Fireball XL5 Ep 27: The Robot Freighter MysteryRating out of 10: 7.1
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807596/?ref_=ttep_ep27In which Steve basically goes batarmadillo crazy and breaks any reasonable definition of the law for literally no reason, ruining an otherwise pretty good plot.
There are some good things to say about this episode, which is why the ending (on which more later) is quite so painful. It includes one of the few times when some villains genuinely outsmart Steve with a good plan that doesn't rely on Steve being phenomenally stupid himself, for one thing. The basic setup with racketeers and needing to guard cargo vessels is a fine and interesting element of space patrol duties to look at, and the gangsters, if slightly cliched, are pretty good villains; it's nice to see villains who aren't super powerful, aren't trying to destroy the earth, but still have a serious mean swagger to them. The basic racketeering plot is a good one, and the aforementioned outwitting of Steve when he goes in convoy is a very nice twist...
...and then the episode falls apart, absurdly and completely. The only hole in the first part of the episode is the strange lack of effective ways of catching the bad guys' mole in space patrol, a conniving Mexican-coded engineer who appears to have sprung straight out of a
Donald J. Trump for President leaflet (itself not a great look). Like, apparently fitting a security camera inside a robotic spaceship seemed like too much work for anyone to bother with. But anyhow, that's a relatively minor point and could be overlooked, compared to the fact that, having caught the mole red handed planting a literal bomb on the spaceship, Steve then goes and gets him and the brothers at gunpoint, and puts them on the robot freighter with a fake bomb to extract a confession. This is, needless to say, not precisely how the law works; confession under duress is invalid in a law court (and lack of legally valid evidence was the only reason they hadn't arrested the villains sooner), not to mention that Steve isn't a police officer and probably can't make gunpoint arrests. Even less pernicketily - it's also COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY. He's just caught a guy red handed planting a bomb on a spaceship, so that's a) a lot of criminal counts right there immediately, b) removing the mole would stop the racket anyway and c) it would probably be fairly easy to catch the rest of the ring via a plea-bargain. Steve's actions are, in short utterly batarmadillo nuts and completely pointless, turning what should have been a well worked victory against cunning opponents into a "let's be honest, Steve should be literally arrested for this" moment.
The good features of the first half of the episode do drag this up quite a lot, and I'll let it scrape into the "average" category with a 7.1 thanks to the unusually well played villains and the first half of the episode being high quality, but there's at least a full point of difference between that and where this episode could have got to with a half-decent and functional ending.
