QUICK RECAP: X Bomber and crew have left the Earth far behind in favor of deep space. They are on the hunt for a spaceship called the Skull, but ironically the Skull finds them first and rescues them from the Sargasso Sea of Space before vanishing. Now, they need to find a friendly planet to make repairs. Hands up if you think they’re not gonna find one.
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As Dr. Benn meditates, the boys are chatting about the events of the last episode. In particular, the possible motives of the Skull. Hercules admits it saved them all. Lee is just hoping he never sees a black hole again. Ever.
PPA, presumably electronically connected to the ship’s sensors, announces they’ve detected a planet with suitable conditions for human life.1 Shiro goes to “yellow alert” and prepares the ship for a landing.
Lamia, in her quarters and reading Scientific American, is blown away by the planet she sees out the window. It’s so beautiful she wonders if they’ve found paradise. Expectations have been set very high…
…only to be ever so slightly let down by what appears to be a matte painting of a petri dish. I do like the look of it and I’m not here to knock this design. It’s just that it doesn’t exactly fit a typical earthly definition of what a paradise planet might look like. However, we mustn’t forget– Lamia is an unearthly young lady.
Setting Lamia’s concepts of celestial beauty to one side, we find ourselves back on the bridge of Makara’s Battlecruiser. Despite being utterly defeated by X Impulse, the ship seems fully operational and undamaged now. Perhaps the Imperial Alliance simply spawns new ships, new bug-like Termoids, and a new Makara and Orion each time they are defeated.
In any case, Orion is somehow tracking X Bomber and knows that they are landing on a planet he calls Alarea; which rhymes with Diarrhea, sometimes spelled Alloria or Alarya.
This is good news for the Alliance because the entire planet (!) is a live volcano2 and full of “ferocious creatures and mutants roaming through the lava.” The creatures will surround the X Bomber, trap them, and then a single laser torpedo will be enough to cause an eruption, Orion explains.
Makara is exuberant. “They’ll go to Hell, buried in lava!” she exclaims with feeling. She’s a compelling villain and far more vicious than her Denise Bryer-voiced Terrahawks counterpoint, Zelda.
As the villains chuckle, X Bomber has entered the atmosphere of a planet for the first time and is now cruising over mountainous, but lush, terrain. 3
X Bomber comes to an abrupt stop right in the middle of a very pretty field.
This planet reminds me of classic Flash Gordon comic strips. It has an old school colorful quality that feels like it would be equally at home in something like John Carter of Mars.
There’s a few moments pause, allowing us to soak in the atmosphere, then we get Shiro telling us that the landing is all successfully completed.
Hercules is surprised to be back on the ground– on a habitable planet, no less! “It’s all been a bit of a frazzle,” he explains.
John Lee throws his hands to the skies in relief. The gang is all feeling "terrific.” Shiro says that it feels good to look up at real sky and breathe real air. Never mind that they just touched down and nobody is outside yet.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Benn and PPA have to kill this buzz before the joy gets out of hand. Benn does this in his usual tempered, philosophical manner. He reminds Shiro that the journey is only just beginning. PPA just gives them all a list of chores.
You can’t blame the robot. After all, they’re here for repairs not R&R.
R&R is precisely what the boys are after though, and so that’s what they go for. Exiting the bridge, they leave PPA snapping about discipline.
The Doctor finds the whole situation funny. He offers PPA a bemused apology for the behavior of the youths. Kids these days, right?
Shiro is waving this repair gun thing at a panel and not having a good time at all. Bored and overworked, he wants to go exploring.
Lee is admiring the scenery and thinking of putting down roots here. Hercules makes fun of his homesteading ambitions.
No one, and I mean no one, is working. They all stare off into the distance wishing they could enjoy their location. That’s when they spot Lamia.
Shiro is worried about them. He reckons they shouldn’t be off by themselves.
Lamia, for her part, is indifferent to any and all potential danger. Her attention is drawn by the flowers.
She claims they smell nice. Kirara has to check for himself while Lamia wanders around in the fields.
The words of Captain Orion are echoing in our ears right about now. The X Bomber crew are likely in very deadly danger and Lamia and Kirara have gone for a frolic in the meadows. Fortunately, Lamia soon spots the danger.
Lamia sees the volcano and it registers faintly, but she concludes it isn’t active. No problem, right?
Kirara is alarmed about something else altogether.
Some strange creatures are burbling on the horizon. White, furry, and with glowing yellow eyes not unlike Kirara’s own.
Lamia is instantly taken with these tiny beasts. “How lovely they are!” She waltzes blithely over to say hello.
This gets Kirara’s hackles up. The little monsters make him uneasy and he is unwilling to approach. Lamia tries to reassure him, then goes to make friends by herself. He responds by lumbering back to the X Bomber.
Having disregarded their concerns, the crew have gone back to work getting their ship ship-shape.
