Fusion Patrol

There’s an elephant in the room that can’t be ignored in this week’s episode. Television hasn’t always been the place for the most enlightened views on people, and if you don’t laugh at it, you have to cry.

This week we look at In Warm Blood.

Episode Synopsis

Spacecraft Pluto 5 is returning to the moon on automatic, but the crew are not responding to moon traffic control. The Star Cops’ David Thereaux investigates and discovers an intact spacecraft and a completely dead crew. They have mummified in the months since their death.

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Pluto 5 is owned by Japanese pharmaceutical giant, Hanimed, and they’ve run interference, preventing Spring from sending a boarding team until they send a corporate doctor to lead the investigation. Having been delayed for 48 hours, Spring is not happy about the situation when Doctor Shoun arrives, and even less happy when the Moonbase commander, Alexi, asks Spring to personally go check on a dear friend of his: a research scientist named Kristina Janssen, who hasn’t responded to routine communication for two days. Janssen is a biochemist working along on an orbiting space research platform.

Spring must send Kenzy in his place, along with David, to board Pluto 5. What they find is a very hot spacecraft, over 41º, and the crew all dead, as if they died instantly. At first, it seems as if one of them is missing, but his body is soon found, too. He was attempting to repair a busted thermostat. Dr. Shoun doesn’t know what killed them, she is just a general doctor, not a forensic pathologist. It’s possible there is an invisible pathogen about the ship, and they treat it with full quarantine procedures.

Aboard the space platform, Spring finds the platform to be unusually hot. He also finds Dr. Janssen’s corpse, sitting in her chair. She hasn’t been dead long, but she intentionally stopped checking in two days ago. Spring suspects suicide, but it is unclear how she died.

Devis does a background check on Janssen and they learn that Janssen won a Noble prize for her research with space medicine, but later was the subject of controversy when it was learned that her human clinical trials had been on unwitting participants. Janssen worked for Hanimed.

Shoun reports back to Hanimed’s CEO, Richard Ho, that she recommends that the ship be destroyed with all aboard as a precaution. Ho seems pleased with that result.

The autopsy on Janssen shows that all her blood clotted at once and Spring has a working theory. Janssen learned of the fate of Pluto 5, knew something about it, destroyed all the information on her computer system, cut off communications and committed suicide. Spring suspects that Hanimed was testing medicines on the crew of Pluto 5 without their knowledge and Janssen, wracked with guilt, used whatever killed the crew on herself. He suspects it is the iron supplements supplied to the crew by Hanimed.

He confronts Shoun, trying to get her to betray her company, which is like her father and mother to her. She refuses and accuses Spring of using people. She leaves the moon and returns to Tokyo. This accusation hits Spring hard. Does he exploit people? Box thinks so.

On Earth, Shoun questions Ho, She wants to know if there is a connection between Pluto 5 and Janssen. He warns her to back off and calls on her unswerving Japanese cultural loyalty to the company to keep her in line.

Spring sends Devis to Earth to snoop around Hanimed, but he is immediately captured due to extreme incompetence.

Soon after this, Dr. Shoun also infiltrates Ho’s office, with considerably more success. She is able to use his computer to find the connection. The crew of Pluto 5 was used as an unwitting test group. She calls Spring to tell him what she found out, but he’s mostly asleep, and she’s got an accent, and then she’s captured by security, cutting off the call.

Ho gives Shoun a dressing down. She is fired, barred from the company, her career is ruined and, he reminds her, Janssen knew the right way out of the situation. Shoun should follow suit.

Spring returns to the space platform where he is conducting tests on the mice that were left behind. It is here that Kenzy reaches him with word about Devis’ capture, and the demands of the Japanese government that Spring travel to Earth and personally apologize to Ho in a humiliating way.

And then the mice die.

Spring goes to Tokyo and surprises Ho at his club, in the steam room. Before introducing himself, he gives Ho some tea, then he confronts him with his suspicions. Ho admits nothing, but reminds Spring that he has no proof and Pluto 5 was destroyed. Spring lays out his suspicion. The drug was a failure because, if the temperature gets over 41º, the blood in the patient instantly clots. The Pluto 5’s thermostat broke, condemning the crew to death. Janssen committed suicide by administering the drug to herself and turning up the heat on the platform.

