Fireball XL5 Ep 6: The Sun TempleRating out of 10: 7.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803306/?ref_=ttep_ep6Review (SPOILERS AHEAD):This was in some ways a fairly decent episode; the setup, with the humans unwittingly offending a highly religious sun-cult by blowing up an asteroid belt and creating a blasphemous second sun in the sky, was really a pretty neat idea and one of the nicest starting setups I've seen in Fireball. The idea of them reacting by firing at the earth also worked fine, though I felt it would have made more sense if they hadn't done it by firing a giant sun ray across half a galaxy to hit precisely the launching site of the earth's asteroid-destroying missiles with pinpoint accuracy. Worse, despite the whole thing being obviously blown to shreds, there was no concern or explanation over the fate of the actual asteroid-destroying warhead, which presumably is wrecked in the explosion but it's not explained why it doesn't actually blow up the missile (and take a continent or so of earth with it).
The second half of the episode followed familiar lines; Venus is kidnapped and set up to be sacrificed, Steve (with the help of Zounie) finds her at the last minute, shoots at things (for once the control panel), and they escape whilst the sun cultists, trapped, burn in their own temple. It's a perfectly reasonable story arc, but it has a lot of parallels in other Fireball episodes and the show is at its best when it deviates from, rather than re-treads, this pattern.
