A pre-accident space vessel, the titular Pisces, returns to the Ark; the crew think they’ve only been away for ten years, but of course they’ve actually been away for four hundred. This apparently causes a known condition called “space senility” where your mind deteriorates rapidly, unless you go back out to space and remain a guest star rather than become a regular character.
This is presumably the explanation for why the Pisces‘ crew exhibit wild swings in attention and personality. The captain, Garaway, goes from saying he absolutely has to get back to his family, to taking the hero trio up for a little jaunt in the spaceship to check out the Ark’s engines, to insisting they have to get back right now because he has to see his family. Garth and Teal, a young lady who plays her role like a five-year-old in a strop, fall in love with each other, but only for a single scene, and the only way you can tell is because they both literally say “I love you” to each other at some point during it. The crew have bouts of narcolepsy for the first third of the story, then this is seemingly forgotten about for the rest of it. The two female crew members suddenly decide, in the middle of a lovely dinner with champagne and fruit, to take off and fly back to Earth, taking everyone else hostage. Nope, thinking about it, even “space senility” doesn’t cover the inconsistencies. As well as failing to explain why the hero trio are still apparently incapable of exhibiting any emotion at all.
Also, while I can believe that the Pisces’ crew might be a little bit in denial over what’s happened to them, it takes them far too long to, you know, ask the ship’s computer, something Devon figured out in five minutes despite being a primitive. It also seems like nobody’s read any of the SF about time dilation, or cracked a popular book on Einstein’s theory of relativity.
In other news, turns out our hero trio have never seen or heard of sheep. Which makes one wonder what they do for protein in Cypress Corners.
A Doctor Of Many Things 