Fireball XL5 Episode 38 Review: Sabotage

[Jubal]

Fireball XL5 Ep 38: Sabotage

Rating out of 10: 7.8
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807591/?ref_=ttep_ep38

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD):
I enjoyed this, it was a pretty run of the mill adventure but it was one that I thought worked pretty well.

The main reason this does well is that a) the aliens are strategically pretty neat and manage to be fairly effective adversaries and b) Commander Zero actually gets in a spaceship for once. I think this is actually one of Zero's best episodes, he gets to do the full range from his extreme cantankerousness to his full-blooded loyalty to the people under his command. The aliens are a reasonable threat, with some unusual weaponry that gives them a bit of added interest; their homeland actually looks and feels (the little we see of it) like a credible base, and they have hoverchairs which are always a plus for classic galactic villains. Best of all, they have a strategy for earth invasion that involves a fairly surgical removal of Earth forces rather than just "bomb all the things" or "invade lol". The gamma attack ships are quite a neat idea, too.

Weak points include lack of explanation why the aliens are taking prisoners and leaving them in a non-secure facility, especially when they've just demonstrated that they can create totally secure facilities that completely debilitate the heroes. It's not simply that too many of Fireball's villains are fools, it's that too many of them are foolish in exactly the same way which gets to one occasionally. Also, we never get to find out how they managed to plant bombs on the entire World Space Patrol fleet. Like, someone should seriously look into that, it implies a minor security failure somewhere along the line. As usual, a cleverer depiction of motivations might be nice too.

All in all, whilst there were definite plot holes, this was a pretty enjoyable piece of adventuring with not much that really grated on me, enough for a good if not quite stellar score.