# Starhunter



## Lonewolf89 (Oct 21, 2002)

Did anyone ever watch this show? I keep seeing on TV late at night. At first I thought it was some lame Outer Limits episode but after an internet search I found out it was an actual show! How long was it on?


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## HeyLynny (May 13, 2003)

I don't know, but I keep bumping into this show late at night too.  I keep meaning to set my tape but keep forgetting.  It doesn't look that bad.  I'll try to remember to tape it and find out.


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## L. Arkwright (Oct 7, 2003)

Was it connected to the film by the same name?


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## Lonewolf89 (Oct 7, 2003)

I don't think so. There is some information on it in the latest SciFi magazine. It seems as though they're still making episodes, so it's fairly new.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 17, 2021)

To revive an old thread...

It lasted two seasons.  I have watched the first two episodes on Amazon (a 'redux' re-edited version with 'improved SFX' ).  I'm surprised it made it to the end of the first season.  It's AWFUL!  I can't work out if it's awful enough to continue with - like _Lexx _was for a couple of seasons.

I knew the show was in trouble at the two minute mark. Over an on-screen caption, '3 million years ago',  a ponderously slow _Arrival / 2001: A Space Odyssey _ alien monolithy mashup arrives through a glowy spacewarp does something sparkly to what we presume is the planet Earth before disolving into nothingness.  Fade (two minutes in) to what is definitely Earth and another caption, 'Present day ... 2285 AD' 

- erm... so which is it?  The present day or the year 2285? 

To distract you from this puzzle the next shot is of a rather attractive semi-naked young woman lying on a bed and, while the audience waits to see if the camera pulls out far enough to see her tits (it does), there is some dialogue.  After that it's all very 'WTF _is _going on?' for 40 minutes. As people explode in toilets, the villain has a threesome (evil lesbian trope box ticked), a Scottish bounty hunter (kilt and hipflask and the best SF comedy eyebrows since Freddy Jones's in _Dune_) has a brain tumour... and then he doesn't,   a mysterious organisation has one of those standing around in a circle taking it in turns to have a light shone on them meeting (_Babylon 5_'s  Grey Council but EVIL! but in business suits and with the sort futuristic hairstyles last seen in Duran Duran videos), the mysterious appearance of a shuttle (the dialogue clearly stated the ship only has one - then the plot suddenly requires two so... erm... oh hell, they just land in a shuttle ok? No one will notice. Before there is a shoot out in a warehouse full of _empty cardboard boxes_(dead lesbian trope box ticked) at the end of which the villain of the piece yells something like, "Behold the awesome power of the Divinity Cluster!" while standing barefoot and Christlike on a computer before dissolving in a rather underwhelming display sfx pyrotechnics. 

The next episode was slightly more coherent - though the Scottish member of the crew seems to have vanished without mention and there's another case of the inflatable spaceshuttle when our heroes, marooned on Mercury, suddenly just take off in one because the plot required them to be somewhere else.

Our hero is played by Michael Pare - and he wears a cardigan.






That chair he's sitting in is where he steers the ship - with those control panel things down the side.  It's very hard to take seriously any sequence where the ship is being piloted by someone lounging in a comfy armchair. 

I may just have to watch some more.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 19, 2021)

Episode 3 and the crew of the Tulip (I kid you not - this ship is called 'The Tulip') rescue the leader of a suicide cult which has just plunged its ship into the heart of the sun (their ship was pyramidal in shape - I think there was an attempt a Pink Floyd reference here but I may be straining)  The cult leader nearly takes over the ship using glowy hand staring eye things and makes reference to 'The Divinity Cluster' that played such a baffingly prominent part of episode one.  (Hints at a story arc?)

Three episodes in and we've had two charismatic religious leaders (charismatic, that is, to the characters - in both cases the actors played them in full-on nutcase mode without an ounce of magnetism) who take over the ship and a pair of convicts in transport  - one of whom  was so charismatic he talked the most gullible of our three person crew into giving him (in his cell) a programmable 3D holographic projector - with utterly predictable results... who attempt to take over the ship..

I'm beginning to detect a pattern here.

Still no sign of Scotty McEyeBrows.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 19, 2021)

Episode 4

The crew of the Tulip capture a psychopathic criminal and are returning him to space prison when they are commandeered by a Special Ops unit with a prisoner of their own.  When some (totally unexplained, out of nowhere) energy burst shockwave something hits them and makes everyone do Start Trek lurching,  the prisoners escape. The Special Ops' prisoner is a girl in a body-stocking who uses the now familiar glowing-hand-to-forehead thing this show is so fond of to bump off some puddingy bad actors pretending to be elite fighting troops.  She sets the Tulip on course for a quarantined research station orbiting the  Uranian moon Miranda.  There, after a lot of wandering up and down the same three corridors, it transpires she is  the re-incarnated daughter of the head of the research base combined with some unfrozen-from-the-moon's-surface, intelligent, hive-mind virus that feeds on hate and emotion.... and then the moon blows up for no other reason than the show only had a couple of minutes' running-time left and no one could think of a proper ending.

I'm sure the directors of this show knew the how to do the standard walk and talk,  'we've got a shedload of boring dialogue to deliver so we'll have the characters walk down a corridor as they deliver it which is slightly less boring than them standing in a row' shots - but they don't get used in this show.  There are various possible reasons for this:
1 They require a set long enough to sustain more than a few seconds of dialogue at a normal walking pace. (Which I'm not sure this show has.)
2 They require equipment which may not be readily available, or costly in time and money - such as steady-cam or dolly tracks
3 They require expensive rehearsal time and then extended shots are more likely to require several takes to get right and are then  more difficult to cut away from and into than static close ups of the actors delivering the same dialogue.
4 They requires actors who can deliver more than two lines at a time.

Instead of the walk and talk shots we get lots of dialogue in cheap-looking, medium close-up, one and two shots which are a lot easier to stitch together and reshape in the cutting room.  But are soap opera dull.  To take the edge off this relentless rigidity just about every shot is dutched.  The camera is tilted at every opportunity.   No one is ever quite vertical.  It's very annoying.

