Space 1999

Taken as it it, S2 is pretty enjoyable all round, with only the occasional clunker. The two part story The Bringers of Wonder is probably the most overly horrific, with its unpleasant aliens who look like giant pot noodles impersonating the Alphan's loved ones to nefarious ends. A far better bet is the following The Lambda Factor, which has the usual sort of whirly space phenomenon giving some of the Alphans psychic abilities and powers. Needless to say, one of them goes nutty as a result, and uses her powers to firstly kill a love rival (by psychokinetically mashing up her innards - very nasty!) and then to take over Alpha itself. Deborah Fallender's performance is quite intense and sadistic, especially in the scene where she forces Tony to crawl over and kiss her boot, and then forcibly transforms Maya into a caterpillar and traps her in a box with no air holes. It's also got a fantastic performance from Martin Landau, who is being harassed by the imagined ghosts of some former colleagues whom he left to die after contracting a space plague on a mission to Venus.

Not the best monster costumes are they? Doctor Who at the same time was getting better results on a fraction of the budget!

There's an unusually large amount of location filming for this one, some of which was at our old friend Black Park. Unfortunately there are more than a few shots showing members of the public in the distance on this otherwise animal-free planet, plus a stray park bench in one shot, and a bloke in a canoe visible in the background as Koenig and Maya swim across the lake :D

Ha! I remeber the David Jackson monster! When he moved his head up you could see his real neck between the mask and the monster suit.

Be very warned - Patrick Mower’s just turned up as a comedy Irish cowboy geologist, and is as annoying as you might expect from that description.

Just watched The Rules of Luton (apparently Freiberger saw a road sign and thought Luton sounded very exotic and alien) and it’s basically Star Trek’s Arena with the serial numbers filed off (and three crap monsters to fight instead of one.) Oddly enough, Blake’s 7 would feature its own variant on Arena in the form of the episode Duel, just over a year after the Space: 1999 episode. David Jackson, who played Gan in B7, is one of the monsters of Luton!

Very interesting piece there John. I have never seen an episode of this show, neither first nor second series, but I' m finding all your comments most enlightening. I know that once I get round to watching one episode I'll have to watch them all, so it's as well to be forewarned.....I still remember how The New Avengers went pear shaped once they had to give in to the demands of the Canadian backers who were keeping it afloat.

Now that all of Space: 1999 is up on Britbox, in lovely HD, I've started watching Season 2 properly for the first time. I agree with Watty that the introduction of Maya and her transmutation powers was a mis-step. They just about get away with it due to the foxiness of Catherine Schell (even with her ears painted brown in the early episodes) and Maya's engaging personality. As a genius level techie, she also replaces the inexplicably absent Victor Bergman - an early version of the first S2 episode had a reference to his demise thanks to a faulty spacesuit, but his disappearance is never mentioned. The same is true of Paul Morrow, David Kano and Tanya Alexander, all of whom Freidburger unceremoniously dropped. Alan Carter almost suffered the same fate until someone (Nick Tate's agent?) pointed out to hatchet-wielding Fred that the character was one of the most popular ones in the series.

The new title sequence is a far cry from the bombastic intro and urgent porno-funk of S1, being much more generic. The imagery is updated to reflect the new action-oriented show, with freeze-frames of Koenig spinning round and firing his gun and Russell striding purposefully down a corridor. The flashing "Red Alert" bit looks a bit crap though.

Something about it seems a bit "off" still. I can't take to Tony at all, which is maybe because he just appears out of nowhere, barking orders and is treated as if he's always been there by the rest of the cast. Prentis Hancock (Paul Morrow) was robbed! About the only character change which is positive is the humanising of Dr Russell, at Barbara Bain's request. After the remarkably still, emotionless (oh, ok then, wooden) performance of S1, here she's a bit more animated, laughing and joking in the tee-hee-hee endings, dressing up in slinky dresses with Maya, and, it seems, now in the middle of a full-blown romance with Koenig.

Following the more cerebral nature of S1, the more Star Trekkian feel is quite jarring. There are a lot more man-in-suit monsters, some of which are a bit more successful than others, and a lot more episodes which end in big explosions rather than Bergman musing on the purpose of existence. Maybe the Star Trek reference isn't misplaced - had the cancelled Star Trek: Phase II series reached our screens, I think it may have resembled S2 Space: 1999 more than a little.

