8. Contact

An astronomer has made a discovery and wants to announce it, but someone representing the company he works for doesn't want him to say anything. He's killed within minutes of the other guy leaving.

George runs into prejudice when one of the guys investigating the death of the astronomer won't speak to him, but will speak to Matt.

Sikes reveals a little of his personal background which is not very pretty. He had a rough childhood. He receives a trunk from the estate of his Uncle but refuses to open it.

There's an Overseer talking to the guy who had been talking to the astronomer just before he was murdered.

Cathy wants Sikes to come to a party she's having but he's reluctant. It seems she's more interested in him than he is in her.

One of the evil guys again. It's hard to figure if he's trying to imitate a British accent, or a German accent; his accent seems to wander around aimlessly.

After talking to George about how he doesn't get angry when he runs into those who are prejudiced against Newcomers, Matt realizes some of his own prejudice and calls Cathy to say he will attend her party after all.

Matt and George find out the object is probably a spaceship that is on the same trajectory that the slaveship George was on used, although it's heading away from our solar system.

Matt gets to the party and within minutes manages to ruin it.

Matt finally opens the trunk from his Uncle's estate.

Susan is talking to George and suggests that they have another child. Apparently her biological clock is ticking and close to running out.

Sikes finds out the scientist was killed by a Newcomer.

Matt and George lean on one of the conspirators.

Cathy visits Sikes that night to talk to him. Sikes tells Cathy he lived with his Uncle Jack whenever his own father got "out of line." (Apparently, he was violent.) There follows a section where Cathy talks about some constellations having meaning for her which is also logically impossible since she was on the slaveship and the ship would have had a completely different view of the stars than that you get from earth; thus, our constellations would be utterly meaningless to her people either on their home planet or on the ship.

The Overseer has a message that he wants sent to the departing ship, saying that they have survived and their "cargo" (the Newcomers) await their arrival. The message also notes that there are billions of "others" waiting, meaning they would also make slaves of the humans.

The message gets sent but early and the woman scientist thinks it's "most likely" the message was lost before it could get to the probe (or ship, or whatever).

George and Susan decide they will have a child after all. Matt, meanwhile, gives Cathy a telescope.

This episode is related to one of the made-for-TV movies where a Newcomer ship goes through our solar system and one of them lands on Earth. Both cases make the assumption that the superior technology that the slave ships have does not include anything for examining nearby planets. Both become examples of incredibly poor logic, or total lack of logic, on the part of the writers, and both episodes fail primarily because of that. They may be interesting to watch, but the moment you really start thinking about them you begin to ask why they bothered with this episode or that particular movie.

First, the beings who have enslaved the Newcomers obviously have extremely advanced technology (although, assuming they do, then the need for slaves would not really be there since virtually all forms of work could be done by machines or androids). Given that technological superiority, there is little doubt that they could scan nearby planets for lifeforms just as is done in Star Trek and other science fiction shows. There is no way the Earth could hide.

Our TV and radio signals could be easily picked up by any alien spaceship. They could detect the present of our satellites around the Earth and other planets like Mars that are almost constantly being circled by earth-launched satellites. They would not need a signal to be sent to the ship to tell them Earth had intelligent life forms.

So the idea that an alien ship would just happen to not have any such technology, and would not happen to be interested in the planets of a solar system it was passing through doesn't make any sense. If it was going through the solar system so fast it couldn't scan the planets then it would be going too fast to be detected by any means available to us, so in either case the basic foundation of the story fails to stand up to even surface examination.

Also, since the signal had been sent, even it was unlikely the probe (or whatever) had detected it, shouldn't George and Sikes made some kind of report to someone who would have reported to the government that the Earth might have to get ready for a virtual interplanetary war? Again, something I think logically would have happened but, at least in the episode, didn't happen.

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