I'm starting to suspect that Eyebrows McScott was a figment of my imagination.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 20, 2021)

Esipode 5: _The Man Who Sold the World_ - the title of which tells us the writers of this show have heard of some SF books even if they have obviously never read any.

The crew of the Tulip go to Pluto and get to leave the confines of the studio for a couple of days as some of the action takes place in a very 1980's _Doctor Who_-looking quarry.  They are there to arrest a war criminal. He does not want to get arrested.  He uploads an annoying referring to themselves in the third person floaty head hologram to destroy the Tulip while our heroes Dante Montana and Luc Scott are left to the tender mercies of his girlfriend. (Who has really nice teeth.  Seriously impressive set of gnashers.) Our villain was involved in horrible genetic experiments during the 'Callisto Rebellion' and it turns out was doing research on... the Divinity Cluster!  Though what he was working on, or what he discovered isn't really explained.  I suspect The Divinity Cluster! isn't really a story arc at all but a thing to be dropped into every other episode to make it look like there is a story arc before being pulled out of a hat for some final episode showdown that will end generating  more unresolved loose ends than it tidies up.  (Not that there are any at the moment.)  To add some impetus to the proceedings all this is happening at _exactly_ the same time as a once in 28,693 years  'electro-magnetic anomaly' is due to hit 'in this part of the Solar System' and makes things explode.  The floaty head AI is defeated when the Percy the sulky teenage girl left in charge of the Tulip gets fed up with everything being sh*t and having off-set grips squirting fire extinguishers at her, pushes a couple of buttons and automagically makes everything all right - just in time to collect our heroes.  The villain ended up dead because he dumped his girlfriend and in a fit of pique she shot him. The girlfriend was then shot in turn by the secondary hero.

Suddenly finding themselves a few minutes short of their allotted adventure time the three person crew take it in turns to stare into middle distance as their inner monologue voice overs unconvincingly waffle on about destiny and the meaningless of existence.

End

The cameraman, fed up with merely dutching his angles, gets inventive and starts off at least two shots with the camera (or at least the image) upside down.

Canada probably has has two quarries within driving distance of Vancouver as the quarry used here was not the same one that appears in every other episode of _Stargate_. 

Scotty McNot has obviously been written out of the show as has any mention of our  hero's main motive (as expressed in the original opening credit voice over) of searching for his son "stolen from him ten years ago", mentioned vaguely in episode one not not referred to at all since.


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## BAYLOR (Nov 21, 2021)

Ive seen a few episodes, Pretty dire stuff.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 22, 2021)

Eipesod 6: Peer Pressure.

Our crew pick up a mother and son from a research facility on one of the moons of Saturn. The mother is wanted for murder. Who has charged her with murder; who she has (possibly) murdered; who arrested her and handed her over to our crew are mysteries that the budget didn't run to answering. So mother and son are locked up in the now familiar cage set. But not before it is made plain that the lad and the crew's teenage girl member really like the look of each other. The son is let out of his cage. The son is put back into his cage . The son is let out again. The son is locked up again. The Mother - during one of the times the son is wandering free around the ship discovering the joys of snogging a 25 year old woman playing a teenager - gets out of her cage by using a rinky-dinky mind-control device to take over the captain's higher brain functions and turn him into her drooling slave. This means Michael Pare gets to do even less than usual, apart from "Pain! Captain Kirk!" acting when she gets pissed off with him. The third member of the crew whose accent and acting chops keep making me think she's wandered in from an episode of Eastenders * gets her higher brain functions tamper-proofed by automagical handwaveium tech and forces the mom scientist to restore the captain's noggin to its previous state. During the procedure the son decides his mom has to be stopped and the best way to do this is to kill himself by going out an airlock without a spacesuit - WHY???? - who knows? The Mom is so upset she uses the mind-control device to turn herself into a drooling cabbage.
Everyone goes home. Teenage girl gets to have a sad moment with a hologram recording of dead boy before the final end credits.

Best bits:
The moment where the young lovers are sitting in the observation deck looking out at the rings of Saturn. The camera dollies forward and the stars behind the rings shift in relation to them. Okay guys, you're not actually looking at Saturn there. You're looking at a cardboard cut-out about three meters in front of the glass. But since this shot was CGI they didn't even have that excuse.

Watching the Mom's voiceover slipping out of sych with her lips. The actress was either not very good at ADR or another actress was bought in to replace her voice entirely because she looks incredibly dubbed for the whole show.

Having said that there were a couple of almost okay moments in this episode. The editor got to flex his muscles and do some groovy jump cutting. Tanya Allen (the teenage Percy) got to prove she is probably the best actor on the show - certainly the most watchable and the one who looks like she's having most fun. And the final shot of Mom rocking in her cell was not exactly ground-breaking but would have worked well as the final 'haunting' shot but they went and buried it fumbling their way to the lost love teenage sadness ending.

* (I think it's the way she gets to say, "What is going on?" at least once every episode - I keep expecting one of the Mitchells to tell her to "Leave it! - You don't wanna know.")


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## Rodders (Nov 22, 2021)

But are you enjoyong it, JunkMonkey? 

Sounds like it could be a "So Bad it's Good" kinda thing.


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## BAYLOR (Nov 22, 2021)

Rodders said:


> But are you enjoyong it, JunkMonkey?
> 
> Sounds like it could be a "So Bad it's Good" kinda thing.



The sad part is  this mess of a series actually had the potential to be something good.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 22, 2021)

I 





Rodders said:


> But are you enjoyong it, JunkMonkey?
> 
> Sounds like it could be a "So Bad it's Good" kinda thing.



I am enjoying it's awfulness.  (I'm sure there's a long German word for that.)  Like Baylor says it " had the potential".  Watching them squander what they had is fascinating.  I have since discovered that there was more than the two original seasons.  In 2017 a three episode 'mini-series' was shot. 