One change which is very noticeable is that the large, very photogenic and plausible looking Main Mission set is replaced with an altogether more cramped and difficult to shoot Command Centre. Whilst the series still looks good, there seems to be a lot of re-used FX footage of Eagles, explosions etc. The alien worlds are still gloriously colourful in their 70s-ness. Maya's introduction, The Metamormorph, has her and her evil father (played by Brian Blessed in a makeup which makes him look like a giant badger,) living in a control room made up of bright., primary coloured lava lamps and bubbling tubes of liquid. As well as Blessed, the show could still attract decent British character actors, including Billie Whitelaw as an evil robot, Guy "Sardonicus" Rolfe with a Fu-Manchu 'tache as, er, God, allegedly, Bernard Cribbins as the voice of an insane mobile computer (quite a frightening performance, actually!) as well as the cobwebbed corpse of its creator, and Freddie Jones and Isla Blair as future-Earth scientists (albeit with some terrible "American" accents!) I'm also sure that had I seen it before, I'd have remembered the episode with Peter Duncan and Stacy Dorning as beautiful aliens who - shock! - turn out to be bad 'uns, because I used to have a massive pre-teen crush on her.

Anyway, I shall persevere, and see what else this season has in store for me...

With hindsight, a lot of Season One episodes seem more akin to an attempt to do a 2001 on a weekly basis, rather than compete with Star Trek and other, more action-orientated SF series. Occasionally, such as in Black Sun there's a suggestion that the Alphans are making their journey at the behest of some higher intelligence, with some unknown purpose. It'd certainly account for the scientific nonsense of the Moon being blasted out of orbit and somehow traversing interstellar space and entering a different star system every week. Of course. when I was 7, such things didn't concern me, as I was more interested in seeing Eagles crash and explode. 😁

Even though S1 and all the associated Dinky toys, Look-In strips etc, sticks in my mind as a big TV event (not sure if Breakaway got that week's TV Times cover, but it should have done,) I don't remember S2 at all from its first run. In the Yorkshire Television region, S1 (apart from five of its episodes,) was initially shown early on Thursday evenings, but ended up on Saturdays at 6.00pm, both slots being prime family viewing, and the Saturday slot being conveniently just after Doctor Who had finished over on BBC1. In comparison, S2 was initially on Sunday afternoons (in the same slot as a repeat of S1, which also had the five previously unshown episodes,) then after two episodes, bounced off to 11pm on Thursdays! Then it ended up on Saturdays at 9.30am - it also took them two years to show all the S2 episodes, so it's no wonder it didn't register with me! I remember seeing an episode on holiday in Scotland, and it was just weird, like a bizarre parallel universe version of the show with different music, some different actors, and slightly different costumes and sets! Very confusing...

I can remember some bits being quite alarming at the time; the occluded eyes of the radiation victims in the first episode, and that scene where one such fellow, maddened, breaks a viewport with his helmet leading to a near-catastrophic decompression. The episode with Lovejoy as an Alphan taken over by some alien force, and eventually charred horribly beyond all recognition. Above all, the horrific fate of Commissioner Simmons in Earthbound, which actually gave me nightmares. Oddly enough, I can't remember everyone elses' favourite, the monster in Dragon's Domain, at all from the first run!

I watched the first one, "Breakaway" on the tube last week. It's amazing to think that something which was ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT in 1975 is now so dull. Surely youngsters should have SHORTER attention spans than us oldsters.

Also watched one or two of Season 2. That's just sheer terrible, and I knew that the first time I saw it. If you have a character that can change into literally anything (a caterpillar, a chimanzee, a tiger, a bee, a mini-Maya, Freric March as Mr Hyde FFS...) then there's absolutely zero tension created because she'll just change into something and go up the baddies' trouser-legs.

I blame Fried Burger for making Season 2 of Space: 1999 worse than Season 1, and for making Season 3 of Star Trek worse than Seasons 1 and 2. He Irwin Allenised everything he touched.

I've always hated this series for scuppering the initially projected second series of U.F.O.