Fully Fueled and Armed Reconstructions?

[The Unknown Angel]

This has been bothering me for a bit ever since I saw "Seek and Destroy".

In that episode, three Angel Interceptors were recreated to destoy Destiny Angel. The reconstructions, despite the originals having been in shipment, were fully armed and fueled.

Considering that shipping the fighters fully armed and fueled via land transport is not a viable option, there's two possible conclusions.

1. The Mysterons are somehow able to bring mutiple recreated objects together that are considerably far from each other to a single point. (Destorying the armaments and possibly the fuel in other locations.)
2. They can store scans to be used as a future date with other matter. (Using the matter in the burnt crates and warehouse to create the armaments and fuel.)

Have any of those ablitlies been aluded to before?

[Skybase Girl]

This is an interesting conundrum, not sure if it’s ever been discussed before. It would certainly seem unlikely that unfinished aircraft would be armed and fuelled before they’d reached their ultimate destination, especially bearing in mind the fuel they use is specialist and shipped directly to CloudBase. Various sources suggest that the shooting script for this episode commented that the loading up of the crates to be transported was rather like “Thunderbird 2 picking up one of the pods.” That’s a bit odd because in Thunderbirds the pod cargo was ready to be deployed immediately it reached its destination, which clearly was not the case with the interceptors. It also confirms the character Fairfield’s explanation to the fire chief that the destroyed aircraft had not been finished.

So that raises another point. Canon says the Mysterons can create an exact likeness of an object or person. But first they must destroy. In the main, this happens in most episodes, but not all. In “Seek and Destroy”, they have “recreated” aircraft which were not finished at the point of destruction, yet ARE now finished and in a different place to where they’d been when the warehouse was blown up. In addition, the retrometabolism (if you take it that’s what the rings are doing), seems to occur quite a while after the destruction. This may only mean that it takes longer for The Mysterons to reconstruct if ‘improvements’ have to be made. It does make it an unusual episode, though. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another one like this, although I could well be wrong.

This may well come under the banner commonly used to justify most plot bloopers: The Mysterons Have Powers We Cannot Hope to Understand! In this case, I think that includes sloppy script writing! This particular episode wasn’t one of the best in my opinion. Plot devices had clearly been overused in a rather unsubtle manner. But, as we’ve said before, probably no one expected that people would be attempting to rationalise the impossible in a kids show that is now nearly 54 years old!

Maybe someone with a more scientific mind might be able to come up with a plausible explanation for the fuel and armaments question.

[Marion]

There are a few humdingers in the plot lines - Treble Cross, for instance. The Mysterons are not supposed to realise they've got the wrong Major Gravener... you reckon?
And don't get me started on 'The Heart of New York'!
Still, if it fits the plot, it must be right

[Carrie]

Sorry, I can't help you with a rational explanation for your question, Parker, it's just one of many contradictions and unexplained moments in the series!

My favourite bangs-head-on-desk episode for plot holes galore has got to be Model Spy. The whole point of the Mysteron threat is to assassinate Andre Verdain, and once they have him in their clutches, Black and Helga just throw him out of the car before doing a disappearing act!
I would have liked to have been a fly on the Mysteron wall when Black and Helga tried to explain that one to their Martian Masters. Oh, oh, plot bunny...anyone biting? Clya Brown might do that one justice...

[chrisbishop]

Not to fill a plot hole, but maybe if it had played differently?

"Spectrum is after us," said Captain Black. "Quick, throw Verdain out of the car."

"Aren't we supposed to, say, kill him?" Helga asked, perplexed.

"Idiot. Look to the right. The read's following a high cliff by the ocean. If you throw him out on that side, he'll go crash on the rocks 50 feet bellow."

"Oh, right..."

THE END



MY favourite bangs-head-on-desk: Inferno. Come on. Firing on an old temple, so to stop a signal from attracting a rogue satellite headint right to it?

