25 - Skyriders of Hell

The episode opens with Egobossler shooting clay pigeons. Kempler shows up to show his new helpers, the Skyriders. These guys look like human vampire bats and materialise from nowhere, hanging upside down on the roof. Ego clearly thinks they will be a great help to him and has a daydream about walking into a palatial ballroom, where the guests gasp in awe at his presence and all the ladies want to have his babies, while he walks up to a throne on a high dais with his scorpion motif above it.

The Gatch team are visiting a man who has some knowledge of Egobossler to try to persuade him to tell them what he knows. He refuses, but takes the team hunting with his 2 young children (Michael and Mary). A stills sequence with truly horrible sound effects follows to show what a jolly time they all have chasing the fox, or whatever it is they're after. Afterwards they have a bit of a party, and after everyone should be asleep the guy burns a piece of paper and jumps in his jeep and goes to see Ego on a yacht. There Ego behaves in a threatening manner, shooting his own 2 guards and then moving to shoot the guy himself. Just as he's about to shoot, a shuriken knocks his gun away and the team, fronted by Ken, appears. Ego has by now fitted his mask. He sits down complacently, and his skyriders appear on the yacht's mast. Ego leaps over the side to his waiting liferaft and the skyriders throw explosives at the team, blowing up the yacht. Ego believes the team and the guy are dead.

However, the team have rescued the guy and go back to his mansion, which is on fire. Ego is inside destroying a notebook, which presumably contains everything the guy knew about him. He sees Gatchaman appear and his skyriders materialise again. This time they have curving blades on their forearms as well as the explosives and general scaryness. They hurl explosives at the team and then form their own fiery pyramid (they seem ok with blue flames), exploding part of the house and hurling Ken onto the roof and, presumably, knocking everybody else unconscious. Ken fights the skyriders on the roof, they knock him off and he hangs onto the guttering for dear life. The fire breaks a window next to him and fire begins to lick as his legs. He spins on the thinnest piece of guttering, forming his own tornado effect which sucks fire up onto the rooftop, burning the skyriders. One remains to fight him with blades, Ken wins. Down in the house, the guy has finally got there and finds members of his household dead, but his children hiding behind a grandfather clock. They rush out to hug him, and Ego turns up and shoots him through the heart right in front of them. Joe has woken up just in time to see this, bringing on a flashback of his own parents being killed. Just then the house starts to fall down so it's time to get out. Outside, the kids are obviously upset, and Joe talks to them, but we don't get to hear anything.

6/10 - can't excuse the horrible sound effects on the stills sequence, but at least Ken didn't go hypershoot due to the Gatchspartan not appearing in this episode. The rest of the team do seem remarkably ineffectual though.

26 - Cow

Boy takes cow to be blessed. Nasty man hands boy a cyborg cow to hold. Cyborg cows exert mind control over normal cows. Cows go mad, like Pamploma on the cheap because the animators obviously didn't have their hearts in this one. Team come along and shoot cyborg cows. Kempler comes along and grabs boy. He and Galactor guards match up against team (note, they do not outnumber the team and they're only armed with machine guns and a sword) and team drops weapons. All watch in understandable astoundment as cow takes ages to race over, disarm Kempler, and take boy to safety. Cow doesn't have binocular vision and depth perception so it then charges cow mech outside city walls (it's both very big and very far away). Boy and team shout at cow to be careful or something stupid like that, while mech shoots badly at the cow for a long time. Eventually cow gets shot. Team rushes to Gatchspartan and Ken goes hypershoot and shoots through the middle of the bull mech. Boy buries cow with a cross and everyone looks terribly upset because they probably wanted steak. Then ugly calf with obvious skin disease and requirement to see a vet distracts boy from his grief. Thank god it's over.

0.5/10

27 - Birth of Egobossler

Grey haired old lady running away from Galactor troops, falls down a cliff into a river. Egobossler (Helm) has a brother, sounds like Cassary, he's in a dungeon in Ego's castle. Flashback - Cassary has his arm in a sling and their father is beating Helm in the face. Helm's mother, a maid, comes in and tries to defend him and father beats her instead. Afterwards Helm carries his mother down a long passage and they have some touching discussion and then she dies. Helm evidently goes out and dyes his face blue and buys a long white wig. With his face bandaged and wearing the Ego clothes, he goes back to where his father and brother are sharing wine. One of them (his brother I think) throws a sword at him which cuts the bandages and his cheek, this is where his scar comes from. Ego shoots his father dead and has a jolly old rejoice at a graveside, I assume his mother's where he's telling her he's avenged her death. In present time, Ego is having a chinwag with his captive brother, when the KNTG turn up. He sends out a loony floating-on-air lizard mech. Ken moves to attack the mech in his plane and it zaps itself and him away to another dimension while the rest of the team fly around uselessly. Eventually he chops at its head and it drops him back into real space, where he jumps on the top of his plane, goes hypershoot, and shoots through the middle of it. The team must be in this ep for 4 minutes at the most. Ken is the only member of the team to do anything. And it's pointless anyway because while they were fighting the mech Ego gets away to a submarine where he has his brother chained up again.

