by Tim Webb

Created on: August 16, 2010

It seems a lot of the TV series that were originally shown in the 1970's have all made a bit of a recent comeback, mainly on ITV4 who seem to have purchased the whole ITC back catalogue. Another shining example of a series that should have gone further was Space 1999. The future was always a bit of a grey area when it came to seventies sci-fi, you could work on the lunar surface and travel between the Earth and the Moon easily and yet seventies fashions hadn't actually gone out of style! It was a shame that this program, which was a high budget Gerry Anderson Production never went on for a third series, if a third series was made it would have ironed out the majority of the issues from the series before that caused the cancellation of the program itself.

The premise of the story is good and an angle that hadn't been approached before in any type of science fiction show. Obviously this show is going to draw the inevitable comparison to Star Trek, and then in my opinion Space 1999 is a lot darker and frankly far grittier in looks and stories than what Star Trek was before the original series was cancelled in 1969.

Space 1999 tells the story of Moonbase Alpha; a lunar based station that oversees the placement of nuclear waste from Earth being stored beneath the lunar surface. Newly appointed Commander, John Koenig arrives to take command of the station and uncovers a dark secret; pilots which begin to act erratically while on duty and are slowly dying from excessive radiation poisoning. An investigation takes place and finds that all pilots worked on or around Nuclear Disposal Area Two. On September 13th 1999, Nuclear Disposal Area Two explodes with such force that the Moon is blown out of Earth orbit across the Solar System and out into unexplored reaches of the universe. Contact with Earth had been lost and the people of Alpha had unwittingly become space explorers. It's also interesting to note that the final scenes of Earth are from a newscast that is reporting the problems being experienced on Earth, such as earthquakes, extreme weather and so on. So this sets up the first episode of Season one.

Further episodes dealt with the fact that the Moon was now an exploration ship and new life forms whether peaceful or aggressive were being discovered., bottom line is that the physics of the story were not correct at all, as the Moon would very unlikely to have survived intact after an explosion of such force. Let alone actually be shifted from Earth orbit. The tone

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