Watching Percy die is cathartic.  Seeing her resurrected, disheartening.  Kenneth and Eugene discuss the up again down again episode A Twist in Time.

Trailer: On the next cruel, cruel episode of Starhunter Redux, entitled A Twist in Time, my dreams are granted then brutally, callously, and painfully crushed repeatedly as Percy dies (yay) and is resurrected (boo) TWICE!

Episode Synopsis

Dante and the Gang are transporting a really, really heinous criminal back somewhere.  He’s so heinous the writers couldn’t even think of something horrible enough to tell us what it was, but it is HEINOUS!  And Percy is really interested in it… well, THAT’S not going to go smoothly, is it?

On the way; however, they are diverted to Triton and a secret research facility that has suffered an emergency in their graviton research.  Caravaggio helpfully explains that gravitons are thought to hold the secret of bubble universes and time travel.  The Trans-Utopian is responding because no one is closer Rudolfo thinks there’ll be big money in rescuing a bunch of well-heeled scientists or their secret papers.

The base on Triton is actually blowing dimensional bubbles like a child’s bubble gun and one of them strikes the Trans-Utopian, causing one of the reactors to explode and the other to go offline.

Percy, who we established just a couple episode ago, is the ship’s official engineer, wants the check and repair the damage, but Dante, the farmer come bounty hunter, forbids her from trying, opting to go himself instead.  This goes about as well as any order he’s ever given Percy, and she runs off to check the reactor anyway.

Lucretia is sent to escort the prisoner to the escape shuttle as it looks like it’s curtains for the Trans-Utopian as it plummets towards Triton.

Percy is injured in a secondary explosion, and cut off by a radiation leak, and bulkheads that are sealed because of pressure leaks.  As Caravaggio tries to guide her to temporary safety awaiting Dante’s rescue, she falls and injures herself further.  She crawls along the floor and with nary a whimper but with a great shout of jubilation from the audience, she dies.

Meanwhile, the prisoner helps waste Lucretia’s time.

Dante – ok, be fair, it’s really Caravaggio – gets the other reactor back online and they escape Triton.  As Dante rushes to try to don his radiation suit and save Percy, unaware that she is dead, dead, dead (bwahahahaha) Caravaggio seals the airtight compartment, ending any chance at rescue.  Dante runs off hoping to try something else, but he falls through a bubble fracture in space time and ends up on the bridge just moments after the first explosion and after Percy has already to inspect the reactor.

Being a lot sharper on the uptake than he usually is, Dante realizes that he can hurry up and save the ship and Percy.

He fails.  He cannot hurry up enough, and Percy dies – and the audience goes wild again!

Meanwhile, the prisoner helps waste Lucretia’s time.

Dante tries again.  This time he tries to retrieve Percy first.  

Meanwhile, the prisoner helps waste Lucretia’s time.

Dante succeeds in saving Percy, but Lucretia, having stowed the prisoner in the shuttle, steps in and assists, sans radiation suit, and dies.  The audience is not happy with that unfair trade-off.

Dante tries one more time.  

Remember what I said earlier about Dante being swifter on the uptake than usual?  Here’s where I take that all back.  It’s only on this, his fourth attempt, that he bother’s to call Lucretia to help him, despite the fact that, after the first attempt, he already knew the other reactor was going to come back online and they’d be safe – there was never any need for her to transport the prisoner to the shuttle.  And no need for the audience to have to watch the prisoner waste Lucretia’s time over and over.

Now, marshaling his personnel and working as a team, he sends Lucretia to save Percy and he attends to the trivial piece he needs to do to help Caravaggio complete the engine restart and everyone is saved.  

(Perhaps this a metaphor of what’s wrong with this show?  Or could this be Dante’s Groundhog Day?)

There’s an unusually long eating scene afterwards where they try to explain how weird what just happened was and then… Dante is back on the bridge.  It seems time and space aren’t unbroken yet.

The End – but you know it isn’t