Spring plays bad cop and beats up Ho a bit. He also turns the thermostat up in the steam room, bringing the temperature dangerously close to 41º. He tells Ho he put the drug in his tea and when the temperature goes over 41º, he’ll die. Ho breaks down and admits what he did. Spring admits that he lied about putting the drug in his tea.

Back on the moon, the Star Cops learn Spring has recruited a new Star Cop: Dr. Anna Shoun.[/expand]

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In this episode of Fusion Patrol, we explore the unaired “Doomwatch” episode titled “Sex and Violence.” We examine the complex themes of moral legislation and societal permissiveness through the lens of a subcommittee investigating obscenity concerns. The narrative follows Dr. Quist as he wrestles with investigating social issues beyond scientific purview, particularly when his wife engages with the committee addressing censorship. As we analyze character dynamics and their motivations, we highlight how marginalized voices are often overlooked in ideological battles and discuss the manipulation of public outrage for political gain. We delve into the implications of freedom of expression in media, reflecting on censorship’s historical and contemporary relevance, while drawing parallels to current societal dilemmas surrounding moral discourse.

This case… is not what you think it is.

John and Eugene discuss “This Case to be Opened in a Million Years.”

Episode Synopsis

Spring gets a call from the Personnel department.  All space staff are periodically required to return to Earth for vacation.  He can either start his 7 day vacation on Earth – NOW – or he can be relieved of command and shipped back to Earth – NOW.  He reluctantly chooses the former and heads off, leaving David in command and with instructions to investigate the freighter crash.

The company is Italian, and the controller, Santanini, isn’t terribly helpful.  His company accepts nuclear waste from Earth, stockpiles it on the moon, then sends shipments of it into space for disposal.  He objects to the Star Cops inspecting the containers due to continued radiation leakage.  This suits David just fine as he seems particularly uninterested in being exposed to radiation.  Colin; however, thinks something is afoot.  Unfortunately, with David unwilling to push very hard, the moonbase commander won’t overrule the ban on health and safety grounds.

On the flight to Earth, Spring is saddened by the prospect of his first vacation since Lee was murdered, but he soon meets a nice Italian lady named Leena and they hit it off.  She convinces him to go to Italy, where she’ll meet him in a few days in the catacombs.

Rome is a bust, after two days of continual rain, Spring decides to cancel his appointment with Leena and go somewhere else on holiday.  But he can’t find her contact info, and when he inquires with Kenzy to check the personnel records of the lunar mining company that she said she worked for, Sunzec, there is no record of her.  Curious, he sticks around until the scheduled rendezvous.

On the moon, Santanini, the Italian controller of the Italian nuclear waste company makes contact with the controller of Sunzec, an Australian… of Italian descent.  Something nefarious is afoot and they meet clandestinely in the cafeteria.  Santanini must make good on his commitments and get the shipment moving.  Santanini asks for some exploded blasting charges.  Kenzy sees them, but does not overhear the conversation.

At the Catacombs, Leena doesn’t show, but the Italian engineer that was put off moonbase on drug charges is waiting for Spring and tries to murder him.  Spring kills him.

Later, Spring consults with the local police detective in charge, an Italian, but he doesn’t promise much in the way of assistance.  Spring plans to leave immediately and then discovers large amounts of money have been deposited into his account.  Returning to his room, he encounters someone planting drugs in his room.  When he tastes them to see what they are, he falls into a hallucinogenic stupor, during which the Italian police detective and an Italian photographer arrive and take Spring’s picture.  When he awakes the next morning, he returns to the moon early.

On the moon, Kenzy and Colin are still suspicious of both the Italians and Sunzec.  Spring returns and is given the blasting charges supposedly found at the sight of the accident.  It was sabotage, probably by the same engineer that tried to kill Spring.

Spring is charged with corruption and David put back in charge.  He declares the case closed, but Kenzy goes to Sunzec for a poke ‘round with Colin as backup.  She discovered that Sunzec has found Uranium 235 and is selling it illegally to lesser nations.  She’s captured, but Colin saves the day.

Spring use Box and discovers that the launch was planned to allow it to swing by an abandoned space station, perhaps to smuggle something off the moon. Despite being relieved of command, breaks into the supposedly radioactive waste and discovers it’s Uranium 235.  Santanini followed him and is about to kill him when David, overcoming his fear of radiation, saves the day.   The Italians have been beaten, for now.

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Families.  You can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without, ’em. Ammirite?

