What is F-01? Get ready to face the mystery!
When last we left our heroes, they were STILL stuck on the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, the bad guys were hovering directly above Star Fleet Command with malicious intentions. They demand F-01. Just one problem, nobody on Earth has any idea what that is.
After a quick recap from Dr. Benn/Peter Marinker’s Narrator, Number One is sent off to Data Center to look up F-01. Apparently, there is no Google in the year 2999. General Kyle insists that he do it quickly, apparently indicating the a search result like that could take ages to pull up. They have less than an hour till Makara opens fire.
Makara is passing the time by guzzling something out of a stone chalice. Bored witless, she tells a termoid to summon Captain Orion. Strangely, instead of using a radio or something like that, the gang or insectoids respond in a chorus, chanting “Captain Orion!” three times in a ritualistic refrain by the end of which Orion has long since arrived. It suggests some sort of hive mind capabilities among the Alliance and also that Captain Orion was waiting just outside for Makara to call him in.
Makara brags to her subordinate about their “surprise attack” even though Star Fleet saw them coming militons away. All they need now? F-01. Whatever it is, it provides invincibility. Makara’s personal ambitions are lofty. She reckons she’s due a promotion if she pulls off this important F-01 job and flatters Orion that he’ll have rank and title too.
It begs the question, if this mission was so important, why send ONLY these two goons to carry it out? Presumably the Alliance has others of equal rank who Makara seeks to be promoted over. Why not send a concentrated attack force to ensure victory and secure invincibility? Clearly, the Imperial authorities didn’t expect any meaningful resistance from residents of our Solar system.
Back on Earth’s moon, Dr. Benn has a chat with Lamia. Her support means the repairs are now about done, but Benn wants to return her to the relative safety of Moon Base where her radar work is “valuable.” Lamia wants to stay and be part of the defence efforts. She disregards Benn’s commands and goes to join the others in the engine room. He just shakes his head in thoughtful disbelief.
Despite being holed up in the engine room, Shiro, Lee, and Hercules have heard the latest report from Earth and are speculating about what F-01 could be. Lee never heard about it at the academy, Hercules reckons it could be a weapon– possibly one of X Bomber’s that hasn’t been used yet.
As Lee dismisses that notion, Shiro chimes in with another suggestion. What if instead of being a thing, F-01 was a person?
SPOILERS AHEAD, FRIENDS.
Lee is hopelessly confused by this comment, so Shiro explains that F-01 could be a sort of superhuman. A Kwisatz Haderach. A Star Child. A messiah for the new millennium who can control the solar system with special abilities.
This trope is an old one in science fiction but it still retains in mythical power. Human beings have always longed for salvation and to evolve into angelic beings that can traverse the stars and leave behind mundane, traditional bodies. This F-01 concept takes those mystical longings at the root of so many religions and speculations and wraps them up in Saturday morning packaging.
By sheer coincidence, just as he is saying these things, Lamia enters. From the chime of the synth, it’s telegraphed immediately that Lamia has something to do with this theory and that Shiro’s guess– wild and unfounded as it is– may be quite close to the mark.
Lamia just wants to help with repairs, but Shiro insists on talking about F-01 some more. Lee thinks Shiro’s theory is crackers, but Shiro rebuts this grounded viewpoint by basically saying “what about ESP?” Good argument, Shiro. 1
Lamia is obviously uncomfortable with this line of thinking. She keeps shifting and blinking. The way she says, “I have absolutely no idea,” announces to the audience that she definitely has some sort of idea.
The boys are oblivious to her feelings and Hercules declares that Shiro’s been in space too long. Ironic, given they all just arrived in space together two episodes ago.2 Lee displays a weak grasp of humanism by declaring that no human being is worth a whole solar system. Has John Lee never been in love?
In an astonishing leap, Shiro advances his theory even further to propose that this being is actually an alien “here among us" and undetected. 3 This causes Lamia to rush out of the room.
Despite having this uncanny insight into a mystery that has everyone else on Earth baffled, Shiro is mystified by Lamia’s departure. Lee, the ever present cynic, reckons it’s something Shiro said.
Putting an end to his work, Shiro goes out after her without another word. Lee wonders if it was something that he (Lee) said.
After his walk,4 Shiro’s curiosity gets in the way of his ethics. As he approaches the bridge, he overhears Benn and Lamia having an obviously private conversation. Rather than enter or leave, Shiro decides to snoop at the door.
