So help me, Truman Bradley actually got me excited at the beginning of this episode.  No, it wasn’t the way he is poured into that suit.  He described “a man-made moon, circling the earth.”  Wow, is this episode set in the distant future?  Cool!  Is it like a Deathstar?  Wow!  Or is he saying our regular ol’ moon is actually man-made (SFT has a precedent of calling alien technology “man-made”)?  Intriguing!  Sadly, none of the above.  SIGH . . . he is just referring to a weather satellite.

He continues on to introduce us to Dr. Milhurst, who lives “several miles from a southwestern city.”  Thanks for narrowing it down to the entire southwest and several miles into the northwest, southeast and sliver of the northeast.  Way to paint a picture.  Are you afraid I’m going to drop by?  Here, Milhurst works “ceaselessly delving into the mysteries of the universe.”

He has invited three other imminent scientists to his lab.  In a first for SFT, he does not have a hot daughter living with him, and none of the other scientists sent his daughter as a surrogate.  He confesses that the recent breakthroughs he made in satellites and orbital mechanics were not his own work.  They came from someone else.  “I don’t know his name.  I don’t even know where he lives, or what country he’s from.”  But he does know he is a “he”.

One place he might have suspected is in Spain because this plot is suspiciously similar to SFT’s Postcard from Barcelona which just aired 7 months ago.

“Some months ago I was doing experiments in the extremely high bands of the electro-magnetic spectrum.”  He made a broadcast in that band, expecting no one to hear it.  He immediately got a response in a clear english-speaking voice.  The voice did not tell him much, but instructed him to tune back in the next night at the same time; also to buy Lucky Strikes.  Eventually, hoping to make earth more peaceful, the voice gave Milhurst the orbital equations.

The other three scientists come back for the next transmission hoping to glom some info to make them famous like Milhurst.  They transmit questions about Chemistry, Atomic Energy, Computer Technology, and how to talk to girls.  An hour later, the voice returns with answers to technical issues they had been researching for years.

The next night, the boyz are a little more altruistic.  They are concerned about ICBMs destroying America before they get a chance to cash in.  They ask if it is possible to build a device that would alert us to incoming missiles.  Or, better yet, destroy the missiles before they landed.  Some sort of Initiative for Strategic Defense!  Maybe call it ISD!

The voice gives them the data to build such a system.  As they watch a radar screen, they are able to identify satellites.  One of the blips is not a satellite, though.  They watch it moving across the screen.  As it moves vertically up the screen, one of them says, “It has an upward trajectory.”  Er, on a 2-D global map, wouldn’t that indicate it is moving north?  He is not the dumbest in the group, though.  As the blip approaches Montana, Milhurst says, “It is over south-central New Mexico.”

The tests go perfectly.  Milhurst even discovers an undocumented feature of the voice’s invention.  Although if WordPress, Microsoft, or Adobe have any say in it, they will add needless steps or eliminate the feature entirely.^[1]  He is able to locate the source of any radio transmission.  They discover the transmissions are coming from the vicinity of Jupiter.

Not much story here, and the story that is here was here 7 months ago.  However, bravo to SFT for getting some small things right.  They correctly placed Jupiter about 367 million miles away (even TZ never seemed to understand how big space is).  They acknowledged that live dialogue was not possible at that distance.  That made the delay a reasonable 64 minutes.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Seriously, are these companies letting interns push out updates now?
• According to SFT: A History of the Television Show, Millhurst was the highest paid actor, pocketing $600.
• Variety called both the directing and screenplay “so-so”.  Maybe they should have given one of the guys a daughter.