Okay, first things first: the sound mixing in this show is always horrible – I swear, the Science Patrol’s telephone is louder than the engines of their spaceships – but this episode is completely maddening because the strange alien Mefilas and all his machinations are accompanied by a high-pitched rattle on the soundtrack. This noise is present for a good twenty of the program’s twenty-three minutes. I can still feel the roots of my teeth throbbing against the gums. It’s that bad.
Anyway, viewers willing to suffer through that cacaphony will be rewarded with a pretty good story. Mefilas is another well-remembered monster who got his start in this series and returned to battle many of the other Ultra-heroes. He launches ocean tankers into the air and jets into outer space, and turns Fuji into a giant. At one neat moment, to let the humans know he means business, he threatens them with giant illusions of two monsters we’d met before, a Baltan and that incoherent Zarab dude, along with a baddie called Kemur Man from the previous series, Ultra Q.
Mefilas belongs to that class of alien menace who needs to conquer the Earth because his own planet is running out of natural resources, a pretty common trope in sixties and seventies sci-fi. He sees Ultraman as a peer and equal. It all deteriorates into wrestling, of course, but curiously ends in a draw, with Mefilas deciding that the only way he can defeat our hero is by destroying the planet.
Our son enjoyed it and was genuinely worried when Fuji and Hayata disappear. The soundtrack didn’t annoy him one-tenth as much as it did the grown-ups.
(We’re going to take another break from Ultraman to cycle in a different show for our rotation, but we will be back with the final six episodes in late March. Stay tuned!)
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 