Say, Scarlet, why not firing on the said satellite instead?!

Nevertheless... I do LOVE the series!

[Clya Brown]

Speaking for myself, I never had a problem with Captain Black and Helga throwing André Verdain out of the car: it always seemed obvious to me that Black had accepted that the game was up, but wasn't able to dematerialise the car with Verdain still aboard. With a French police car blocking the road in front and an SPV only a few seconds behind them, there wouldn't have been time to kill him - so they had to throw him out first. I'm guessing that the car in which they were travelling was also a reconstruction, which would mean that everything could be teleported away in one go, by whatever weird and wonderful means the Mysterons employ to pull stunts like that.

Having said that, it does raise the question of whether Captain Black is himself a reconstruction... because in the first episode, he isn't actually killed in the conventional sense, but seems to be mysteriously transformed into what amounts to a living corpse while still sitting in the MEV. If so, it might be inferred that Black would be as much of an obstacle to the teleportation as Verdain himself - but then, I always felt that the vanishing trick was something that Black had personally initiated, as opposed to being a call for help from his masters on Mars to get him out of a tight spot. If it's a power the Mysterons have given him, presumably he'd be able to apply it to Mysteronised objects and/or persons, but not to other humans.

What did bother me was that the Mysterons apparently changed their minds after they announced that they intended to kill Verdain - because when they're driving away from the casino, Black talks about getting him "to the island". Er... why? They obviously did originally intend to kill him - Gabrielle's sabotaging of the boat's engine in Monte Carlo harbour makes that clear enough - so why the change of heart? And doesn't the thing about having an island to take Verdain to suggest that there was an element of pre-planning in all of this?

The Verdain incident isn't the first time the Mysterons have changed their plans in mid-stream: in the very first episode, after having announced that they intend to kill the World President - and having already made one determined attempt to do so - we see Captain Black telepathically reminding the Mysteronised Scarlet that they want the World President alive. So what happened to make them change their minds?

Getting back to the original question of how the Mysterons managed to fuel and arm a set of reconstructed planes, how about this for an explanation: We see Mr Fairfield with the fire engines inspecting the gutted warehouse… but we don’t know how much time has elapsed since the fire. The driver was killed at the scene, and there's obviously been enough time for the fire crews both to be sent for (presumably by some passer-by who has seen the blaze) and to extinguish the fire, so Fairfield might well not have learned about the destruction for several hours. Suppose the Mysterons didn’t reconstruct the planes in mid-air, but on the ground instead, along with the trailers onto which they'd been loaded. Suppose Captain Black uses the transporter to take the reconstructed trailers, with the reconstructed planes still on them, off to a facility somewhere, where they are fuelled and armed… whereupon they take off to undertake their mission, coincidentally overflying the location where they were destroyed. Will it do?

[hazel]

Getting back to the original question of how the Mysterons managed to fuel and arm a set of reconstructed planes, how about this for an explanation: We see Mr Fairfield with the fire engines inspecting the gutted warehouse… but we don’t know how much time has elapsed since the fire. The driver was killed at the scene, and there's obviously been enough time for the fire crews both to be sent for (presumably by some passer-by who has seen the blaze) and to extinguish the fire, so Fairfield might well not have learned about the destruction for several hours. Suppose the Mysterons didn’t reconstruct the planes in mid-air, but on the ground instead, along with the trailers onto which they'd been loaded. Suppose Captain Black uses the transporter to take the reconstructed trailers, with the reconstructed planes still on them, off to a facility somewhere, where they are fuelled and armed… whereupon they take off to undertake their mission, coincidentally overflying the location where they were destroyed. Will it do?

Sounds reasonable to me! Well thought out!

[chrisbishop]

Neat! Indeed a plot bunny for a missing scene!

[The Unknown Angel]

What an excellent explanation, and some great plot fuel. And yes, I will probably write about it because despite the plot hole, "Seek and Destroy" is one of my favorite episodes.

Thank you.