It is time for The Ultraman Episode 36: The Snow Queen from Outer Space!
We’re in for another standalone episode after finishing up the two parter from last week and it is a good one.
The episode opens up in the Japan Alps, where an extreme cold front has made the temperature drop a ridiculous amount, so much so that a rescue team was sent to a village several days ago but hasn’t arrived yet. Several villagers head out to find it and discover the truck frozen solid–along with the rescuers inside it. The men see a strange woman with a wolf standing in the snow and run off.
At the village, Hikari and Mutsumi are investigating the extreme cold when the men come in talking about a snow queen. The Science Defense Squad members don’t believe there is a snow queen but Hikari seems to consider it. They go out for a cross-country ski to investigate before the rest of the team arrives and Hikari hears a wolf and heads towards it. In a cave, he sees the snow queen and the wolf, but when Mutsumi appears, the apparition disappears before she can see it too.
Captain Gondo and the rest of the SDS arrive where Hikari and Mutsumi tell him about the snow queen. He seems afraid of the notion, which adds some needed levity considering people are being frozen to death. The weather team reports strange sound waves coming from the mountain so they go to check it out. When they get there (on snow mobiles this time), the weather team’s snow trucks have been frozen solid, just like the others. Hikari hears something again and runs off on his snowmobile and finds Darantulas, which is nightmare of a creature being an alien spider with wings. As if a spider wouldn’t be bad enough on its own!
Also, it can shoot beams of ice from its eyes and has freezing breath. So you know, a friendly spider.
It attacks and freezes the snow mobile but Hikari jumps to safety and runs for it. He sees the wolf again and follows it down a tunnel to a space ship. Inside is the snow queen, who is actually an alien named Noa. She explains she is from another planet that was dealing with an expanding sun, so her scientist father was working on a freezing technology to control the temperature of her burning world. Unfortunately, a spider got into the device and mutated into Darantulas, going out of control and killing her father. He gave Noa the Super Magma medallion, which was designed to help Ultraman kill the monster before they even knew the monster would be created, which is kind of amazing.
Noa gives the medallion to Hikari, who promises to give it to Ultraman, not letting in on the secret that he is Ultraman. Then he heads out to help fight the monster, which the SDS has already engaged in combat in the Maddock and their fighters.
Will the medallion be enough to help Ultraman fight off the monster? Will Japan’s temperatures return to normal? You better believe it!
This was a fun episode. There’s something about snowbound episodes of shows that end up being really creepy. You have the specter of a snow queen running around throwing a supernatural pall over everything, and then there’s a horrific looking spider doing its own damage to add to the creep factor. I enjoy the bait and switch too where you think the snow queen might be responsible for the storm but she was just looking for help in stopping it but nobody would answer her telepathic summons except for Hikari.
The monster design is good too. You don’t need to go crazy with a spider as the base and they didn’t. They added horns and some wings with a web pattern on them and boom, nightmare-fuel. The only thing missing was it shooting some ice webs. Top-tier monster.
We also got an upgrade for Ultraman in the episode, too! It lets him shoot some magma balls but doesn’t change his appearance at all. Hikari had the medallion at the end of the episode so he could always use it again, though it is limited but needing exposure to sunlight. It will be interesting to see if he does in terms of continuity or if it is a one and done. I’m betting on the latter but I do like it when new abilities are added and keep getting used.
That’s all for this installment. See you next time for the next installment, Ultra Fans!
