Season 17, Episode 5 (New Year Special!)

Episode 5: Miracle Day

New Earth, in the impossibly distant future. The good people of New New York are ready to celebrate a New Year’s Day unlike any other – for this year, the Face of Boe will return to life, as announced by Mother Hame and Cassandra Unlimited^®. Will this Second Coming herald a new era of faith and hope for the galaxy?  A skeptical Lady Penelope decides to investigate…

 

This was our (slightly delayed) New Year Special. I had planned to run this last week but could not be ready in time because of various health problems which pretty much ruined my Xmas holidays… But I’m on the mend now and I intend to resume Lady Penelope’s Odyssey’s usual weekly play schedule (fingers crossed and all that).

This episode finally brought forth an event which I had planned for quite some time – namely the resurrection of the Face of Boe, whose disembodied consciousness had been hazily perceived by Penelope herself during her previous stay in New New York during season 16 (see Episode 16.11, Lady of the Future). 

Miracle Day reused much of the background information and many NPCs from this previous episode – including the faithful Mother Hame and the coldly egomaniacal Lady Cassie.  

And yes, the Face of Boe truly has returned and will undoubtedly feature in some forthcoming episodes, putting New New York in the list of Penelope’s regular destinations, along with New Camelot, Marlowe’s alternate 17^th century and a few other privileged times and places.

In actual play, the episode proved to be a very moving story, with some nifty philosophical overtones – necessity vs. free will and all that.

Its most memorable moment was, I think, the great ‘psychic communion’ scene between Penelope and the disembodied psyche (Ghost? Soul? Spirit?) of the Face of Boe.

To cut a long story short, the whole Second Coming story was actually a sham engineered by Lady Cassie: having successfully cloned the Face of Boe’s physical body (so to speak) from samples preserved in the archives of the now defunct Order of Plenitude, the corporate über-queen secretly intended to use the resurrected Face as her own puppet god, with her own mind in control of what would have essentially been a living but mindless being.

But since the very spirit (Ghost? Soul? Psyche?) of the true Face of Boe was still hovering around, she first had to imprison it in a psychic cage to prevent any unwanted interference…

Fortunately, Penelope (with the help of her psychic-and-time sensitive companion Indira) managed to establish communication with the true disembodied Face and to free it from its psychic imprisonment, enabling it to incarnate itself in the manufactured clone, thereby beating Lady Cassie at her own game. 

In the end, the Miracle did occur and the carefully constructed deception was turned into a history-defining moment of truth.

Happy new year, everyone!  😀