#gnt

The Good: flipping through the book to check book length (10 chapters) and the formatting is better this time than the first edition first book (the trap), with more consistent page breaks for the chapters this time around. much nicer to look at and, unlike the first book, no chapters mixed together to create one mega chapter before print

we start off from where we last saw the spindrift, speeding away from the giant city they Did Not Firebomb, as well as getting a definitive time for how long they've been stranded already (6 days), including a throwaway reference to a future episode (s2 ep 13 land of the lost) with the Sea of Storms kinda (steve mentions a sea with no name because no man has sailed it)

aside from a nice little recap about the situation (same as earth BUT BIG?!) the narrative admits that neither human nor giant actually know particularly a lot about each other outside of Both Wrong Size And Both Dangerous To The Other

a nice reminder that they, in fact, cannot stay in the air forever (the battery only has so much charge and needs 2x as long to charge in the first place) and will need to land eventually

ruminations once more on how earth would react to alien critters in a spaceship that could turn off all of earth's power in an instant and how unpopular they would be for it, aka the situation the spindrift currently finds itself in at the moment

steve's plan for the moment is to land on an uninhabited island, hope to thrombeldinbar that the giant's radar can't pick them up at the moment, and basically lay low by avoiding using their radio and electricity in the hopes that the giants think they showed up, caused damage, and then fucked off again. which should be easy because, as stated on the last book, the giants don't have certain things like skyscrapers and planes

betty clocking steve for the bad liar he is actually works really well, especially when my version has these 3 (4, technically -rebecca, a new character, who missed the flight-) as a regular/established team for flights, so of course they'd know each other to the point they know when the other(s) are full of shit. additionally, dan knows when to stop asking questions when steve has something in mind

steve still being cautious even when it looks like they're in the clear for the moment because he's a firm believer in finagle's law aka murphy's law aka if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment. also i learned there's an alternative name(s) to murphy's law

learning from their past experiences already, by staying in the ship after landing and waiting for their microphones to pick up something and also just waiting for daylight a+++

there's something scurrying about the ship they can't make out yet (i mean, we can, we read the opening blurb before the book began) and they are SMARTLY waiting to find out when there's, again, daylight to see shit by

took them awhile but they're back to describing the rest of the crew at least

whatever the strange (to them, not us, probably) creature that keeps PITTER PATTERing along the ship can't be ascertained even when they turn the lights off and try to see it in the moonlight (bad for the spindrift, good for the plot!)

turns out to be the spider we were (fore)warned about and they only discover it when valerie keeps shouting she's not scared and lights a cigarette defiantly

The Bad: steve people name shit all the time even if they haven't actually traversed it because you still need to name it to reference it "oh it's the forbidden forest" or "oh it's the treacherous sea of doom" etc etc etc so people can tell other people it exists even if they haven't been there themselves

dan, i hate to disagree with you, in fact it hurts to agree with aggro!steve, but sometime's a bluff is the only plan and you just roll with it

steve shut the absolute fuck up and let the rest of the crew have this victory for a little while. ya'll have been stuck on the planet almost a week already and betty is trying to make sure no one despairs too much

yeah ok i'm liking the spindrift needing to operate 100% as a spaceship less and less. aside from the fact it takes precious time (and pages) describing how they have to continuously tilt to launch and land just doesn't make sense, especially in case of emergencies. if the spindrift had limited flight capability while on earth, they'd need some way to land safely without relying on the "space" part of their spaceship. it's like not equipping a regular jet plane with flotation devices because you expect it to always be in the air

so this is more of a "bridget knows jack shit about science" but i'm gonna pin a question about how often they should be recharging their atomic battery, mainly when the current charge isn't low enough to warrant it, because wouldn't that make the battery weaker over time since it's "trained" to think it needs to charge more despite its capacity being at a certain level?

oh absolutely fuck off NOW you describe mark as a business tycoon when the last book it was nothing but how he's an astronomer?

look i get you have to describe the spider face as like, gruesome and scary, but there's also like...going overboard with it too

"it was only a spider" FUCK OFF YOU JUST DESCRIBED IT AS "DEMONIAC HATRED INCARNATE" 2 SECONDS AGO YOU DON'T GET TO BE CASUAL ABOUT IT NOW

Salvageable: 25% maybe

the spider crawling along the ship is actually something that could've occurred often enough on the show, especially when they were camped in one spot for a good chunk of the show (excluding the 2 or 3 times the ship was carried off by someone and returned to the same general spot before episode's end) and the nearby wildlife would grow so used to the spindrift it would either become a known place to avoid or to crawl over. such a thing would also be on betty's "chores" list either as a daily or weekly task, clearing spider webs or shooing away critters. it just makes sense both in the maintaining a safe environment aspect and the getting used to what the crew can or can't handle wildlife-wise aspect (build the crew's confidence by smacking lizards in the face on a daily basis)

honestly now that i'm thinking about it, considering how long the tv!crew were stranded as well as in one spot for like 80% of the series, i'm surprised they didn't attempt some kind of garden for themselves. even if they couldn't grow something substantial their size, they still could've cultivated herbs or flowers or something to supplement their diet