In Review: Project Blue Book: Season 1 – Operation Paperclip

Synopsis: In rural Alabama, a farmer claims a UFO killed his pigs. This sets the team on a trail which leads them to scientific escapees from the Third Reich.

Review: Hynek and Quinn find themselves in deep trouble as they get close to the conspiracy that they are helping to cover up.

The Story

A strange encounter with a commercial airliner, an Alabama farmer, and some dead pigs lead Hynek and Quinn to a top secret project, which involves a former Nazi scientist Wernher Von Braun. As the investigation develops Hynek and Quinn find themselves seeing their first extraterrestrial being, which Von Braun tells them is a primate, which he has sent into space on one of his rockets.

Elsewhere Hynek’s wife Mimi confronts the man who has been following her. The man says she and her family are in grave danger. Mimi who is frightened and confused calls on her friend Susie Miller for help. Susie exploits this opportunity to take Mimi to where Hynek works and gets Mimi to cover for her while she steals some intelligence.

The Acting

Thomas Kretschmann proves to be really good as Von Braun who forms a bond with Hynek in order to try and win his trust. The scenes he shares with Hynek are pretty much important to the whole story given that Hynek chooses not to have any part in Von Braun’s plans.

Michael Malarkey also puts in a great performance as Quinn, who for obvious reasons don’t trust Von Braun or any of the former Nazi’s that are working with him. The scene where he shares his experience of having liberated one of the Nazi death camps in the Holocaust is really passionate and right on point. Having visited Auschwitz myself in the 1990s as well as another of the old death camps. I can completely appreciate Quinn’s reaction to the German scientists.

Overall

This has to be the best episode thus far. I really liked the use of the former Nazi Rocket scientist in the story, which is very believable given that they were instrumental in helping America in the Space Race during the 1950s and ’60s. So it is not too much of a leap to believe that some of them would have been involved in government investigations into extraterrestrials and alien technologies.