4/10 - I have since found out that Helm didn't know who his father was and was employed as Cassary's bodyguard - he's being beaten because Cassary got hurt. Very talky episode, very little action, probably much better if you actually understand more than 10 words of Japanese.

28 - Desperate struggle in the valley of betrayal

This was quite a good one. I assume it's set in africa somewhere. Don't know any of the names so bad black guy can be called Idi Amin. All the african characters are black, all the Galactors are white. Galactor captain (fairly normally dressed in white military style uniform with wild hair) shoots black guy driving round in jeep and, while having a jolly old evil laugh about it, finds some paper in his pocket. Nambu somehow has the piece of paper (and a shrunken head in this scene) and sends the team out to africa. They get there just as the rebels are being thrashed out of a forest by tanks and jet planes. Ken and Jun shoot down the planes and the others destroy the ground forces. The team then goes to talk to the rebels. The male team members hand over their bracelets to Jun and go to the mine? quarry? to work. Under the area where people are working is a comical looking drilling machine, I assume it's looking for diamonds or some specific kind of ore, it's armed with a big laser. The guys get down to the drilling machine and Idi Amin and the captain turn up and catch them in big tumblers and gas them. Then they take them to the area where the rebels are hiding and hang them up on big X's (which Joe can't struggle his way off) to get the rebels and Jun to come out. They're in a cave, and the lead rebel throws down his gun, and the others follow. He then moves to surrender, but the female rebel shoots him in the back. He pulls off his mask - he was the Galactor captain all along, the real leader was the guy he shot in the first place. Jun kicks ass big time. She has a pink tourniquet type thing on her right upper arm which she uses to throw energy nets over the enemy. After a while she's joined by the female rebel, and then by the other rebels. She gets to her tank, the female rebel shoots the locks on the Xs, Jun throws the guys their bracelets after some shooting with her G3 triangle thing. Idi Amin turns up in the drill. The laser sure does shoot a wide beam. So they all get into the Gatchspartan and go hypershoot. They beat the Galactors and everyone is relatively happy. Unless they're dead.

8/10 - this is a good episode, I don't have any idea about the dialogue though. Artwork and framerate pretty good in this, several frames I really wish I could have captured. The drill mech was pissy though, if the team were on previous series form they would have beaten it easily.

29 - Tragic brother and sister thing

Egobossler looks like he's getting ready for some world domination but he's miffed because Marstora from Gatch 2 has returned. Z says something like they have to use Marstora's plan, and Ego is very miffed. Next a guy in a red/blue lycra suit stands by a tank outside a city. He's got special binoculars which allow him to see that there are hidden tanks. He presses a button on his arm and his tank turns into 3 transformers looking robots who proceed to destroy the tanks. The team see from on top of the city walls and Ken & Joe give chase. Ken pulls the gatchafencer but the guy trips or zaps him or something (Can't remember). Joe grabs the guy and pushes him up against a wall. Guy moves to attack, grows spikes on his knees, Joe sees this and pulls a spike off. He sees the guy is a cyborg and the guy gets away. They give chase again. Ken winds up in front of a church where a young nun is playing guitar. They talk for a while and she gives him a blessing as he leaves. When she goes into her room, the guy comes in too - he's hurt and needs help. He collapses and she somehow gets him into her bed where she gets him a drink. He sees the family picture on her dresser, he has the same picture. They are brother and sister although they didn't recognise each other. The sister talks for a while and then Joe bursts in, and the guy jumps out of the window. Marstora is commanding some kind of orange crayfish mech, the guy flies back into it. Ken sees it and calls everyone together for the Gatchspartan. Joe actually tries firing weapons at the crayfish, but it shoots back with everything including its claws =- the spartan is hit and crashes next to the church. Marstora is about to shoot the gatchspartan but the guy sees his sister standing next to the spartan and so puts up a fight. He gets very very shot, full of holes, while he launches missiles from his arms at the crew. Then he calls his transforming robots up from the hold of the mech. They do serious damage to the mech while he laughs in tragic hysteria. He remembers how he was recruited and transformed into a cyborg. And just when I'm thinking that the mech will self destruct because it's taken so much damage, Ken goes all hypershoot and rams straight through the middle of it again. Ho hum. Guy gets buried, location is surprisingly similar to the cow's burial. Are the team sadder about the death of the heroic cow or the enemy cyborg?

