Fireball XL5 Ep 21: Robert To The RescueRating out of 10: 7.5
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803300/?ref_=ttep_ep21Review (SPOILERS AHEAD):This was a pretty respectable episode, a couple of astronomical mishaps and a couple of plot elements could have been firmed up but all in all a pretty solid story.
The bad side first - the planet-sized object didn't really need to eclipse the sun, that brought it slightly absurdly close, though I guess that's a bit pernickety of me. More annoying for me was the fact that the object was apparently planet-sized but you could still see its curvature when Fireball landed. It seems to be distressingly random whether one sees planetary curvature in Fireball episodes, and that does get to me. Plot-wise I thought it could have been made a little more explicit that the crew were mentally conditioned to obey orders without question - the mind-wipe was made clear enough, but it felt a bit out of the blue that they just accepted Robert's orders.
The good side - great episode for Robert, and the plot (which I won't spoiler all of here) was really very nicely done. The touch at the end showing the single remaining effect of the escapade was very neat indeed, too. Another really good point - complex (by Fireball's standards) alien motivations, these antagonists were not cackling supervillains or especially murderous, and their desire for self-preservation and fear of discovery, coupled with their extremely high technology level and view of the humans as primitives, gave them an interesting and different dynamic to simple gribbly-monster or aggressive alien types.
This was a pretty nice episode overall, and one of the better Fireball plots I've seen.
