I can’t lie, this one didn’t do much for me. It’s like this: West’s little brother has signed up for the war, and when he gets stationed to the Saratoga it stresses West out. Little brother is in a unit commanded by a foolish guy who wants to rush into battle to prove himself. So West spends the episode worried and little brother’s unit gets ambushed and, yeah, little brother ends up dead because war is bad. Pretty basic stuff. I’m not gonna say it was actively bad, but I was bored, so it sure wasn’t good. I hope, if nothing else, it actively colours West’s motivations going forth.

I don’t know how much time is meant to have passed since the war began, but when the “new meat” recruits arrive on the ship, the Wild Cards talk about how young they look, even though we’re in the first season. They’re acknowledging how the combat has mentally aged them, even thought they all look like young models.

This episode contains the line of dialogue “For this mission, the fourth planet from Achilles will be designated ‘Gooch'” and it is therefore the most important episode so far.

This one picks up from where the last one left us, so the existence of an alien enemy ace wasn’t a new status quo, it was a To Be Continued waiting to be resolved, and so it is resolved here. With Chiggy von Richthofen taking out human fighters at an alarming rate, the humans know they need to find a way to stop it before the Chigs create a bunch more ships like that. To that end they have some fancy alien space element with which they can make a single torpedo that should be able to take it out. They need a pilot who can get in there and do one cool hit and really mess up the alien ace. You know who wants to be that pilot? Commander McQueen (I have no idea if Commander is his actual rank, but he commands the Wild Cards, so he is deemed thus by me). Can he be the one to take the ol’ baddie down?

Incidentally, one of those extras who has been hanging around gets to play a prominent role in this one. Her name is Winslow and I checked IMDB to be sure, she was in other episodes even if I never picked her out of the crowd (though now that I realize she played the live-action version of Bernice in that one episode of Duckman, I wonder how I missed her). Winslow, a member of the Wild Cards even if she’s not one of the main cast, attempts to hit on McQueen, her commanding officer. He does not react well to this impropriety. But when she comes by later to apologize, he opens up to her and explains he has a failed relationship with a woman back on Earth and now he is seeking a purpose in life and has put himself fully into the military. With this alien ace out there massacring his allies, he’s just wondering what the point of it all is.

The thing is, McQueen doesn’t get the assignment to be the pilot who shoots the super-weapon. Some other guy does and that guy is killed, the super-weapon destroyed wastefully, and in the same mission Winslow is killed. That was pretty cool to me. If the show had decided to accept that, I would have been impressed. But the show continues and McQueen then disobeys orders and goes out on his own, with no backup and no special torpedo. He fights Chiggy von Richthofen and wins, because McQueen has main character powers. That part of the episode I find dumb.

In previous episodes I found McQueen to be very likeable. Perhaps I was blinded by the fact that he is very handsome, but he always seemed like a sensible sort. In this one he gets obsessed with having to be the one to save the day, and even resorts to torturing a Silicate saboteur for information on where the enemy ace is. One way to make me lose faith in a character is to have them torture a prisoner for information. And in the end, the show decides that everything McQueen did was worth it, because he legitimately was the only one who could bring down this baddie. The episode ends with McQueen disheartened, still wondering what the point of it all was, but the narrative isn’t so worried about it. The narrative says it was all good.

I mentioned last time how I thought there ought to be more space plane fighting, and this time it’s all about space plane fighting. This one is about the Chigs having a single fighter pilot who is an ace (they even nickname him Chiggy von Richthofen) who just keeps shooting down the human planes. Seriously, most of the episode is just that one Chig shooting down a bunch of humans and the humans being like “Well, we gotta do something about that.” Even when they finally send in the main characters, the ace is able to force them to retreat. That’s pretty much a definitive win against main characters. And the episode ends with this threat still out there.

Chiggy von Richthofen is obviously quite skilled, but also has a unique fighter, more armoured than other Chig craft and unable to be picked up on sensors or whatever. If any explanation is offered for why the Chigs don’t just build more craft like this, I sure didn’t see it. Oh, and the craft actually has “Abandon All Hope” in English painted on there. This really makes it clear that this Chig knows stuff about humans and has a personality and all that. I approve of anything that makes these aliens a bit more individualistic and even though we never see Chiggy von Richthofen, only exterior shots of the ship, this episode does that. Unless the next episode reveals there is a Silicate or human in there. But I am assuming that ain’t gonna happen.

Also, Vensen had an ex-boyfriend on one of the squads that got ruined and she’s all sad about it.

We’ve had aliens and androids and genetically engineered people and space battles with lots of sound, but this episode reveals that another common sci-fi concept also exists in this universe: psychic powers. It seems like they exist, but only just barely. Most people don’t really believe in them. But it turns out that Damphousse has psychic powers, so they are clearly real.

The Wild Cards are on a mission on some planet full of underground caverns when Damphousse has a premonition that if they go down a tunnel they’ll die. She disobeys orders to save her team, and the others who went down the tunnel all get killed. She doesn’t know what caused this vision, but the reports reach the military’s Psi-Ops division and a guy named Burke (played by Richard Kind) comes to investigate Damphousse’s “Anomalous Intuition” as they call it. He does various tests (pretty much the same ones you’d see a show set in the modern day do when testing a psychic) but is unable to prove anything. With that in mind, he accompanies the team on their next mission, even though he’s a real Richard Kind type. On that mission Damphousse does indeed have a vision that one of them will die, and it causes a bunch of tension. She also realizes that Burke’s real motivation is that he wants to prove psychic powers exist, more for his own curiosity than anything. In the end, surprising no PDRs in the audience, Burke is the one who is killed, but he gets to have a moment with Damphousse as he dies. Oh, and then at the end, Damphousse prays to God. It feels like there’s still a chance for this show to go all Christian on me. Fingers crossed.

This show hasn’t had the number of recognizable (to me) actors that Earth 2 did, certainly nothing on Tim Curry’s level, but Richard Kind is a pretty prominent one. This is the guy who wrote the Mentaculus after all!

The caves and tunnels we get in this week’s mission are neat, they continue to impress me with how they manage to keep the combat fresh. It would be easy for it to feel like the same thing every time. That said, I find myself missing the space planes that I had assumed from my childhood memory were the main focus of the show. I assume it’s a budget thing, but also the ground combat makes it easier for our characters to interact.