A very good episode, but one thought came to mind when Captain Carlin said he was redocking Sky 1. Redocking Sky One must be a slow and complicated process. I don't think it could be done in a short period of time as this episode suggests.
Ed Bishop gave a fine performance during the scene where he calls up the hospital. When he's told his son is listed under another last name, Staker appears to be on the verge of crying. He's not an unemotional meanie after all!
It's interesting that the alien seems to be a defector being pursued by another UFO. This would have made for an interesting storyline for further eps. Too bad UFO was cancelled. It could have gone in some interesting directions.
The aliens ships are said to be travelling SOL 1.4 & the reaction is that that is too fast.
Seeing as some earlier eps put the speed at SOL 8 that seems unusual.
However then it's said that the Interceptors couldn't intercept them in time.
IIRC the moon is a quarter of a million miles from Earth & I don't think it's been established that the Interceptors can exceed the speed of light so the alien ships must be within... oh, let's say a light second of Earth.
And yet it seems to take several hours for the alien ship to reach Earth.
Of course it was later said that the second alien ship had veered off 10 million miles away & that was at a point after the Interceptors failed to intercept the ships...
I think the writer was just throwing numbers around without doing any checking on what it would mean.
Given how fast the alien ship was travelling that was an awfully wimpy splash when it hit the ocean.
I wonder how Sky 1 redocks. Surely it can't use those jet engines to reenter the water. I would guess that it would have to somehow slow down & land on the water and sink while the sub part comes up from behind.
Might have been interesting if they had shown the redocking process sometime.
Why couldn't Sky 1 be used to triangulate the radio signal?
Why did the alien need to set up his device in a house?
When the pursuing UFO re-enters Earth's episode to kill the alien at the end of the episode, SID orders "Red Alert replacement Sky One." I have no idea what he's on about. Sky One is attached to Skydiver at that time...
The aliens ships are said to be travelling SOL 1.4 & the reaction is that that is too fast.
Seeing as some earlier eps put the speed at SOL 8 that seems unusual.
But usually, by the time they approach Earth, they're sublight, usually around SOL 0.8.
"Mr. Perfect" (I don't know Mary's SO's name) is rather useless, isn't he?
On the DVD set (at least as I'm getting it from Netflix), this episode follows "The Dalotek Affair".
I watched this in two parts (finished tonite).
Very good ending. It's not your stereotypical "happy ending". They lose both the alien and Straker's son.
And to press the point that Straker lost his son, any hope of some kind of relationship with his ex-wife, or the alien defector being questioned, it ends with an overhead view down at Straker, completely by himself in a big empty room.
I'll never understand why Straker never told Alec what was happening to his son, or why he needed the transport for personal reasons. He just allows it to be diverted. I guess he told himself that he could have both-- recovering the alien and get the drug to his son in time, but not a word of explanation to such a close friend as Alec? That was frustrating.