						Starhunter Transformation (TV Mini Series 2017– ) - IMDb
					

Starhunter Transformation: With Heidi von Palleske, Murray Melvin, Stephen Marcus, Paul Fox. STARHUNTER Transformation, continues the adventures of Dante and Percy Montana, interplanetary bounty-hunters (Starhunters) in a politically complex and diverse environment of settled worlds and a lot of...




					www.imdb.com
				




The producers have, as yet, not found a buyer/airtime/distribution deal.  You have to wonder how bad things have to be for  _that _to have happened given the drek that makes it free to air (ish) on Amazon Prime.


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## BAYLOR (Nov 22, 2021)

JunkMonkey said:


> I
> 
> I am enjoying it's awfulness.  (I'm sure there's a long German word for that.)  Like Baylor says it " had the potential".  Watching them squander what they had is fascinating.  I have since discovered that there was more than the two original seasons.  In 2017 a three episode 'mini-series' was shot.
> 
> ...



Here's what the producers  should do  but won't likely do .   Keep the cast and over all premise  but hire a a big name  executive producer  and let that person in their own writers and directors and editors  and,  increase the special  effects budget.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 23, 2021)

Iepsode 7 : Frozen

While transporting a gay art thief the crew pick up a mayday signal from a shuttle.  On the shuttle are a scientist and his son fleeing a secret research base.... (big deja vu from last episode - just how many family-friendly, secret research bases _are_ there in this solar system?).  The son has the unconscious ability to make people see dead relatives. While the rescuing is going on the art thief lets himself out of his cell using a getting out of jail free  gizmo he smuggled onboard knowing, after last week's episode, that the crew of the Tulip have no idea that searching their prisoners for concealed weapons or devices with teeny flashing  lights might save them an awful lot of time relocking up people they thought were safely behind bars.

'Raiders' turn up wanting the son because... that's what Raider do - steal sons.  Our captain remembers his primary goal in life and tries to find out from them what happened to the son they stole from _him_ ten years ago in "2265".  (Which was 'ten years ago' if you believe the original opening credits but twenty if you believe the Redux's.)  As well as the captain remembering his raison d'être, his sidekick Luc discovers she's working for the secret organisation behind the secret research base and that the secret gay art thief secretly works for them too. Seven episodes in and people are starting to get the story arc into gear.  The son projects an image of himself into the Raiders' minds and they go away thinking the image is him.  Gay art thief is released because.... they're trying to set him up as a recurring character?  Father and son are dropped off on Titan where they will be safe because Titan has been "Raider-free for years".  There's probably a sign on the door with a counter in it. 

*"Titan. Proudly Raider Free for [1],[5][8][5] days."*​
Other news:
The film crew seen to have fixed the dodgy camera head - there were hardly any dutched angles this episode.  They probably fixed it on the day they shot all the holding cell shots; they were all very very hand held. "Jesus this thing's heavy! What time did they say they'd have it fixed?"

I think I'm going to start counting the number of times people say "What's going on?" at crucial moments.  I suspect it's this show's equivalent of the "Captain's log supplemental..." quick recap after an ad break.  

"What's going on!"
"The Raiders are still there - waiting for the dog food commercial to finish!"
"Look out! They're firing again!"


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 25, 2021)

Epidose 8: Past Lives

One of those 'Just how small is this Solar System?' episodes The crew of the Tulip are JUST in the right place to intercept a shuttle fleeing from a secret research base orbiting Saturn (I am Getting Very Deja Vu here) The only person on board is - da da daaaah! - second in command, ex Black Ops, hard woman of the crew, Luc's ex husband! (What are the chances eh?) He has been injected with some experimental drug that will kill him in 48 hours. Doing a bit of research of her own Luc discovers the research base is probably owned by the powerful cabal which may or may not be headed by her dad - he may not be the boss but we saw him taking part in the Grey Council meeting in the first episode being very adamant and dominant.

This cabal by the way glories in the name of 'The Orchard' which makes me think that at some point they got the advertising / image consultants in.

"Well we've looked at all the metrics and held extensive focus groups in our secret advertising research base orbiting Saturn and we've identified your core problem. Basically your plans for Universal Domination will continue failing to reach their full potential unless you rebrand. 'Mega-Z-Death Corp.' has to go. For some reason people just don't warm to having their loved ones slaughtered and their civil liberties infringed by any organisation with a Z in its name. We suggest you rename yourself something a little more organic, classical, and friendly like 'Apple', or 'Meta', or 'The Orchard'...."

The captain, not wanting to be left out, has a ex wife too. He keeps her in a chipset and has to wear groovy 3D glasses to accesses her. Apparently she was a research scientist in a blah blah blah and just developed a method of storing people's entire personalities onto hardware when the bad guys arrived and blew everything up apart from the dying-wife digitizer (every home should have one!).

There was a moment of possible tension in the episode when the sudden need for a specific circuit/memory board component to get the ship's reactor back online (so they could make it to some medical facility in time to blah blah blah...) And the audience thinks "Oh no - the captain's's gonna have to sacrifice the interactive wife chip to save his friend's husband! What convoluted and ironic agony!" The audience may have thought that - well I did - but if the writers did they managed to forget to include it in the final script. (That or it was Reduxed out of existence since the first broadcast.)

The head's gone on the camera rig again and it was back to flopping Dutch angles about all over the place.
But only one shot started upside down.

Mentions of Divinty Cluster - Zero.
Big-hearted, hard-drinking Scottish Stereotypes - Zero
Topless Women - Zero (unless you count one of those flashback sex scenes where people make love with the sheets taped to their chest whenever the camera is anywhere but DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU). The boobies used to distract us from the plot in episode one obviously got the money in to make the show - but not enough to pay anyone to do it naked.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 26, 2021)

Epicsod 9: Family Values

Our hero plugs his wife in and has a wee chat with her in her Lawnmowermanny cyberspace. Apparently she's dying again, her digitized form is breaking down 'on a sub-molecular level', thus adding extra imperative to the whole "find our son" thing. Personally I would have thought a "run CHKDSK for errors and make a backup" thing would have been first on my list but then I'm not a successful TV scriptwriter*.

