Red For Danger is basically so bad it's good!
WRITTEN BY
No specific credit.
PLOT
Upon discovering that their energy recharger is broken beyond repair, the Liberator crew travel to the nearest planet in search of a replacement, only to find themselves on an eerie red world of zombies and cotton candy...
ANALYSIS
I'll start off by saying that I thought this story had potential. A creepy planet with a mysterious chemical atmosphere, populated by zombies and broken starships? It's a horror goldmine. But instead, it becomes a comedy goldmine because of the immense leaps in logic and plot holes peppered throughout the thing.
Why are there zombies on the planet?? I'm not exaggerating, they're just called "zombies" in the text. Apparently they have a giant space magnet to draw ships in and use them to build... something. We never find out what, or where they got the magnet from or how it's so powerful. We know the planet has an atmosphere that will drive people mad in six hours (precisely six hours, as the crew leave with ten minutes to spare and show no ill effects) and Vila suggests that it might have something to do with the Federation's experiments. So is it some project gone terribly wrong? Some clarification would have been nice here.
Travis is just... hanging out. Blake finds him at the very end, uses the oldest trick in the book to escape ("behind you!") and then teleports away, leaving the poor man as stranded as before. Why is Travis even in this story?? And how come he hasn't gone mad?
There's a sister ship to the Liberator called "the Crusader". Interested? Well, too bad, because it's only sitting on this planet so the crew could visit it and find the same malfunction as on their own ship. Which of course serves to clue them into the fact that their accident was actually sabotage. Or at least it would if Avon didn't immediately find a functional replacement on yet another ship, which happens to be Travis's. Yes, Travis's ship uses tech similar to the Liberator. And I guess possible the space magnet fried a different component on it? Both possible, but extremely unlikely.
But even leaving these major holes aside, the rest of the story is frustratingly incompetent. There's numerous glaring inconsistencies with the TV canon. Occasionally, there's an unnecessary tangent like Cally asking for "detailed descriptions" of the missing component after having searched for the thing an hour, or Avon getting crabby over Blake randomly refusing to let him try and repair the problem only to immediately get the permission. Text space, which might have been put to better use in explaining wtf is going on! It's a mess.
CHARACTERS
Blake seems to be handled fairly well, but pretty much everyone else are out of character. Jenna proves herself to be utterly useless as a pilot as she requires others to tell her that the ship's speed is out of whack. Vila is bizarrely trusted with control over the entire ship. Avon is democratic enough to allow Cally to have the deciding vote on their next action. Speaking of Cally, she and Jenna look hilariously inept when they encounter someone on Travis's ship - presumably a single trooper - and "buzz off" immediately (their words, not mine).
And as I already said, Travis's cameo is hilarious. He's just stranded there on the planet without any explanation, gets fooled like a schoolboy and then left behind again. I do somewhat like the idea of Travis being in the middle of his own adventure when the Liberator crew turn up, but I needed more than a single page of it.
NOTES
- Why did Zen not inform the crew that the Link Maintenance Valve was malfunctioning? He starts talking about immediately when Blake points it out, but given its vital status, you'd think his first responsibility would be to make an announcement.
- Orac is depicted as having a "red alert" and also the ability to switch on by himself. The artwork for him also has him be considerably larger than he is in the show. Speaking of Orac, I did get a slight kick out of seeing Avon and him bicker. One of the few aspects of the show that this story not only nailed, but predicted (as the relationship didn't really bloom until Series C and D).
- What is the "red atmosphere" supposed to be? I know they say it's chemicals, but given that it's so substantial that it requires to be cut through, I'm wondering how the crew are able to breath.
- Blake's first reaction upon seeing the zombie construction site is to wonder whether they're building "a new Federation Space Control", presumably a misguided reference to Pressure Point.
- Having the crew discover wreckage of older System ships isn't a bad idea at all, but naming one "the Crusader" is just very, very silly.
- Travis is depicted in the artwork as having no eyepatch. He does have a beard, though. And yet again, he is referred to as "Colonel Travis". It's rather impressive that by 1980, the creators of these annuals still hadn't watched even the first series (or perhaps this was written for an older annual, and they simply replaced Gan's name with Orac).
No comments:
Post a Comment