Cruise Ship To The Stars
Buck is assigned to provide undercover security for the Miss Cosmos beauty pageant. While he’s relieved to see at least one 20th century custom has survived, Buck finds that the contest is more about genetic perfection than just looks – and that genetic perfection puts a price tag on the head of every contestant for bounty hunters and others seeking an infusion of genetic material. Even with Wilma and Twiki backing him up, however, Buck is in for a challenge – a killer is on board, and oddly enough, her appearances seem to coincide with the period disappearances of one of the contestants.
teleplay by Michael Bryant and Cory Applebaum
story by Michael Bryant
directed by Sigmund Neufeld, Jr.
music by Shirley WalkerCast: Gil Gerard (Buck Rogers), Erin Gray (Wilma Deering), Tim O’Connor (Doctor Huer), Leigh McCloskey (Jay), Trisha Noble (Sabrina), Brett Halsey (Cruise Ship Captain), Kimberly Beck (Allison Michaels), Dorothy Stratten (Miss Cosmos)
Notes: The Lyran Queen model was reused as the Searcher in season two. Actress Dorothy Stratten, who had been the Playboy Playmate of the Month as recently as August 1979 and the Playmate of the Year in 1980, was murdered by her husband less than a year after this episode aired; that highly publicized tragedy became the basis of the movie Star 80.
LogBook entry by Earl Green
K. Callan (Alsia), Max Grodenchik (Rom), Albert Henderson (Cos) 
With UNIT’s work now out in the open, Colonel Emily Chaudhry finds her duties as UNIT’s public relations officer growing more complicated by the day. The latest operation – making a very visible show of transporting discarded nuclear weapons to keep the press and public’s attention away from a smaller convoy transporting pieces of an apparent alien spacecraft – proves to be no exception when both the spacecraft convoy and its decoy convoy are attacked almost simultaneously. UNIT’s commanding officer, Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, is kidnapped, but no one else is taken. The spacecraft is quietly spirited away by a group who wishes to use its technology to further its secret space-time experiments. But the experiments continue to go horribly wrong, resulting in commuter train crashes with massive casualties, a major disruption of the British banking system, and even a jetliner crash directly into Windsor Castle. Colonel Chaudhry and the rest of UNIT try to piece together the puzzle and find their missing CO, but when a new CO, Colonel Dalton, is assigned to take over, he seems like a poor fit: he knows nothing of UNIT’s past work, and shows no interest in learning. Worse yet, Chaudhry discovers that he may have ties to ICIS.