6/10 - Nika-nika-Dominica blah blah blah

30 - Creeping Alien

This episode bears quite a resemblance to the Dexter's Lab episode "Gooey Aliens that Control Your Mind", except for the lack of humour.

The episode opens with the ending of the last episode - Marstora's crayfish mech being destroyed by Ken's hypershoot. This is Marstora's report to Sosai Z, who is obviously most annoyed about it. Ego smirks in the background, sure that Marstora will be demoted but Z instructs Marstora to put his next plan into operation. Ego is most put out.

Marstora goes to a lab where he has a little container of pulsating yellow stuff in isolation. He zaps it, and cuts a little bit out and puts it into a petri dish, where it pulsates and grows. He flies his orange craft (Marstora likes orange) over a city and ejects the petri dish. The yellow stuff crawls along a path and kills a florist, then pops out of a water fountain and kills a guy in a park. Jun and Jinpei happen to be out having a run in this park and Jun is about to drink from the same water fountain (and the yellow stuff is just popping out to get her) when Jinpei shouts that he's found the dead man. All over the city people are turning up dead because they turned their taps on. Nambu calls the team together to discuss it, but then a whole beachful (might be a reservoir beach rather than an ocean beach) of fisherman turn up dead and they go out to investigate. While the bodies are being removed, the team talk to a young boy with his arm in a cast. Jinpei doesn't notice as a lump of the yellow stuff crawls up a fishing line and winds up on his knee - fortunately he's in birdstyle. The boy picks up a stone and hurls it at the stuff, and it splatters off onto the beach - and also onto his cast. Joe throws a rocket powered shuriken into the stuff, which burns and vanishes. Jinpei is relieved, but while they continue talking the boy collapses.

Ken, Joe and Ryu return to talk to Nambu. More stuff is turning up all over the place, it's getting through the water system and causing chaos and death all over the place. Some turns up in the ISO building, it heads for Joe but falls to the floor and Nambu stamps on it, which stunsa and shrinks it and allows a scientist with tweezers to capture it and put it into a little test tube. The guys then set out to track down the stuff in the reservoirs. They see a lump and shoot at it, and then get the keepers of the dam to shut down all the pipes out of the reservoir. Meanwhile Jinpei is in the boy's hospital room playing with some little robots. The boy gets out of his bed and picks up one of the robots and turns it off. He collapses very badly, he's now very ill indeed.

Jun and Jinpei return to help Nambu examine the sample. They can't work out what to do with it. The yellow stuff starts attacking people all over the place again, including leeching through ceilings and floors in ISO headquarters. Jun and Jinpei leave in their vehicles to join the rest of the team. They fly around for a while, Jinpei forming a theory about what makes the stuff go, until they see that all the little blobs of stuff are joining together into one great big blob floating in front of the sun. They unite the Gatchspartan and shoot it with their lasers, and it splatters back into little pieces. Just as they're feeling happy about this, all the stuff joins back together again and, at a signal from Marstora, turns into a floating grey cyclops (disappointing). It has a huge laser eye and it shoots the Gatchspartan a lot more than the Gatchspartan shoots it. Eventually Ken goes hypershoot and rams through its neck. Then he sees Marstora's craft and shoots it with the Gatchspartan's lasers. Marstora calls back to base to ask for help from Egobossler, who cheerfully ignores him. Marstora's ship blows up, Ego looks smug because his rival is destroyed.

7/10 - what a shame the stuff had to turn into a giant grey cyclops. This is a great episode up until this point and still good in the minute or so after the hypershoot effect finishes.

31 - Runaway train chase

The episode opens with gunmen taking over a passenger jet, gassing and removing one of its passengers (Doctor/Professor Stellar? Starroz? dunno) and then blowing up the jet with the rest of its passengers on board while they escape with parachutes. Flashbacks then show that lots of other scientists have been kidnapped.

Next we see two men in a car, one blonde with sunglasses, the other with dark hair. They're driving along when suddenly a huge truck forces them off the road, and the occupants break the car windows and gas them. They are taken to a steam train, where a young boy is asleep in one of the wagons, and tied up in the passenger compartment with all the other kidnapped scientists. The train starts up, driven by uniformed goons, and when the blonde and dark haired guys wake up, they turn out to be Ken and Joe in disguise (Ken in wig and sunglasses, Joe in a mask). They untie the scientists, and find out that they can't communicate with the rest of the team using their bracelets. A section of the train track opens up, revealing sloped track that takes the train down into tunnels, where it connects onto a waiting Galactor engine (it's an evil looking engine).

