Fireball XL5 Episode 8 Review: Space Pirates

[Jubal]

Fireball XL5 Ep 8: Space Pirates

Rating out of 10: 7.6
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803303/?ref_=ttep_ep8

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD):

Space Pirates wasn't a bad episode, with some interesting plot ideas but also a few missed opportunities. The framing of the story is the episode's most unusual feature - it is shown as being told by Venus to Commander Zero's son whilst babysitting. This does raise some interesting continued questions through the narrative as to the reliability of what is being seen and the boundaries between fact and fiction - though it would do it better if it were not for the fact that a lot of the silliness of the plot would be entirely in keeping with the rest of the show anyway. The tale of adventure, kidnap, and the scarce resources of space is by no means a bad one, and there is some neat in-episode continuity with Professor Matic's slightly bungled attempts at magic tricks providing the episode with its Chekhov's gun.

The main reason I'm not scoring this episode higher is that whilst a lot of the structure of the story was neat, the character interactions felt lacking and the pirates could have been far better realised as villains on screen. Although their nature - completely teleported out of the 1700s stereotype, complete with cutlasses and eyepatches and calling earth people "landlubbers" - may be a reference to Venus weaving the piratical elements of the child's book into a different tale, the story would have felt more watchable if the crossover had been managed better - something akin to the captain from Doctor Who's "The Pirate Planet" would have made a significantly better villain. The sense that everything might be the work of an unreliable narrator offered some opportunities that were missed - the knowledge that Venus was telling the story of course took away from any sense of threat or impact, and wasn't explored well within the script to counterbalance that. The storyteller as a framing device tends to work better to frame part of a story than the whole thing (see also: the Odyssey), and if used to drop around the whole story more needs to be done than was done here to justify its use.

Overall, not a bad episode of Fireball at all, and a lot of neat ideas, though the execution was less than perfect in places.