Battle To The Death: X Bomber Vs. the Imperial Alliance
Episode 13 or Lee's chance to make some soup 🍲
Welcome back to Star Fleet! Today on our rip-roaring Saturday morning adventure series, we’re going to talk about trauma.
Despite the heroic music as X Bomber flies by, Peter Marinker narrates that Shiro is “conscience stricken.” The opening shot of our protagonist shows him in bed, fully dressed, helmet on, lights on, and obviously depressed as hell.
A couple of continuity notes– we have to talk about the posters on the wall in the bunk room because there are some fascinating art department choices. Shiro apparently has a thing for early motorcars which I presume is unusual for a young man in the 2990s. Also, we are told that Shiro is facing the prospect of a “new year in space.” In episode one, we are told that the year is 2999, which would appear to make this episode set on the brink of the year 3000. Future episodes would seem to flatly contradict this.
The most likely explanation, friends, is that this is a compilation episode and that it was written in haste without regard to overall storyline.1 To save time in the production schedule, the filmmakers used flashbacks explaining the story so far with a minimum of new material filmed. But, for the most part the dubbing team re-recorded new dialogue and there are a few alternate takes used that can’t be seen anywhere else in the series. Head back to episode 9 for more details on this!
The rehash is no longer necessary in the post-DVD, post-streaming era, but there are still a lot of deep and resonant themes in this episode that really advance the character of Shiro. I just wish we could spend a little more time on those.
“Cheer up, Shiro! It's New Year’s Day today! We’re gonna celebrate!” Lee booms with obvious disdain for the cry for help that is a man sleeping with his helmet on.
If you have friends who are depressed (or traumatized by killing their mentor), make sure you know what you are doing and that they are getting real help before you barge in with intent to party. Advice to “just cheer up” comes from a good place but is often not helpful in real life, non-puppet depression.
Lee cooked some soup using “artificial protein.” He’s uncertain how it tastes but maintains that it looks good. I hate to disagree, but I’m not sure I’d swig down a bowl of this if there were other options available.
Shiro thinks it looks good enough to eat and jokes that Lee could have been a chef and Lee agrees with tongue in cheek. Things are practically getting jovial here.
In a very nice touch, Shiro leans over to smell the soup and you can see the steam rising from the prop. These little details do a lot to make the puppets seem more human.
Shiro can’t believe he’s celebrating at the far end of the universe. Odd that he never imagined being way out here since he signed up for Star Fleet Academy. Where did he think they were going to send him?
He also can’t help but think about life back on Earth and that leads us into our first flashback.
We cut from a crash zoom into soup to this sequence taken from way back in episode 5 showcasing Shiro’s training years. The dialogue has been re-recorded and re-written in the English dub resulting in a sequence that feels even more like a hazy memory.
Back in the present, Hercules reminds Shiro that Carter is dead. As if Shiro didn’t know that– being the one who killed him. Lee chastises Hercules for his insensitive behavior, before being a bit insensitive himself and pointing out that he was like an older brother they all looked up to.
Shiro doesn’t seem to notice any of it and instead wonders about the source of their malaise. It all started when Captain Carter quit his cushy teaching job to go work on Pluto Alpha Base. “Did he foresee the invasion?” Shiro wonders. A very good question! If so, how? What other reasons would Carter have for leaving Earth in a hurry? Divorce? Caught in a money laundering scheme? Fell in love with a student? We’ll never know.
Our next flashback takes us to episode 1 for Captain Carter’s defeat on Pluto. It’s here that all his men lost their lives and where he was taken prisoner by the Imperial Alliance.
We seem to drift away from the eulogy of Carter that loosely holds this episode together into a more general recap as Shiro tells the others all about the events that they witnessed together. “Risking our lives for F-01. We didn’t even know what F-01 was!” Hercules recalls. It’s an interesting perspective, but of course they still don’t know what F-01 is.
We get up to the point where X Bomber is on the verge of crashing near the end of episode 1, then we skip ahead to episode 2 where Lamia is attacked by Alliance fighters. “We must get there!” Lamia says, in a totally different line reading. Then we cut back to the crash, then back to Lamia again. Why? I don’t know. We’re reminiscing with the boys, that's why.
But then things take a turn again. Instead of just remembering what they saw as in the crash, or projecting places they would have known about like Pluto Base, the boys seem to recall the interior of Makara’s ship– something they haven’t really seen other than in fleeting glimpses in the background of ship-to-ship communications. It seems like the narrative is completely third person omniscient, despite the first person conceit.
Rocketing through the showdown of episode 3, we move on to episode 4 to talk about the transport fleet arriving on Pluto.
Then? On to episode 5 to recap the search for Carter in the snow. “You made us search everywhere,” Hercules says. “Hercules and I were convinced he was dead,” Lee admits. This could be a tender moment of honesty between friends if only we slowed down a bit.
Next? First contact with the sailing ship the Skull. This section may feel particularly irrelevant, but it isn’t. Stay tuned!
But if you thought we were done with rewinding the narrative, you thought wrong! Nope, back to episode 4 we go to see the battle between Dai-X and the Imperial base on Jupiter. “We’ll give them a display of the Dai-X powers!” Shiro remembers himself saying. Funny, that’s not quite how I heard it before.
The conclusion of episode 6 follows, with X Bomber falling into a deadly graveyard in space. Iconic. Then their escape from the same, with totally different dialogue for everyone. If you recall, episode 7 was mainly concerned with the power drain affecting X Bomber within the black hole. In this version of events that problem isn’t even mentioned.
Then we roll past episodes 8 and 9, to 10 where Captain Carter makes his official debut as commander of the Alliance forces. What’s interesting here is that Hercules and Shiro acknowledge Carter’s total brainwashed state. They no longer seem to feel the intense anger that they felt toward him before.
Shiro admits to his friends that the familiar voice of Captain Carter “preyed on my mind” in a vulnerable moment.
Lee joins the chorus of his friends by saying that Captain Carter was just a victim of Imperial conditioning. “We gotta face it, guys. The Captain Carter that we knew and loved died on Pluto Alpha Base.”
Shiro knows better. He flashes back to last week’s episode 12, where he fired on his old master. He says he had no choice– “it was my life or his”– but we are left wondering. Could Carter have been saved? Should Shiro have sacrificed himself to bring Carter back to the side of Earth Defense Forces?
Just like that, the episode ends. There will be a bit more exploration of the same material in the next one– so much so that it almost feels as if this whole thing were a late addition after the rest of the season was completed.
Would I recommend someone watch these instead of watching the whole thing? Probably not. Some time would be saved and some of the tedium of the earlier episodes before the storyline kicks into high gear could be skipped but then you lose the payoff of having made it to the series high points.
These compilation style episodes are totally anachronistic in today’s world where most TV dramas are 13 episodes or less in duration. Watching them is a bit of a chore because they cover so much story we already know about and usually cut out a lot of the detail and nuance that made the original episodes entertaining. But it’s still well worth the examination in my opinion.
It almost feels like the closest thing to a Christmas or holiday themed episode in the series. True, Lamia, Benn, and the rest are missing but it is actually nice to take a pause for something more introspective after the jam-packed episode 12. There was so much drama there, having time to process is quite helpful. Plus it is charming to go back to an earlier era of TV where the need to provide viewers with opportunities to catch up on the narrative was a necessity.
Next time– back to the action! In the meantime… enjoy your soup!
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Another logical explanation is that this episode first aired on the 3rd of January, 1981 in Japan, making it the first to be broadcast in the new year. The team could have been hoping to tie in calendar events with events in the story.