Well, I sure wasn’t expecting this: it’s a Christmas episode. And it’s a religiousy one too.

Instead of their usual space planes (which actually don’t see that much use now that I think about it), this time with Wild Cards are in a mid-size ship where they can all be together doing different jobs (there’s a communications position, and pilots, and turrets, and cetera). They get in a fight with the Chigs and get blown off course or whatever and are left pretty much dead in the water.

Back on the Saratoga, they are assumed dead but McQueen doesn’t believe it. He’s able to convince Ross to let him use resources to look for the main cast. They figure out that the Wild Cards can hear their radio calls, but not respond, which keeps the search going, but the Saratoga is searching the wrong part of space. That means that the team gets to all react to being stranded, drifting toward enemy lines, and it’s Christmas above it all.

Amusingly, we learn that Hawkes left the In-Vitro training before learning what Christmas is or who Jesus was. There’s a tinge of “teach someone the true meaning of Christmas” to his plot, but I wish there’d been more. I wish the show had gone on to be fully about teaching him Christianity. I would have laughed. McQueen’s plot is about not losing faith that the team is out there. Mildly religious stuff. But then there’s Wang’s plot. He’s the type who will cross himself when he thinks he’s going to die, so he was probably religious growing up, but now, after all he’s had to see and do during the war, he’s a non-believer. Thus, it is through him that the miracle that saves the day comes to pass. While Wang is on communicator duty, he picks up a strange code that he translates and uses to find the location of a nearby comet. This “some scientific language” goes on to explain how the ship could adjust its momentum to fall into orbit around the comet, which will carry them back to the Saratoga. And because Wang has faith in the message, he does a spacewalk to adjust the thrusters and does the dang thing. And then they have a Christmas party.

So the theme of the episode is mostly vague “faith” stuff, but Jesus and Christmas are specifically mentioned, something you don’t get in Star Trek. We don’t get explanations for where the strange code came from (though the comet used is clearly analogous to the star the Magi followed), or why a group of passing Chigs didn’t shoot the ship. These are just miracles. If we learn that the Chigs celebrate Christmas too, I will be highly entertained.

Some other stray notes: 1) There are definitely extras among the Wild Cards for the last couple episodes, but I have no idea if they’re the same ones who were introduced in that one episode. I ain’t gonna check. 2) At one point in this episode the team picks up a transmission from Earth, assumed to have been beamed out into space long ago. It’s the Adam West Batman theme song. I approve. 3) There’s also a point in here where it seems like the team can hear Chig fighters flying by not only through their ship walls, but through space. Generally with sci-fi shows I assume that the sound in space is just for the benefit of the audience, but the team hears the ships flying by and react to them and everything. Sound definitely travels through space in this, I guess. 4) Commodore Ross plays guitar for the missing team, which was cool.

This one starts with West being brought back from a combat scene, the only survivor of the Wild Cards. I guess they must’ve killed off most of the cast between episodes. Well, at least we’ll get a West-focused episode that isn’t about him pining for that ladyfriend of his.

When he comes to, West asks McQueen what happened to the rest of the team and McQueen is like “You know what happened, you told us.” The team is dead and they even have a recording of West saying so in his distress call. West can’t remember what happened, so the bulk of the episode is him stressed out and having hallucinations and such while insisting that they aren’t dead. McQueen is sympathetic, he is the only survivor of his team from the pilot after all, but he assumes West just has survivor’s guilt. Meanwhile, the doctors basically say “It’s really inconvenient for him to think his friends are still alive, so we could just do some sci-fi brain stuff and make him forget them” and that almost happens. In the end though, West’s memory comes in and he reveals that he sent the distress call as part of a plan to ambush the Chigs, then got separated from the rest of the team. Anyway, now that they know that they go and save the team, who held up fine while they were thought dead behind enemy lines for a couple days.

I like when war stories make war look bad, because I’m biased because I think war is bad, so seeing West suffer trauma and even break down in tears at the end is a plus for me. I’ll even allow the happy ending this time, because realistically I never expected anything else. Felt like a bottle episode. Not much to comment on. In the future they still use big loud floor buffers like we have now.

This one picks up where the last one left off. The team has crashed onto some moon or whatever and they are taken prisoner, but it isn’t just the Chigs who have them captured, the aliens are working with the Silicates. That alliance had been raised as a possibility before, but it is confirmed now, which is handy because it means they can do an episode with the team prisoners and have them able to speak to their captors, which they couldn’t do with just the Chigs.

