Space:1999

Netflix is a wonderful thing. We watched the whole first season of Heroes without having to buy anything, and I decided to take advantage of a hole in my queue to rent the first disc of Space:1999.

In case you don’t remember, back on September 13, 1999, the moon was ripped from the earth’s orbit by a series of nuclear explosions caused by magnetic radiation igniting atomic waste. At least, that was the premise of this 1975 TV series, which was extremely optimistic about technological advances that would take place within the subsequent 22 years – and extremely sloppy applying basic scientific principles to their dystopian vision of the future .

I’ve always been a geek, but there are gaps in my geekdom that I hope Netflix can fill. Every geek needs to memorize Monty Python and the Holy Grail and know the words to “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes. (Fish Heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women… yeah!) I qualify on both fronts, but I’m pretty sure familiarity with Space:1999 is a geeky prerequisite that I overlooked.

I do have vague memories of seeing the series in its first run. My next door neighbor was into it, and I caught a few snippets here and there from the second season, the one with the hot shapeshifter chick with sideburns, pictured at left.

Why did she have sideburns? I find them off-putting.

One Christmas, I got a toy Eagle, which is the Space:1999 spaceship. And my mom bought a Space:1999 ray gun but refused to give it to me when I stumbled upon it hidden in plain sight on the top shelf of her closet, when it was clearly supposed to be a Santa surprise. (My parents were never good at hiding Christmas presents.) When I didn’t get it for Christmas, Mom told me maybe it would be a New Year’s gift. I’d never gotten a New year’s gift. I still haven’t. Maybe she’ll give it to me at my retirement party.

Anyway…

I had a lot of fun watching the first three episodes, despite the fact that they’re really not very good. The science and philosophy is ponderously silly, but everyone’s taking themselves so seriously that you have to give them credit for trying. It’s no use recounting how thoroughly implausible the whole thing is – comic books have better science. No, the moon couldn’t be blasted from orbit and then wind up zooming past planet after planet – it would take thousands of years for them to get anywhere at all, and the likelihood of them ending up anywhere interesting is infinitesimal.

Now, with that out of the way, was it fun to watch?

Well, yes and no. My biggest problem was the pacing – everything is glacially slow, and then suddenly there’s a herky-jerky burst of action, and then we’re back to this sort of stilted, formal weirdness. Martin Landau manages to create a character out of the cardboard dialogue he’s given, but I’m pretty sure that his co-star – and ex-wife – Barbara Bain is made out of cardboard. She has one reaction shot – a blank, vaguely-concerned glazed stare – that I’m pretty sure they just shot once and reused 200 times throughout the series.

The one thing that actually holds up surprisingly well is the elaborate (for 1975) special effects. The use of real models as opposed to CGI makes things look surprisingly realistic, except when they move. Then the spaceships look like big, clunky puppets on a string.

The plots seem to be taken from scripts that have been eaten through by moths. They strain at gnats as they explain the mind-numbing minutiae of their junk science, but then they swallow camels with plot lurches that come out of nowhere. In the second episode, Barbara Bain’s husband returns from the dead in the middle of deep space, and nobody seems particularly surprised. (She doesn’t, anyway. She greets the news with a blank, vaguely-concerned glazed stare.) He then warns them not to go the planet they’ve miraculously stumbled upon, which they do anyway, so everyone dies and the moon blows up.

Except Barbara feels bad, so her husband, who died again a few minutes earlier, shows up, tells her he’s made of anti-matter because of some scientific awkwardness, and then he reverses time or something and everyone comes back, except now they know better than to do what they just did, even though they only technically sort of still did it.

It makes no sense.

But the third episode makes even less sense, and it’s delightful. It seems the moon is heading into a “black sun,” and they decide to put up a tiny little force field over their base, which constitutes about 1/4000th of the entire lunar surface, and they expect this to keep them safe even though they previously explained that the “black sun” will crush the entire moon, so how this will protect them isn’t all that clear.

In the meantime, six people are sent off on an Eagle to “make sure the human race continues in space” just in case the dinky force field is unsuccessful. One of those chosen to escape disaster is Barbara Bain, who is nigh unto menopausal, which means she will have to breed quickly if the species is to survive. When she discovers she’s to be Eve to one of the three Adams, she accepts her fate with a blank, vaguely-concerned glazed stare.

As the moon draws closer to the black hole, Martin Landau and his sidekick with mutton chops, pictured left, who is not the previously mentioned hot sideburned chick pictured above, discuss the nature of God, or “cosmic intelligence.” Then, when they get into the black hole, they lose their physical opacity and can see through themselves, which they find “interesting.” They proceed to age about 2,000 years, when, as pruny geezers, they discover they can read each other’s thoughts and learn that “each star is a cell in the brain of the universe.” They then chat with God, who is female, and she tells them she thinks only once every thousand years, which, realistically, explains a lot. Then they find out they’ve made it through to the other side of the universe, and everything is back to normal, and the Eagle returns with a blank, vaguely-concerned blankly-staring Barbara Bain, even though the Eagle had been heading in the opposite direction.

I loved this one. It was a poor man’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like that movie, this episode confused weirdness with profundity, but it actually made more sense than 2001 did. And it took place two years earlier, so there.

I doubt I’ll rent anymore Space:1999 discs. I think I got the gist of it. I’m a full-fledged geek now.