Chapter Six: Hills of Death
...and so we get another patented duck, tuck and roll out of a speeding vehicle just seconds before it passes over a precipice. As Ted and Cody try to think up a good excuse to give the owners of their regular car rental firm (probably - seriously, these guys go through some cars), Graber and Daly return to Krog's Batcave-style hideout proudly brandishing the stolen payroll. The brief joy at a job mostly bungle-free and relatively competently done is sadly interrupted immediately by an incoming message from Retik who's just got to a message to Krog. Oh Lord.
Opening the conversation with the everyday question of "Do you have an atomic bomb powerful enough to start a volcanic eruption in the Mount Alta crater?", the lunar lunatic sets out his plan to create tectonic havoc setting off a chain reaction of earthquakes and tsunami to disrupt terrestrial life long enough for the invasion campaign to begin. And so the henchmen charter a small plane with a 'nuclear device' of an unfeasibly small and inoffensive looking size. They orchestrate these manoeuvres in the light, dropping their Little Boy with its kiss that's never ever gonna fade away right into the mountain. Oh, and presumably this is the Mount Alta in Washington state rather than the one in New Zealand: their small craft doesn't look like it's carrying enough fuel for a cross Pacific hop.
And so the destruction, dogs and cats living together and mass hysteria begin, in a hail of stock footage. Discovering by the caprice of chance that the second airport that he checked hired a plane to two suspicious dudes, Cody takes Ted with him to check out the nearby Al's Cafe, wherein the proprietor of the property (Ted Thorpe, but you can call him Al even if you're not his bodyguard) confirms their suspicions. However, our heroes' hopes for a hot beef sandwich are foiled even worse than that time I felt ill in York (don't ask) when the goons enter, knock Cody out in yet another punch-up, and whisk Ted away as hostage. Having none of this, Ted decides to up his concussion insurance by making his second leap out of a moving vehicle that morning while Cody straps into his rocket pack and sets off in flying pursuit. Swooping in on the fleeing felons, he chases them into the foothills (....OF DEATH!) of Mount Clark whereupon he's waylaid by Graber, bricked in the head and tossed over the edge...
Chapter Seven: Camouflaged Destruction
...where he plummets earthward very slowly with an upward-scrolling back projection of a mountain behind him before engaging his rockets, in a sequence that would not - nay, could not - be bettered until the unbridled genius of Kirk and Spock's jet-powered Yosemite escapades in the opening sequences of Shatner's Star Trek V: the Final Frontier.
Returning to Al's Cafe, he questions both Al and a helpful mechanic (who, with his leather jacket 'n' fedora combo, is clearly rocking some Indiana Jones cosplay) who tells him of the two wise guys asking about some special work on a truck the day before - whereupon he had directed them to Benson's garage on the other side of town. This is no regular lorry, though, but Krog and Graber's A-Team style modified van which contains the atomic death ray behind a flimsy facade of radio parts. Popping back to the lab for a quick chat with Joan, the Commando informs her of his plan to track the truck and then deploy Ted who is standing by at the airfield with a plane ready to bomb it.
To bomb the truck. To drop bombs upon the vehicle carry the nuclear laser machine. This man is, apparently, a scientist. To be fair to hi, though, he's been punched in the head a lot and fallen out of several fast-moving vehicles this week. His brain's clearly going.
Cody mounts the air once again, keeping in contact with Ted's bomb plane via radio until he spots the laser lorry - upon which he makes an aerial hookup with the plane, taking on bombing duties (which entail manually dropping very small grenades out of the window) while Ted continues at the controls. The villains swing their truck around and take aim with the atomic laser, as Ted sets the plane on a dive-bomb course straight at the target and the ray fires, destroying the plane...
Chapter Eight: The Enemy Planet
...and with cry of "Better bail out!" Cody pulls on his helmet and soars from the plummeting plane while Ted parachutes safely to the ground (using the same footage of a parachutist gently landing as we saw for Joan in an earlier instalment) just before the aircraft's destruction.
Back at Cody Laboratories, the Commando and agent Henderson decide that offence may be the best defence, and that rather than sitting around like tin ducks in a shooting gallery their best bet is to mount another expedition moonwards to attempt to steal a supply of lunarium so that they can manufacture their own atomic ray weapons to battle those of the radar men. Calling on his trusty crew of Ted, Joan and pilot Hank, Cody preps his rocket for a return-a to Luna. Soaring once again through the brightly-lit depths of interplanetary space, they land in a canyon. Cody takes another recon flight, and spots a spacesuit-clad guard standing sentinel over the valley, and swoops in to tussle with him. Quickly subduing the alien during their brief fight by tightly grabbing his air line and suffocating him, Cody disarms him of his laser pistol (say: what happened to the ray gun that he acquired from the last moon man standing point that he fought with on the previous trip? I seriously thought for a minute that this was a continuity error, and this fight footage had been spliced in to the earlier episode by mistake, until it ended differently without the villain being pitched over the cliff....).
Having taken the lunarian prisoner, Cody dons his moon spacesuit while Ted wears the Commando's rocket man outfit and they both make for the moon city. Gaining access to the lunarium store through being mistaken for the guard he's posing as, Cody lugs a crate of the stuff out of the airlock and is met by Ted, but declares that the "stuff's so heavy it'll take us a week to lug back to the ship!" - proving that we can add knowledge of how gravity works on the lunar surface to the list of things that have fallen out of his head of late. Somebody strip this man of his Scientist's Club member card.
Stealing one of those cool Juggernaut moon tanks, the pair race (relatively quickly, this being the moon and all) back toward the ship with the trunk of lunar junk in tow. Pursued by another tank along a quite nicely-maintained road for the moon, their getaway vehicle is crippled by a laser blast. As Ted takes to the air with the jet pack, another blast sends Cody reeling to the floor, struggling for air as a slice of poetic justice sees his suit's oxygen line ripped...
To be concluded...
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