Review: Ultraman Episode 23 - My Home is Earth

 

Ultraman Episode #23

My Home is Earth

 Original Air Date: December 18th, 1966

Directed by: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay by: Mamoru Sasaki

Review by: Toku Tom Fool

The 23rd episode of Ultraman begins with an International Peace Conference. Being a Power Rangers fan, I instantly get worried that half the SSSP team is going away. There's some problems with this peace conference as planes keep crashing on their way there and Hayata is not piloting any of them. Paris SSSP HQ believes that someone is trying to stop the peace conference and they are making our team deal with it since the conference is taking place in Tokyo. Ide wonders which country could be behind the evil deeds but Alan, from Paris HQ, believes it could be an alien threat. 

Meanwhile on Route 1, a hit and run driver is trying to get away from a police car. Apparently no monsters protect children on this route like Route 87. I guess the Route 87 monster wasn't needed as the hit and run driver runs into an invisible wall and explodes. The SSSP learns about this and goes to investigate. Arashi does run into the wall but he's driving slowly so you would think it would be okay. Wrong! The car explodes after everyone gets out. I blame that on Hayata being in the car with them. This is when they find out that it's an invisible rocket that is causing the invisible wall. Ide tries to shoot at the rocket in the Jet VTOL but he can't hit it. 

 

Back at HQ, Captain Muramatsu uses clever analogies using bikes and color wheels to show how the rocket is invisible. This makes Ide want to get to work on weapons to hit this rocket. Ide works all night to create three new weapons to find this rocket. That man should be praised way more than he is and Arashi calls him an idiot half the time. Show my man some respect. They get back in a Jet VTOL and fire at the invisible rocket and with Ide's new weapons they are able to spot the rocket which is more like a UFO.

The being in the UFO grows into a giant monster. Alan calls it Jamila which raises questions why he knows the name and we actually do get a reason for this. The team tries to shoot Jamila but a giant monster running away from 5 guys on the ground goes pretty well for the monster. The team camps overnight discussing why this monster would want to disrupt the peace conference. This is where we get Alan's explanation of who Jamila is. It turns out that Jamila was an astronaut during the Space Race between America and the Soviet Union and his ship got lost and he was presumed dead. This was kept a secret from the public. Muramatsu somehow correctly guess that Jamila landed on a planet that transformed him into this monster. I feel like they are making a lot of assumptions here. This could have easily just been a random alien. Was someone monitoring this situation the whole time and saw him land on another planet and then return to Earth? Why did Jamila recreate his rocket into a UFO like object? Eh, who cares! It leads to good Ide scenes where he doesn't want to kill Jamila because he's just a poor human that got caught in a bad situation. There's also a great moment where Ide throws his gun on the ground and Arashi looks like his puppy just got hit by a car.

The next day, the SSSP and Defense Force are trying to kill Jamila. It's not going well. Jamila is destroying houses in a small village as the big monsters usually do. They do manage to set Jamila on fire but fire has no effect on Jamila. There's a young boy that stupidly saves a pigeon while Jamila is using fire breath on houses near him. I like the part where Ide tries to appeal to Jamila's humanity but it ultimately doesn't work. I actually would have preferred if the episode ended with Ide turning Jamila human again with a great speech but alas we need an Ultraman fight. 

Jamila makes his way to the International Peace Conference which must have been near that village. The monster starts taking down some flags while the Defense Force fires water bombs at him. Water hurts Jamila but fire doesn't because of whatever planet Jamila landed on back in the 1950s. Hayata transforms into Ultraman right around this time. He does so near that young boy and the boy does react to it but he was probably too busy playing with his bird. I love that Ultraman's first move is to jump at Jamila and completely miss. It made me laugh. They scuffle a little more before Ultraman uses his water gun to kill Jamila. 

Some time later, the SSSP has a little funeral for Jamila. The peace conference even has a little monument for him that's in French. I'm going to assume Jamila was French but Alan didn't make that clear earlier in the episode. The big mystery of this is that the monument says he was born in 1960 and died in 1993. You're telling me this series is supposed to take place in 1993! I can't remember if they had established that before. I do know it gets retconned in the sequel series making this show take place in 1966 instead. That means I have to come up with a head canon for why it says 1960 to 1993. My first headcanon is that they accidentally made a mistake and have to go back and make a new one. Simple enough. Another headcanon is that maybe Jamila followed a different religion that had a calendar that made it so he was born in 1960 and died in 1993 and they respected his calendar. Maybe Jamila's unnamed country is actually using a calendar that's 27 years ahead for some reason. I'm putting too much thought into this.

Okay, that was another good one I would say. It raised a lot of questions but still good. It's well directed like that memorial reflection shot. Akio Jissoji did this and the last episode and both are very creative in their direction. This is another great Ide episode where he gets to show emotion about how they are like Jamila and being a giant monster man could be their future. Muramatsu has some good lines in this one too. Everybody else does what they need to do. 

Next episode is the 24th episode titled "The Undersea Science Center" and I better see a center dealing with science that is under water or I'll be angry. Oh, I was way off on my guess for this episode by the way. You can follow me on Twitter @TokuTomFoolery where I live tweet all Ultraman episodes and other Toku related topics. I recently did first Power Rangers movie for instance. See you all there.