Directed by Kazuho Mitsuta. Written by Shinichi Ichikawa. Airdate April 21, 1968.
Similar to “Return to the North!”, this episode looks at the life of an Ultra Guard member outside of the day-to-day work of defending Earth from invaders. We learn that Soga is engaged; his fiancée, Saeko Nambu (Sanae Kitabayashi), is a sophomore at Kyonan University. The other UG members tease Soga by calling him Soga-kun, the familiar form of address that Saeko uses with him. This is a welcome touch of humor and lightness among the Ultra Guard, who rarely have the easy camaraderie of the Science Patrol in Ultraman.
However, Soga’s engagement to Saeko is a minor part of the episode, not its centerpiece, which makes it weaker than “Return to the North!”, where Furuhashi’s relationship with his mother drove the drama. Soga having a fiancée is only a hook to get the UG closer to one of her professors, physics-department head Niwa (Masahiko Naruse), who helped the university launch a research satellite into orbit. TDF intelligence discovers that Niwa is an imposter — which in Ultraseven-speak means he’s an alien — but they don’t know the purpose of his satellite.
Although Soga gets the most involved in the action of anyone in the Ultra Guard, he isn’t the episode’s protagonist. The real main character is Teibun Ichinomiya (Tomonori Kenmochi), one of Professor Niwa’s advanced students and Saeko’s senpai (senior comrade). Ichinomiya intensely admires Niwa. He’s also aware that Niwa is indeed an alien, Alien Prote. Niwa helped Ichinomiya build a teleportation machine when the rest of the scientific community brushed him off, so he cannot believe the professor is plotting an invasion.
According to episode writer Shinichi Ichikawa, he based Ichinomiya on himself: a man struggling for recognition from his seniors. Naturally, a self-insert figure would drift to center stage. But does this work? Ichinomiya is an interesting character with several good lines: “You hear ‘alien’ and you think ‘invader’? […] Scholars on Earth ignored my electrical transmission teleportation theory, and only that alien appreciated it.” But his discovery that Niwa is a hostile invader feels a step removed from the center of the story, too distant to really grip the viewer.
A major part of the problem is the unnecessary step of introducing Ichinomiya through Saeko, a character we’ve never met before, and having his key scene explaining his motivations happen between them. Why not make Ichinomiya a friend of Soga’s and let them have a big scene together? That would add a directness to the drama it lacks with Saeko acting as an intermediary.
The episode overall has a slow pace, a surprising approach for director Mitsuta, who just took us on a frantic car race and through a white-knuckler in a super blizzard. He still has his signature interest in character drama, which helps give poignancy to Ichinomiya’s story. The scenes just don’t click and pop the way they usually do with Mitsuta. The episode is never boring — the performance from Masahiko Naruse as Niwa is too strong for his villain scenes to lag — but it feels remote. The final payoff with Ichinomiya needs to land hard, but it doesn’t.
On the other hand, the fight between Seven and Alien Prote on the Kyonan Campus is a stand-out. It matches the slower story pace, but in an intelligent and interesting way. Alien Prote has a superficial resemblance to the classic Ultraman villain Mefilas; like Mefilas, he relies on deception and trickery in combat rather than raw force. Alien Prote uses invisibility, teleportation, and multiple projections to give Seven a difficult confrontation. The nighttime setting and the unusual university buildings, such as a large pyramid structure built in the Brutalist style, give the fight a unique feel that lingers after the plot details fade away. I had few memories of the episode when I rewatched it for this review, but I recalled every beat of the Prote–Seven fight.
The finale occurs in space, with Seven and the UG facing Alien Prote’s spaceship and the spy satellite used to gather intel for yet another planned invasion of Earth. The effects in the space scenes are impressive and moody, but they still have the slower pace of the rest of the episode.
As a small bonus, the way Dan transforms is handled differently: he jumps out of sight during a fight and then bounces back as a human-sized Ultraseven. No need to see him use the Ultra Eye. That’s a nice dash of variety.
Saeko vanishes from the show after this, so we never learn whether she and Soga got married. The sequel series of television and direct-to-video specials, Heisei Ultraseven, doesn’t mention Soga at all, so we’ll have to stick with head canon about his future romantic life.
I’ve already written the best summation of my feelings on “The Earthling All Alone”: it didn’t stick in my memory except for the strange and well-crafted Ultra fight.
Rating: Average
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