Kenneth and Eugene discuss Family Values.

Episode Synopsis:

Rudolfo monologs at the captive audience on the Trans-utopian, it is unclear if they are hearing a word he’s saying.  Time seems to weigh heavily upon them.  Dante shuts himself in his room and engages maximum privacy protocols.  There he hooks up to a neural device and enters a virtual world where his wife, Penny awaits.

Penny, it would seem, is an incomplete data simulation of Dante’s late wife.  This, too, is breaking down and will cease to function, but for now, it is their anniversary and Dante is feeling the loss.  Penny thinks she can feel their son, Travis, nearby.  “Please find him, Dante, so I can see him one last time before I die again.”

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Meanwhile, Percy, ignoring maximum privacy mode enters Dante’s room and seems him, seemingly unconscious, hooked up to the machine.  She leaves without alerting Dante to her presence.

They arrive at Mars and Rudolfo gives them something more useful than a monolog, he gives them an assignment.  Apprehend Etienne, a small time crook.

Etienne and his accomplice/lover Brad are running a computerized shell game, and cheating, of course.  Rumbled, just as Dante and Lucretia arrive, they flee for their lives out onto the terraformed desert of Mars, but to no avail, Dante and Lucretia catch them.

At the same time a Raider ship arrives, attacks and kills Brad.  Unable to communicate with the ship because of Mars’ turbulent terraformed atmosphere, they must flee – that is until Percy uses their Birdseye drone, specially modified with explosives, to destroy the Raider ship.  In the wreckage, Dante finds a wounded raider and his captive “son.”

Raiders are former Black Galaxy Marines that were used for secret biological testing.  Those that didn’t die became sterile and, apparently due to frustrated daddy issues, decided to become a force of privateers who steal children to raise as their own.

Dante immediately recognizes the 10ish year old child to be his son, Travis, who he last saw 10 years ago when he was a baby.  Never mind that it doesn’t make sense, dads just have a natural instinct about these things.  They take them all captive and continue to return to the city and their shuttle.  Unfortunately, more Raiders are on their trail.

Back on the Trans-utopian, having destroyed the Birdseye, Percy has nothing better to do that use this opportunity to break into Dante’s room and hook herself up to the Penny Arcade.  She comes face to face with her late Aunt, who compliments her, tells her she shouldn’t have come, and makes her forget everything she saw.  Caravaggio, aware of what has happened, uses fruit ripening gases to awaken Percy.

Back on Mars, they’ve got a problem.  The Raiders are coming, they don’t have weapons to fight them off, and, if they managed to get back to their six-seater shuttle, which easily flew four people in last week’s episode, they don’t have room to carry five people.

It is at this moment that Dante remembers he has a portable DNA paternity tester which takes only seconds to administer.  He tests the boy, but the device is broken… or is it?  He’ll definitely have to take the boy back to the ship, but they’ll never make it with the Raiders tracking them.

Etienne, disconsolate over the death of Brad, volunteers to stay behind with the injured Raider, waiting for the others to arrive, giving Dante, Lucretia and the boy time to get back to the shuttle.

When the Raiders arrive for them, Etienne actually has a weapon on him that both ruins the reception on my television, and also incapacitates – or possibly kills – all the Raiders, allowing him to escape.

Finally back at the Trans-utopian, DNA tests confirm what everybody except Dante already knew, the boy isn’t his.  They head out to return him to his real family, but before they get there, Dante and the boy share a bit of surrogate father/son time that Dante so desperately craves.

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It’s Freudians versus Technologists in this week’s episode of Doomwatch.  Simon and Eugene discuss.

Episode Synopsis

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She uses her “insiders track” to Quist to try to get him to look into it, but he insists that it doesn’t sound so bad and, anyway, it is absolutely not within Doomwatch’s remit.

Hetherington visits the Minister.  His treatment is 100% successful, but he’s facing a lot of kickback from old-school Freudian psychiatrists who are threatened by his new, no-therapy treatment.  There’s an appropriations meetings coming up next week and his technique could save immense amounts of money to the healthcare system.  We wouldn’t want anything to go wrong.

What could go wrong?

“Oh, did I mention, one of those old-school Freudians stopped by my facility and didn’t like what she saw.  It was Doctor Ann Tarrant.”

