Space: 1999 - Set Two (Episodes 7-12)
There are times when I ask myself just what I could have been thinking when I embarked on a Space: 1999 episode guide. My hazy memories of the show were far fonder before I invested in multiple DVD box sets and got reacquainted with the series. But it is an important and, in hindsight, useful part of SFTV history. I’ll explain more in a bit. First let’s talk about the episodes included in this 2-disc set.
When you’ve got a DVD set that opens up with an episode featuring Peter Cushing with a long grey wig (did he borrow it from his good friend Christopher Lee?), you’re either watching Space: 1999 again, or you smoked something before watching one of the Hammer Frankenstein movies.
The episode in question is Missing Link, a bizarre take on that favorite sci-fi chestnut, “character A goes through some ordeal or adventure entirely in his mind while characters B through Z try to get him to wake up in the real world.” Though the first half of the show is interesting, it soon descends into Kirk-gets-the-babe terrority, only substituting Martin Landau for William Shatner. If anything, the most interesting element of Missing Link is that, after all this time, no clear line of command succession has been made official if Koenig is incapacitated or killed - you’d think Paul Morrow, as Koenig’s second-in-command on the moonbase, would be it, probably leaning heavily on Victor Bergman. But hey, Alan Carter can bust the heads of half the moonbase’s security force with his bare hands, so who’s to say he can’t step in and take over? Nothing seems to have been set in stone, which makes for some really testy padding scenes - and a bit of implausibility. In the situation the Alphans are in, you’d think this sort of matter would already have been decided and formalized.
Things get significantly weirder (and better) in Guardian Of Piri, which, while it’s yet another workhorse storyline (everyone’s mind has been taken over except for the commander), has some distinctly fun moments. Though it may not have been intended to be one of those fun moments, Barbara Bain’s bubbleheaded laugh as a possessed Dr. Russell is priceless - and a hell of a lot more appealing than the doctor’s usual angsty personality. There’s an interesting, but unexplored, bit of character development as we get a hint that Koenig, having lost his crew, seems to consider turning to drug-induced oblivion. By Space: 1999 standards, the mass exodus launch from Moonbase Alpha is a special effects tour de force, and we get to see future series regular Catherine Schell minus the overdone disco-era makeup she donned as Maya in season 2. It’s actually an interesting and fun little hour with a nifty plot twist at the end.
This disc closes with Force Of Life, a bizarre take on the well-worn alien possession chestnut, guest starring an amazingly young Ian “Lovejoy” McShane - good God, the man had that incurable case of five-o’-clock-shadow all the way back in his twenties! - as the hapless, red-shirt-ish technician who gets taken over. The motivation that we’re supposed to care about this is supplied second-hand by the fact that he has a female companion (never clearly identified as wife, girlfriend, or any permutation thereof) who worries about him for the whole episode. The part of the story that should have been its centerpiece - Koenig issuing orders for his crew to kill their alien-controlled ex-comrade - is glossed over rather emotionlessly. Still, for its thematic flaws on the page, Force Of Life is commendable for its spooky atmosphere - the scene in which McShane stalks a fellow crewmember, with lights dimming in his wake as his alien influence sucks the energy out of the moonbase, is slickly executed. A case of style over substance, but at least it was well-done style.
The second disc lurches from one bit of bizarre strangeness to the next, kicking off with two episodes which seem to bear promising premises and then fall apart. It’s not the science so much as the fiction that fails us with Alpha Child (a piteous waste of Brit SF fixture Julian Glover, who’s done everything from Blake’s 7 to Doctor Who to The Empire Strikes Back), and one of the single worst episodes of the first three DVD sets, The Last Sunset. Sunset starts off with a very interesting premise - unmanned alien probes land on the moon and spew forth all the gases necessary to give it a summery, Earthlike atmosphere. It all goes straight to hell when first officer Paul Morrow goes nutso (after eating mushrooms he doesn’t know are hallucinogenic) and decides that he’s the Adam of a new human race. The ensuing mayhem and gratuitous violence outdoes almost any ridiculous excess the original Star Trek ever gave us (or, for that matter, most episodes of Buck Rogers). The real kicker is that, before it gets to that point, The Last Sunset is a very entertaining episode - a miserably wasted opportunity.
Voyager’s Return is an episode that made me laugh out loud. Not because it’s balls-to-the-wall comedy (far from it, in fact). But because once again, I got the feeling that the makers of Star Trek: Voyager dipped into Space: 1999’s story well many times to “borrow” ideas. Voyager’s Return (ironic, eh?) was eerily similar to the seventh-season Voyager episode Friendship One. Both concern our heroes running into the disastrous consequences of earlier unmanned probes from Earth whose power sources have wreaked havoc on distant civilizations, and in both cases, our heroes are made to answer for the unintended results. To draw things even closer, Voyager’s Return features a very classy guest starring turn by Jeremy Kemp, who later played Captain Picard’s brother in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s a small universe, isn’t it? And a decent episode about exploring it, too.
The discs are once again saddled with not-too-special features, including a gallery of publicity photos from each disc’s episodes and the all-important DVD credits. In other words, nothing spectacular.
So why is Space: 1999 important? After watching a couple of box sets’ worth, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is what the legendary abandoned Star Trek Phase II TV series would have been like. It took itself far too seriously for its own good (despite some inherently goofy elements like the costumes and acting), with far too much reliance on “weird and unexplainable” events. Guardian Of Piri is commendable here for being a rarity: it doesn’t just subject our heroes to bizarre phenomena and then exit stage left without explaining itself. It’s actually a fully-formed, self-containing story (albeit one which no one took credit for writing, though it bears some Johnny Byrne trademarks - see the notes entry for Guardian in our Space: 1999 episode guide for more details).
And if you think about it, Space: 1999 has a modern antecedent: the miserable exercise in modern SF that bears the name of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. Both shows were well-intentioned from the start, and had a complete change of direction and a “brightening” of tone after their first seasons, dispensing with angst-ridden running story arcs and getting on with just exploring stuff and interfering with other cultures for the heck of it. That said, I find Space: 1999’s considerably more downbeat tone to be more realistic for the characters’ circumstances, and as hammy as Landau gets as Koenig, thank God he’s no Kevin Sorbo.