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.

I don’t think it’s too early for me to say that I am enjoying this show less than I did Earth 2, but I’m not yet ready to claim this is a bad show, and certainly they’re able to try some interesting things. Large swathes of this episode are without dialogue and, even if there is some clearly-mandated-by-higher-ups clumsy narration at the beginning, I found this to be a bold choice for television of the era.

One of our top two favourite handsome In-Vitro cast members, Cooper Hawkes, gets to star in this one. He’s recruited for a secret mission that goes badly and he winds up stranded on a Chig-occupied planet waiting for extraction that he may or may not be able to get to. Hawkes spends a lot of this episode killing Chigs and being haunted by a corpsey sexylady (who, being bad at faces, I didn’t realize was played by the same actor as Vansen until after, and I don’t know what is relevant about that to the scenario). This is interspersed with flashbacks to Hawkes’s birth and training in the In-Vitro training facility (we see text on screen and In Vitro is apparently not hyphenated, but I ain’t changing now). We see that Hawkes first began to question the propagandistic programming they were being fed when he saw a bird (appropriate given his name) and he was considered “defective” and had to escape. All good stuff.

In the present, while stranded on the planet fighting the Chigs, he is about to kill a Chig when he notices it looking up at that planet’s equivalent of a bird (and I was very happy to see this example of alien life, I assure you). With this, Hawkes (and the viewer) finally comes to think of Chigs as persons with maybe different personalities and points of view and whatnot. Maybe it’s just that they all look exactly the same because of their armour, but I suspect that they probably have a lot of similarities to In-Vitros, who are trained from day one to be soldiers. Later Hawkes has a moment of bonding with a Chig (probably the same one who watched the bird, but how would I know). And later still, he has to fight some more and realizes that one of the ones he killed was the same one he had the moment with. It’s a shame. It’s a tragedy. It’s war.

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.