In Review: Thunderbirds Are Go – Skyhook

Synopsis: International Rescue scrambles all flight – capable craft to rescue the crew of CIRRUS – a high atmosphere weather station that handles predictive climate control. But a combination of bad weather conditions and technical difficulties delay their rescue attempts, which forces them to think outside the box.

Review: After a week without a new ‘Thunderbirds’ episode to watch. I was totally up for this one and was not disappointed.

The episode starts with all the Tracy brothers hanging out on their island because they have not been called out to any major incidents in close to 48 hours, which in reality would be a pretty unlikely story.

Things only really start to get going when John gets a bit fed up of the Earths gravity and decided to take the space lift back to Thunderbird 5. While making his assent he spots some potential trouble at CIRRUS a weather station, which is run by a scientist who is known for cutting corners when it comes to safety.

Johns concerns about the station are soon confirmed when its safety’s disengage and it begins an uncontrollable assent into space.

In order to initiate a rescue John orders all the Thunderbird ships to engage in a massive rescue attempt, but every attempt fails due to technical issues caused by CIRRUS’s lead scientists negligence when it comes to safety.

Ultimately the rescue requires some out the box thinking from John who uses the orbital lift on Thunderbird 5 in order to scoop CIRRUS up like a giant ice cream stuff. This plan much depends on Brain’s designs for TB5 overcompensating for safety protocols, which means that John can in theory push the space station beyond its known safety limits. Using a combination of brute force and gravity to rescue the crew of CIRRUS.

This episode went fast and was frantic with action from the get go. I liked the final solution and it was great to see John engaged in a heroic rescue given that for most of the series with the exception of one episode. He has been the guy running the rescue attempts by giving his brothers the relevant needed information from orbit. So it was brilliant to see him having to initiation a rescue with the use of the station.

I also liked the fact that the lead scientist at CIRRUS was an old rival of Brains.

Overall this was a fun episode with some brilliant model work and FX.