The Arrow B76 took off 2 days ago. Radar tracked it for 76,200 miles then it disappeared.

For 48 hours there has been no sign of the AR-76 (which apparently is what we’re calling it now, 30 seconds later). Major Dozier tells Congress-man Burns perhaps he can figure out who repealed the law of what goes up must come down. As it was tracked 76,200 miles, the officer would have been better off heeding Newton’s 1st Law of Motion rather than the drug-addled musings of a 60’s pop song that had not been written yet.  

Congressman Burns says they are past the point where they can laugh at the waste of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.  After all, a graft-mine like that doesn’t come along every day.

Inexplicably, he says their calculations indicate it should fall to Earth within 50 miles of where it was launched.  He is interested to see what happened to the passengers, some mice which the men have nicknamed the Flying Mice Brothers^[1], even though the obvious gag would have been The Wrat Brothers.

Out of the blue, Burns zings the officer by saying his father would have known how much it cost. They get word that the rocket has came down nearby at the ol’ Baker Ranch.  We don’t get to see the spacecraft, but it returned containing a block of ice large enough to contain a thing from another world.

Sgt Paul Newman runs in and tells Dozier and Burns that a man has died from exposure to the block of ice.  Burns complains that in 3 days, the block of ice has turned 75 miles of desert into the Arctic.  Not to nitpick, but the Arctic technically is a desert.  His complaints are understandable, however, as congressional fact-finding missions tend more toward Hawaii than the Arctic Rim.

The block of ice is impervious to any attempt to melt or destroy it.  The military even believes it could be attempting to send a signal to outer space.  They are concerned that the effects of this giant ice cube could extend to other farms and cities around the world.

Dozier secretly sends the AR-76 up again, taking the ice back to outer space.  To be sure it is destroyed in space, Dozier went up with the rocket.  Burns regrets that two Doziers have given their lives for their country.

Kind of a simplistic tale.  Spacecraft returns a block of ice, it is bad, so it is sent back to space.  It really baffles me why this series is so infantile.  People weren’t stupid back then.  To the contrary, this is when the foundation for space exploration was just starting. I guess the powers that be at the network just weren’t ready for anything challenging.  This aired an hour after Ozzie and Harriet and opposite Our Miss Brooks.  But 60 years before The Kardashians and Real Housewives of Yada Yada.

I give this one 16 out of 32 degrees.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Worst title since Billy and the Cloneasaurus.
• See also Ice-Nine.
• Paul Newman had a small role; sadly too small for me to work in puns on Sting, Hustler, Butch, Hombre, Nobody’s Fool, Verdict, Absence of Malice, Exodus, Newman’s Own, etc.
• The rocket program is headed by Dr. Meshkoff who has a heavy accent — I’m no expert, but he sounds like a Russki. Of course, had the producers been prescient, he would have been a German.  As everyone knows, our Germans were better than their Germans.
• The sponsor is again Maslin Carpets.  They are humping their new Cantata which is shown available in the following colors.  They knew this was B&W, right?