Who among us can forget that terrible day, 9/13/1999, when the massive nuclear waste dump (it seemed like a good idea at the time...) on the Moon blew up, tearing the Moon out of Earth's orbit and hurling it right out of our solar system? For 15 years now we on Earth have had to do without tides, moonlit walks, werewolves, and so much else. And nobody knows what happened to those 311 unfortunates who were stationed on Moonbase Alpha when the accident happened.

But seriously, a lot of IMWANers of a certain age will remember this mid-1970s syndicated science fiction series. For all the goofiness of its premise of turning the Moon into an impromptu star ship, "Space: 1999" is something of a milestone for science fiction TV. Sci-fi shows weren't all that common in the decade between "Star Trek" and "Star Wars." Full-bore space adventure series were almost unheard of. If you wanted that kind of thing you were pretty much limited to "Trek" reruns, "Dr. Who" and "Space: 1999." The latter had easily the highest production values of any sci-fi series that ran before the networks started trying to grab onto "Star Wars'" coattails at the very end of the '70s.

I was quite young when it first ran in syndication and have only a few memories of viewing it then. I've got some more of a scattering of 1970s merchandising tie-ins---toys, coloring books, an illustrated juvenile collection of stories set on Moonbase Alpha, etc. When I was in college I got to watch reruns of some of the episodes that were shown late on Saturday nights on the Arkansas Educational Television Network (It was okay for a PBS station to run the show, since it was produced in Britain). Now, over two decades after I last saw it, I've gotten several first-season episodes on DVD. Let's see what they're like....

Collision Course
The crew of Moonbase Alpha work to prevent a collision between the Moon and another planet--but is acting to prevent the collision really the right thing to do?

Some reviews of "Space: 1999" that I've read over the years have complained about how the scripts often didn't make much sense. They must have had this episode in mind. It begins with an Eagle nuking an asteroid that's in danger of hitting the Moon. Its destruction reveals a full-sized planet that's also in danger of colliding. Since they don't have enough boom available to blow it up, they make plans to plant some carefully-sited charges to create a shock wave that will divert the rogue planet (In space? Where there's no medium to propagate a shock wave?) from the Moon's path. Then Commander Koenig and his Eagle are abducted by a huge spacecraft from the planet. Aboard the dusty, cobwebby interior of the ship he meets a being in the form of an elderly woman, who greets him by name and says that her people have been waiting for him for millions of years. After a vague speech liberally sprinkled with words like "eternity" and "destiny" she sends him back to Alpha.

There, dazed like a typical returned alien abductee, he is assumed to be slightly out of his head, especially when he starts raving about how they've got to call off the shock wave operation. He and a fellow abductee end up starting a brawl in mission control to prevent the countdown. The others are sure that these two madmen are about to doom them all. And then...well, one guess as to what, exactly, happens is as good as another. There's really no making heads or tails of the whole thing.

It's a shame the episode was so badly written, because from a technical perspective it's well-done. There are some good special effects and model work. The Moonbase Alpha sets are impressive in a dated, 1970s sort of way. But the episode just doesn't have all that much interest or excitement. They should have saved the script and sold it to Gene Roddenberry, so he could have used it about 10 years later on the first season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Such a goofy premise.

I remember this show in syndication, but had no memory of the premise until this thread. I remember the ship they had, because I got a big toy of it at a yard sale and it was just the right size for Star Wars figures.

The moon(!) travelled through space to different planetary systems - presumably at greater than light speed - then slowed down long enough to have an adventure before hitting warp speed again...
BUT it had Catherine Schell, so, you know.

it was originally intended to be a sequel to UFO IIRC

UFO I liked.

Space: 1999 ...not.

It's one of the few Gerry Anderson properties I've never bothered to purchase.

I loved this show as a kid. The theme music is still etched into my mind - one of the most memorable TV themes of all time, I think.

The whole "let's spoil the episode with quick cuts" thing was borrowed for the BSG revamp.

It had some amazing actors in it - usually as the 'alien menace of the week'.

Death's Other Dominion
The Moon encounters a frigid planet inhabited by a colony from Earth.

In the world of "Space: 1999" space travel evidently got underway much earlier than it did in our universe. By 1986 they were already sending an expedition of several dozen members all the way out to Uranus! Unfortunately they encountered some kind of space-time anomaly thingie that caused them to far overshoot their goal. Not only did they wind up light years away, but they went back over 800 years in time, so that they now claim to have lived that long since their accident (Or maybe Moonbase Alpha has been hurled forward in time? A space-time anomaly thingie might explain how the rogue Moon got out of the solar system so fast....). They've spent the intervening centuries on a Hoth-like ice planet, dwelling in starkly furnished ice caves, subsisting on hydroponically grown salads, discovering the secret of immortality, and occasionally venturing outside to hunt big furry critters that the viewer never sees.

