The character of Xavier the time-traveling bad guy is being played by a different actor and he seems unclear what both his motivation and his ethnicity are supposed to be. You’ve got to watch the first 10 minutes of the episode on hulu to appreciate how hilariously bizarre this is. I swear at one point in that opening scene he seems to lapse into a Bela Lugosi impression.

We’ve learned important things from Galactica 1980, particularly this, which appears at the end of every episode:

Just in case you had any questions, I guess.

Most importantly, we’ve decided that “William Ayers and the Polecats” would make an excellent band name.