The Minister’s face is priceless.  Soon, he’s on the phone to Quist, just to let him know he’s thinking about him and, we wouldn’t want any setbacks in Dr. Hetherington’s work.

Now, Quist is interested.

Meanwhile, Dr. Tarrant is talking with Dr. McEwan.  She wants to evaluate his patient, Mr. Beavis, a violent sociopath “cured” by his technique.  Beavis has been fitted with radio receivers – when his brain starts to exhibit violent patterns, he is pacified by the computer.  Beavis is eager to talk with Dr. Tarrant – he is very proud of his cure.

Tarrant takes him for a walk on the grounds and pushes him about his background.  He doesn’t want to talk about it, but rather wants to talk about his treatment.  She continues to push and he gets violent.  Back in the control room, they watch as the computer pacifies him, unknown to them in the struggle he we disconnected from the receiver.  Dr. Tarrant falls and hits her head, and Beavis, panicked, runs to escape.

Later, Beavis rips the remaining equipment off and throws it away. Finds a small farmhouse and takes a woman and her children hostage at shotgun point.  He is beginning to confuse the woman with his wife, whom he murdered.  He is waiting for Dr. McEwan.

When McEwan arrives, Beavis releases the hostages in exchange for McEwan coming into the house with him.

While Quist, Tarrant and the police wait outside, they hear the sound of a shotgun.

McEwan comes out.  Beavis killed himself with a shotgun blast to the heart.  He also left a final will, leaving his brain to Dr. McEwan so that he can figure out why he went wrong.

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Crazy genius developing diabolical plans on a remote space facility.  Are we watching Blakes 7 again?

John and Eugene discuss Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits?

Episode Synopsis:

On Earth, Dilly Goodman contacts the Ronald Reagan space station, trying to reach her brother, Harvey, but they have not record that he ever existed, and even the module Z-13 that he assigned to never existed.

On the moon, Kenzy is not happy about the job duties she’s been assigned now that she’s back in the Star Cops.  Spring clearly doesn’t trust her or want her on the force and is trying to make it miserable enough for her to resign.  But she won’t.   

Spring is on his way to the Ronald Reagan to try to convince the Americans to allow him to replace Hubble, the American Star Cop that was caught on the fiddle in the previous episode.  Second in command, David, must meet with the next Moonbase Coordinator, a Russian, who is replacing the previous coordinator that left after being rumbled for a crime by Spring and the Star Cops two episodes ago.

On the Ronald Reagan, Spring meets with American Commander Griffin.  Griffin is a royal grade-A1 asshole as well as a comically stereotypical American.  He’s not happy that Hubble was forced to resign.  He doesn’t want “internationals” on his space station.  He doesn’t trust Europeans, and he even thinks Spring has played into the Russian’s hands by having the moonbase coordinator replaced.  He’s not going to cooperate, the State Department isn’t going to cooperate, and he’s going to make Spring’s stay as miserable as possible.

Dilly Goodman calls Star Cop HQ on the moon and talks to Kenzy.  She explains that her brother has not only gone missing, but that everyone tells her that he never even existed.  All this under the watchful eye of the new moonbase coordinator.  Kenzy leaves for the Ronald Reagan to investigate.

She’s met by a distinctly cold shoulder by Spring because, not only is she not doing her assigned job, she still hasn’t resigned, but she also didn’t do a very good job of preparing for the case before leaving.  She, and the others back on the moon, think there’s something fishy going on.  Someone is manipulating things, possibly the Russians.  There is literally no computer records of a Harvey Goodman existing anywhere.  Ever.

Realizing this is a massive attempt to erase the man, Spring decides they need to look into this further.  He lets Kenzy stay when it turns out there’s one person happy to see her on the Ronald Reagan – the American Commander, who like to show her fun ways to use his pool table.

Spring lets Kenzy endure a decade’s worth of #MeToo experiences while he breaks into the commanders office to study his computer files.

On Earth, David has gone to interview the sister.  Her house is vacant, and he is knocked out from behind by someone working for Griffin.

On the moon, the salvage operators file their claim and move the capsule, designated Z-13, into a moonbase hanger to open and salvage.

When Griffin discovers Spring was in his office, he realizes the game is up.  He offers Spring a deal – you forget Goodman and I’ll allow Star Cops on this base.  Kenzy saves the day by recording that attempt at quid pro quo and forces Griffin to tell them what’s happening.

