This week it’s two more episodes of Ultra Q, as John and Eugene look at the torturously-named (in English) The Underground Super Express Goes West, and the less-torturously-named, Balloonga.

The Underground Super Express Goes West Synopsis

At a rather futuristic-looking Tokyo station, our cast of characters assemble.  Yuri is there for the inaugural run of the Super-Express to the West, a 450 KM/hr express train from Tokyo to Kitakyushu.  Jun and Ippei are there on other business.  Jun is picking up a case carrying the world’s first artificial lifeform, dubbed M1.  

Transporting the world’s first artificial lifeform.  What could possible go wrong?

A lifeform that, if let out of it’s compressed cylinder, would grow into something… unknown, with the intelligence of a human.

What could possibly go wrong

Ippei, while there for Jun’s business, is more interested in how to get onboard the super-express.

He takes a camera case and pretends to be a photographer working with Yuri.

Unfortunately, he grabbed the case with M1 – THAT’S what could go wrong!

Also, a scrappy little shoe-shine boy, named Weasel, and a friend sneak onboard the train pretending to be a full-sized human.

The train departs.

Luckily Jun discovers the swap and notifies the train, which confiscates the case and puts it in their specially-designed safe, but not before some reporters use flash photography on it.  Which apparently activates it, for soon, M1. Has come to life and taken its form, a giant gorilla like thing, which monkeys around with the train.

The passengers are rescued when the train staff decouple the cars, but the engine, M1 and Weasel hurtle towards the end of the track at 600kph.  When they crash, both are hurtled into Earth’s orbit.

Balloonga Synopsis

Spacecraft Saturn 1 returns to Earth with it’s sole astronaut onboard, but at the critical re-entry stage, it encounters a strange balloon in space and runs out of fuel.  The ship crashes to Earth.

Later Jun and Yuri, returning from an assignment, detour over the crash sight, where the spy an old man with a red balloon, just before they run out of gas and just manage to glide back to base.  Ippei, inspecting the plane finds a small balloon lodged in the radiator.

They take it into Tokyo for scientists to look over, but on the way, the car runs out of gas, and the balloon grows, floating the car off and then finally busting the car from the inside.  The falling parts hit Ippei and critically would him as he tries to protect Yuri.

Balloonga, as it is soon named, sucks the power out of everything, and Tokyo must go powerless, leaving Ippei, in desperate need to surgery in a bad way,

Jun learns of a man who, professor naramaru claimed, 20 years ago to have found a Balloonga and killed it.  Yuri sets out to find him, and actually just bumps into him on the street.

A typhoon is coming and balllonga sucks all the power out of the typhoon.  But Nagamaru had a plane, and has sent Jun to get it executed, which he does – detonating a nuke in Earth’s orbit.  Balloonga takes to the skies to eat the artificial sun, and then proceed off into space to eat our sun.  Problem solved.

Nagamaru reveals he was also the father of the astronaut who was killed.

Convenient.