Airdate: 3/26/81
Buck, Hawk and Wilma explore another Earth-like planet and find a man who had crash-landed and
been stranded there for several weeks. Wilma brings the man, named Reardon,
back to the Searcher while Buck and Hawk continue to survey the weird,
supernatural-seeming phenomenon on the “ghost world.” Upon returning to the
ship, they’re even more surprised by the crew: the admiral has become a cruel
martinet; Twikki a surly, resentful back-talker, Goodfellow a cranky old man
and Chrichton is…. nice! Buck
suspects that the ship, and everyone on it, is a fake – and when Wilma freaks
out uncharacteristically, he learns she is too. When the Sracher is held by a
snare beam emanating from the planet, Hawk and Buck go down to the source and
there the find a wise old Asian man – the mastermind behind the “test” Buck had
just gone through, and must now complete so he can take the old man’s place as
1,000-year protector of the planet. It involves finding a sabateur on the
Searcher and stopping him – it turns out to be Reardon, or at least the entity
inhabiting him, and so they must get to him before a bomb blows the whole ship
to Kingdom Come.
Show has finally begun to hit its stride – with only 3 shows
before its cancellation. Too bad, too, because we’ve hit a stretch of
imaginative, challenging storylines that give Buck more to do than just spout
anachronisms and one-liners. Some of these shows, in fact, do remind me of vintage Star
Trek; something I’m sure the creators would take as a compliment since that
what they modeled season two after. The concept of personality shifts in
characters we’ve now become familiar with is irresistible (gotta love the
oversensitive Wilma!) and the finale inside the engine room is a genuine
nail-biter (you sure couldn’t say that about many of the first season shows).
The source of all of this – a mystical Asian man searching for his successor –
is sort of part Kung Fu and part Willy Wonka. A wee bit hokey, but
overall it works.
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