Opening with "the Book" (voiced by Peter Jones) giving a brief history of how the Galactic Empire grew fabulously rich before plunging into a gigantic economic recession, the third installment of the six-part miniseries "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" itself plunges into the meat (whale or otherwise) of Douglas Adams's frenetic, free-ranging, and altogether farcical space operetta that tweaks just about every human convention although this time it's economists who seem to get it in the neck the most. (Serves them right, those dismal-science killjoys.)
One byproduct of the staggeringly wealthy galactic economy was the demand for outrageously priced custom-built luxury planets, and to supply that demand was Magrathea, a planet-building planet that, when the Big Crash came, simply went into hibernation knowing that no one would be buying virtually unaffordable worlds until the economy recovered. A situation like that doesn't happen overnight, and even five million years after the Crash, it still hadn't quite happened, yet the canny planet builders of Magrathea had been awoken to--but we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?
Because five million years is a long time for some sentient life forms, Magrathea, off the radar screen for so long, had become a myth, a fairy story that parents tell their children at bedtime so they'll grow up to be economists, or so says Ford Prefect (David Dixon), a field researcher for the Guide, to his semi-half-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (Mark Wing-Davey), the president of the galaxy-turned-fugitive for stealing the Heart of Gold, a shiny-new spaceship featuring the revolutionary Infinite Improbability Drive propulsion system that he claims is in orbit around the mythical planet of Magrathea.
A prime example of Adams's comic cheek is the spoiler his loopy narrative delivers early: Magrathea does in fact exist, and to ensure that its inhabitants will hibernate undisturbed, they left a holotape recording politely informing travelers venturing too near their planet to buzz off. For more persistent travelers, they extend the courtesy of two nuclear-tipped missiles that are soon locked onto obliterating the Heart of Gold.
Here's the spoiler: As the missiles are launched, the Book, informing viewers that because stress levels in the galaxy are so high, reassures us that, no, the ship is not destroyed and thus its travelers, who also include Arthur Dent (Simon Jones), an Earthling whisked away from the Earth by Ford moments before it was destroyed by a Vogon destructor fleet making way for a hyperspace bypass; Trillian (Sandra Dickinson), another Earthling whisked away from the Earth by Zaphod six months prior to that at a swell party in Islington that, improbably, Arthur had also attended and where he tried to score with her; and Marvin the paranoid android (operated by David Learner; voiced by Stephen Moore), who came with the ship, are spared thanks to--well, let's leave that unsaid just to increase your stress levels, or at least curiosity, dear readers.
Having landed on Magrathea, Ford, Trillian, and Zaphod proceed into the planet's interior, leaving Arthur and Marvin to "stand guard" on a desolate, presumably uninhabited, or at least still-slumbering, planet. However, Arthur does encounter Slartibartfast (Richard Vernon), a Magrathean who warns him that great things are afoot before he guides Arthur into the planet's interior for a revelation that is, let's just say, Earth-shattering. (We can safely say that humans were only third-most intelligent species on Earth, but as for the other two smarter ones, you'll just have to watch this episode, won't you?)
Standing in for the actual (okay, mythical) Magrathea is the notorious "BBC rock quarry" (at least one of them, anyway) so well-known to fans of the "Doctor Who" serials from this era. (Adams had served as the script editor for that venerable science-fiction program as he was creating "Hitchhiker's.") That location filming complements production designer Andrew Howe-Davies's fairly impressive sets, although selective lighting helps to bolster those impressions.
However, increased exposure to Zaphod's animatronic third arm and especially his second head magnify those special-effects limitations--shall we say that it makes it difficult for him to be of two minds about anything? Fine, let's not and say we did. On the other hand, Slartibartfast's globular buggy is an amusing success.
While the cliffhanger is both abrupt and subdued, this third episode of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" thickens the plot and lays the groundwork for greater things afoot as Simon Jones and Richard Vernon, both veterans of the original radio series, establish a comfortable rapport even as Slartibartfast quietly blows Arthur's world apart yet again; they are the highlight here, spurring genuine interest in the rest of the story. You couldn't build a better mousetrap, at least one that doesn't use a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias as bait.
POINT TO PONDER: Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept only facts and opinions you agree with. It is extremely difficult to avoid. Are reviews "helpful" only if they validate your confirmation bias? Are they "not helpful" if they contradict it? Thanks to the pervasiveness of confirmation bias, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down is essentially useless as an indicator of whether a review is or isn't "helpful."
