Fireball XL5 Episode 32 Review: Faster Than Light

[Jubal]

Fireball XL5 Ep 32: Faster Than Light

Rating out of 10: 7.6
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807586/?ref_=ttep_ep32

Faster Than Light was a good concept, some of the execution let it down a little but it was a pretty reasonable episode.

Broadly, conceptually, it worked. Fireball going beyond the edge of charted space, great, due to a mechanical fault, also good stuff, the precise FTL stuff not necessary per se but sure, that worked OK. The destination - if serendipitous - was also a good call, a sort of "gas cloud in space environment" is actually quite a fun idea for a show like this, and it's a pity it wasn't fleshed out and explored better, more inhabitants would have been nice. The Fireball crew worked pretty well together, Zounie as usual managed to cause a good deal of trouble and it's still not obvious why they just let him run all over the spaceship all the time, but other than that the characters worked nicely. Seeing their quiet resolve in the face of assumed imminent death is quite an interesting moment, and Steve, to give credit where it's due, actually does handle the situation pretty well and shows unusually good leadership. The "let's show interesting machinery" bits of the episode, seeing more of Fireball's dangerous engine rooms and a space rescue mission setting off, were also nice.

There were some weak elements. Obviously the science was pretty much zilch, which is fine, but also the internal consistency was poor - why, for example, they managed to fire up to lightspeed again on the return journey, but then apparently flew home fine once they were back in normal space, should have been given at least some form of minimalist explanation. The space bird in the gas cloud was in theory a cool concept, but didn't look good or work well visually - it wasn't a great puppet and it would have been better had it looked somewhat more alien and less like "we literally just made a slightly shoddy condor eagle thing".

All in all, then, this could have been an excellent episode, but I'll settle for it being a good one.