Oh, bother. I forgot to weigh myself before breakfast, so we’ll have to exclude today…

A rather annoying business executive riding in the back of his rather expensive car phones a minion and tells him to collect some paperwork from his flat while he’s on the way to catch a train. The minion gets to the extremely expensive apartment, which is filled with lots of bizarre modern art. He’s particularly impressed with the newest piece, which we recognise as a strange sparkly thing anomaly. He calls his boss and mentions how cool it is, which surprises the boss as he hasn’t actually bought anything lately.  When the minion’s phone is dragged into the anomaly, he follows it into some future location where a nasty looking fungus spits spores into his face. He staggers back, coughs up some spores and is then dragged back into the anomaly, which closes.

At the ARC, we find that Connor is sleeping in the office, since Abby has her little brother staying with her. He’s accompanied by two cute little Diictodons that missed going back through an anomaly a few weeks back. One of them gets loose and this could be a bit of a problem….

Meanwhile, that annoying excutive type, having given up on his minion, has gone to his flat to pick up the paperwork and a good dose of fungal spores. Well, he didn’t plan on getting those, but got them anyway.  And off he goes to catch his train, getting increasingly unwell and with blotches of fungus growing all over him…

And then the security alarm goes off at the ARC. Connor thinks it’s his escaped pet getting somewhere it shouldn’t, but it turns out to be Danny Quinn, making an unorthodox application for a job. While Lester tries to handle that situation, creepy Christine turns up, asking about the mysterious artifact, and trying to get Lester to accept her minion, Captain Wilder as Cutter’s replacement. And while Lester denies all knowledge of the artifact and declines her kind offer, it’s found that the anomaly detector is offline due to a slight case of cable chewage. Once that’s fixed, the gang are alerted to the recent presence of the anomaly we saw earlier.

At the flat, the fungus is discovered by the team, and Connor is given the job of analysing it. And it’s nasty, virulent stuff. Which is made very clear when one of Christine’s minions, who’s been having a bit of a snoop around, touches it and collapses. Connor and Danny go into the room in full biohazard kit, and find that the victim has been pretty much eaten by the stuff. While they’re looking elsewhere, the apparently dead man rises and is revealed to have transformed into a nasty mobile fungal wossname. And while that’s happening at the ARC, there’s a chase going on at St Pancras, where our increasingly mouldy executive is feeling most unwell. He heads for some conveniently dark and damp tunnels.

Connor and Danny leave the big fungal monster in the lab and decide that something needs to be done about it, what with it contaminating anything it touches. Connor tries raising the temperature in the lab, which eventually leads to the big fungus exploding quite messily.

Down in the tunnels, the executive has morphed into another fungus monster. Danny dashes to the site with flamethrowers to deal with it.  But at the ARC, things go a wee bit wrong again, when Connor’s pet manages to get into the lab. Connor goes in without putting the full biohazard kit, and finds that the fungus isn’t dead. It’s just spored. And the nasty stuff is growing rapidly all around him. He suggests lowering the temperature, which does manage to kill the fungus, without quite killing Connor.

Realising that flames might be a bad idea, Danny manages to get the fungal creature into the back of a security van which he takes back to the ARC, where the gang have prepared enough kit to freeze the main room. Lots of fun follows, with Jenny having a close encounter of the fungal kind, which leads to her needing to be revived after being slightly frozen. But at least the fungus was destroyed.

Lester announces, much to Christine’s annoyance, that he’s appointing Danny as Cutter’s replacement. And Jenny decides it’s time to leave, and off she goes.

Any doubts about how the show would continue without its original star can, I think, be safely dismissed. It’s coming along nicely, with some interesting secret plotting going on, and the ongoing mystery of the artifact developing nicely…

Oh good, Guy’s back and he’s stopped moping around and is back to being extremely nasty, which is just the way we like him. It seems that he’s persuaded Prince John that all the bad stuff is the Sheriff’s fault and that Guy is the guy to get things done. So John’s provided him with a load of elite troops[1], tents and a weapon that will sort out Robin Hood once and for all, which is just as well, because that’s what John wants him to do, and John’s the kind of chap who’s likely to get upset if he doesn’t get what he wants.

While Guy’s getting his plans together, Robin’s busy rescuing a young woman called Isabella, who claims not to be the aristocratic type she appears, but a decoy. Apparently she her mistress has run away from her unpleasant husband, who’s sent the usual bunch of ineffective guards to bring her back.

Guy’s new soldiers manage to herd Robin and his friends through the forest to where Guy is waiting with his weapon, which turns out to be a singularly mangy and oddly limping, if hungry, lion[2]. Isabella comes in handy, as she has some bags of mustard, which make handy chemical weapons. The lion, Guy and his troops are all half-blinded by the mustard, and everyone gets away, at which point they notice that Little John isn’t with them. How they’d managed to notice the absence of such a big man for so long is one of those questions that will probably never be answered.

The reason John isn’t with them is that while they were all being chased through the forest, John met up with Bertha and her gladiators. Bertha’s a distinctly dodgy woman accompanied by a bunch of kids she’s “rescued” and some big blokes who perform staged fights which Bertha takes bets on. Due to a slight misunderstanding, John damages one of her fighters, and agrees to help her…

Bertha and her entourage reach Nottingham, where we learn that she’s an old acquaintance of the Sheriff, who doesn’t seem at all pleased to see her, though he does see her as an opportunity to raise some of the money Prince John still wants. He demands 200 Crowns from her takings. Pointing out that she won’t make that much, she offers 100 instead, plus one dead outlaw – she’ll fix a fight and ensure John ends up dead. Nice lady.

Robin goes to Guy’s camp, where comedy ensues involving the soldiers being trapped in the enclosure with the lion, Isabella revealing that she’s Guy’s sister, and that she really doesn’t want to go back to the husband he sent her to when she was thirteen. Assuming that this was an honest mistake on his part, she’s a wee bit upset when he makes it quite clear that he didn’t really care what happened to her, because he got a good price for her.

John’s fight to the death goes a bit wrong when one of Bertha’s adopted kids, whose life John saved earlier manages to warn him that he’s going to be killed, which makes him a wee bit annoyed. Lots of fighting follows, the Sheriff reveals that Bertha is in the habit of not only fixing fights but also selling kids into slavery, and Guy comes back to Nottingham in a suitable state of dejection.

It’s all complete nonsense, but still a lot of fun. Things should look up next week, when Prince John comes to Nottingham…

[1] Black armour, a nice line in shield wall tricks and black masks. Or maybe it’s black face paint across the eyes.
[2] Guy seems to be sharing the Sheriff’s Bond Villain habit. Anyone vaguely sane would just have shot the gang with crossbows or some such, but Guy has to go for the dramatic bit….

• Time to start catching up on last week’s TV. Normal posting service will resume tomorrowish. #
• Note: toasted plain bagels make good burger buns so long as you don’t drop too much through the holes. #

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