Don't ask me why, because I'm not at all certain that I can give you a decent explanation, but one thing I have always found fascinating is the way people can start a conversation talking about one thing and end up segueing into a topic which may seem entirely unrelated - and quite often far more serious than the topic which was the original focus of the discussion.

It happened recently at my house. My son Joshua and I had spent much of the day tending to some long-put off chores out in the garage, and decided to reward ourselves by watching a little TV together that evening. My wife had recently bought for me a boxed DVD set of a favorite show from my high school days: "Buck Rogers In The 25th Century," the science fiction series produced by Glen A. Larson and starring Gil Gerard and Erin Young that ran for two seasons (1979 to 1981) on NBC. Hardly great television, to be sure, but definitely a guilty pleasure.

As we watched Josh started asking questions about the show, and during the course of the discussion I explained that the first and second seasons of "Buck Rogers" were almost like two entirely different shows. The first season was exciting and fun, with a playful sense of humor that kept the show interesting even during the most silly and outlandish of plotlines.

But the second season - in which the main character was now serving on board a starship in deep space, far removed from 25th century Earth - tried to be far more serious both in tone and subject matter, a fact which most fans cite as the reason for its cancellation at the end of that season. The show became heavy-handed and essentially turned its back on the comic strip that had inspired it, becoming instead just a worn-out retread of the other well-known SF series produced by Larson just a year or so earlier: the original "Battlestar Galactica."

(In fact, season two of "Buck" was little more than "Battlestar Galactica" in reverse: instead of a fleet of survivors from another star system looking for the lost colony of humans who migrated to Earth, Buck and his companions were trekking through space seeking out lost colonists from Earth who had fled their homeworld in the wake of the holocaust that had nearly destroyed it several centuries earlier. Makes a person wonder what kind of stories Larson and his writing team might have been able to come up with had they chose to forego the sequel series "Galactica 1980," and instead had moved the show from ABC to NBC and found a way to have Adama and Buck run into one another halfway...)

Anyway, that discussion prompted a comparison between the original "Galactica" - also a short-lived series - and the more recent, more successful remake that ended last year after several seasons. As is well known the remake proved far more popular than the original; it won a Peabody Award, garnered much critical acclaim, and was even named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 shows of all time. But, frankly, I didn't much care for it. The new "Galactica" may have had better production values and more realistic storylines, but it just wasn't as much fun.

Fans say the characters in the remake were more realistic, but to me that was part of the problem. They became so realistic that they were totally unlikable; they seemed to spend all their energy fighting and backstabbing and wallowing in loathing and self-pity. Who wants to spend much time around people like that - even fictional ones?

The characters from the original series, on the other hand, faced their enemies and their problems with an unwavering faith in duty, family, faith, and the strength of the human spirit. Their dialogue may have been corny and cartoonish at times, but they demonstrated a sense of courage, dignity and - yes! - optimism that was sadly lacking in the remake.

At one point during our conversation the observation was made that the newer version of "Galactica" was, whether by accident or design, a reflection of the era in which it was made. An era marked by hatred, intolerance, fear, isolation and, perhaps worst of all, a nagging sense of cynicism - the feeling that things are never, ever going to get better, no matter what we do or how hard we try.

And that, in turn, brought to mind comments made in a recent letter to the editor received at the newspaper where I work, in which the writer seemed to be basically saying that very thing. That there are no solutions to the problems that face our nation and our world today. So why bother?

Seems a pretty jaundiced way of looking at the world, if you ask me. To continually insist that there is no hope is the surest way to insure that there truly is no hope. What's the sense in that?

Maybe I'm being overly idealistic, but I prefer to think that as long as there are people who still believe in hope, then hope still exists. And I've seen ample evidence that it does.

There are people in this country of differing political viewpoints who disagree - strongly, loudly, all too often rudely - about the direction this country should be going in. But the one thing that unites them is a shared sense that things CAN get better.

That's hope, boys and girls. And it's not dead yet.

In the end Joshua and I both agreed that the conversation had taken an unexpectedly serious turn - especially given that the whole thing was started by our viewing of a campy, lightweight TV show from three decades past with spaceships and ray guns and a stubby little robot whose dialogue was performed by the same actor who had earlier given voice to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

But, as both my son and my father have pointed out on so many occasions in the past, the truth can quite often be found in the strangest of places...

(Copyright 2010, by John A. Small)