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Last Call at the Broken Hammer - Episode #205 (some spoilers below) (Click here for synopsis)

This week's episode did not have a 'B' story, which was nice for a change. The main story could have used a bit more polishing but was typically fast moving and exciting to follow. As usual (for me at least) close examination revealed a lot of interesting (and often questionable) details.

The premise of looking for former President Ortiz was a good one and the plot twist concerning her identify while not hugely surprising was still pretty well done. My guess is this episode was filmed before the prior one, since here the Andromeda is still "in the shop", whereas in Pitiless it seems completely renovated, but this is not a big deal and made sense as a way to leave them to their own resources on the planet.

I liked the guest cast for the most part and felt they came together to tell a fairly good story. The stand out here for me was Rachel Hayward as Cory even if her role was short. However, I found Jadis (Enuka Okuma) was difficult to watch and hard to believe. It is not impossible that this character would be driven to murder, but I found the portrayal unconvincing and thought her actions (while understandable) were not treated very seriously.

As far as the regular cast I was just a bit disappointed. Dylan seemed to be uncharacteristically "stupid" both in calling out Ortiz's name initially and then in publicly revealing Saphia's identity. Tyr handled himself well, but the story had him twice single handedly take out artillery positions without apparent injury, which strains credibility a lot.

Speaking of strained credibility, the force lances as handy dandy all purpose weapons was a bit hard to swallow given their size and the apparently lack of major energy weapons in the Commonwealth. Also, identify switching has never been shown as easy in this series and seems like it could have significantly changed past stories if it were a reality. Interesting idea, but likely just invented for the sake of this plot and since the series seems to want to do some good "world building" they should be more consistent.

On the topic of world building it was interesting to see the Kalderans introduced here. The concept of intelligent pack mentalities is a fascinating one (see Vernor Vinge's novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" for a great example of this). However, the come across as just plain stupid here (marching in to rapidly be killed) and are not the convincing threat I think they were meant to be. The poor costumes did not help here, which may highlight a need for the producers to be careful to tell stories in a way they have the budget to do well.

Overall, I enjoyed a lot about the show but think it suffered in some of the details that can make the difference between a fair/good episode and a solid or great story.

The ratings for the episode are given below. For information on how my rating system works, click on this link.

Review 11/06/01 by Larry Kramer 

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