It goes something like this:  Goodman was working, in an unauthorized capacity, on microbiology – something that is forbidden on the Ronald Reagan as too dangerous.  Goodman discovered (or engineered) a space bug that could survive the vacuum of space, but accidentally released it, and getting himself killed.  The Americans sealed up the capsule and dropped it towards the sun.  Believing that no one would ever believe it wasn’t a US backed bio-warfare project, they decided to cover it up, erasing Goodman from all records, because they knew he had no family.  So who is the so-called sister?  She has completely disappeared, but Griffin believes that she is a Russian provocateur trying to use the Star Cops into embarrassing the Americans.  Coincidentally, Hubble knew about this cover-up and had been blackmailing Griffin to keep silent.

With the Russian moonbase coordinator watching, the salvage people cut their way into the capsule.

Back on the moon, Spring receives a call from the “sister” and it turns out she’s not a Russian, she’s the press.  He cuts a deal with her and she uses the power of the press to strong-arm the American’s into allowing Star Cops on the Ronald Reagan.

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Percy nearly gets everyone killed.

Episode Synopsis:

Lucretia is helping Percy with her martial arts training.  Important stuff, since Percy has entered a competition on Mars, their next port of call.  One problem, Dante knew about neither the training nor the competition – of which neither he approves.  Family drama ensues, leading to Percy and Dante refusing to talk to each other like a pair of children.

But no time to resolve that, Rudolfo calls, he’s got an easy assignment for them: escort two dangerous prisoners, already in custody, from Mars to the new maximum security prison on Mercury.

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This new prison is only for the really, top-tier criminals.  Fully automated and located on the permanent sunnyside of the planet.  With no guards, there is no one to assist, bribe or take hostage in an escape attempt, and no way to survive outside for more than a few minutes if they did.

The police have no love lost with bounty hunters, and so they jerk Dante and Lucretia around.  When they arrive to pick up the two prisoners, there’s only one.  Much to their inconvenience, they must take the first prisoner back to the Trans-utopian, then leave him there while the two of them return to pick up the second one.

The first is a handsome young man, who is locked in a holding cell aboard the the Trans-utopian. As Dante and Lucretia leave to get the other, Dante warns Percy to stay completely away from this prisoner.  Don’t even talk to him.  He is highly dangerous.

No sooner than Dante and Lucretia leave, Percy is down at the cells having a heart-to-heart with the silver-tongued, murdering criminal.   When Caravaggio attempts to intervene for her safety, she hacks him into forgetting all about it so she can continue.

Back on the Mars station, the second prisoner escaped from the cops, and Dante and Lucretia must chase him down and capture him.  The whole process, of course, took a whole lot longer than anticipated and during their absence, the prisoner, Jeremy, really wins over Percy.

On the flight to Mercury, Percy continues her secret visits to Jeremy.  He uses her doubts about the incorruptibility of the criminal justice system to sow the seeds that he’s not really guilty of the things he’s been convicted of.  While he doesn’t even try to get her to let him free, he does convince her to give him her camera, which is capable of recording and projecting a three-dimensional image of a person, then program it to say and do things.  That way, he’ll have recording of her to remember her by in his long, lonely confinement on Mercury.

The orbit of Mercury will be tricky, Percy will need to change the orbit several times to keep the Trans-utopian in the penumbra or the planet, so she must stay aboard the ship and remain diligent.  Instead she sabotages the ship and play act out her leaving the ship and running away with a Jeremy using hologram projections.

In another foolproof security component of the prison, people must arrive on the dark side, then a special, fully-automated, high-temperature resistant shuttle picks them up and transports them to the prison.

On the way, our villains start to get cocky, because they know something our heroes don’t.  There’s an armed man up front, who shows himself.  Forced to surrender their guns, they are tossed out on the sunnyside to die, while the shuttle returns to the Trans-utopian.  To make matters worse, there wasn’t a guy, it was a hologram, and they make sure Dante knows it was Percy that made it all possible.

When the prisoners return to the ship, Jeremy tells Percy that Lucretia died in an accident and Dante is critically wounded and needs immediate medical attention.  Against Caravaggio’s warnings, she lets them in.  Jeremy immediately knocks her senseless – well, even more senseless than she’s been throughout the episode, but she’s able to come around enough to use the holograph projector to distract them, and escapes.  She starts to sabotage the ship even more.

