SUBSMASH Comments Hope it makes it this time

SubSmash

Where to start on this episode?

Perhaps, with the fact that Straker wants his most experienced crew along, and we DON’T see Captain Carlin or any of his crew. We get Foster, a Helmsman named Tony Chin (Who I don’t remember seeing anywhere else), CaptainWaterman (Another new face), the Navigator, Lewis, who is an experienced submariner, Nina Barry, who came all the way from MoonBase to run the sonar (I wasn’t aware that sonar and Radar were all that similar, but having only used radar, I can’t say for certain. Not that it matters, neither set uses a scope design that I am familiar with. And god alone knows how much time, or how much money, for that matter, it took to bring her down from MoonBase.)

I don’t understand what exactly “Sea skimming” is. It didn’t seem to be a great deal faster then they were going before, but it was certainly noisier. Especially given that they required an explosive charge to start the turbines or what ever when the order was first given, we hear the bang and see a puff of smoke from the hull amidships.[i] Not exactly a way to sneak up on someone.

I did like the bit of Straker and Foster discussing whether the UFO knew that it was the cat or the mouse. Although neither one of them is essential to the mission they tag along. Foster for no obvious reason, Straker so thathe can continue his obsessive hands-on approach to life. He assembles the finest crew available, then leads them into the battle zone despite his claustrophobia.

Is Straker foolish for putting almost all of his senior command in one basket? This isn’t the first time that he has lead from the front with all, or most of his command staff with him, so is it a personality fault, or justa way to make maximum use out of the regular cast so that you can save money on guest stars?

 

Nitpicking

According to UFO_3 Paths of Fear, a standard tour on SkyDiver is eight weeks long[ii]. Given that this is directly adapted from the episodes, I will give it the status of Cannon. So where does everyone sleep, or eat for that matter? Where is the head or the showers?

In The Psychobombs, they show them opening a compartment to get small arms out, yet there is no indication that there is anywhere to store food, spareparts or anything else that they would need for a long voyage.

Approximately 83 percent of the main cabin is taken up by insterments of some kind, most of which serve no obvious purpose. In SubSmash, even after they have gone to “Emergency Power” every light and monitor on the ship is still on. Several times you can see monitors displaying snow. Why didn’t anyone bother to shut them off, or for that matter, why didn’t the ships computer shut them down when they went off line. A crew of six could not run a ship of that size without a computer doing a lot of the work. I neversaw any charts and yet they were navigating a course.

SkyDiver has underwater cameras and lights yet I don’t see any on the plans for the boat. Besides the one right by Helm control, could someone please show me where these various escape hatches are located? I don’t see anyindications of hatches on the plans. Just where are the missile tubes at, the ones that Straker mentions, and what is the crawlspace that Nina uses in her failed escape normally used for? Is this one of the connecting pointsfor Sky One? Do the booster rockets fit into these tubes? They look about the right size given the scale of Sky One.

Since these tubes were supposedly airtight, how come Nina didn’t run out of air after ten minutes or so, especially as we never see her using her oxygen tank.. Why was she barefoot and Lewis still had his boots on when he went out?

Even if we give them the element of drama, one still has to wonder if Albatross One came all the way from London, or was Freeman working somewhere else and they just picked him up? For that matter, why only send one rescue plane? Wouldn’t a number of sea craft be on stand-by, “Just in case” asthe Mobile teams are?

Since you can not completely shut down a nuclear reactor short of removing the fuel rods, why didn’t they risk using the reactor to charge up the batteries, or run the pumps themselves. It was noted that the reactor coolingsystem was “Damaged” but I would have been more then happy to risk a little radiation poisoning to get out of the sub faster. Most times you can recover from radiation, it is really, REALLY hard to recover from suffocation or drowning.

I was watching SubSmash on tape again this morning and I came up with fortysix major peeves and a host of smaller ones.

Where was all of the diving gear aboard the sub? Why didn’t the designersinclude any kind of air scrubbing system on the ship. These types of systems have been around since the First World War, surely a modern outfit like SHADO wouldn’t over look something as basic as that.

Why didn’t they bleed some of the air that was all ready in the ballast tanks back into the boat? They were all ready on the bottom, so it is not like they needed it to stay afloat.

Why was there no way to pump out the escape hatch by hand, or for that matter, opening it when there was a little water inside the tube. You could seethat there was an eight to twelve inch difference between the bottom of the tub and the edge of the door, so you wouldn’t have to worry about a couple of inches of water in the bottom of the tube. Why didn’t the crew getreal friendly in that escape tube so that they could get out faster?

Were they shallow enough that they could have flooded the boat and free swam to the surface?

Of course the main answer to all of these questions is that correcting any of them would haven lessened or negated the dramatic impact of the show. UFO is always interested in entertaining people first, and all of the technical stuff that we like to look over twenty or thirty years later is a happy accident when it works. A show has to have an internal consistency to attract viewers, but it can, and has gone out the window the minute that it getsin the way of story telling.

This has been the problem with a number of shows that have developed “Devoted” fan followings. Not that UFO has reached Mythic Proportions like Star Trek yet, but we do like to watch them over and over again, trying to squeeze every last nuance out of them, even when we have to reach for some ofthem as in Fanfic.

So is this a commentary on the show itself, or more a comment on ourselves,that we are willing to devote the time and energy to pursuer things like this?
By the way: If I don’t send in any thing else this week, to one and all mothers, a Happy Mother’s Day on the Eleventh.

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[i] I have all ways wondered if SkyDiver is a water jet impellor drive or some other form of “Jet” propulsion. I have never seen any props anywhere on the models. Impellors are pumps that “Squirt” water out at high pressure/speed to propel a ship forward, rather like the way in which the squid and octopus move around.

[ii] “As always, Carlin left his ship as clean and neat as he had found it, seven weeks ago…)


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At 09:22 AM 5/6/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>
>SubSmash
>
>Where to start on this episode?
>
>Perhaps, with the fact that Straker wants his most experienced crew along,
and we DON’T see Captain Carlin or any of his crew. We get Foster, a
Helmsman named Tony Chin (Who I don’t remember seeing anywhere else),
Captain Waterman (Another new face), the Navigator, Lewis, who is an
experienced submariner, Nina Barry, who came all the way from MoonBase to
run the sonar (I wasn’t aware that sonar and Radar were all that similar,
but having only used radar, I can’t say for certain. Not that it matters,
neither set uses a scope design that I am familiar with. And god alone
knows how much time, or how much money, for that matter, it took to bring
her down from MoonBase.)

Not to mention she spends half the episode stuck in a tube. "So I just lie
in this tube then for the remainder of the show? Does my character have
any more dialogue? Not til the very end? She mainly lies in the tube, is
that it? Is it too late to call my agent?"

Doug

>Not to mention she spends half the episode stuck in a tube. "So I just lie
>in this tube then for the remainder of the show? Does my character have
>any more dialogue? Not til the very end? She mainly lies in the tube, is
>that it? Is it too late to call my agent?"

"Is that it?" ? I believe SUB-SMASH was the episode where Dolores
Mantez had the most lines of dialog and most screen time in the
entire series.

Marc