The Tulip goes to Mars to arrest a small time con artist (doesn't anywhere in this universe have any local law enforcement?). The conman is played by a small, moustached, round faced, French-accented actor. His character is gay, has a boyfriend, and for the first few minutes of his screen time I'm convinced my suspicion that they let the gay French-accented, round faced, moustached art thief go in episode seven so that he could become an established character was justified. But I was wrong. This was a completely different character.

Just as our heroes are about to make the pinch out in the Martian desert where the couple have fled so the show's designers don't have to come up with a set, they are attacked by a Raider! Pew! Pew! Pew! Hopelessly out-gunned our heroes and their captives cower behind some rocks until a teenage girl, sitting in a comfy chair on their mother ship, drops a spy drone onto the bad guy's ship and knocks it out of the sky.

In the wreckage they find the raider is still alive and so is a 12 year old boy. "This could be my SON!" The French con man's boyfriend died - somehow, we're not sure how. Other Raiders are on the way. Facing unsurmountable odds our heroes decide to run away taking the boy with them. The French conman says he will stay behind and hold of a hoard of evil bad guys. Our heroes, forgetting he is the only person they have an arrest warrant for and with a past history of letting Frenchmen with moustaches go free immediately say 'yes' and leg it back to their shuttle-craft. The bad guys arrive. French guy says, 'Hi bad guys, look at meeeee!'. His eyes glow and in a really weird piece of SFX seems to embody the whole of the universe for a few seconds (like the Eternity character from the early Steve Ditko Dr Strange comics). All the bad guys die... for some reason. (Because it says so in the script?) They just drop dead. And the audience are totally baffled - because this really did come out of absolutely nowhere. Right up till this moment the character has been your typical three-time loser, snivelling failure - then he pops up from behind a barrel and suddenly he's GOD!

Back on the good ship Tulip a DNA test proves the boy isn't our hero's son but they do now know who he is and will take him home.

Everyone is a bit sad.



No Scots. No tits. No Divinity Doo-Dah! (unless the French drop dead guys thing was a manifestation of it, and if it was it didn't look anything like its previous, "Behold the Awesome Power!" manifestation and no mention was made in the dialogue.

I am becoming increasingly bewildered by this show.

Other matters:

So far this show has had five Gay/bi characters in eight episodes - which is pretty good going considering it took Talia Winters and Susan Ivanova nearly two whole seasons (of Babylon 5) to even get the suggestion of a kiss. Trouble here though is that every one of them has been on the 'wrong' side of the law, three of them ended up dead, the other two French.

Mars we are told is a wasteland "A hundred years of Terraforming and Trillions spent." I dunno but a breathable atmosphere, fluffy clouds in the sky and puddles of standing water after only a hundred years sounds pretty good going to me. (None of these clouds BTW are visible from space. The establishing shots of the Tulip in orbit look like current NASA maps.)

Our Special Ops, tough lady hero doesn't know how to wear a surgical mask. The white water-absorbent side goes next to the face, the coloured water-repellent side outside. I only know this because of the current pandemic - and the fact that my wife works in a medical facility and is fed up with telling people how to wear them... BUT during the course of this episode there is mention of a killer 'Black flu' epidemic which rendered lots of men sterile (that's why the Raiders steal baby boys), so how to wear a surgical mask properly would be part of the basic world building.

Like a lot of episodic TV the running order of this show in open to debate. Family Values in the Redux version (as presented on Amazon Prime) is episode eight. IMDb lists this as originally being episode three. So whatever attempt at a story arc there may have been in the original has been well and truly mangled even before each individual episode was re-edited.




*'success' here defined as 'getting something you wrote filmed'.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 29, 2021)

Espiode 10: Cell Game

While picking up  a prisoner for transfer the crew of the Tulip are ambushed and teen engineer wizz kid Percy is thrown into Women in Prison hell.  The rest of crew are blackmailed by the prison warder into busting out a dangerous killer from their next stop in order to get her out.  To get _into_ the maximum security prison, our hero pretends to be a prisoner in transit and gets locked up with the prisoner he is delivering.  Back on Prison One, fed up with her bad girl cell mates (ie the type of  aggressive unconvincing butch cliché lesbians that only appear in WIP movies), Percy busts out of her cell and gets one of them killed.  In prison Two Dante (our hero) convinces the bad guy he's supposed to be springing to go along with him - but not before saying nasty things about HIS sexuality about which the guy neither takes offence or denies. The plan is to pretend they have some virulent mutant form of hepatitis and get carted off to a medical facility by the Tulip.  The plan works.   Back on Prison one the swap is made and just as Th Warder is about renege on the deal Dante whips out some hitherto unused (and unmentioned) bit of backstory to turn the tables and all the bad guys are arrested.

Actually this was a watchable episode.   For one thing it didn't stop.  A lot of previous episodes there have been longueurs with lots of aimless corridor wandering and skulking round corners which served very little purpose other than to pad out the lack of script to a decent running time.  This episode substituted a sh*tload of fist fights, rape, and the usual gratuitous prison sadism for the wandering around stuff.  There was also a bit more in the way of world-building too.  As a throwaway added threat, the warder makes noises about selling Percy into the sex trade.

Hard to describe an episode with so much casual gay bashing and by-the-numbers prison violence crap as the 'best' episode so far but certainly the least boring.  There were two parallel story-lines which doesn't happen often and the intercutting between to two was well done.  And there was tension between our crew with differences of opinion and divided loyalty which stretched  the actors a little more than delivering the usual agreeing with each other, or asking what was going on stuff.

Other Stuff:
Searching for son? No 
Scotty Person? No
Tits? Yes.
Divinity Clustering. No.
Orchard? No.


