I welcome you expressing a different take, even if it might sound like I’m arguing.

It’s easy to sound, intentionally or otherwise, when expressing an opinion, like, “This is the only valid position someone could take.”

I may sound like it, but I genuinely don’t believe it. Different people like different things and have different life experiences, preferences, and biases. They genuinely see things and process things differently. When it comes to opinions, all are valid.

(Caveat: That does not hold for opinions on objective facts. I allow no quarter for people who think their opinion is as valid as fact. Just say “no” to false equivalency.)

With regards to Hawke’s claustrophobia, as stated, I never read any of that into the helmet scene. It could do, I grant you, but even if it wasn’t foreshadowed, neither were Wang’s or Dambhousse’s phobias. It’s not a dealbreaker. Lots of people have phobias they don’t foreshadow until confronted with them.

To me, the problem squarely rests with the idea of the weapon. This could be a highly effective weapon to incapacitate enemy troops. Paralyze them with fear, scare them till their insensate, cause them to make mistakes, induce them to desert the battlefield – These are all great outcomes for a deployed weapon. That they turn to killing one another just doesn’t make much sense to me (in most cases.) Aside from the physical effects, it doesn’t tell us much about the characters, either. if you don’t believe that the characters’ fears of cockroaches, blood, and claustrophobia could lead to a Mexican standoff, then the characters cannot ring true to the audience.

…and the direction was really poor. 😉

As a comment here already mentioned but I also like how Hawkes relationship with his helmet is given a further layer here because now we can look back to the second episode and read it as him trying to deal with this fear but that doesn’t remove the original reasoning he gave for cutting into his helmet. The writer for this episode was not Wong or Morgan but Marilyn Osborn who was the story editor on the series! I bring this up because I think that this episode approaches the characters from a sense of an overview rather than something deeper, for the faults you may have with Wong and Morgan’s scripts it has been noted that their episodes bring something out in the characters while this one comes across as someone who only knows them in a bare bones function.

Just wanted to say that although we have different takes and views on Space: Above and Beyond, I still like listening to the podcast and am glad that other people out there are discussing the series. We went over the series for our podcast and had a blast with the show and so I hope you don’t mind us dropping in and offering up some different views into the conversation.

Yeah, but both statements can be true and I like that they didn’t need to over do it and let the viewer pick up on that previous action to what he is doing here! He cuts his helmet because they don’t cater to Tanks but also he wants more space free to him up and heck even later episodes touch on how much the helmets bother him because of how boxed in they make him feel.

Seems to me that Hawkes was cutting into his helmet to make room for his neck nipple, which was, I thought, a good way to show that tanks were second-class – in much the same way (and still is to a lesser degree) it used to be very difficult to find things, like scissors, designed for left-handed people.

Helmets simply weren’t designed to accommodate tanks.

If you love stories where writers don’t know where the story is headed, Neo Ultra Q will not disappoint from week to week.

Try not to think of Mr, Brethren as Garamonesque, think of him as Pigmonesque. Pigmon is a completely different creature.

https://ultra.fandom.com/wiki/Pigmon

+ I liked the casting. The new crew seemed like actual real-world people, while in hindsight, the 1960s cast seem straight from Japanese central casting. The way the cast was used, however, was head-scratchingly flat.

+ 2000s Japanese kids are a lot fatter than 1960s Japanese kids.

+ I am bitterly disappointed that the Professor Icinotani stand-in does not have outrageous facial hair. Can we really call this Ultra Q?

+ In Laundry Day, in the cleaning the bathhouse scene, did the old men (mostly) get reverted to kids? Is Mr Brethren a Fountain of Youth? Does he not clean clothes but send them back in time to their original condition? Is the World white at the end because we’ve been sent back to the last ice age?

+ I was sure that Mr Brethren was going to resurrect Mrs Shiro. That story arc didn’t seem to wind up where it needed to be.

+ How can they have a Garamonesque monster which isn’t Garamon?!? My massive confusion was quickly followed by acid-etched disappointment at the lack of hopping.

I’ll save a lot of my comments for the upcoming episodes, but, as someone with no prior knowledge of Bugs before I watched the first episode, this sharp left turn in Series 3 really feels like they’ve lost the plot to me.

Under their guise as independent security/tech experts, they could be called in wherever someone was willing to pay them to do a job, but working for a government agency with a specific remit feels like a restriction on what they can become involved with, except…

I think maybe we’ve all been misreading/mispronouncing the “Bureau of Weapons Technology”, it’s really always been the “Bureau of Weapons ‘n Technology”

“Oh, my god, someone has kidnapped the daughter of a wealthy minister. Who shall we assign this to? The police? MI5?”

“No. Wait! They sent the ransom via fax machine. That’s technology! Better put Beckett’s people on it right away!”

Yeah. That’s how it seems.

Also, the inter-office romance has all the charm of fingers scratching a chalk board.

+ Every one of the unbelievable, clunky, forced romantic subplots are maximum cringe. What were the producers thinking? None of this works.

+ Did I miss why the Bureau of Weapons was brought in on this heist caper? Are the BoW now going to do Scooby Doo investigations of any passing mystery?

+ Nicholas Clay could at least look as though he’s aged a day since filming Excalibur.

+ Where do counterfeiters and patent clerks get their Uzi’s from? Is this why the BoW were involved?

+ For once, they have a story which requires lots of lasers, and they go and use CGI for all the lasers?!?