Best XL5 ep bar none.
I'm sorry but I totally disagree.
The best episode is either Planet 46, Convict in Space, Sabotage or Space City Special.
Planet 46 is a bit dull, Convict in Space is great and I haven't seen Space City Special.
What do you thinks wrong with this one then? I think its got everything, perfectly summing up the series and being quite scary. Its the only Supermarionation to ever give me nightmares (when I was about 8 ) and its still pretty creepy today. But I'm not frightened anymore, cos it isn't real and AGH! KOODAS! KOODAS!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!
What is the point at the start of Koodas bringing his palace up to ground level, then doing the freaky speech, then taking it back underground?
Perhaps the acoustics in Koodas' hall work best when his palace is above ground.
I found it rather unnerving to think of Koodas carefully keeping the recordings of his ancestors' voices and playing them back, possibly because there is no one else left to talk to. (Actually, I think that someone must have recorded the voice patterns, and Koodas fiddled them around to say what he wanted. How would his ancestors have know that they would have a descendant named Koodas?) Poor guy seemed quite, quite mad, or perhaps that Eternal Fountain stuff left him permanently drugged out. Those bulging eyes with their pinpoint pupils...I hope that they stay out of my dreams....
Either his ancestors were all cursed with bad royal portrait painters, or long necks were an artistic convention, or the physiology of the Zanadus has changed over time.
The lazoons, while reasonably intelligent and good mimics, don't appear to be sentient or violent. How did they get to that planet in the first place, and what did they do to so damage the population? How long ago did it happen? Steve mentioned that "they" were sworn to destroy all lazoons, but it seems to be down to one man.
Koodas tells his ancestors that he has finally come up with a virus that will destroy the lazoons. Once Zoonie falls ill, Venus promptly identifies the virus, and Steve mentions that it hasn't been seen on Earth for the last fifty years.
BTW--I thought that Zoonie was something that Venus picked up on a visit to his home planet. Steve's statement implies that Zoonie might be an Earth-bred specimen, and that there might be lots of them on the planet. Koodas, however, refers to the "Earth Lazoon" (singular). How did he know that there was a lazoon on Earth in the first place?
Venus' dinner gown looked quite pretty. I wonder what it would have looked like in color?
Steve's aside to the audience about women being the same as back in the 1960's made me want to reach in the screen and throttle him.
Was that thunder and lightning outside the Major's window an actual storm, or was it the result of Koodas communing with him?
Koodas' suicide at the end was startling, yet it fit in with his obsession. A really eerie episode. I wonder what would have happened if Koodas and his ancestors had spent their time and energy restoring their world, instead of fixating on the lazoons...were the lazoons really guilty, or did the Zanadus make them a scapegoat for everything that went wrong...hmmmmm.
BTW, Steve mentions to the Major that Venus has been in the service for five years. If, as the episode guide claims, she is 19, then she would have joined at the age of 14. Seems just a tad young to me.
When Zoonie fell ill, they took him to the laboratory on XL5. You'd think that Space City itself would have would have a more complete medical set-up than a ship. Of course, in that case, Steve and Venus would not have been on board when the ship was hijacked, leaving Professor Matic to deal with the situation on his own. (That could have been interesting.)