Hercules is done for the day, and so is Shiro. They’re ready for that R&R that was promised.
Up above, Lee appears to be mindlessly banging on things with a hammer. He needs some help with that, and Shiro offers to come join him. That’s when things get shaky.
Kirara, short on verbal skills, communicates by shaking Shiro off the scaffolding he has been standing on. This is a very successful sequence from a puppetry point of view.
Shiro lands with a cry of “Gosh sakes!” right onto one of the needle free cactus pods. It’s a bit of a stiff landing after the successful illusion of the fall itself.
Kirara is still trying to get Shiro’s attention. Shiro isn’t picking up on the clues. Hercules, the brains of the operation, points out that Lamia must be in trouble.
Putting two and two together, Hercules and Shiro scramble to go check on Lamia. Lee stays behind, complaining all the while. It’s interesting that while all three are looking for a break, only Hercules and Shiro, the ones competing for Lamia’s affections, leave behind their tools to check on her.
Lamia is making friends with the local wildlife. She tells them to come out, not be afraid, and that she won’t hurt them. In reply, they go on making their friendly burbling sound.
As the males approach, the creatures duck into hiding. There’s some lovely sound design with atmospheric synth and effective footstep foley.
Shiro hails Lamia. With a hint of condescension, he tells her that the planet is dangerous for her on her own. Lamia is unafraid and also unaware that the creatures are amassing behind her.
Freaked out by their emergence, Shiro and Hercules draw their sidearms and start blasting. Lamia is horrified.
One creature is hit. The others spin around, flap their arms and show other signs of distress– but don’t flee. In fact, as the shooting stops and Lamia approaches their fallen comrade, they reappear. They seem unaware of the deadly danger these intruders could represent.
“I’m so sorry, mon-mon,” Lamia says, apologizing whilst revealing the species’ name for the first time.
Shiro, clueless and insensitive, demands Lamia come away from the fallen beast. Lamia insists that killing was unnecessary and that she was making friends.
We are now getting into the philosophical crux of the episode, a surprisingly deep subject for Saturday morning that is handled in a thought provoking manner.
Shiro orders Lamia away and she refuses to comply. “Your instincts are to kill first and question later,” she tells him.
Hercules, who also pulled his weapon, tells her (less condescendingly and a bit more gently) that the galaxy is a lawless place where killing is sometimes required for survival.
Lamia dismisses this perspective as pure barbarism. She calls the Mon-mons out into the open, seemingly able to communicate with them fully.
Shiro and Hercules, startled at her knowing/naming the aliens, give each other a look.
“Just because it’s pretty, doesn’t mean it isn’t a dangerous creature,” Shiro argues. “It could have a poisonous bite.”
But to Lamia, this common sense approach is the heart of the problem. “You’re the one who carries poison in your heart,” she tells Shiro. His knee jerk reaction and xenophobia are the direct cause of the dangers that he fears.
This is the emotional core of this episode– quite sophisticated stuff for Saturday morning viewing at any time in TV history. We will delve in much deeper in my next post.
For now, I will say that I understand both of the perspectives represented in this and subsequent scenes. I spent two years of my childhood living on a farm and a great deal more playing outside in the woods. One thing I learned very quickly was that shiny, colorful, or pretty bugs/plants/creatures/mushrooms were often the most dangerous. A flashy appearance was nature’s “keep away” warning as I sometimes found out though first hand experience.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen many people (or animals in shelters) rejected because of their unusual appearance. Growing up in the American South at the time I did meant seeing anyone or anything different being ridiculed, accused of being un-American, or worse. While the public lynchings and hate crimes of the Jim Crow past had gone by the wayside, they were replaced by more covert kinds of racism and fear of difference.
So what’s the answer? How do we protect ourselves from potential dangers while at the same time learning to look past outward differences in order to find friendship and cooperation? We’ll find out how the crew of X Bomber face this next week.
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How convenient for our heroes to find a habitable planet so close to home. Of course, no where on screen is it explained exactly how far away from Earth the X Bomber is, which brings up the question of X Bomber’s speed. While terms like “hyper speed” and “quantum speed” are thrown around, there’s no clear definitions and there’s no streaky star effects to indicate faster than light travel. In previous episodes, it seemed as if X Bomber had just barely left the solar system when they fell in the Sargasso Sea. Even if they had, the distance between planets is considerable and it seems unlikely that a planet just happened to be in range of the depleted spaceship.
It all could be a moot point anyway. The planet could be exoplanet Proxima B https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/2211/proxima-b-3d-model/
An entire volcanic planet isn’t likely to be as stable as this one. See Mustafar in Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith and the Genesis Planet in Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock for more scientifically inaccurate volcano planets.
How does a ship as boxy and blocky as the X Bomber enter an atmosphere? What sort of heat shielding must they be using? There are none of the visible markers of planetary re-entry on the hull.