Hell in a Handbasket

That is a pretty big muzzle flash! And you can tell by the odd spark appearing on the robot that our hero managed to hit it in the eye, or where an eye would be if it was so equipped. Pretty good shooting considering that he was indulging in panic fire, spray-and-pray tactics. But perfect shot placement is one of the advantages of having a special effects department in your corner.

Shooting the robot's eye or not, our hero eventually runs dry without doing any noticeable damage to the machine. He looks curiously at his handgun, notes the way the slide is locked back on an empty magazine, and prepares himself for death.

The scene is too dark to make out many details, but it appears to be a standard autoloading handgun with some sort of can attached in front of the trigger guard. Lucky thing that we get to see the gun used during daylight in an episode entitled Fragged.

Ah, that is better! Now we can see that the gun doesn't have a hammer, which means that it must use an internal striker of some sort to set the primer off. There are also three levers on the left side of the gun. Probably the safety, slide release, and a take down lever.

My regular readers all probably know which make and model of gun this is by now, but let us take a look at a front view before we spill the beans.

That is a FN FiveSeven handgun, a new design that is chambered to fire the tiny 5.7x28mm cartridge. The gun itself is seriously underpowered for most military or law enforcement use, although the small bullet is supposed to provide superior penetration. There are some who like the gun, but it has yet to catch on. (Click here for a range report on the handgun by Mr. Completely.)

So the handgun used in the show is a modern, off-the-shelf pistol that everyone just pretends is futuristic. But what about that can that is hanging in front of the trigger guard? What the heck is that?

We have seen that device before. It was part of the original Colonial sidearm from season one, which was a .357 Magnum revolver which had been made to look exotic by having a specially made metal sleeve clipped around it. The can in front of the trigger guard, though, doesn't look like anything I've seen on a handgun before. We can clearly see one in the screen shot below.

So they took the can off of the first prop, and just attached it to a regular handgun. But what is it supposed to do?

In Valley of Darkness, it becomes pretty clear that the can is supposed to be a single-shot rocket launcher. In fact, one of the major plot points during the ep is that the heroes are woefully short of "explosive rounds". Considering that these rounds are the only thing that can stop a battle robot, and also considering that the entire show is about a war between the last remnants of humanity and a genocidal race of robots, it seems to me that it would be completely insane to fail to provide plenty of these explosive rounds to every single soldier with a weapon that can fire them. But then there wouldn't be much dramatic tension if they did that.

Obviously, the prop doesn't actually fire little rocket propelled grenades. But we do get to very briefly see one of these "explosive rounds" as the character of Apollo, played by actor Jamie Bamber, frantically reloads his pop gun as a killer robot rushes upon him to deliver the final blow.

Is it just me, or does that look like a teensy tiny 50mm mortar round?

Oh, well. Whatever it is, it certainly wouldn't be able to produce the dramatic explosions shown in the series.

I wonder if sales of the FN FiveSeven increased since they started to use them in the show? It wouldn't surprise me if that proved to be the case.