For some reason the prospect of getting to spend centuries sharing such a lifestyle thrills most of the Alphans--they're all over the colonists' offer to let them join them. All except Koenig, who as in the previous episode takes a decidedly contrarian point of view against all his fellow Alphans, and mulishly refuses to reconsider. It seems that there are dissidents in the colony who don't think their version of immortality is all it's cracked up to be, and Koenig instantly adopts their point of view. He agrees to return to Alpha and submit the question to a democratic vote. The leader of the colonists goes with him to present his case. En route the issue resolves itself in a most abrupt--and gross--fashion.

The script makes only marginally more sense than in the previous episode, but this segment is much more watchable. The lavish indoor and outdoor sets of the ice planet are a feast for the eyes. The snowstorms and other special effects are excellent. Apart from the computers and similarly dated design elements, you'd be hard-pressed to tell that this episode was filmed almost forty years ago. This really was a fantastically well-produced show for its era.

The two guest stars are also a treat to watch. As Simon says, they do sometimes have some great guest stars. Brian Blessed is always interesting. The real fun, though, is watching John Shrapnel as the expedition's demented former commander--who turns out to be more sane than he seems. The performance could have been terribly over the top. Instead Shrapnel's character is oddly compelling.

It's an odd theme. It starts out with that portentous rumble of kettle drums and all--and then suddenly turns very '70s. A lot of the incidental music is quite good. I've read that most of it was recycled from earlier Gary and Sylvia Anderson shows (none of which I've ever seen).

The show was pretty popular in Canada and then it just kind of disappeared from people's consciousness. I enjoyed the show but I remember the toys based on the ships more clearly than any story line.

Gerry anderson enjoyed a good timpani rumble.

Did they ever encounter anyone friendly on their journey?

IIRC any alien species or other travelers they met always ended up wanting to kill them or seize control of Moonbase Alpha. Didn't have that optimistic view of the future that Star Trek went for.

Also -- given the rate at which members of the crew were killed per episode I am pretty surprised anyone was left by the end of the series.

Even back then, I thought it was a lame premise. I liked the way the show looked, IIRC, but the very idea a nuclear waste dump could blow up, let alone propel the moon out of orbit, let alone hurl it to other worlds - it was just so mind numbingly bad you could hardly call it science fiction. We couldn't do anything like that even if we tried.

I got the complete UFO series two or three years ago.
I thought it held up pretty well.

All I really remember about Space 1999 is that Estes used the ship, essentially, as a big nose cone to make it fly.

Full Circle
A search party seeking a vanished survey team encounters belligerent cavemen--who are not what they seem.

The wandering Moon encounters star systems with potentially habitable worlds at surprisingly frequent intervals. They are only within Eagle spacecraft range for a few days as they pass by. Standard procedure is to send down an away team to check out the new world. Assuming it's a good colonization prospect, the Alphans have a pre-prepared plan called "Operation Exodus," which basically amounts to loading everybody and everything they can carry into their Eagles and migrating to the new planet before the Moon gets out of range. Obviously they don't have a lot of time before they make their judgement call, and something always seems to go awry during the exploration phase.

In this case they meet cavemen--highly stereotypical cavemen who dress in roughly-butchered skins, wear shaggy hair and beards, wave spears and stone axes, and have very bad dispositions and no language beyond grunts and screams. Were I a Cro-Magnon (the Alphans use that term to describe them), I think I'd probably feel pretty offended by this portrayal. There are a couple of moments where the primitives come across as believably "other" in their actions and reactions. Mostly, though, they're too comic-bookish to credit. It's also hard to swallow what we learn about their origins:



This episode has relatively little in the way of special effects, but there's one that caught my attention. In one scene a caveman gets hold of an Alphan's "comlock." These are the little futuristic walkie-talkies, with built-in miniature two-way TV screens. I've read elsewhere that these incorporated actual miniature TVs that were available as a novelty back in the 1970s. Shots of someone looking at a comlock screen had to take care to conceal the fact that the props had a coaxial cable running out the other end to bring in the signal for the screen. In the scene we see closeups of the caveman's fingers touching the screen, turning it around in his hand, etc. It's nicely acted--much more subtle than most of the caveman scenes--but what really caught my attention was the technical aspects of the shot. The prop, the screen and its image, and the actor's fingers are all in good focus. That little shot much have taken a lot of painstaking planning and set-up to pull off. I doubt any other TV show prior to the post-"Star Wars" era would have put that much time and effort into something like that. This really was a remarkably well-produced show that put a lot into making its futuristic technology convincing. If only they'd had a better premise and scripts!

