“Relic”

My quick catch-up on the missed episodes of Thunderbirds are go continues. I hate it when I miss the beginning of things so I apologise for doing that and hopefully won’t let that happen again.

This episode finally attempts to give the series some backstory with the return of an old friend of Jeff Tracy named Captain Lee Taylor (Rich Hall). Taylor is a bit of a hermit who lives alone on a Moon base that goes way back to Jeff Tracy’s days as an astronaut. Apparently this base was something he helped come up with so there’s a personal element to the stakes for the Tracy’s.

When a sure to be fatal meteor shower heads towards the base Scott and Alan get into Thunderbird 3 and head to the moon so that they can rescue Taylor. Despite having two space adventures in a row this episode doesn’t feel the least bit redundant with the scale being a lot smaller since Thunderbird 3 is the only vehicle used for the most part.

I like that most of the episode is character driven with enough action to keep the pace of the episode feeling immediate. Every conversation is promptly cut off by another problem presenting itself. It presents a good balance of story and action so that older and younger viewers will be equally appeased.

It’s good that the story is very much Scott centric as he has been left largely on the sidelines of late so it’s high time he got to be involved in an adventure. The downside to this is that Alan is left sitting by the phone for most of the episode and only serves to ferry Scott to the Moon.

I have often criticised this series for the characters lacking in fallibility. In most cases they will attempt something and it’ll just work which means that they aren’t given much opportunity to think on their feet when unexpected things happen. There have been exceptions to this and they make up the best episodes of the series. This episode has another example of that where Scott ignores a warning about the Moon’s gravity interfering with his jetpack simply because it comes from his younger brother. Sure enough the jetpack malfunctions and Scott is given a very painful and embarrassing lesson in arrogance. It really does serve him right but I’m not convinced that he’ll learn anything from this.

The moon base looked really cool as it blended futuristic with old fashioned in a really interesting way. It looks as if it is a pioneering piece of technology in “our” future but the past of the world that the Tracy’s inhabit. I really can’t fault this show on design in almost any instance.

I found the scenes on the base to be pretty hit and miss. Taylor was a pretty irritating presence after a while and the bulk of the action being Scott shooting at rocks with the base’s built in weapons wasn’t the most stimulating. A scene involving a tricked out moon buggy was really impressive and made up for a lot of that but the episode takes a bit too long to get there.

Scott interacting with Taylor is a complete missed opportunity. The bulk of his lines were around being unable to remember the names of the Tracy brothers and short anecdotes about Jeff that didn’t really pop the way the episode needed them to. This was a real opportunity to give some real insight into the sort of man Jeff Tracy was from the perspective of someone who isn’t his mother but the episode opts to use juvenile humour instead.

There is a little bit of depth given to Scott as Grandma Tracy tells Scott that he is similar to his father. This conversation foreshadows Scott being the ideal person to talk to Taylor as it could help him gain some insight into the sort of man that he might become. Sadly this falls flat but in concept it was a great idea.

Scott is shown to be a bit of a dreamer as he wonders what it would be like to be one of the pioneers of space exploration like his Neil Armstrong or his father. This is something that definitely sets him apart from his brothers as there’s a suggestion that he wants more out of life than he is currently getting. It is only a suggestion but it’s better than nothing.