Incidentally, we’re told the Chigs don’t like that humans call them “Chigs” or “Aliens” but we’re not given a preferred term, so I’ll have to stick with it. We are told that the Chigs’ term for the humans translates to “red stink creatures” which does amuse me.

While captured, the Wild Cards go through various tests of loyalty with the implication being that the Chigs are testing them to learn about humans or whatever. Vansen and Damphousse are told to pick which of them gets to survive, but figure out what is going on and refuse to turn on one another. West is reunited with his missing ladyfriend, who turns out to be a prisoner there as well and who turns out to be in the middle of an escape plan, which I immediately clocked as being too convenient to be real and West eventually does as well, shooting the fake version of ladyfriend. Hawkes and McQueen just have fun times fighting Silicates and debating why In-Vitros should serve in the human military. Wang is just tortured. And sadly for Wang, he’s broken by it. He’s told that the target they bombed was full of innocent civilian Chigs (a claim the veracity of which I’m still uncertain about, save that I doubt the show would actually let the heroes have done that) and he records a video in which he takes the blame for war crimes. True or not, Wang is torn up by his torture in a way that stays with him, so that when he gets home he can’t even hook up with his new romantic interest from last episode. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes down the line.

While I could tell West’s ladyfriend was fake almost instantly, I assumed she was a Silicate who had been made to resemble the missing woman. This, I thought, would be a sign that the Silicates are more of a potential threat than I had assumed, if they were able to create doppelgangers of humans. But it’s weirder than that. When West shoots her, she seems to turn into a dissolving Chig. Does that mean Chigs can shapeshift? Can they create custom-made bodies to be grown at a moment’s notice? Either way, now that they definitely have a way they can look human and communicate with humans, I expect we’ll get a representative of them to speak to the cast very soon.

Oh and there’s a cliffhanger where the corporate guys look in a suitcase with a glowing light in it or whatever. I’m sure that’ll matter at some point.

I mentioned last time that Fred Van Lente had written an “other-continuity” appearance of Rocket Racer not applicable to the mainstream Bob Farrell. Well, let’s delve Into The Rocketverse and explore that:

This was in a book called Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #21. You know how mainstream superhero comics are a poisoned cesspool of non-stop drastic changes to the status quo trying to trick the audience into thinking stories are “important” because apparently the bulk of readers of mainstream superhero comics only value stories for how “important” they are? Well, Marvel Adventures Spider-Man was mercifully not that. It was just a book that sought to tell simple Spider-Man stories and, from what I’ve seen, it did them well. Naturally it’s long dead now.

This story begins with Spider-Man chasing the Rocket Racer who has a big bag of cash stolen from a bank (classic!). This version of Bob stutters with almost every other word and he lobs insults at Spider-Man implying that the vigilante is dumb, showing that this Bob very much values intellect. Bob escapes with relative ease, but Spidey finds one of his rockets hasn’t exploded and it has a “T” logo on it.

Spider-Man then has to deal with two other supervillains, Frog Man (Eugene) and Stilt-Man (Wilbur), only to discover that the three are actually working together. They are just nerdy guys who “met online at a message board for connoisseurs of the mechanical arts” and from there they met the Tinkerer, the guy who provides supervillains with technology. The Tinkerer offered the three guys super-suits for free, no strings attached, because what the Tinkerer actually wanted was to show off how good his tech was to real supervillains. When these three loser villains fail to defeat Spider-Man on their own, Tinkerer remote controls them to attack more violently, against their protestations. The hero still wins, of course, but we see that these guys are crooks, but don’t want to be murderers.

This version of Bob clearly loves technology, but it seems like all credit for his devices goes to Tinkerer here, which clearly makes him less of a self-made Rocket Racer. The regular version of Bob did have his tech improved by the Tinkerer, but only after designing it himself and beginning his Rocket Racer career. Like Van Lente’s Supervillain Team-Up story, this story leans into the “nerd” take on Bob. He’s got a Star Trek shirt and a Godzilla poster and the like. I don’t mind this take, save for the fact I don’t think the mainstream Bob has the disposable income to collect things like that.

As for Wilbur and Eugene: Bob-616 has only minor connections to either of those characters. He attended the funeral/wake for his universe’s Wilbur Day, but more to be with his friends who were closer. And he may have met his universe’s Eugene, but only in passing as far as we’ve been told. For the sake of this story, Bob is roughly the same nebulous age that he always is, but Stilt-Man is, if anything, aged down and Frog Man aged up, so they are all now in the same cohort. For the record, in the Marvel Universe proper, Eugene is not a tech-guy. His Frog-Man suit was built by his father and he’s had to rely on others to repair it. Also, regular Eugene has never been a criminal.