Lamia wants to know the truth about herself. She abruptly announces that she believes F-01 refers to herself.
This is a startling assertion. Dr. Benn points out that she has no evidence. But Lamia insists something is calling her away… A very metaphysical force, it would seem.
In a surprise move, she confesses she knows very little about herself or how she was raised. Either she’s a total amnesiac or else this story is at least a little bit for our benefit, but either way it’s STORY TIME!
I had originally planned to skim over this section, but there’s too much to unpack. For starters, Dr. Benn begins his tale with cryptic remarks like “you must be told the truth sooner or later” which only serve to heighten the suspense. Referencing Lamia as “my dear” and saying it’s time for her to “grow into a woman,” it seems Dr. Benn and his impressive widow’s peak regard Lamia as a child of 16 or 18. While her age is sometimes stated as this, Liza Ross’ performance would seem to place her a few years older than that. She certainly isn’t physically smaller than the other puppets.
Having uttered these revelations, Dr. Benn then casually drops the bombshell that all of the information he has about Lamia comes from Professor Hagen. For those of you who recall, Hagen is Shiro’s last name and this Professor was also a designer of the X Bomber. Professor Hagen, it would seem, is the key to the whole thing.
The story goes like this: Hagen Sr. was working on Mars Institute when a spaceship crashes down from the skies. He was the only one brave enough to investigate.
Hagen finds a capsule, containing a baby. Like Moses floating to the Pharoah’s Daughter or Kal-El appearing in Kansas by the Kent family farm, Lamia has arrived from a distant land– an infant with no knowledge of her terrible purpose. 5
Just as Hagen is admiring the gift chance has given him (having left behind his own offspring) he is startled by Kirara, who scares him into dropping his flashlight.
Kirara, evidently sensing that anybody who drops a flashlight at a time like this is no threat, retreats. The capsule opens and the baby smiles at Hagen. Note the flashing pendant at her throat. Don’t leave babies alone in the crib with jewelry, folks, it’s a choking hazard.
Surprise! This mysterious baby is Lamia! Who’d have thunk it?
The smile from the baby cued Hagen Sr. to lift his visor, even though there’s no proof of a human supporting atmosphere in here. What there is proof of is that a perfectly healthy alien monster just decided to take a nap at possibly the most crucial moment of it’s career of sacred baby protection. A potential threat appears, what do you do? Growl and nap. Proof that he is actually just a pet and not much of a bodyguard. Don’t worry. He proves himself later.
Er, much later. Here he just plays with his rattle. A toy which does nothing to entertain the baby. This is an important moment for Lamia because it’s the story of how she got her name, Lamia6 which was given by Hagen an presumably not known to her people.
It's also important for Shiro, because while he was growing up back on Earth wondering just what the hell happened to his Dad, his Dad was actually on another planet raising an alien kid in a pretty idealized childhood. No doubt Shiro's own memories of his youth are not quite so pleasant.
Lamia grows up in secret. Why all the secrecy? Would the appearance of a baby in Professor Hagen’s life make Shiro’s mother jealous? All of this seems to be leading us back to the question of alien first contact. If Lamia was an extraterrestrial (she looks extremely human and breathes our air) than why wasn’t she studied by scientists other than Hagen Sr? Wasn’t anyone at the institute curious about this new daughter who appeared shortly after the crash?
The home life of Professor Hagen and Lamia is ideal that it has to be a fantasy. Lamia literally plays the harp as Hagen stops reading to listen with pride. They’re surrounded by sculpture in an abstract, dreamlike environment.
Back in the gritty reality of the X Bomber bridge, Dr. Benn concludes by telling Lamia things she must already know– such as that Professor Hagen disappeared without warning some time ago.
Lamia wants to know about her real parents and Dr. Benn takes a big hit of his pipe before admitting he knows nothing about her origins or why she wound up on Mars.
The implications slowly sinking in, Lamia realizes that she is in fact– not exactly human. Despite appearances to the contrary.
Shiro’s head must be spinning at this point. The filmmakers let us hear his thoughts via voiceover. However, he’s chosen to brush past the news that his Dad had a second family on Mars and forsook his son for a daughter, and instead concentrates on the news that this beautiful girl he just met is an alien.
Kirara, probably desperate for redemption after how bad he appeared in that story, suddenly becomes alerted to Shiro’s presence. This happens without Shiro making any noise and conveniently right at the end of story time. Perfect!
