Anne is a friend and blogging compatriot (she has a rpg blog at DIY & Dragons and a book/film blog at The Lunar Flaneur), and since the algorithms now classify her as "old," she just started watching Space: 1999. I asked her to share her thoughts:
On most streaming services, the "recommended for you" section is usually just a mix of whatever's currently popular, plus advice to rewatch things I've already viewed on the service. But watching It's A Wonderful Life over the holidays seems to have unlocked a new tier of algorithmic recommendations, for what I might charitably describe as mature audiences. Yes, the robots have decided I'm OLD.
Scrolling through the "Shows for Old People," I spotted Space: 1999, a British sci-fi show from the mid-70s that I knew almost nothing about, except that Modiphius recently released a licensed game for it and it was previously reviewed right here on Flashback Universe.
As I write this, I've watched the first 9 episodes of the first season. Here are my thoughts so far.
My very first impression of the show was that they had clearly invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the props, the sets, the miniatures. Our setting is Moonbase Alpha, currently the distant and advanced scientific facility in the solar system. The interiors resemble the utilitarian aesthetic of a naval vessel or an Antarctic research station. We see halls, control rooms, laboratories, an atomic reactor to generate power for the base. The models representing the exterior of the station or its shuttle crafts are styled to look like something NASA might produce with enough budget, like something from the art of Robert McCall. When people go outside, they wear spacesuits. The action on the moon's exterior uses wirework and maybe a bit of slow motion to recreate the appearance of low gravity.
I find it impossible not to compare the show to Star Trek, and my initial impression of Space: 1999 is that it's intended to be more realistic than Trek, and that it's going to have better production values. We're on the Earth's moon rather than across the galaxy. We're in the near future of our own society, rather than centuries distant in a post-scarcity utopia. The models representing the exterior of the station and its shuttle crafts have nubbly, detailed surfaces like the Death Star or a Borg Cube rather than the smooth shell of the Enterprise. There's no warp drive, no matter transporters, no replicators.
The uniforms are drab jumpsuits, without the primary color vibrancy of Trek's outfits. The characterization, at least initially, is almost purely professional. These people have jobs, duties, roles, not personality or idiosyncrasy or charisma. It's hard to tell the extras from the leads. They're all on a first-name basis, so we get Alan, Victor, and John instead of Scotty, Bones, Spock, or Kirk. The computer has no voice. A dozen decisions have deprived these characters of Star Trek's techniques for giving them vitality and individuality, and too little has been done to put any back. Although each episode is under an hour, they're paced so slowly that they feel longer.
For all that, Space: 1999 is absolutely not a realistic show. What this setup accomplishes is to take an ensemble of hard sci-fi professionals and throw them each week into far more fantastical scenarios, which they are in no way prepared for. And they are, quite literally, thrown. By the end of the first episode, the moon has been knocked out of orbit by an atomic explosion on its surface, becoming a rogue planet on an unstoppable one-way trip to the depths of space. The mechanism is something like Iain Banks's Feersum Endjinn or Cixin Liu's The Wandering Earth, the effect like The Odyssey or Harry Martinson's Aniara or Star Trek: Voyager or any of a dozen other stories about lost ships that can't return home. The show's frisson comes from the contrast between the crew of contemporary scientists and the otherworldly, scientifically impossible threats they find themselves faced with. It's a style of science fiction that reminds me of Forbidden Planet or The Black Hole, a style that's about to be buried by the runaway success of Star Wars.
So far, I think I've identified two main types of episodes. In the first, our heroes find themselves trapped in the plot of a disaster movie or creature feature. In the second, they encounter psychic aliens from an ancient and highly advanced society that is nonetheless nearing the end of its lifespan, that will either be rejuvenated or utterly destroyed by contact with the modern day humans on Moonbase Alpha. In both cases, the lunar scientists are very, VERY badly outmatched by a situation that they can't possibly hope to overcome or master, only, at best, survive.
The disaster and monster episodes are almost like horror movies. In the first few, SO many people die and so many buildings explode that you have to think, if they carried on like that, it would soon defy belief that there's any moonbase remaining to carry on the voyage, or any survivors left to crew it. These episodes are LOUD. The difference between the sound effects and the dialogue level is shocking. Monsters scream, broken machinery wails, the wind roars as atmosphere escapes through a breach into space.
In the second episode, a crew member is possessed by an alien entity that turns him into a kind of vampire for heat. He freezes half a dozen people to death just by touching them before eventually blowing up a nuclear reactor while trying to embrace its warmth. In the eighth, another crewmember is tormented by the siren call of a giant tentacled beast with a single glowing eye, a monstrosity that wouldn't look out of place on the set of Atomic Submarine, and that Trey informs me was likely inspired by a monster in an Italian sword-and-sandal epic [At least the internet thinks so! - Trey]. These episodes really feel like encounters with an earlier era of scifi storytelling. Compare those two to the salt vampire or the monstrous-looking Horta from Star Trek - in Trek both are motivated by comprehensible desires like hunger or protection, not just alien malevolence. And in Trek, both are intelligent and able to communicate; in Space they make noise but never speak.
The second type of episode is a little harder for me to classify. The aliens are all either literally human or human-looking, and they all wear colorful, flowy space fashion that contrasts with the crew's bland uniforms. They've all been from technologically and socially advanced societies, often worlds that've had spacefaring technology for longer than humans have had bronze tools or writing. But there's more in common than that. They're nearly all psychic, able to read the crew's thoughts. They're nearly all trying to deceive the crew in some way. They're all set in their ways, locked in some sort of pattern they would otherwise remain in indefinitely. For all of them, their encounter with the rogue moon is existential - meeting humanity will change everything, maybe setting them on a better path, maybe causing their extinction. For the crew of Alpha, finding a way through whatever trap's been set requires navigating a conflict between the ideal and the material, between mind and body, between appearance and actuality.
In the third episode, the moon is set to collide with another planet, but they're asked to take a leap of faith and believe that the merest touch will cause the fatal obstacle to sublime away to a higher plane of existence. In the fourth, aliens who can turn idea into matter show the crew a vision of the catastrophe that would result if they actually made contact. In the fifth episode, they're invited to join a society where everyone is immortal but no one can change, and every day is just like the last. In the ninth, they're again offered membership in an alien society, and again the offer carries much greater costs than are initially apparent.
I'm certain that Space: 1999 was influenced by the original series of Star Trek. Probably some aspects of the show are deliberate imitations, others I think must be attempts to improve on Trek or distinguish Space by charting a different course. I wonder, but I don't know, if Space influenced The Next Generation at all. The base's doctor, Helena, reminds me of Beverly Crusher. In the seventh episode "Alpha Child," an alien warlord implants his consciousness into the mind of a newborn and then rapid-grows its body; it's quite similar to what happens to Counselor Troi in "The Child." The ninth episode I mentioned, "Mission of the Darians," has a divided society that resembles the one in "Up the Long Ladder." It's certainly not conclusive, just enough to make me wonder.
