Revisiting UFO....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
Yes, I believe so.
Confetti Check A-O.K.
As a seven-year-old, episodes like this and "Confetti Check A-OK" were SO boring. Just "too much talking!"
Yet when I watched the DVDs a few years back, all those episodes suddenly became my favorites. Cool how that works, huh?
^Part of the reason why the suits couldn't work out who was the target audience for the show.
"The Square Triangle" ***
Straker lets a UFO land in hopes of capturing it intact."
This is a weird one, and it's easy to see how some might not see this a a kids' show. Straker lets a UFO make planetfall on Earth in hopes of capturing it, but the alien walks right into the middle of a plot by a woman and her lover to kill her husband. Overall I thought this dragged and I had a a bit of a hard time to stay interested.
Two things do pop out here. These aliens are quite different from the conventional idea of aliens because they don't use any form of ray gun or energy beam weapons. The UFOs have some sort of beam weapon, but the aliens hand weapons appear to be straightforward projectile launchers. They use guns just like we do.
The other thing thats odd is why does SHADO bother to reveal itself if they're going to wipe people's memories anyway? Isn't that taking a risk? Or is the amnesia drug one hundred percent effective? It just seems rather silly.
The ending is rather odd, too, because we lastly see the wife, supposedly after her memory has been wiped, standing over a tombstone. She finally walks away and we never see whose tombstone she was standing over.
Straker lets a UFO land in hopes of capturing it intact."
This is a weird one, and it's easy to see how some might not see this a a kids' show. Straker lets a UFO make planetfall on Earth in hopes of capturing it, but the alien walks right into the middle of a plot by a woman and her lover to kill her husband. Overall I thought this dragged and I had a a bit of a hard time to stay interested.
Two things do pop out here. These aliens are quite different from the conventional idea of aliens because they don't use any form of ray gun or energy beam weapons. The UFOs have some sort of beam weapon, but the aliens hand weapons appear to be straightforward projectile launchers. They use guns just like we do.
The other thing thats odd is why does SHADO bother to reveal itself if they're going to wipe people's memories anyway? Isn't that taking a risk? Or is the amnesia drug one hundred percent effective? It just seems rather silly.
The ending is rather odd, too, because we lastly see the wife, supposedly after her memory has been wiped, standing over a tombstone. She finally walks away and we never see whose tombstone she was standing over.
Straker's moral dilemma was they couldn't do anything to warn the Husband or prevent them from trying again. The attempt was erased from their mind, therefore, there was nothing to make them think twice about it.
I believe the scene at the Tombstone wasn't right away, but, after they had made the second attempt and succeeded. To me this was the most chilling part of the episode, that Straker et al, knew they'd do it again, and probably succeed, and nothing they could do to prevent it.
Of course that is a possibility, but, I think with the set up of the previous scene, we were meant to believe it was her husband (though your idea would be Poetic Justice)
No, watch the ending carefully. When she leaves the churchyard, Cass meets her at the gate and they walk away together.
I'll have to watch it again because if so then thats chilling indeed.
I was a bit older than that when it came on the air, about ten or eleven, but it was always the characters and character interactions that were the meat of a story for me; even then I was a little writer.
"Court Martial" ***
Paul Foster is accused of espionage and selling classified SHADO information.
Although there are good parts to this I felt it was just a bit too paint-by-number for me. And this is another episode that while dealing with a decent subject it does seem somewhat out of place in what many would think is supposed to be an action-adventure series. I also found the courtroom scenes to be rather dry and not very engaging.
Note: I did check the ending of "The Square Triangle" again and the woman's lover does meet her right at the end. That does make it rather chilling that Straker and company were effectively allowing events to run a rather predictable course.
Paul Foster is accused of espionage and selling classified SHADO information.
Although there are good parts to this I felt it was just a bit too paint-by-number for me. And this is another episode that while dealing with a decent subject it does seem somewhat out of place in what many would think is supposed to be an action-adventure series. I also found the courtroom scenes to be rather dry and not very engaging.
Note: I did check the ending of "The Square Triangle" again and the woman's lover does meet her right at the end. That does make it rather chilling that Straker and company were effectively allowing events to run a rather predictable course.
The compilation is called Invasion UFO. it was part of the Super Space Theater packages assembled by ITC New York.