After a brief tussle, Shiro is dragged before Lamia and Benn. Extraordinarily, Shiro claims he wasn’t listening on purpose. It was an accident! Sure, Shiro, sure.
Dr. Benn takes a Zen approach to the whole thing. Perhaps feeling guilty for keeping the secret of Hagen Sr. from the authorities, he claims he didn’t want to reveal anything that would cause “unnecessary distress” to Lamia. Wouldn’t suddenly discovering you are an alien cause you some distress?
Benn swears Shiro to secrecy, explaining that people will never look at Lamia the same way if they know she isn’t human. It’s as if she’s not standing right there.
Also, how do we know Lamia isn’t human? Certainly, she came from outside the Solar system but was she ever given a medical exam? To all intents and purposes, she is a human and loyal to the cause of her benefactors.
Shiro agrees to keep the secret too and Lamia bows to Dr. Benn and thanks him politely. Shiro, for his eavesdropping gets no thanks at all. Next question– what if Lamia IS the F-01? She seems to feel she is. But Benn won’t hear of it.
In fact, he goes so far as to claim that F-01 does not exist. How could he know that since he doesn’t know what F-01 is?
Turning things back to the matter at hand, the imminent destruction of Star Fleet Command by a malicious invasion fleet, he orders the gang to return to their positions. He is, perhaps, forgetting that he just sent Lamia back to Moon Base for safekeeping and that his new crew don’t have any idea of regular positions yet. Clearly, the love of the halflings’ leaf has dulled his faculties.
Although we’re not at the halfway point, I will end this section here. We are about nine minutes in and the whole concept of the series has just pivoted. F-01 was mentioned in previous episodes, but here it takes its place on center stage as the driving force of the plot. The whole narrative of Star Fleet is about to orbit the mysterious F-01 concept.
Lamia’s origin story and the implications are staggeringly huge. In the first place, Shiro was our main hero. Now, before episode three is finished, it seems like the spotlight may swing away from him (young, heroic, and well helmeted) onto an unlikely new hero. A girl! Even in the 1980s, the television landscape was hardly egalitarian. Boys were the majority of all heroes and girls still damsels in distress or sidekicks and romantic partners. Lamia emerged from nowhere to change all that, despite her outward showing of humility and delicate femininity.
Plus, her relationship to Shiro has now been shifted to that of stepsister in a move that pre-figures George Lucas’ decision to make Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia brother and sister in Return of the Jedi (1983) despite earlier romantic tension between the two.
Shiro and Lamia’s relationship has an extra dimension because of their relationship to Professor Hagen. The ‘younger sibling supplanting the older’ motif has it’s origins in religion with Biblical sibilings such as Jacob and Esau or Leah and Rachel and is common in myth, fairy tale, and folklore. Shiro now has to face the fact that a potential romantic partner is not only a younger sister (kind of) she is also seemingly predestined to take his place as a hero.
Although Benn insists that Lamia isn’t the F-01, it seems evident at this early stage that she probably is. After all, no other credible explanations of F-01 have been proposed.
All this amounts to a lot of missed opportunities. The first two episodes were so focused on constant action that they did little to prepare us for this hard right turn into epic storytelling. Rather than the mysteries of Lamia and F-01 gradually revealing themselves, we find ourselves hit by a tidal wave of new information with no time to process it. Fortunately, we’ll revisit this flashback and it’s potential meaning several times as the series goes on.
For now, we have to deal with an imposing problem. How do you get rid of a giant alien battleship?
There’s no evidence in the series that extrasensory perception has been proven to be a fact of life in the Earth civilization of 2999.
It’s unclear just how much time has passed, but it seems as if the events of the first three episodes all take place within a single day.
This is another popular sci-fi trope. Look no further than the “man is the warmest place to hide” terror of The Thing or any of the various iterations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
For a good overview of the technical differences between front and rear projection, check out this article: https://www.filmriot.com/blog/rear-front-projection/
Terrible in the sense of Frank Herbert’s messianic figure. A harbinger of war, but also an even greater time of peace.
Lamia is not a word of Japanese extraction. It’s origins are in fact, from Greek mythology. In that world, Lamia was a blood sucking, child eating monster. I’m guessing the producers of the show named her this just because they liked the sound of the word.
Other Lamias include a city in Greece, a river in Uganda, the daughter of Poseidon, a Bulgarian dragon, and many, many more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(disambiguation)