Review of 'Project Blue Book' 2.1

The pulpy science fiction that is Project Blue Book was back on the History Channel last Tuesday for the debut of its second season. I was kidnapped by a UFO so didn't get a chance to watch and review until now -- no, only kidding, I was really up in Boston last Tuesday, for a radio show in which my new album Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time was debuted. That's true -- listen to this -- and I promise everything else I say in this review will be true, at least as far as I know it.

Here's the set-up, inherited from season one: Dr. Hynek (very loosely based on the real person) and Captain Quinn (totally fictitious) are the essence of Project Blue Book, now self-tasked with a very strange task indeed. Hynek believes flying saucers are real alien visitations. Quinn started off the first season doubting that, and moved from not so sure to pretty much believing it. But the two need to pretend that they think all the UFOs are hoaxes, so General Harding will keep them on the case of making the public believe that the UFOs are hoaxes. This is the only way Hynek and Quinn can keep on the cutting edge of this. Also, there's a gorgeous Soviet spy who is well on her way now to getting Quinn wrapped around her finger.

Episode 2.1 features Hynek, Quinn, and Harding out in Roswell, New Mexico, in our real history the continuing focus of all kinds of UFO investigations. Of course, in Project Blue Book, the UFOs were and are really from outer space, or least not of this Earth. And Harding wants to keep this quiet. He "confesses" to Hynek and Quinn that he indeed covered something up at Roswell a few years back. But it wasn't an alien spacecraft, it was some kind of new weapon that we could use against the Soviets, so of course he needed to keep it secret.

The continuing tension is how long can Hynek and Quinn keep their mouths shut, when they both know that Harding was lying in his confession? I thought last year, and still think now, that Harding himself might well be an alien. I mean, he looks like an extraterrestrial, you can't believe anything he says, and this series is science fiction, isn't it?