This week has nothing except a closing scene taking place on Earth. So if you're into low-budget space adventures and drug humor, "Fear and Loathing on the Planet Kitson" is the episode for you.
The episode concerns itself primarily with the hunt for Fitz. So Mack, Elena, and Melinda don't show up. Whether you think that's a good thing or not is up to you. I tend to think dividing the storyline between the off-Earth shenanigans and the on-Earth case is a bad thing. Splitting up the regulars seems like a mediocre idea at best, a bad idea at worst.
But on the other hand, I don't find the "search for Fitz" that compelling. Maybe the creative team will convince me otherwise in the weeks to come. We'll see.
And admittedly, the Fitz/Enoch pair-up is good as is the Daisy/Jemma pair-up as they trip on alien food and alternate between giggling, crying, and smelling everyone as cheese.
We start with an alien hunter named Malachi (Christopher James Baker) finding out Fitz and Enoch are wanted men. He uses a teleportation doohickey to go after them. They're on Kitson, where two members of the engineering crew from last episode have decided to abandon them and take the ship. Fitz has one gambling chip, so he and Enoch go to the local casino. Enoch manages to lose all their money because he doesn't know how to bluff. He puts up Fitz as collateral to get into a high-stakes game where death is the reward for the loser.
While all of this is going on, Team Daisy are at Nata-Atzia arguing about how Jemma took them there without asking them. They're interrupted when a local customs officer (Clark Middleton) insists on inspecting their ship. He comes aboard, and it turns out he's working with Malachi. The team manage to capture Malachi, and they find out where Fitz is. They head to Kitson, and Piper and Davis guard Malachi while Jemma and Daisy go down to the casino. But not before everyone but Piper eats some alien snacks.
The snacks cause 60s LSD-type hallucinations, and it's hijinks ahoy! Davis blisses out, and Malachi escapes, accesses the ship's computers, and teleports away before Piper can stop him. Jemma and Daisy get most of the humor, as they wander into the casino, stare at the pretty lights, talk about people smelling like cheese, and reminisce about how they first met. Daisy had big hair, Jemma had "big nerd face". Eventually they cry over each other's love life (or in Daisy's case, lack thereof), and hear a dolphin squeaking.
The "dolphin" is Enoch, sending Fitz high-pitched signals so he can win his card game. The game breaks up when Enoch shuts down, and the dealer realizes Enoch and Fitz are together. Fitz uses the sulphur-based blood of a dead player to get out of the room. Jemma finds him while Daisy fights some goons, and Malachi arrives and teleports away with Fitz.
In the closing tag, Sarge and Jaco fire their cannon device into the sky. Not much happens--yet--and it appears to be a detection device. They go off to do something else.
How much you like the episode depends mostly on how much you like 60s drug humor. Since that's a good chunk of the back half of the episode. Most of the rest is Enoch talking a lot about how he's an artificial life form and doesn't understand bluffing, and Fitz doing the metaphorical equivalent of slapping his forehead and going "Doh!" a lot. That gets a bit repetitive, but Joel Stoffer as Enoch is talented enough to make it work. Mostly.
Chloe Bennett and Elizabeth Henstridge have always had good chemistry as Daisy and Jemma. So the two of them bouncing off each other is also entertaining. Henstridge is good without another regular, as she haggles with an alien guard who comes across more as a Vogan from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Maximilian Osinski as Agent Davis gets to do some minor stuff on his LSD-like trip. It's good to be a recurring actor on the show.
As I mentioned above, the rest of the episode is low-budget space adventure. The casino is filled with human-looking and humanoid aliens, doing all of the typical casino-trope stuff. There are mentions of the planet's owner, Mr. Kitson. And besides Malachi hunting Fitz and Enoch, there are also hunter Omnicroms looking for Enoch, who has been decommissioned.
As I said in last week's review, there's not a lot to say about the show. It still expertly juggles snark, humor, tragedy (Jemma finds Fitz just in time to see him teleported away), and camaraderie. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing too exciting about it, either. None of the show's major mysteries--who is Sarge, who is after Fitz--are answered. But then again, it's only the third episode of the season so giving us answers this early is not expected. Whether the creative team will go the route of the last few seasons and dedicate the first half of the season to one story and the second half to a different-but-related one, we'll see. To some degree it probably depends on how long the season is.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
Written by Gislef on May 25, 2019
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