This may very well be the most ridiculous hour of television I've ever seen, and I grew up in the 80s. The basic plot has a record producer (played with a Scooby Doo villain menace by Jerry Orbach) using the "rock" group under his tutelage to send out sound waves that cause galactic youth to revolt. But that plot thumbnail really doesn't do any sort of justice to the total absurdity of this episode. If it had been done tongue-in-cheek maybe I could cut it some slack, but the approach is so serious (well, as serious as 'Buck Rogers' is capable of) all I could do was gape in a mix of horror and awe.
Gil Gerard is not one of our great thespians, but as usual he makes for a likable lunk, and one must award the beefy, hirsute actor points for managing to keep a straight face here. You can almost hear Orbach asking himself why he didn't become an accountant or architect as he dutifully hams his way through this muck. The music--a combination of disco and a morbidly obese cat running back and forth across a synthesizer--will get stuck in your head like gum in your hair.
'Buck Rogers' is a poorly made series. The sets look cheap, the special f/x chintzy, and the costumes like something you'd have found at a yard sale at Liberace's circa the late 70s. At its best, it's passable genre entertainment for the undiscriminating viewer or a nostalgic touchstone for Gen-Xers. At its worst, it's "Space Rockers.", like a 48-minute colonoscopy administered by a doctor with cacti for hands.