The train zips through the tunnels. When a panel slides aside allowing a camera to view the carriage, Ken and Joe are back in their seats (although not in the same places) and all the scientists look tied up, so Mechandor is happy that the mission is going well. But when Egobossler looks, all the passenger seats are empty and Ken and Joe are in birdstyle, planning escape with the scientists. Mechandor quickly uncouples the engine from the rest of the train and speeds away, and then the track moves to take the rest of the train into a different tunnel, which just happens to come to an end in a huge pool of molten lava. Everybody looks rather worried, especially the goons who have been left on the train. They race through the carriages trying to get to the Galactor engine, but it's gone, and they all fall out on the track.

The young boy has woken up by now and is also running through the carriages. Joe catches him before he can fall out onto the tracks as well. Conveniently, the young boy knows how to drive a steam train, so Ken goes up to help him reverse the engine. Joe flips out of the other end of the train to add some extra braking power. As a cyborg, he's stronger than a speeding train, and following the rules of this sort of situation the train stops just as he's teetering on the edge of the precipice.

They then get the steam engine running properly to take them back out of the tunnels. Once its past the place where the tunnels switched to force them into the lava in the first place, the tunnel switches back and 4 Galactor engines chase them. The Galactor engines fire at the steam train, so Ken and Joe go up on top of the carriages and shoot the tunnel roof down onto the track. This derails the Galactor engines and they explode. An automatic system means that the steam engine can get back up the sloping track and out to the real tracks again. Just when they're celebrating, a really dodgy huge robot that looks like a child's toy and has the reactions of a tired 11 month old baby turns up. They steam through its legs, it fails to catch them because its reactions are so bad. Then it chases them, comically, and shoots all over the place, badly, while making noises like Lurch from The Addams Family. This is a really crappy mech.

At this point, Jun, Jinpei and Ryu turn up in the Gatchspartan. Jun shoots the stupid robot a few times with the Gatchalaser, then Ken and Joe leap up onto it. Ken stands on top of the G1 and lops of one of its arms, then one of its legs. The robot then sheds its other limbs, rolls along like an easter egg, and then rises into the sky. It splits around its middle and lasers shoot out randomly. It also seems to grow much bigger, but we're all used to that after watching any series of Gatchaman. At this point Ken goes hypershoot and rams straight through the middle of it.

The boy drives the train off into the sunset. The team stand on a station platform. The episode ends.

5/10 - the beginning made me feel very uncomfortable because it was far more realistic an attack than I'm used to from Gatchaman, and the end was just stupid. Even having Ken and Joe in disguise wasn't very interesting.

32 - Mysterious Space Pulse

This is a confusing one.

A mech which looks like a cross between Godzilla and one of those robot toy dogs is terrorising cities. The team go to talk to a young boy about it, for reasons I cannot fathom. Nambu has a flashback (maybe) in which he's talking to Kamo, and the boy is in the room and comes over to shout at them and shoot them with a toy gun before running away in tears. Back in the present, the young boy is upset and runs from the team, and Jinpei follows him down to the outside of the building where they talk. I believe the boy may be a relative of Kamo. Anyway, Jinpei goes to see Kamo at their base and talks to him, arranging to take him to the hotel where the boy is staying. Kamo goes, the boy sees him and runs joyfully to greet him, and Kamo is not happy to see him at all, leaving the boy in floods of tears again. Anyone would think he'd brought dishonour on his cow or something. The mech attacks another city, and Kamo goes on the Gatchspartan with the team. Joe glides down to an observatory with him, but Jinpei sees that it is the city where the boy is living and also glides down to the ground. Kamo gets something from the observatory (looks like a box of lights) and Joe takes him back to the Gatchspartan. The boy was being carried from his hotel by his carer, but the carer is injured and so the boy is running through the ruins by himself. The Gatchspartan takes on the mech, which has some kind of glowing shield all around itself except for a hole in front of where its eyes would be which it uses for shooting through. Kamo fits the lightbox on the top of the G1, which absorbs the energy of the mech's weapon and allows it through the shield to attack the mech (commanded by Mechandor). He blows it up a bit, destroying the shield. Then he goes hypershoot and rams through the mech's neck. The mech is destroyed, the Gatchspartan lands and Kamo looks for the boy, who is safely with Jinpei by the remains of the mech. Kamo and the boy are reconciled. I remain confused.

4/10 - wish I knew what was going on. Apparently this one is in Eagle Riders as "Uncle Avery" which might give me some idea of what all the talking was about, but I suspect they will have changed the plot.