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## JunkMonkey (Nov 30, 2021)

11: Blacklight

The crew are on their way to somewhere undefined delivering a captured female Raider.  Deep in the bowels of their ship a short circuit defrosts a military officer who, along with a couple of his colleagues,  has been in cryogenic deep sleep for fifty years.  He wakes up. They don't.  Somewhat disorientated he is determined to do Good Old British stage acting in an American TV milieu and continue with his 'Mission' - fighting a war with the Raiders for possession of Mars that has been over for half a century. His side won but he went down in the history books as missing, presumed dead after leading his troops to a heroic defeat.  As amazing TV timing would have it the Raiders are having a super secret conclave which the crew of the Tulip just happen to be in the right place to stumble upon.  "Aha!" Thinks our hero.  "A chance to infiltrate the Raiders and find my son!".  Aided by the captured Raider girl who, for some reason, idolises the resurrected military officer he is about to put that plan into action when the military officer sneaks away, boards a one-man suicide fighter that he hid on the Tulip fifty years ago and that NO ONE HAD NOTICED in all that time, and kamikazes into the Raider base. End of that plan.  End of show. (The question of how the Tulip escapes the entire Raider navy after launching an unprovoked attack on their mother ship is not only left unanswered - it's not even asked.  The show just stops at the point where you would expect the all-out, 'Zap! Pow! Getus outta here! Pew! Pew! Pew!' heck to start.)



Okay, THE big problem with this episode is.... that it makes no sense whatsoever. 

Ignore the fact that the Raiders can fly around the Solar System at will and have a huge space base that no one is able to track.  (Blah blah! I know 'cloaking devices'.  Well, there's no mention in the script of any such devices and, even if there were, you could still SEE the thing.  They didn't even paint it black.  If we can track thousands of asteroids from ground-based, and near-earth orbit observatories in the first half of the 21st century then something the size of an American City Block (cubed) and made of shiny metal should be pretty easy to spot when people are spread out from Mercury to Pluto.)

I can just about let the scriptwriters off with the idea that the cryogenic chamber had been undiscovered for 50 years.  I would have been more convinced if a couple of lines of dialogue explaining it away had been included.  Something about 'all knowledge of that area of the ship being erased from the ship's AI' maybe.  What I can't find any explanation for is why those guys were in the cryochamber in the first place.  The Tulip is an old vessel (at least 50 years we learned from this episode) requisitioned for use as a troop ship during the long ago war.   Our gallant crew have no trouble dealing with the journey times they enure.  They have been from Mercury to Pluto in the course of the series so far with no noticeable signs of ageing.  So why freeze high ranking military officers for the hop from Earth to Mars?  And then _lose_ them?  The only thing I can come up with - and this is a stretch - is that the higher-ups in the military saw these guys as fuckups and for some bizarre reason decided this elaborate set-up was a best way shunting them to one side.  I would have thought assigning them some dead-end desk job, counting paper-clips on the most obscure establishment they had on the books would have been easier to arrange, but apparently not. 

Other stuff.

Scotty McScotScot is still AWOL. 
No Boobies.
No Orchard.
No Gay Bashing.
Disintegration of Digital Wife? - Proceeding apace.

We also learned that MIchael Paré can cry on cue - which is a difficult thing to do.  My respect for him as an actor went up a notch during this episode.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 2, 2021)

12:  Goodbye, So Long

It's Danté's turn to bump into someone from his past and dig up old memories as he finds himself meeting his (dead) wife's first husband.  The old friend was always a bit of a hustler and is ostensibly making his living selling spares and recycled junk at a market but...  he has a bigger deal going down and the bad guys aren't happy because he hasn't come up with the goods.   

Leaving Danté alone for a minute he goes to to get something from his ship. There is a godallmighty explosion and his ship is blown to atoms (or, at least, a lot of sizeable CGI polygons) .  Everyone runs away, taking with them the old friend's business partner.  The business partner waits till the air filtration system is fixed - which is why they were looking for spare parts in the first place - before finally achieving what everyone else who has boarded this ship has attempted and failed to do. By simply sneaking up behind people and hitting them with heavy objects, he takes over the ship.  He lets Raiders on board and together they torture Danté, trying to get him to tell them where "THE SEEDS" are.  What seeds? He doesn't know what they are talking about. (Nor do we, but that's OK). Meanwhile, back in the cells, the women of the crew hot-wire the lock and escape.  Realising Danté really doesn't know about the show's McGuffin, the old friend shoots all the Raiders dead.   And then it's his turn to get in the cell when the women turn up and point guns at him.  They fix the ship but find it has been programmed to fly to another space station and are unable to change course.  There are Raiders on their tail.  Danté pulls up the arrest records from the destination space base, sees a name he recognises, and decides (for no discernable reason) that's who the bad guys are supposed to meet. The records have no info as to his current whereabouts   Luc sneaks off to her room and, with her secret Talking to The Orchard Device, does a CSI and gets his location in seconds flat.  This really is pulling plot rabbits out of the hat stuff.  "We need to get to the next set and have to have some explanation as to why we are there so if we just keep talking for a bit it will make it look like we know what we're doing .... and here we are."  

After a bit of fist to belly interrogation the old friend tells us that THE SEEDS are the seeds of an ultra-secret experimental genetically-engineered super-terraforming plant which will make anywhere they are planted have a breathable atmosphere in no time at all.  Gosh!   That sounds useful!

They find the bar where the plot rabbit is working.  They've just about worked out _he_ hasn't got the McGuffin when the Old Friend walks in.  He wasn't dead after all!  _He_ doesn't know where the seeds are either. Everyone shouts things like, "You just couldn't stay dead ,could you?!", and "Damn you Montana!  Why did you have to come back into my life?!" until one of them realises he can't think of a cliché to say and starts shooting instead.  (It's like a game from _Whose Line is it Anyway?_ but with artillery.)  

Everyone who might possibly have a clue as to what is going on gets killed. 

Dante is sad.  His best chance (this week) of finding his son - the Raiders wanted the seeds so he was going to do a swap - has vanished forever.  No one knows where the seeds are.  Where are the seeds?  Does anyone know where the seeds are?  Percy, put down that silly kaleidoscope the business partner was always so careful with and look for the seeds... Percy!  Well, at least let the camera have a POV of what you are looking at... (Hmmm I wonder what those floaty blobby blue things are?)

Ironic fade to black.