Things are looking bad for Dante and Lucretia, until they aren’t.  The shuttle returns to pick them up.  They blow a hole in the Trans-utopian to get back onboard.  Finally Dante and Lucretia come face to face with the two criminals in a Mexican standoff.  Percy sneaks up behind the bad guys and surprises them enough that our heroes get the upper hand.

They are locked in the prison on Mercury.

Leaving Mercury, Percy apologizes, somewhat, to Lucretia, for, you know, doing things so stupid that she nearly got them all killed.  Then she has a conversation with Dante and he seemingly gives her the opportunity to leave the ship if she wants to.  She doesn’t and it’s all smiles and family time again.

The end.

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People are going crazy everywhere, and everyone knows everyone!  Can it be the leaded gas, or the constraints of 1970’s television?  Simon and Eugene discuss Waiting for a Knighthood.

Episode Synopsis:

A vicar is giving a sermon.  It’s a bizarre rambling assemblage of incoherent thoughts.  But it’s not just scripture, it’s other incoherent thoughts, and then the vicar collapses.  In the pews that day, Dr. Anne Tarrant.

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Weeks later, Dr. Quist is relaxing on a Sunday afternoon at Anne Tarrant’s cottage, the vicar’s wife shows up to update Anne on the vicar’s condition.  He had lead poisoning, of all things!  She takes a few jabs at Dr. Quist’s atheism and makes some commentary on declining church attendance.  Quist shocks her when he reveals he practically lives with Anne now.  Anne lets her off her shocked horse by letting her in on a secret.  Quist and Tarrant are married, but Tarrant has kept her maiden name.

Back at Doomwatch’s super-duper new high-tech headquarters, Quist puts Bradley on looking into how the Vicar got lead poisoning.

In the Minister’s office, his inside man in Doomwatch, Neil Stafford is playing politics.  He’s warning the minister that having two insiders in Doomwatch is counterproductive.

Bradley and Barbara’s investigation turns up that the vicar was always renovating cars – a passion of his – and not only did he strip the parts in high-octane leaded gas, but the ground near his garage is highly contaminated with lead from the exhaust fumes.

You know, John Ridge used to tinker with high performance cars, maybe he had lead poisoning, too?  Quist hopes to get Ridge out of the nuthatch, where he is being held after attempting to kill millions of people, so the team investigate the lead angle, while Anne evaluates his current mental state.

During the investigation, at Ridge’s rented mews, Bradly and Stafford meet Ridge’s landlady’s maid, who keeps an eye on the place.  She learns from them that Ridge is in a sanatorium.

Meanwhile, Richard Massingham, industry tycoon, is wining and dining his old friend the Minister.  He wants him to understand, fully, that the car industry is vulnerable.  If they want to make cheaper and better cars, and sell more cars, they need lead to remain in petrol.  Those over-zealous Europeans have started to ban leaded petrol and even the American’s have fallen for this hysteria – just because the air in Los Angeles is bad.

Later Massingham’s son is kidnapped.  Clues lead the police to a rich lady in the country – one of the stockholders in Massingham’s company.  Yes, she and her driver and his wife, her maid, saw the boy but they didn’t see anything suspicious happening.

Stafford visits Ridge on Quist’s orders to evaluate him and who should turn up at the same time to visit Ridge?  The rich woman’s driver – or I should say, Ridge’s landlord’s driver – or more specifically, Ridge’s landlord’s maid’s husband.  She – the maid – is the kidnapper and he’s gone to Ridge for help.  Ridge, still incarcerated gives the info to Stafford.

It seems the maid’s son died of lead poisoning, which she now believes is auto-industry’s fault, so she has kidnapped Massingham’s son, who is about the same age.  What are her intentions?  Revenge killing? A mentally-unstable plot to replace her son with another child.  It’s never really clear.  Could she be suffering from lead poisoning, too?  Doomwatch look into that angle.

Massingham wants the minister to publish something in all the papers saying lead in petrol is safe so the woman will release the boy, but the minister, while a political animal, does seem to understand that lead really is bad and demures at the idea.  He does reveal that Doomwatch’s investigation into the kidnapping reveal that the maid’s son probably died of lead poisoning from chewing on his collection of old-time lead toy soldiers.  They will be publishing that in the papers, perhaps it will help.

