Fountain of Youth

Uncle Moodri shows up. This is his first appearance and it's obvious right off that he's going to be a rather "different" character.

One theme is Susan's attempt to get an ad agency job. She dresses as professionally as she possibly can, but she keeps getting rejected over and over due to her age (which is hard to compute; the aliens don't age the same way humans do, so Susan is over 60 earth-years in age but about half that in Newcomer years.)

Anyhow, the theme here is not discrimination against Newcomers; it's discrimination based on age. The agencies make numerous assumptions based on the person's age, and they are assuming that Susan would not be able to work well with them, that she is too old and her views would not fit the needs of their customers.

The end result is that Susan tells sort of a fib (technically, on a certain planet, Uncle Moodri points out, she is only 28 of those planet's years in age), and she dresses in a sexier, more revealing outfit. The combination of those two allows her to get the proverbial foot in the door.

The other theme revolves around this guy, the evil doctor. He's taking a gland out of Tenctonese patients and implanting it into humans, then killing the alien patients. The gland helps a human regress physically in age and, theoretically, could provide the "fountain of youth" of the title.

This, also, ties into the prejudice against aging, and shows that some people will do anything, including murder, in order to try to avoid aging. Sikes destroys the data the doctor had gathered on his experiments with the gland in hopes no one else will try to do the same thing. It is interesting to note that, at the end of World War II, the U.S. agreed not to prosecute many Japanese who would have been considered war criminals, and who had performed some very, very terrible experiments on humans, in exchange for the data they gathered from their experiments. This was somewhat similar to how many of the German scientists who worked on the V-2 and other rocket programs were not prosecuted, but were actually hired by the government to work for us. The moral like that Sikes drew in the story was not followed by our own "real life" government.

Thus, the show, continuing its battle against prejudice of all sorts, this time attacks prejudice based on aging, something which is increasingly important as the U.S. population ages.


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