The bulk of the movie is made up of 'Identified', 'The Computer Affair' and 'Reflections in the Water' with clips from 'The Man Who Came Back'.
Overall the compilation is quite well assembled, but suffers form the generic 'disco' music added to the soundtrack. Also the compilation was done from 16mm prints rather than 35mm. It also has poor computer graphic titles and not the classic UFO credits.
It can still be found on eBay on VHS and laserdisc.
The bulk of the movie is made up of 'Identified', 'The Computer Affair' and 'Reflections in the Water' with clips from 'The Man Who Came Back'.
Overall the compilation is quite well assembled, but suffers form the generic 'disco' music added to the soundtrack. Also the compilation was done from 16mm prints rather than 35mm. It also has poor computer graphic titles and not the classic UFO credits.
It can still be found on eBay on VHS and laserdisc.
"Close Up" ****
SHADO launches a deep space probe to track a UFO back to its home planet.
I quite liked this episode even though it felt a bit slow at times. It was interesting to watch this story unfold of a credible operation for SHADO to undertake. It was done mostly convincingly. But that said I can't avoid what I felt were too huge logic flaws.
The first is just how in hell was the probe supposed to keep up with a UFO capable of FTL speeds to make it back home across interstellar space? And, of course, the probe has to radio transmit its findings back home, and radio travels only at the speed of light. Even if they had the propulsion system to keep up with the UFO the math means the alien planet still isn't very far away. And all of this happens within four months. None of this adds up because what we've seen doesn't support Earth having that kind of starflight capability.
The second part was the bit about the probe not transmitting range and scale of its pictures. WTF!!! I don't buy that for a second because even from the beginning it would be known that space probes would have to have that sort of data for its pictures to mean anything. I find very hard to believe that such a simple thing would have been overlooked in the design and development stages. Now if they had said the probe had malfunctioned then that would have been a different thing, but they say the probe has a design flaw which just doesn't sound credible.
It's a well told story, but in technical terms it has a big goof.
Straker shows something of his more personable side in this. He shows that he trusts his personnel and isn't reticent about expressing praise. He also seems to show an interest in Lt. Ellis that comes off as something more than professional.
SHADO launches a deep space probe to track a UFO back to its home planet.
I quite liked this episode even though it felt a bit slow at times. It was interesting to watch this story unfold of a credible operation for SHADO to undertake. It was done mostly convincingly. But that said I can't avoid what I felt were too huge logic flaws.
The first is just how in hell was the probe supposed to keep up with a UFO capable of FTL speeds to make it back home across interstellar space? And, of course, the probe has to radio transmit its findings back home, and radio travels only at the speed of light. Even if they had the propulsion system to keep up with the UFO the math means the alien planet still isn't very far away. And all of this happens within four months. None of this adds up because what we've seen doesn't support Earth having that kind of starflight capability.
The second part was the bit about the probe not transmitting range and scale of its pictures. WTF!!! I don't buy that for a second because even from the beginning it would be known that space probes would have to have that sort of data for its pictures to mean anything. I find very hard to believe that such a simple thing would have been overlooked in the design and development stages. Now if they had said the probe had malfunctioned then that would have been a different thing, but they say the probe has a design flaw which just doesn't sound credible.
It's a well told story, but in technical terms it has a big goof.
Straker shows something of his more personable side in this. He shows that he trusts his personnel and isn't reticent about expressing praise. He also seems to show an interest in Lt. Ellis that comes off as something more than professional.
Yeah, even when I viewed that episode as a child it made very little sense. Even if they don't know the exact size of the planet, surely they'd know exactly where it is. Nowadays I might suggest that they managed to attached some sort of tracking device directly to the UFO, and that this device then signalled home using a superluminal signalling method involving quantum entanglement (not thought to be possible, but used as a plot device by several s-f writers anyway). However, observation of the star patterns don't yield a fix on the position of the alien planet. The aliens aren't just travelling across space, their FTL technology takes them between different branes (worldsheets) of the multiverse.
No, that's not what they say. The probe malfunctions and doesn't transmit the scale data. It's supposed to, but it doesn't. The test shots of the Earth all have the correct data on them, but it goes wrong when it gets to the alien planet.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for that one. All I'll say is, the various writers over the years at APF/Century 21 always had a great difficulty understanding the scale of outer space, all the way back to Fireball XL5, where the vast reaches of intergalactic space appear to be a few days' journey time from Earth.
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