Honestly, this is one of my least favorite episodes of the whole run. It introduces a couple of largely uninteresting/one-joke characters and serves little purpose in the grand scheme of this aside from really starting to hammer home our main theme (failure) and establishing Jonas Venture's genius through the Gargantua-1 Space Station.
The episode opens with a filmstrip, complete with beeping and projector sounds, on (what else?) Careers in Science. It seems appropriate to note that this is the only episode of the show that doesn't open in the more "cinematic" 16x9 widescreen that characterizes the cold opens for the first two seasons (starting in the season 3, the whole episode is presented in widescreen), and that alone is enough to strike the viewer as odd (This is also the only episode not to be "Presented in glorious EXTRA-Color!," but since that's more a parody of how proud networks and studios were of, y'know, having color in the '60s).
Anyway, the filmstrip sets up our locale (as well as giving us an iconic shot for the climax), the Gargantua-1 Space Station, built by Jonas Venture back in the '60s and '70s, with little Rusty tagging along as though he has a choice (More on that when we get to "The Incredible Mr. Brisby"). Gargantua-1 is the "ninth wonder of the world," we're told, with a crew of 2,000, it's probably the height of man's achievement, and after being operational for all these years, the "Problem" light has turned on... and that's never happened before. Clearly the brainiac son of Dr. Venture should be able to fix this in a jiffy!
In addition, Col. Bud Manstrong tells the boys a tale of a Phantom Spaceman who is said to roam the corridors looking to murder the crew, and there's a horrendously ugly woman (Lt. Baldovich) with whom Brock has sex ("I like it with the helmet on."), presumably because Jackson and Doc simply couldn't think of something else to do with him. A problem that arises in a lot of the early episodes is that Brock has only two modes: Murderer Extraordinaire or Impossibly Well-Endowed Loverman, and these two things inform most of his plot lines. Which is rough on rewatchings, because the Brock of later episodes is so much more interesting, conflicted, complicated, whereas here we're just presented with a skewed version of the character Vin Diesel plays in most of his movies.
As I say, they push the failure theme in pretty hard here, the opening promises a crew of two thousand, which is a pretty stark difference to the two people who actually run the place. Hank and Dean run around fairly ineffectually, eventually beating up HELPeR in a case of mistaken identity and shoving him out the airlock. And Doc realizes that the Problem indicated by the light is him (okay, a toy he left in the panel which has since melted). Of course, the problem once recognized is easily solved and Doc is able to patch things up pretty easily afterward (because it takes exactly zero skill to do so).
What else is there even to say about this episode? Gargantua-1 is interesting as an expression of failure. The "ninth wonder of the world" has barely been used at all, as Brock points out at one point, "The whole place smells like a new radio." Further, the next time we hear about Gargantua-1, it will be plummeting to Earth (also probably Rusty's fault, I can't imagine urine is good for electronics). And Bud Manstrong as a largely impotent man-child with no conception of how human relationships work, because he's been trapped on a Space Station since he was old enough to be paperboy.
It's not a bad episode, it's just so far from the peak as to be approaching the nadir. Luckily, it gets better from here. The next episode has more Monarch mayhem and crazy super-science. It also attempts to broaden Brock (but unfortunately only through his only established character traits thus far).
Episode grade: 6.2/10
Notes:
-For detail obsessives, this episode has the first mentions of Dean's favorite book series, "Giant Boy Detective."
"Great, Dad, super idea! No, you should always put a gravity button on the ninth wonder of the world!"
-Doctor Venture
"Who lets a 10-year-old build a space station??"
-Doctor Venture
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