Fireball XL5 Ep 24: Drama at Space CityRating out of 10: 7.2
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807585/?ref_=ttep_ep24Drama At Space City: in which a fairly terrible premise turns into a surprisingly not-so-awful episode.
The premise of "kid accidentally ends up in space" was perhaps inevitably going to end up happening in
Fireball at some point. Fortunately, the resulting episode is surprisingly less awful than it might have been. The episode takes a fairly long time to get going, it culminates in a played-straight sequence of scared kid, dead radio, and Fireball XL1 giving chase, and so on. The slow start is actually helpful, though; the plot point around which the episode revolves is fundamentally trivial, but is given about the right amount of time, leaving the rest of the episode for some quite useful and nice character-sketch scenes. It's a very character-driven episode, and it's this that allows it to carve out a suitable place for itself among other Fireball XL5 stories.
The Zero household are very central to the episode, with Venus and Steve away on holiday. Indeed Commander Zero is really the main character of the episode, and his mix of concern and high efficiency in the final mission sequence is an interesting view on his character (and his use of XL1 is interesting to compare to Steve's command of XL5). His wife could do with a bit more independent character, but as a 1960s housewife stereotype isn't played too badly. The main thing I liked about the episode was really the viewpoint on Space City's normal operation between XL5's missions - Mat's work on Robert, the routine checks on Fireball, the radio fixing, and so on, give a much more rounded feel to Space City than we get at other times. On the minus side Jonathan Zero comes across as slightly annoying, and coupling him with Zounie doesn't help matters; after Zounie nearly dies saving them both, it would be nice for Jonathan to get a bit of character development, but this seems absent at the end.
I'll give this a 7.2, which given I expected it to be pretty hopeless is a testament to some actually well put together characterisation and a nice view into the inner workings of the World Space Patrol.