Other stuffing:

No Scottish orchard tits.  Two minor outbreaks of 'Gay' humour - neither of them particularly offensive but both pretty needless.    Lots of Dutching.  No Upsideowning.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 7, 2021)

13: The Most Wanted Man

A bunch of heavies and a Suit clear the regular patrons out of a bar - a bar that looks suspiciously like the same as the bar in last week's shoot-out even though it clearly isn't. This one is on a Mars orbital station and the other one was.... erm... somewhere else. (Not the fact that it looks like last week's set is a problem. Maybe cheap bars come as standard, off-the-shelf fitted units in this universe. There's probably an Ikea catalogue of them.) The person the bad guys are to meet arrives - and you just KNOW they are the bad guys from the off. He arrives in blurry motion effect which is supposed to make him look like he moving super-fast. (It's what the characters in the Myst games would look like in Zip Mode if you could see them.)
"I want to talk to Darius. You are not Darius!" he says.
"We need to know you have the Maguffin!" says the Suit.
"I am the Maguffin!" (Maguffins are obviously NOT standard and off the shelf - and I spelled 'Maguffin' differently last episode so that proves it!)
The suit has heard all he needs to know and signals his heavies. The Maguffin makes the show's editors do a jump cut and they are all suddenly lying on the floor, unconscious. He leaves. "Hi Ho! Zip Mode, away!"

Meanwhile, in orbit around Mars, the Tulip is beset by problems. Most of them being that their boss on Earth has jumped the gun and claimed the bounty reward for Zip Mode guy (the Solar System's most wanted man) and told everyone that the crew of the Tulip have him held captive. Various factions want him / money / to blow s**t up for the fun of it - take your pick. Michael Paré get to do a lot of acting to a mid-air greenscreen where lots of separately recorded dialogue will be added later. The Tulip is surrounded in the way spaceships in the flat two-dimensional way that Star Trek ships meet. Hemmed in by three ships at 120 degrees from each other on the same plane the Tulip is going nowhere. 'Up' and 'Down' are obviously not in the Ikea catalogue. Taking advantage of a bit of jostling for position between these guys Percy jumps starts the main engines and they escape following the Ion trail of another ship that blasted off from Mars during the stand off and which, for some reason the scriptwriters didn't bother telling us, they know is piloted by The Most Wanted Zip Mode Man.

Off they zoom to the asteroid belt pursued, in turn, by all the 'We want our money' / 'Most Wanted Man' / 'Blow s**t up' guys. Dante blows up the asteroid the Maguffin is hiding behind and they take his ship on board. MaGuffin is not as knocked out by the concussion as they thought he would be and does the hiding-in-the-roof-just-out-of-camera-shot thing and gets past Luc and Dante when they go onboard - which is pretty sloppy of them because Luc and Dante used the hiding-in-the-roof-just-out-of-camera-shot thing a few episodes to sneak in somewhere. Anyway, once onboard the Tulip, Ex Special Ops Most Wanted Maguffin Guy uses his Zip Flash Edit powers to (all together now!) take over the ship.

The bad guys from scene one are in one of the following ships. Luc has been talking to them because they are working for The Orchard. Darius who MaGuffin guy wanted to talk to in scene one is apparently Luc's dad. Luc takes him to the Orchard ship not because Darius is on it but because he takes her word that going is the only way he will get to see Darius. (WHY he needs to see Darius so much is more than a little vague.) On the way Maguffin info-dumps a whole screed of backstory about being involved in a secret project (Everyone take a drink!) an archaeological dig on Earth which has discovered proof of alien intervention millions of years ago. One of the things they found (which we don't get to see - even in flashback) is a dingus which, one night, activated his divinity cluster and gave him the Zip Flash abilities.

Luc returns to the Tulip alone. Dante is Pissed off with Luc. On the Orchard ship Maguffin decides he wants to explode before the end credits. So he does. (WHY? - who knows?) Even though Luc has wangled double the bounty for the exploding Maguffin (I hope she got cash up front). Dante is REALLY pissed off with her - final line of the show: " I want you off my ship" The nearest thing to a cliffhanger we've had in 13 episodes.

Other stuff. No Norks. One Scottish guy but not the one from episode one. No 'gay' jokes which was nice. The actress playing teen-genius Percy is steadily ramping up the "look at me I'm quirky" ticks.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 10, 2021)

Epsod 14 - Half Dense Players 

Darius is back! In an all-white space station interior that is probably still wet from being repainted from being an all-grey space station interior in a previous episode, he is greeted by two scientist types who are impressed that he came so fast. "Only five weeks from the Moon to Jupiter space." He want to see 'The Body - NOW!' Cut To:  to the Red Spot on Jupiter.  Cut To:  a woman doing mad action artist painting like they only do in the movies - mad swirly gestures.  I've met a lot of painters in my time.  Some of them genuinely certifiable.  Not one of them has has painted like that. Cut To: Darius again - he's coming back from having seen 'The Body' and is babbling "This incident suggests a catastrophic intersection of multidimensional  space and time - the subject matter forced the intersection by accident the multi mumble hyperdimentionumble hyper-field wimmble woop." Or something. The actor is either improvising or lost his lines. Apparently there was other DNA involved belonging to someone who is apparently very significant in this universe.   NONE of which we pay the slightest bit of attention to because we're all trying to work out why Darius is wearing sunglasses in a spaceship.







Is a good question and it was seriously testing my ability to rationalise Hollywood logic till I remembered the weirdly dis-concerting mad staring eyes thing the actor had going on in the first episode. 






I had real trouble listening to what he was saying back then because I was so fascinated by his weird, doing serious acting by staring shtick. I suspect I wasn't the only one, so they made him wear shades even when it doesn't make any sense.  Confirmation for my theory, I think, comes when he doesn't take them off at any point. 

So the Tulip get the job of transporting Andrea Arquette, the system famous artist doing the ACTION PAINTING! in the cutaways.  Andrea is an 'all round Renaissance woman' played by a reasonably attractive French actress called Ambre Boukebza with an accent so thick you could glue things to walls with it.  For once the prisoner isn't locked up in the incredibly escapable holding cell set but locked securely (hah!) in the guest quarters.

Last week's cliffhanger is resolved when Tulip's owner just tells Danté he can't fire Luc. 

