Peter Jones as the Book feels like a wonderful, reassuring presence by now. His calm matter-of-factness and careful explanations are helping to keep me up to speed on everything. This is another episode where we don’t jump straight into our heroes’ action, but instead we get more world-building about the universe that Arthur has started to explore. This time the world-building is about actual world-building, with a short history of Magrathea and the custom planet business.
The early days of space travel, when men were real men and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, look great fun. The real man manages to remind me of both Brian Tilsley from Coronation Street and the assassin in Blake’s 7’s Assassin, but I think this probably just says something about ’80s perms popularity.
As well as that marvellous imagery, we see a bored rich man being fed grapes, giving us the opportunity to then zoom out for a great vast shot of a horizon that’s apparently just the wrong shade of pink. This and the spaceship are a lovely combination of filming and effects, which continue to help the universe feel particularly alien.
Journey to Magrathea
It’s a while before we reach Magrathea because the journey becomes excitingly dangerous and dramatic. The Book reassures us that the impact on everyone will be minimal and they’re going to be perfectly safe. Perhaps this should remove the tension, but instead it leaves me all the more curious about how they’re going to manage it.
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“You lie a lot.”
While Ford doesn’t have a great deal to say or do at times here, David Dixon is offering some marvellous screwed up facial expressions as the ship heads violently towards Magrathea.
He’s also rather untrusting of Eddie the shipboard computer: “I wouldn’t trust that computer to speak my weight.” Eddie reminded me of Talkie the Toaster, the frustrating, overbearing talking toaster from Red Dwarf. Unlike Talkie, who the Red Dwarf crew were simply stuck with, we learn that Zaphod can install Eddie’s with a new personality.
I’m very much onboard with Ford’s distrust of computers. Since I wrote about computers with personalities for the previous episode, AI chatbots have become a common feature of attempting to contact banks and utility companies, so my antagonism towards them has only increased. At least Eddie and Marvin are real-life entities though – not computers behind a screen that pretend to be human.
A bowl of petunias and a sperm whale
The Infinite Improbability Drive is a really nice way of getting out of situations and, with it already established, we can’t feel cheated at the last moment. The bowl of petunias and the whale hurtling towards the ground – “so big and flat and wide, it needs a big wide sounding word like round, round, grrrround!” – was among the images that stuck with me from the 2005 film. I love the burbling rush of thoughts from the whale that are hardly at all to do with what’s actually happening to it, but instead we get a whale immediately pondering, “What is my purpose in life?”
Magrathea
Arthur’s enthusiastic first impression of the novelty of a new planet is a lovely contrast with Ford’s grim verdict.
“It’s fantastic!”
“Desolate hole.”
Ford hasn’t been a particularly negative or downbeat character so far, so this sudden bluntness made me laugh out loud.
Readers of my Blake’s 7 blogs will know that I am fond of a quarry and Magrathea offers us a particularly impressive one. Nonetheless, I appreciate that both Arthur and Ford’s statements are both true. I suspect a visitor to Earth would react similarly if they landed in, say, Walsall, or Stoke.
“It’s all so stark and dreary.”
“I think it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s only just getting through to me – a whole new alien world, thousands of light years away from home. Pity it’s such a dump.”
I love that we get to see the hugeness of the location, giving a real sense of scale to Magrathea. It’s been a couple of episodes of staying away from anything Earth-like and there’s an effort to continue it. There is a colour filter over the camera lens to simulate dusk filming, making it slightly different to most of the quarry filming I’m used to watching. With Arthur left on the surface with Marvin while the others explore, we get a clear idea that some time has passed, even without the shot of a night sky.
Slartibartfast
Zaphod was just about starting to get on my nerves a tad, so it was a welcome break for Arthur to be left alone and Slartibartfast is a much calmer presence. I really rather like him and his passion for doing “all the little fiddly bits around fjords”. The travel globe that he takes Arthur off in is fab and I can’t work out how the production did the effect of it apparently floating off. I kept looking for strings or ropes but spotted nothing and it headed away nice and smoothly.
In the film, Slartibartfast doesn’t make an appearance until near the end of the story, so it was a nice surprise to meet him here. It’s rather thrown me as I try to recall Hitch-Hiker’s plot order and means I’m now increasingly unsure what to expect next. Compared to the first two episodes, it seemed as though the plot had barely crawled forward during this one. Yet I didn’t mind at all because the episode itself flew by. I’m keen to know what awaits Arthur next, and what bad thing Ford, Trillian and Zaphod are facing that Zaphod’s sunglasses blocked out.
