by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 28, 2008   Last Updated: January 29, 2008

"Space: 1999" was one of the best science fiction TV shows in the 1970s. Nearly all the members of its special effects team went on to work on the original "Alien" and "The Empire Strikes Back," and its second season was producer by a producer from the original Star Trek series. Though the two seasons of 24 episodes were never broadcast on network television, they were syndicated widely to individual stations in 96 countries around the world.

Its producers had already created an elaborate model of a moon base for an earlier series (titled "UFO"). When its second season was cancelled by broadcasters, the producers cleverly repurposed the set just three years later. In "Space: 1999" it's inhabited by a colony of 311 workers overseeing a moon-based nuclear storage facility. In the show's first episode, a nuclear chain reaction blasts the moon out of orbit and into deep space. The episode - titled "Breakaway" - ends with the moon base receiving its last transmission from earth before hurtling into the unknown.

The show's opening credits give this date as September 13, 1999. But when the show aired - in 1975 - science fiction writer Isaac Asimov observed that such a powerful explosion would've also shattered the moon to pieces. (And Harlan Ellison suggested that instead, it would crash catastrophically towards earth!) But instead the moon colony endured strange new dangers in space, and each hour-long episode was surprisingly dark. In "The Black Sun," the crew spends the episode preparing for their death in an inescapable gravitational vortex. There's memories of childhood, a discussion of god, a final cigar, and ultimately an unexpected encounter with a cosmic intelligence. Another episode finds them encountering an earth-like paradise, only to discover it's made of unstable anti-matter which very nearly kills them all.

But it's the serious tone that makes this a credible (and sadly forgotten) classic. The crew wore somber moon-grey uniforms, and faced their life-and-death struggles with very little humor. Its distributor insisted on the casting of top American television stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (though much of the remaining cast was British). Guests even included some top science fiction actors, including Leo McKern, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

In the second season, the series was re-vamped to include a shape-shifting alien named Maya (along with other cast changes which were never explained), and more colorful uniforms. Though the show couldn't survive the breakup of its production team, its irregular broadcast and distribution schedule meant that in some markets the final episode wasn't aired until 1979.

And there was one last moment of glory. When the show had aired in 1974, the series it had been set 25 years into the near-future. So when September 13, 1999 actually came around, fans of the series were treated to a final message from the moon base's data analyst. It was filmed by actress Zienia Merton from the original series, and included on a DVD of bonus material for the series.

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