Fireball XL5 Episode 19 Review: Prisoner on the Lost Planet

[Jubal]

Fireball XL5 Ep 19: Prisoner on the Lost Planet

Rating out of 10: 5.8
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807589/?ref_=tt_ep_pr

In which Steve is particularly notably a dick.

There were some good bits of this episode - Steve gets to explain some interesting things about the various treaties earth is signed up to, some of the action scenes are sort of fun, and the plot hook of "new receiver picks up ancient distress call from unexplored space" is well constructed at the episode's opening. After that point, however, things go a little downhill.

The meteor storm sequence isn't terribly exciting, it serves to a) fill time and b) show that Steve, whilst admittedly a damn good pilot, also doesn't really give much of a damn about himself or his crew. If I were commanding the World Space Patrol, I'd be making darned sure any of my pilots who decided to fly dead ahead with their navigator shouting "It's suicide!" loudly at them would be removed from command at once. Also, given they know the distress call is twenty years out of date, that's a good sign that a) whoever's sending it out has been there at least twenty years and therefore b) they can wait for a meteorite belt to clear. 0/10 for Steve's leadership skills, as is actually fairly usual.

And then we get to the planet, and things get no better. The trope of "beautiful and somewhat mysterious/exotic woman ensnares brave manly hero" is a literary staple from the epic of Gilgamesh onwards, and this is not one of its better moments in those millennia of history. There are plus points for the Space Amazon's evident intelligence, but she's nonetheless a fairly stereotyped husk of a character, attempting to get what she wants from Steve and then becoming vindictive, destructive and spiteful when she fails to get what she wants. And then she goes completely insane. Any of these elements on their own and in combination with others might have been reasonable as part of her character, but together they form the "jealous mysterious woman" trope that from Ishtar onwards (and including Circe on the way for that matter) has been played out too often for it to work well. The character shifts work, if at all, only because they are so miserably predictable in sequence; they are far too sharp and stark to make her a good character or opponent. Finally, to cap it all off, Steve manages to get back to the ship and flies off, making a sexist quip to Venus as he does so.

Stories where the hero is annoying and the villain is overly predictable are never that fun to watch, and thus did this prove.