Danté has the hots for artist lady.  Luc get message from Daddy Darius telling her to get artist lady into a shuttle and meet an Orchard ship. (Why this in-flight transfer is needed is never explained. Since Darius is at an Orchard facility waiting for her arrival what's the point of having her kidnapped from the people he employed to deliver her to him?)  Luc refuses putting her loyalty to the crew above her loyalty to him - meanwhile an invisible something is following the Tulip.  We recognise it as the alien ship from the opening credits but Percy has to fire "probes" at it and "run diagnostics".  Percy has just worked out that the something is  made of unknown alloys and is three million years old when the special effects we have come to recognise as being associated with 'The Divinity Cluster' come out of it and wrap themselves around the artist who walks out of her securely locked guest quarters. (Every one takes an 'escaped prisoner' drink!)  She wanders around the Tulip. Danté follows her and some 'weird stuff' happens.  She faints. She wakes up.  She starts talking in the First person plural as she is now one with the alien special effect. Blah Blah prophetic utterances about "All will become known to you!" and "You will see in all dimensions!", "You will be.... as GODS!" She vanishes!

Realising the crew of the Tulip "Know too much" (lucky them) and are in danger from The Orchard,  Luc records a quick tell-all report and uploads it to a deadman's switch to be broadcast, system-wide, "on all frequencies" if the Tulip is fired upon  - which must have been hard to do on a Pam III xe glued to an early Nokia but that's the wonders of technology for you.





I miss the 90s​
Darius backs down.

Not sure what to do about Luc, Danté goes to her room.  She's sat at a table.  He sits  opposite her and looking directly into the camera says: "And now I wanna know what's going on..." The camera pans 180 degrees and finds Luc who nods, and the camera pans right 180 back round to Danté "And I wanna know the truth..." and the camera pans right  onto Luc. Pause , And then Back round onto Danté Pause and back round  onto Luc and it doesn't pause and it keeps on going round and round ... and I think the director thought he was being innovate and creative but it just makes it look like they are sitting on a roundabout.  On the upside.  It's just about the only shot in the show that isn't dutched.  I think they _wanted_ to dutch it but realised  audience would have suffered severe motion sickness if they had.

Fade to black.

Son looking for? Yes. 
Norks? No. 
Scots? None. 
Overall interest level in series? Waning.


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## Rodders (Dec 11, 2021)

These summaries are great JunkMonkey and it sounds truly cliché. 

I do always wonder on shows like this whether any genre favourites were born out of shows like this. Perhaps a writer or producer that went on to something bigger and far better.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 12, 2021)

Ipesode 15: Dark and Stormy Night

This is going to be short.

After 11 minutes of montage made up bits from most of the previous episodes, Dante and Luc meet Darius who comes onboard the Tulip alone. They all three stand in the middle of a circular dolly track and Darius tells them there are dark forces at work - please trust him. If the badder guys get their hands on the secret of the Divinity Cluster they will use it for EVIL. But he will use it for GOOD. He will provide Danté with all that he knows about the Raiders so he can find his son because... the Secret Research Danté's wife was doing was sponsored by the Orchard and Divinity Cluster related (the implication is made that she may have experimented on him). Danté and Luc agree. Darius leaves. Darius mutters "they will lead us straight to the boy" - and his ship explodes. Evil, Orchardy, bastards have blown him up. Luc looks a bit sad but she has a Divinity Cluster activating injector dingus previously only seen in the first episode. So now Danté and Luc are friends again and Danté is the father of the Kwisatz Haderach.

Percy wasn't invited to this episode.

The director realised that the sunglasses look for Darius was really dumb so they gave him regular glasses to wear which is what they should have done from the off.
The new on-screen dialogue in this episode took up about five minutes of screen time and, with only three actors, standing still in one set, was probably shot in a couple of hours. The rest of the 40+ minute running time was made up of scenes from previous episodes. Yawn.

Other stuff:
Tits? Yes but flashbacks from episode one.
Scotsmen. Yes One shot from ditto but he didn't get any dialogue so that probably cut his repeat fees to next to nothing.
No gay bashing.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 14, 2021)

16 : Supermax

Someone finally succeeds in taking control of the Tulip!

They buy it.

Stopping off to buy spares at a spiffingly huge space station (which may well get blown up in a later episode if the title sequence is to be trusted) the crew return to the ship to find its new owners in possession and busy converting it into a prison ship.

The smooth talking, wide-boy owner Max and his slinky wife hire the crew back on as warders. Slinky wife tries to get Danté into bed. Percy runs around sabotaging things. Luc gets a couple of funny lines and reactions shots and calls the Orchard to pull strings. Caught in a compromising position with Danté, the wife yells rape. Luc and Danté get banged up in the holding cells again till Percy makes everyone take a drink by busting them out. There is a bit of running around and gunplay before the delays Percy has managed to cause with all her sabotage has made the whole buying the Tulip project so unprofitable that the bank (with a nudge from the Orchard) calls in the loan.

Who actually owns the ship at the end of the show is left unexplained.

This was almost a fun episode very much played for comedy. It wasn't exactly a Feydeau farce but the actors were obviously having fun hamming it up.

One bit of weirdness. Towards the end of the show our heroes step out of a lift, the see Max's heavies, and Danté starts firing, dropping two of them Bang! Bang. Just like that. The third surrenders. As Danté fires the words 'STUN ACTIVATED' float for a second in front of his muzzle like some bit of SIM Game info. In the original those words aren't there and there is at least one muzzle flash. The Redux addition of the STUN thing (and the removal of the flash) was done, I suspect, to make it look less like Danté had just shot the buggers dead in cold blood- and also to explain why they were then alive enough to be locked up in the ubiquitous holding cells without a scratch on them at the end of the show.

Tits? Yes. Man tits. Michael Paré gets his shirt off for the 'rape' sequence.
Son Hunting - on hold.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 16, 2021)

17: A Twist in Time 

You don't need to read this.  The title tells you everything you need to know.  Well it does if you have seen any of the countless iterations of _Groundhog Day / Run Lola Run /  Back and Back and Back to the Future _ - “There is the theory of the moebius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop, from which there is no escape. When we reach that point, whatever happened will happen again.”  episodes of any SF show.  The Caught in a Time Loop episode is, like the equally obligatory Body Swap Episode, a rite of passage that every SF show has to go through. 

