Instead the rest of it is taken up by a dreadful "battle of the sexes" storyline. Written by Ben Steed. Oh dear. As with the excesses of "Harvest on Kairos" you feel as if the production team are playing against the script. The male tribe, the Hommiks, are shown to be a thick bunch of barbarians but it's pretty clear the intended villain is Seska leader Pella and her desire for independence, compared to former Seska Nina, who has chosen to 'be a woman', i.e. marry loutish Hommik chief Gunn-Sar and give up, basically. Ouch. Add in Avon's rant about the biological superiority of the male and it's a cringe-fest from top to bottom and a huge comedown for a series which (like a lot of Terry Nation's work) has a respectable track record for the time in terms of progressive roles for female characters.
The whole savage males versus savvy females plot is terrible and it's never really explained why some bright spark decided to restart the Xenon society after the civilisation crumbled by divvying everyone up by gender anyway, or really how the Seska develop telekinesis, which they seem to have mainly to solve the conundrum of how to access the launch silo. It's a real mess and just seems to be Steed making crude gender observations. Unlike his previous scripts these aren't rogue characters or outdated lines, this is the actual plot.
The performances are terrible, almost universally. The regulars are all severely rusty while Paul Darrow's minimalist style has developed into simple bad delivery; he sounds like he's mumbling his way through a rehearsal. Michael Keating has a game go at bringing the leaden comedy lines he's given to life but it's beyond hope while Tarrant does basically nothing of note. Dayna meanwhile does get to fight Gunn-Sar but botches most of her dialogue; her challenge to Gunn-Sar is crying out for someone to go "actually, 12 of the challengers have been women" like in that pee-wee football episode of The Simpsons. The guest cast are even worse; Gunn-Sar is initially amusing (his quibbling with Cato over the number of challengers he's killed is probably the only good thing in the episode) but is simply far too broad. He's not even over the top, just playing the role for laughs - it's a laughable part, yes, but this just makes the whole thing seem juvenile.
Once again that Josette Simon isn't a particularly natural martial artist is thrown up but it's unfair to single her out; both of the challenge fights and all the other scuffles are slow, again looking like rehearsals where the moves are being worked out. The challenges consist of Gunn-Sar and Avon/Dayna circling slowly around a gravel pit surrounded by bored extras yelling "Go on Gunn-Sar" whenever the director glared at them. The timing throughout is terrible and everything's slow, padded and ridiculously telegraphed - Kate taking half an hour to throw herself in front of Pella's gun and then waiting another week to be accidentally shot is another prime offender.
Soolin meanwhile is mentioned a couple of times but doesn't show up until the coda. Considering her debut has her as a simple moll with less characterisation than, say, Tyce and her second features her showing up with about a minute to go the character is already two episodes behind everyone else; for much of the first half of the season she'll be dealing with hurriedly rewritten lines intended for Cally or Dayna and it's little wonder the character made so little impression on basically anyone. The production team seem to have held both her and Slave back for an episode to make it less obvious they're like-for-like replacements for Cally and Zen but it's still leaden so they might have been better off just embracing it and getting on with an adventure.
Her basic character is that she can fire a gun and is a bit feisty, which will cause huge problems as it entirely overlaps with Dayna, who will from hereon in develop a random personality to fit whatever the plot needs. You have to ask if it would have been so difficult to integrate Soolin into the plot; she could have known a way to open the hatch or something but fled and got entangled with the primitive tribe or something, surely? It couldn't have been worse than her actual scene, where she all but pleads with Vila to join up then fires off an independent-sounding non-sequitur. You sell your skill? Do you think the crew are on a salary or something? Avon then just gives a weird look to camera that means nothing beyond someone deciding Avon looking oddly at camera was how a lot of Season 4 episodes were going to end. If I was watching this in 1981 with no idea the series was going to get better I'm not sure I'd bother turning it on again next week.
Not only is it dumb and sexist but it's incredibly boring and strangely redundant - the only problems with the crew taking over Scorpio and recruiting Soolin are the ACME drawing pins thrown under the tyres by this episode. If it had started with them flying around on Scorpio with Soolin as part of the crew it would have been a logical-enough follow-on from "Rescue", where they defeat Scorpio's owner with Soolin almost another of his victims. So despite being the episode where the crew get their new ship and team-mate this one really is a waste of time. While it's marginally less nonsensical than "Dawn of the Gods" it's also more unpleasant, which makes this one the worst episode of the whole series.
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