Back at Doomwatch and, as an aside, Stafford points out the other mole in Doomwatch to Bradley and suggests he fire him.  Ridge is also released from the sanatorium and Stafford gives him a ride home.  When Ridge gets there, he discovers the maid has been using his flat to keep the boy prisoner, so all’s well that ends well.

Also, industry makes a pre-emptive marketing strike and announce a 25% reduction in lead in their products.  Quist points out to Anne, a 25% decrease still leaves a massive amount of lead being released into the atmosphere.

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Episode Synopsis:

On Earth, there’s trouble at the mill as a computer system goes haywire blowing up a chemical plant, but it’s not a total loss, it gives the BBC stunt team a chance to shine in the chaos.

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On the Moon, Spring and David are preparing for a trip to Outpost 9, a remote location, even on the moon.  As they prepare, they discuss the pending dismissal of two Star Cops, Hubble and Kenzy.  Spring has determined that they are bent cops, David doesn’t think he has enough evidence.

Security at Outpost 9 is tight, and the visit seems almost pointless. Dr. Chandri, head of the outpost cannot tell them about the research they do, but he’s picked up some potentially troubling news through his research.  An organization of anarchists are planning on blowing up a space shuttle.  He knows nothing save that they are called the Black Hand Group or BHG for short.  Spring has more than a usual copper’s knowledge of computers and works out that Outpost 9 must be working on an Intelligent Listening System – a computer system that taps into a vast amount of broadcast information, and uses algorithms to sift through it and pick up information of use to the intelligence community.

All this information could have been imparted over the com link, and Spring is certain Chandri wants to tell him more, but he gets nothing more.

On Earth, they’re having problems in the Chunnel.  The computers have diverted two oncoming trains onto the same track causing the trains to collide at high speed, killing hundreds.  Like the chemical plant disaster, strange poetry appears on the computer screens before the disaster happens.

Kenzy, one of the bent cops, unaware that she’s about to be fired, arrives on the moon to meet Spring for the first time.  She’s come with a great idea.  An Australian company makes these new weapons, just made for space warfare.  Just exactly the sort of the things Star Cops could use.  Spring isn’t interested.  He plays back a video of a detained perp giving her a bribe and now she’s fired. But she’s an Australian and she’s not going to take this lying down.  At this point, she meets Colin Devis, the newest Star Cop – he was pretending to be the perp that bribed her.

David is not happy, Devis also attempted to bribe him, although he passed the “test” with flying colors.  He has words with Spring; however, Spring pre-empts his outrage with a promotion to second-in-command of the Star Cops.  David gives Devis his first assignment, go to Earth and negotiate a contract to purchase the weapons Kenzy showed them bypassing her and any possible profit she’d get from the deal.

Box has turned up very little information about the BHG, so he returns to talk to Chandri, alone.  When he arrives, the pieces start to fall into place.  Chandri has “discovered” the computer worm and how it infects the computers.  It’s installed in a small piece of circuitry at the manufacturing plant and lays dormant until triggered by an activation code – a line of poetry, “O rose thou art sick.”  The computers affected were made at the Chandri family business.  In fact, he developed it himself and has used it, killing the other members of the Outpost 9 staff.  His Intelligent Listening System that he’s been developing for some government is a failure, which Spring suspected because of the poor quality information provided about the BHG.  Now, rather than be found to be a failure, Chandri will destroy Moonbase 9, and all the evidence, along with Spring.  Spring overpowers Chandri and kills him with one of the new space weapons – which, incidentally, Chandri also developed.  With the base set to self-destruct, can Spring escape in time?

Back on Earth, Devis is returning from his mission to purchase weapons.  Coincidentally, he gets a flight with Kenzy, who is returning to space because she loves it out there.  Any friends that she thought she had in high places got pulled out from under her by Spring’s cagey purchase of high-tech weapons.  Miracle of miracles, the information from Chandri wasn’t a complete waste of time, this just happens to be the shuttle that the BHG plan to hijack and destroy.  Devis and Kenzy take on the hijackers and, in a find piece of fielding on the boundary, Kenzy uses her Australian super cricket powers to catch a glass globe contains a deadly pathogen.

With Devis and Kenzy the heroes of the day, Kenzy uses her time on the news to brag up how brilliant Spring was for planting them on the shuttle flight to prevent the disaster.  Cornered, Spring (oh, who did escape from Outpost 9) must reinstate her.

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