Heya! I swear I'll listen to your commentary tonight. Until I have something to say about it, here's some notes I did regarding commenting on the same episode.
CREDITS
* Episode originally aired October 19th, 1996. The USA website originally scheduled it to air the week before, for for reasons unknown it was transposed with "Word of Honor". It markes the end of the first 'block' of new episodes - the next weekend was a rerun of 'Red and Blue'.
ACT ONE
* Ships re=used: Bengal, Scimitar, Dralthi.
* Ships inntroduced: Kilrathi Jump Buoy, Space Ambulance. The jump buoy shows up briefly in the opening shot - it'll get "fleshed out" in a battle scene in 'Expendable'. In the original trilogy jump buoys are only used to mark jump points... but Wing Commander IV made a point of showing how they're also part of a communications network (ie, the relay in the Hellespont). It's one of those "Oh, that's what that meant!" situations (like all the 'old man' stuff in the WCIV novel)... had you known it was a Kilrathi buoy, you'd know they were in the system before even Tolwyn gives the briefing.
* The name of the star system, Dioscuri, is from Greek mythology - it's the word referring to Castor and Pollux. This may be an indication of where in the universe Dioscuri is -- or it may just be a bad classics joke (the planet is 'Dioscuri *Two*').
* Tolwyn's orders regarding non-interference echoes the situation with the Mopokes in the original Wing Commander - from the Rostov Series. It's also most likely cribbed directly from Star Trek's "Prime Directive".
* Colors! Blair and Grunt are blue, Maniac is green.
* This is my least favorite episode, but it has my favorite shot - the lizard thing eating the egg and changing colors.
* Atmospheric hydrocarbons and electromagnetic radiation are real things. Scientists measure atmospheric hydrocarbons to keep track of pollution levels... and electromagnetic radiation is given off by things like TV and radio signals. Both make for a good measure of whether or not the Kilrathi are operating on a supposedly untouched planet.
* By the numbers. Blair claims that there are "dozens" of Dralthi. How many are there really?
- The first shot of Blair's radar shows twelve.
- The first swam shot shows eighteen together.
- The second swam shot shows thirty seven together.
- They fire a volley of eleven missiles.
- Blair drops eleven decoys!
- The second shot of Blair's radar shows fourteen targets.
- The third shot of Blair's radar shows twenty eight (13 ahead, 15 behind)
- There are fifteen in the next group seen.
* Note Blair's Damage VDU. It's a good approximation of the WC1/2 style damage screens. "Turbines" is one of the elements in the text list, which is a reference to Wing Commander III's loading screen... which is, in turn, a reference to the original Batman TV series ('Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!', is the procedure for starting up both the Batmobile and an F-66 Thunderbolt).
* APU stands for Auxiliary Power Unit.
* More numbers:
- Maniac's radar shows sixteen targets.
- There are eighteen in the next swarm.
- They fire twelve missiles, which Grunt draws off.
* Interestingly, Blair's radar shows targets as triangles... but Maniac's shows them as circles.
* Maniac's 'stub' gun was originally seen in 'Red and Blue' - Burroughs kills a guard with a close range shot to the head. At the time, it wasn't clear what the weapon was... but the rest of the series makes it clear that that is the "standard" Confed sidearm.
ACT TWO
* Note that four Scimitars are launched. (blue, purple, red and orange)
* "When I was with the Marines on Repleetah" - keep in mind that this episode was produced *before* Word of Honor... the fact that they were aired in reverse order makes a lot of Grunt's comments seem odd. The original intent was to foreshadow the upcoming episode that featured flashbacks to fighting on Repleetah.
* Grunt's rifle is odd. In the previous episode, "Word of Honor", he reveals that he keeps a Kilrathi rifle in his cockpit ("souvenier of the corps!")... the one on this episode is a human laser rifle, which will be seen again in "Glory of Sivar". This may be the M-47 semiautomatic laser rifle spoken of in End Run and The Confederation Handbook.
* (Grunt killing Dioscurians) This is very, very satisfying to anyone who grew up with Return of the Jedi.
* "How can we, tied up like this?!" - this was really funny when it originally aired.
* "Lords of Darkness" - harkens to what we know of Kilrathi Kilrathi religion and the idea that above all they fear going to a "darkness" or "void"... it's the basis behind the Sivar-Eshrad situation in SM2 and the Nephilim k'nthrak in WCP.
* "Now I remember why I left the infantry" - again, written as foreshadowing... we *know* why he left the infantry because we've already seen Word of Honor -- so this is an odd line. In the original order, this would have been the first hint that there was a reason for him to have left the marines in the first place.
* "Yeah, Kilrathi high tech!" - contender for one of the worst lines in Wing Commander history. Surprise, surprise - it's delivered by Mark Hamill.
ACT THREE
* Do Kilrathi eat people? The WC3 novel claims they do - and that Thrakhath and company feasted on Angel after her execution.
* "Sivar is exalted when the Kilrathi trick their enemies" - interesting note on Kilrathi psychology, which works to explain the 'false peace' in Fleet Action.
* "Discarded weapons" - what's the deal with the Dralthi? As best we can tell, they're exactly the same as all the other Dralthi in the series... but both the Kilrathi and, by inference, the Confed pilots act like they're inferior technology.
* End Run talks about a fearsome "Claw Knife" carried by the Kilrathi, that can disembowl victims with a single wrist movement. This, however, looks more like the Kilrathi equivalent of a butter knife.
* It's a *GREEN* Kilrathi! Green Kilrathi will later appear as the crew of a Snakeir in the Wing Commander Movie.
* "Hunting Karrigle" - this isn't a real word... it's a rare instance of a Kilrathi word being invented on Academy -- and no background whatsoever being provided.
* Remember four Scimitars taking off earlier? There are only three now. Archer (Purple), Payback (Orange) and Hyena (Red). The blue one is probably waiting somewhere safe with the rescue shuttle.
* The Kilrathi and Archer's radars both show twelve Dralthi. The actual swarm shot shows only nine.
* There's a brief shot of a Dralthi landing without any red markings.
* Here's the space ambulance, which appears in this episode and no where else. Its role was played by a WC3-style Longbow in the previous episode. Look, they've captured the Green Kilrathi!
* Blair is again flying a Blue Scimitar, despite the fact that his own fighter was blown up earlier.
CLOSING CREDITS
* Lords of the Sky gets a nice reference later in the series. Archer refers to the Dolosians in "Recreation".
* For the killboards! Blair shoots down two Dralthi (and loses a Scimitar). Maniac shoots down four Dralthi and Grunt shoots down one. Archer blows up a Kilrathi base (the irony, of course, is that Archer probably kills more people than anyone else in this episode.
