They did it again! With everyone else snoozing away in bed, poor Lt. 90 is stuck on watch. Does this man get any sleep?
Commander Zero, at least, had the wit to throw some clothes on. We're treated to the sight of Steve Zodiac in his bathrobe. Professor Matic, as well, although that might not be considered such a treat. Venus, apparently, lives too far away to respond to general alarms, although you'd think that it would be wired in to her house.
How is it that no one noticed the approach of XL27 until it was almost falling on top of them?
I'm rather confused about the XL27. Lt. 90 said that the crew managed to get close to Earth (the solar system?) before before going on remote. However, Venus indicated that they'd been hit with a heavy coma ray, and would be unconcious for at least a month. They were struck right near the ice planet. How were they able to make it back to the general vicinity of Earth, let alone scribble a note as to where they'd been? I think it would have been better if they'd had their own robot pilot who got them home.
Funny coincidence that those ice aliens, who had thought that the XL27 was adrift in space, activated their sun deflector the morning after the XL27 made it home. My first thought was that someone had contaminated the XL27 somehow and sent it home to affect the weather.
The Earth had gotten cold and was getting steadily colder, implying that the deflector was in constant use. Yet the aliens showed off what they were doing to the XL5 crew by bringing the deflector out...and turning it on. Why had it been put away in the first place?
The aliens had calculated that it would be a month before everything was killed off on Earth, but Zero and 90 seemed to think that they were right on the verge of death.
When Steve & Co. fall through the weakened floor, you hear them yelling to each other for quite a long time before they land in that sub-room. Yet when Steve chips footholds in the wall and climbs back up to the hole in the ceiling, the upper floor is right above the hole. Shouldn't there have been a fairly long shaft to climb up?
The destruction of the deflector, the underground workings, and (presumably) the aliens was very satisfying. Take that, you bad guys!
During the trip home, why on Earth didn't Steve radio ahead and explain what had happened? Commander Zero seemed to think that the Earth just happened to freeze and and just happened to thaw out by itself, while Steve & Co. were out joyriding.
I enjoyed the little interchange between Commander Zero and Lt. 90, but I was really expecting the Lieutenant's description of Commander Zero as "a bear with a sore head" to come back to haunt him at the very end, when the danger was past.