Episode 7.6
Having set his chronodrive to the maximum to escape the Coronavirus, Alan has arrived at two years next October to find that all of the Galaxy’s dilithium crystals are beyond their sell by, best before and even use by dates and thus everyone has wisely thrown them away and is drifting uselessly in space (oh, and civilisation has thus collapsed). Some viewers might be thinking ‘What a good thing that Alan was an early adopter of the alternative Mushroom Drive’. But if so they must have forgotten that (in episode 3.1) Alan ‘burnt out’ the necessary enslaved giant space tardigrade, more in weary disbelief than anything else. In fact, Alan’s saucer is propelled in accordance with a theory just as silly. The cosmos really comprises lots of threads of wool vibrating in sympathy to something or other (love?). Thus, by capturing some cosmic threads and putting them under unnatural strain in the Saucer’s Wool-Drive Alan achieves no less narrative plausibility than the conventional dilithium crystal story.