General Kincaid, the father of Daniel Kincaid, is due at Fort Hope for a full inspection, which leaves everyone from the lowliest maintenance personnel to Weiss and Chennault on edge. Daniel hatches a plan to be away from Fort Hope at the time of his father’s visit: famed comic Lenny Hacker has failed to show up on time for his next stand-up gig, and all available evidence points toward his private ship going down on the remote prison world of Catraz. Abandoned years ago when the guards simply evacuated from the planet during a prison uprising, trapping the prisoners there and letting them run wild, Catraz technically isn’t within the Space Rangers’ jurisdiction, but Daniel proposes a mission to rescue Hacker before the prisoners on Catraz tear him apart. Boon and the rest of his crew agree to the mission just to avoid the inspection. It’s anything but a milk run, however: the dense, stormy atmosphere of Catraz makes surface-to-space communications nearly impossible, and it also renders Zylyn’s Graaka hunting instincts nearly useless. When Boon and his crew are captured, including Hacker, the rescue mission designed to keep them away from Kincaid’s father may turn into the longest assignment of all.
written by Jess Hugh Mann
directed by Thom Eberhardt
music by Hans Zimmer & Mark Mancina
Cast: Jeff Kaake (Captain John Boon), Marjorie Monaghan (Jojo), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Zylyn), Jack McGee (Doc), Clint Howard (Mimmer), Danny Quinn (Daniel), Gottfried John (Weiss), Linda Hunt (Chennault), Buddy Hackett (Lenny), Arlen Dean Snyder (General Kincaid), Cec Verrell (Ree), Sam Whipple (Marhsall), Jeremy Roberts (Convict), Peter Looney (Convict), Keith Berger (Ringer), Ron Howard George (Dirk), Sandra Spriggs (Announcer)
Notes: This was one of the last two Space Rangers episodes, neither of which was aired during the series’ original run on CBS. It was broadcast with the other episodes in foreign markets, and was later made available on videotape and DVD.
Comedian Buddy Hackett (1924-2003) was practically playing himself here: Hackett’s birth name was actually Leonard Hacker. At this late stage in Hackett’s career, television appearances were few and far between, and this was one of his last TV guest shots.
Sam Whipple later joined the cast of UPN’s late ’90s SF series Seven Days. If you look closely at the only scene with Whipple’s character, you’ll see that he appears on a television screen mounted into an exact replica of the wall-mounted viewscreen from the quarters aboard Red Dwarf. Pen Densham’s production company, Trilogy Entertainment, had purchased the leftover set pieces from the failed 1992 American Red Dwarf pilot at a substantial discount. Both this screen and the hexagonal central console – better known to Red Dwarf fans as the “Holly console” from season 3 onward of the BBC series – also appeared in the Densham-produced Fox TV movie Lifepod later in 1993; numerous props and set pieces from Space Rangers could also be seen in that movie.
Jeremy Roberts, appearing here as one of the unnamed convict characters, has the odd distinction of playing the same character – U.S.S. Excelsior helmsman Dmitri Valtane – in both Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Voyager which revisited the events of that movie. Ringer, the android crewmember of questionable value, first appeared in The Replacements; if this episode had aired as part of Space Rangers’ original run on CBS, this would’ve marked his second appearance.
The writer of this episode, Jess Hugh Mann, has only one credit in IMDb, and this is it. Given the punny nature of the name (hu-man), it’s likely that this was a pseudonym for one of the show’s producers.
LogBook entry by Earl Green