Space Job #4 // Review
First Officer Masht is trying to put things together for a memorial service for Sheridan. There really isn’t a good place for it. The spacecraft isn’t big enough to have a standard place for everyone to get together. It’s suggested that maybe he get shot out into space from the torpedo bay. (She saw it in an old movie once. It might work.) Things are about to wrap up for the crew in Space Job #4. Writer David A. Goodman concludes a charmingly funny science fiction space series that is transported to the page by artist Álvaro Sarraseca. Color resonates the depth and shadow courtesy of Jordi Escuin Llorach.
The Captain is expected to deliver a eulogy. Of course...the Captain doesn’t want to deliver a eulogy, as he didn’t even know Sheridan. It’s going to be a pretty tense end for everyone involved. The Captain would prefer to simply fire Masht, but as it turns out, she may have some relationship with someone of great power. So the only question is: if she’s as wealthy as some sort of deity, why is she working as a first officer on some tiny ship? Answers to this question and more may be revealed before the end of the first arc of the series.
They’re using a torpedo as a coffin. They can’t quite fit Sheridan into it so that he can be shot out into space. There’s a reason for that, and it’s every bit as tolerably humorous as much of the rest of the humor in the series. Goodman has a pretty good handle on what’s funny. He almost does a pretty good job of steering the script in the general direction of the humor in question. He almost even manages to nearly get there on occasion.
There’s a serene silence about the art that occasionally approaches a kind of beauty. Then the lifeless, floating corpse of Sheridan smushes up against an external camera, and it just looks kind of silly. Thankfully, Sarraseca isn’t trying to punch up the humor with unduly weird rendering. It’s all quite realistically rendered with some beautiful shots of space hanging out in the background of everything. The attempt to give space a sort of...day-to-day working atmosphere kind of feels like it’s been attained throughout the series at the expense of steering away from a warm central personality, though. It’s a workplace sitcom, though, and...workplaces aren’t always bursting at the seams with personality, so at least that much seems...accurate.
Space exploration fantasy has been around for well over half a century. It’s been really, really successful as well. Any sub-genre of pop fiction with the kind of success of Star Trek and Babylon 5 and so on has also garnered a whole bunch of spoofery and parody. Over the decades, there have been many, many space adventure comedies. Space Job is one of those. It kind of feels like it’s been an attempt to fuse Star Trek with The Office. Or maybe not. I don’t know.
