Wednesday 7 November 2012

16 Lamia Kidnapped

"Lamia is to dominate the universe using her great power in the year 3000"

Episode 16: Lamia Kidnapped
UK Video: Space Quest for F-01
US Video: Volume 6: Lost in Space
DVD: Star Fleet - The Complete Series - Disc 3

Termoid soldiers board X-Bomber but are resisted by the recovering Hercules & Shiro. PPA uses a built in laser to drive the Termoids out of sickbay. Lamia is captured trying to escape and Kirara is injured as the Termoids use a grenade to cover their escape with their prisoner. Lamia is taken to the battlecruiser where Commander Makara has her imprisoned. The Battlecruiser lays mines which drift towards the planet as it retreats. Captain Halley calls X-Bomber and comes to meet them on Malphane. He explains that Lamia is F-01 and is a princess from the planet Esper. At her birth it was foretold that she would possess a tremendous power in the year 3000. The Imperial Alliance then attacked Esper to try to seize F-01 and the elders of the planet fled. Hearing of the research institute on Mars they sent Lamia there to be cared for by humans. Doctor Benn introduces Shiro to Halley as the son of the man who found Lamia. Halley can't join them in fighting the Alliance as he cannot expose his protectors in the Collinian Star Cluster to the Alliance. Halley explains that he and Lamia are to become one so he can guide her. He explains how the pendant has awoken some of Lamia's powers and communicates with her discovering she is in the Aurelian rainbow coloured star cluster, but the Alliance attach her to the Laser Memory Dissimilator to contain her powers. X-Bomber tries to trace her location as the Skull leaves for safety. X-Bomber launches from Malphane but find themselves obstructed by the mine field which further damages the ship. They attempt to detonate the mines using Laser Torpedoes but the damage proved to much for the ship causing it to crash onto Malphane again....

Good episode: a gun battle in X-Bomber to open with, some answers in the middle, a fab space sequence with the minefield at the end and another wonderful crash sequence. The answers we get from Halley fill in a lot of the gaps in Lamia's past and there's a particularly interesting reaction from Halley when he's told Shiro is the son of the man that found Lamia: "So you're the one...." As well as knowing everything about Lamia, Halley would seem to know something about Shiro too.....

Captain Orion is a lecherous so and so in this episode when confronted with Lamia "what a pretty little thing, how old are you child?" Ugh.... Lamia is attached to the Laser Memory Dissimilator to limit her powers, last seen being used to interrogate Captain Carter in episode 2.

We get to see X-Bomber's yellow space suits again, hanging in the airlock as the Termoid soldiers come aboard. The weapon used to destroy some of the mines needs some comment: it's described as Laser Torpedoes, and looks a lot like the Imperial Alliance Laser Torpedo effect. However where as previously (episode 8) X-Bomber's Laser Torpedoes were four converging blasts from the wing tips here it's a pair of blasts from the top of the neck, previously the location of the blue beam cannons seen in episode 4.

This episode was the first one on US Video Volume 6: Lost in Space and oh look Lamia's been kidnapped! That's the clincher to the arguement I've been highlighting for the last few episodes: the covers and titles for volume 6 (which seem to show a scene from episode 14, on volume 5) and Volume 5: Kidnapped have been accidentally swapped in pre production!. A brief excerpt from this episode, the meeting between X-Bomber's crew and Captain Halley was used on the UK compilation video tape Space Quest for F-01 and the full episode is on Star Fleet - The Complete Series - Disc 3 where a brief snippet of the program's ad cap can be heard at 8:44 into the episode. Sadly the Ad Caps don't appear in full elsewhere on the DVD. I'll be returning to what else is missing from the DVDs at a later stage....

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