There are some impressive cave sets, but much of this episode--unlike previous stories--takes place out-of-doors, with extensive location filming. The locations are shot in a pleasant, wooded area, quite unlike the barren canyons and gavel pits where sci-fi alien planet exteriors of the period were usually shot. Either that's another example of the producers' efforts to be different, or there were no disused quarries available for filming in Britain at that time--probably because "Dr. Who's" location scouts got there first.

I found myself wondering at the end why the Alphans abandoned any efforts to settle this salubrious-looking environment, given that the caveman problem seemed to have a fairly simple solution. I suppose the whole business used up so much of their limited available survey time that they decided they couldn't take a chance on finding any more unwelcome surprises. Plus the adventure left several prominent Alphans with what must have been some very embarrassing memories.

End of Eternity
The Alphans encounter an asteroid containing a being in suspended animation--and discover too late that it is a prison.

Balor, the being in question, has near-giant stature, superhuman strength, and mind-control powers, and also a very nasty disposition. He's essentially Darth Vader minus the mask and scarred face--not at all what the Alphans need stalking the corridors of their base. Evidently in their alternate universe people aren't still watching movies like "The Thing From Another World" by the end of the 20th century, or they'd surely have known better than to take an alien being out of suspended animation. Nothing good EVER comes of trying a thing like that!

While the plot's a bit hackneyed, it doesn't have as many of the gigantic holes seen in the previous episodes, and the Alphans' reactions make more sense here. There are a couple of rather interestingly "artsy" silent scenes. And the climax, where they find a way to get rid of Balor, actually generates some suspense, even though I knew exactly what was about to happen.

I knew that because I had seen this particular episode twice before--once on PBS in college, and once as a child during the show's initial run in the mid-1970s. In fact, for some reason I have more childhood memories of this episode than of any other. A couple of times while watching it I had that feeling one sometimes gets when watching something one remembers from childhood--that feeling of suddenly, for just a moment, experiencing something of those childhood emotions at seeing it for the first time, of seeing it through a child's eyes again. Little though I watched of "Space: 1999" as a child, it did make a lasting impression.

The scene that made the biggest impression was the one where a crew member, acting under Balor's mind control, "flies" a model airplane around like a kid, complete with "airplane" noises--and then suddenly turns and viciously assaults Koenig with it. The scene is shot from Koenig's point of view, as the deranged crewman jabs the model into his face again and again. It's a horrifying scene, and I can recall being both frightened and absolutely baffled by it as a child. In the following scene there's a shot of a puddle of blood left over from the assault (but Koenig, thanks to Balor's intervention, has already gotten better). That was a surprisingly bloody shot for a 1970s TV show. "Space: 1999" had several such moments in its run.

I liked the show when I saw it as a kid, but didn't see the pilot until years later on YouTube. Seriously, that has to be the most ridiculous premise in the history of science fiction television, and that's saying a LOT. Even if, IF an explosion on the moon was enough to dislodge it from its orbit with the Earth and NOT destroy it, there's no way it would be traveling fast enough NOT to evacuate Moon Base Alpha's residents to Earth. But once you ignore that, there was some damn good stories on that show.

BTW, the bald guy who was the genius doctor on the show was Canadian (can't remember his name) and I saw footage of him on YouTube talking about one of Quebec's important votes. (I think it may have been the sovreignty vote in the late 80's.)

I can't remember the name, but there was some book on Amazon which had a more interesting premise. A comet which has a hundred times the mass and ten times the speed of other comets is headed toward the moon and will destroy. Nobody knows how bad it will be on Earth when what is left of the moon starts to rain down, but in any event the moon has to be evacuated. Unfortunately, it can't be done quickly Remember how in Titanic everybody was waiting for lifeboats that there was not enough of? Same deal, here but there's one interesting catch. The Vice-President of the United States is on the Moon and he has promised that he won't get off before everybody else. Of course as the deadline for the asteroid to strike gets closer, he tries to figure out a way to worm out of his promise.

The book is Moonfall by Jack McDevitt

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061051128/?tag=imwan-20

Of course, instead of finding that book, maybe I should read instead Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress which imagines lunar colonists recreating the American Revolution by declaring independence from Earth.