Fireball XL5 Episode 35 review: Space City Special

Started by Jubal, February 25, 2017, 10:15:11 PM

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Jubal

Fireball XL5 Ep 35: Space City Special

Rating out of 10: 8.0
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0819051/?ref_=ttep_ep35

So this was fun. Not spectacular as a plot, but amusingly self-aware. I'd recommend making this the last episode of Fireball if one's watching through them; it feels like a curtain-downer, and is much better for that purpose than Space Magnet, which actually did finish off the series.

The plot is simple, and not in many ways crucial to the episode: there's a plot by our old friends the Subterranes to assassinate the World Space Patrol's top general, General Rossiter, which is ultimately foiled by some solid teamwork between Venus and Steve. It's not super high octane stuff, though it is a near miss for our heroes. The real charm of Space City Special comes, as it's clearly intended to, in the parts worked around the emergency. In the build-up to a major awards show, with TV cameras rolling, we get the Space City team oddly prosaically navigating around the media as well as the actual threat, and a lot of zany episodes and humour around Zounie's dislike of bagpipes, Zero and Ninety's duelling over uniform smartness, and so on. The decision to get the Fireball crew to perform a musical number for charity is a major thread of whimsy running through the episode, and gives the whole thing a very unusual feel by Fireball standards. The finale, though, with the crew singing the theme song then cutting to an instrumental version, is good fun, and one of the things that charmed me about the episode as a whole.

The case against Space City Special is that it's not really much of an episode, and it's certainly not an adventure - the crew don't even get into space, and the whole thing works almost more like a sitcom that's riffing on the Fireball characters rather than a Fireball episode in its own right. I wouldn't want to watch it too often, and I'm glad this style of episode wasn't any more prevalent. The villains are an irrelevance (which is perhaps rather sad - the Subterranes certainly deserved a far better send-off); the character studies are a charming whistle through the basic features of each rather than being particularly interesting in any way. It needs to be a one of a kind episode, jarring with the rest of the series as it does, hence my feeling that it's a curtain-downer by its nature.

It wasn't much of a Fireball episode, but it was a bit of good fun for Fireball fans and those who've seen the characters through the rest of the series. Hard to rate compared to any of the rest of the series, but (perhaps partly in relief at it being a much better closing point than Space Magnet) I'll give it an 8.0.
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...