pace captain Justy Ueki Tylor has been called the most irresponsible man in space, but he also seems to be the luckiest. Whether he's being attacked by a single assassin or an entire Raalgon Empire fleet, he always seems to come out on top--much to the disgust of his officers, his crew and his superiors at the United Planets Space Force.
As this comic space opera continues, the Raalgons have placed a spy on Tylor's ship, the Soyokaze. Nurse Harumi is attractive enough that every man on board suddenly needs to go to the sickbay for treatment of cut fingers and "old war wounds." But she's also a brilliant secret agent. Unfortunately, she can't make any more sense out of Tylor than anyone else on board. The Raalgons remain intrigued with Tylor's character, but they're not certain whether he's worth killing. The UPSF has no such compunctions--Tylor's superiors are actively out to sabotage his career and destroy his ship via a series of dirty tricks and underhanded schemes.
The ship's internal problems repeatedly come to a boil as well, as Tylor's staff officers struggle with their pride and frustration over their commander's indifference and their own faltering careers. Commander Yuriko Star is particularly incensed and makes great efforts to restore military discipline on the Soyokaze. But the ship is promptly downgraded and dispatched to a dull, remote corner of the galaxy, where the crew has to create its own entertainment--mostly by fomenting and observing personal rivalries and conflicts.
The fine line between genius and idiocy
Irresponsible Captain Tylor's larger plot--the interstellar United Planets/Raalgon Empire war--comes to a near-standstill throughout the seven episodes on these tapes, but the characters take a series of giant leaps forward. All except for Tylor--it's still not clear, nor destined to become clear before the series' end, whether he's a secret genius or a monumental moron.
What is clear is that his outlandish antics are funny, and his impassioned underlings have no idea how to deal with them. So they compensate by getting deeply involved in the petty details of each other's lives, to the point where two girls' decision to train as fighter pilots turns into an emotional slalom course for the entire crew. The cast's childish glee or monstrous despair over any new event in their lives is half the fun of this series. The surprisingly solid plot is the other half.
There are weak points in these collections--most notably, the pilot training episode (Vol. 3, No. 10) is dubiously bathetic and falls into a sentimental resolution worthy of the worst Disney films. But the strong points--especially the downgrading episode (Vol. 3, No. 9), in which the entire crew fixates on religious and superstitious omens to predict whether Tylor will let them down once again--far outweigh the bad spots. And as with Vol. 1, this remains a solidly plotted serious space series that incidentally happens to be hysterically humorous.