Never have I seen it done so badly and boringly as this.

Delivering this week's loonytune psycho killer to somewhere (last week's "who actually owns the ship now?" having been resolved off-screen before the episode starts) the Tulip diverts to offer help at a "secret lab"  (Chug! chug! chug!) doing "graviton research funded by the Mars federation". (How the crew of the Tulip are aware of all these secret bases  is a mystery.  Maybe they subscribe to _Secret Research Weekly,  New Secret Scientist, Unlicensed Experimental Station Monthly, Jane's Hidden Base Review, _or whatever.)

Scanners fail to find any signs of life at the station and, just as they are about to decelerating to enter orbit, something blows up on the ship and all the engines go offline. They have 15 minutes before they hit the surface....  oops!  Percy rushes off to fix the engines. Luc rushes off to get the prisoner into the shuttle in case they have to bail, and Danté manspreads in his comfy chair getting frustrated that no one is listening to him.

Needless to say things from go bad to worse. A strange glowing balls of something unexplained drfift past the ship coming from somewhere unexplained (I think we are supposed to assume it's coming from the secret research base but it could be from anywhere) one of them touches the ship and there is another explosion.  Percy is trapped in a bit of the ship with a hole in it and the only way she can get out before she runs out of air is through a section of the ship with the kind of 'kills you in seconds' radiation that only happens in SF shows. (And she's got a big hole in her leg.)   Luc and Danté rush to her rescue but are too late.... she dies?(it's a bit vague but I think that's what happens). Danté rushes off to get a radiation suit just as another plot energy bubble hits the ship and he's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion.  
Realising with remarkable swiftness that he has been thrown back in time he sets out to get it right this time.... And fails. 

He's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion and sets out to get it right this time.... and fails.  

He's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion and sets out to get it right this time.... and succeeds!

But gets Luc killed. 

He's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion and sets out to get it right this time.... and _does_.  

And everyone is happy.  Happy ending coda. Then another bubble or something intersects with the ship and Luc and Percy suddenly aren't there having the happy ending coda any more and Michael Paré does sad face.






The end...

And it's all so deadly boring!  Every time we loop back we get to see the same bits of action  from exactly the same angles (but different takes) sometimes lengthened sometimes cut.  They used the outakes.  But nothing is added plot wise at any point.  Nothing is revealed that we didn't know about in the first iteration.  We just get to watch our captain getting everything wrong for 40 minutes.  Over and over again.  Dull. Dull. Dull.

The Redux producers really like the SIM gun status thing because they used it again - REALLY BIG - in a close up.

No boobs. No Scots. No son hunting.
Gay bashing? - a snide 'joke' about someone having had so many sex changes he was "discredited as a man perhaps but his research still stands".  Ho ****ing ho.


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## JunkMonkey (Dec 19, 2021)

19 : Eat Sin 

Not content with showing us the same sequences of Percy getting trapped and the others trying to rescue her  over and over again last episode we get to see it all over again in a "Previously on Starhunter..." teaser which ends up with Michael Paré doing sad face again.  The first "Previously on" of the series so far.

Realising he is alone (which takes him considerably longer to figure out than realising he had been thrown backwards through time in the previous episode) Danté checks on the prisoner. He's still in his cell so whatever has happened is probably chromosome linked.  As Danté leaves the cells, a glowing ball of pure plotdeviceium floats through a wall and is greeted by the loonytune psycho-killer like a long-lost friend. Danté goes back to the bridge andtalks to the ship's AI (which glories in the name of Caravaggio and is played with a nice line in sneery archness by Murray Melvin a jobbing actor, who despite having regular screen credits spanning 60 years, will probably best be remembered as Rita Tushingham's gay flatmate in _A Taste of Honey _ from 1961). Suddenly there is a shimmery visual effect and Danté has been replaced by Percy who gets to look surprised and say "Oh brother!" before the fade to a commercial break.  

The transition from Danté to Percy was done seamlessly. The angle is dutched (yawn!) and it was obviously done with the actors just replacing each other on set  while the camera was locked off and the jump disguised in the shimmer.  For a moment or two (or possibly longer if you had to suffer dog food commercials) we get to think that we have seamlessly segued from the Obligatory Time Loop Episode into the Obligatory Body Swap Episode.  But, sadly, no, we don't get to see Tanya Allen doing a Michael Paré impression (is the world ready?).  We have instead stepped into the Not Quite Obligatory (But Soon Will be) Alone in the Ship in Parallel Universes Episode.  (The _Farscape_ episode -"Through the Looking Glass" worked the same idea the year before but did it SOOOO much better.)

Needless to say the prisoner has escaped (Chug!) via the glowing plotdeviceium ball. He lures Danté into a trap and ties him up. (Thereby getting control of the ship! Take another three shots because... You've guessed it.  The escaped killer is loose in all three universes.) He gets to tie up all three of our leads in the same camera setups in each universe and gets to do "Woooo! I'm a scary killer!" acting at them for a bit and rabbit on about pain being beautiful and feeding agony back to the Universe blah blah.  Again, like last week's episode, these three scenarios are played out pretty much shot for shot the same each time.  Though the editor has a little more fun cutting back and forth between these parallel, but essentially identical, story lines it's still pretty dull stuff.  In the end plucky perky Percy is the one to turn the tables by turning the gravity on the bit of floor that the killer is standing on up to 11 and then jumping through the gravity warp time displacement special effect because (somehow) she can now predict where it will turn up. She meets the SFX and instructs the ship to self-destruct behind her.  Then she's in the same universe / time line as Danté. The killer is there too (somehow) so they jump through the "time warp anomaly"  conveniently at the end of the corridor and blow up the ship behind them... and then everything is all right again because the killer now isn't in the final (Luc's) universe - because Luc killed him.  (Another episode in which the women do all the heavy lifting and our hero wanders around looking lost.)  They blow up the base and Percy has a bad. horror movie, jump-scare dream.

The end.

Usual Tits/Scots/Gay bashing/son hunting report card - total blank


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