Woohoo!  The crew of the USS Something has reached Tau Gamma Prime!  It is “an unspoiled planet with no signs of intelligent life,” a condition which will not change after their landing.

Xeno-biologist Teresa Janowitz explains the plants look similar to earth’s “because they’re based on photosynthesis.  You get the same amount of sunlight on the same-sized planet, survival of the fittest will give you the same types of trees.”  See paragraph one.

They land the ship on the planet which, like every planet in SF, has 2 moons. ^[1] It is full of resources that will make the team rich.  “The earth is almost out of resources.  No one’s found a new titanium deposit in years.  Petroleum’s just a memory” and Al Gore is still saying we have just 10 more years until it’s too late.

Perimeter weapon in action.

They’re enjoying a nice day in the woods until Corporal Judith Mason gets hauled up in a spring trap and killed.  This isn’t good news for the crew as they have lost a friend,  it leaves them short-handed, it is evidence of an aggressive native population, and it leaves one woman alone on the planet with four dudes four dudes on a planet with one woman.

That night, they are attacked again and another crew-member is killed. They high-tail it back to the ship. Once safely inside, they “activate perimeter weapons” which mostly just seem to fire 45 degrees straight down into the ground.

The next day they suit up in armor and arm themselves.  They need to clear out the locals so they can survey the planet and collect their commissions.  They follow a trail of snot blood until it leads them to some bleepin’ dead aliens.  They kill off some other aliens later and recover a mysterious object.  It really feels like they were padding out the story.

In fact, yada yada to the rest of it.  It was a fine episode, but not worth recapping every beat.  The object turned out to be a beacon.  The aliens they killed were basically children on a camping trip.  The aliens tap into the ship’s computers and locate earth.  Like the aliens in Trial by Fire, they decide the appropriate response to a few inadvertent deaths is to destroy the earth.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Would also have accepted two suns.
• Title Analysis: Seems pretty random.
• Director Ken Girotti has had a huge career, so who am I to criticize?  OK, he did seem to be way too in love with close-ups in this episode.  Luckily, Melissa Gilbert made this very tolerable.