By Owen Quinn author of the Time Warriors and Zombie Blues
photos copyright Gerry Anderson
I was recently made aware of just how many movies and television shows the younger generation have never heard of, never mind seen. So to that end, we look back at some characters you really need to see before you kick the bucket.
Gerry Anderson’s second season of Space 1999 is generally seen as the lesser of the two seasons with a splurge of aliens and the addition of shape shifting crew member Maya played by Catherine Schell. Logic was out the window but I don’t care. I love this show and prefer season two to the first one. But despite the moaners, there are some genuinely good episodes like The Metamorph and Dorzak. It’s widely agreed that the mid season two parter story Bringers of Wonder is an outstanding story that is well received.
It opens with Commander Keoing (the late legend Martin Landau) seemingly having a breakdown while piloting an Eagle. He crashes it and his only hope for survival is being hooked to a brain machine that Doctor Helena Russell (Landau’s real life wife at the time, Barbara Bain) hopes can restore him to normal. In the meantime an advanced Earth ship, a Swift, arrives on Moonbase Alpha. Aboard are family, friends and colleagues of the Alphans. They claim to be a rescue mission from Earth thanks to technological advancement. They can all go home, however when Koenig is healed, he sees something else. He sees horrible plasmatic monsters. He freaks out and is sedated again. It soon becomes clear he is right and they are facing an alien race that even Maya falls before.
The beauty of these episodes is that the aliens can control the mind and make you see whatever they want you to. While Keonig’s reaction to them is totally OTT in order to satisfy the ‘Koenig has had a mental breakdown’ aspect of the story, the rest is quite good. The Alphans are mere puppets before the aliens which are never named but can speak telepathically. Their design is disgusting and by far one of the most memorable aliens from my childhood. What is also nice is that they are not the usual man in a rubber suit monster but something unique. Maya describes them as being like the stuff that grows on decaying matter when she has to transform into one of them to discover their plans for the moonbase.
They are capable of space travel and have been drawn to the moonbase because of its nuclear reserves, the same reserves that caused them to be torn out of Earth’s orbit. While this at first seems an ideal solution to both parties, Maya reveals that to consume the nuclear waste, the aliens will have to detonate it destroying them all in the process. They control every aspect of the Alphan’s behavior except for Keonig, Maya and Helena who Koenig has persuaded them to use the brain machine to free their minds.
Under the guise of a lottery to choose the first three Alphans to go home, the nuclear experts are picked. To them they are on Earth, reunited with their loved ones. Alan Carter (Nick Tate) is having a great time with women and living it up under the sun again but in reality they are sabotaging the nuclear reactors to blow. None of them will even know they have killed everyone they care about as the illusions are so powerful. When Koenig tries to stop them Alan thinks he is using a dune buggy to stop a man killing him and his ladies but is simply driving the surface vehicle.
Helena races to find how the brain machine is protecting their minds and discovers a signal blocks the alien influence. She releases it over the intercoms and frees the others who see what the aliens are for the first time. But Alan and the others are still possessed as the signal doesn’t filter through their helmets. Koenig is viciously attacked as the aliens focus all their mental power on Alan and the others. However the more they do the more it weakens them. Without the explosion they will die. Koenig manages to save the day and the aliens and their ship fade away.
Whoever these beings were are master manipulators of the human mind. They targeted Koenig to kill him as the leader. He was meant to die in the Eagle crash leaving the arrival of friends and family from Earth a welcome distraction for the grieving Alphans. With his death they would willingly follow the alien lead. Without Koenig surviving the crash, their plan would have succeeded and Moonbase Alpha would have been destroyed with all hands dead. They even blocked the obvious problem of all the people on the ship being the same age as when the moon left Earth. They would be dead by this stage and Maya’s keen scientific mind is scrambled to not register this. But that doesn’t explain how they never knew she was a metamorph.
Such is the allure of the aliens illusions that we get some beautiful dialogue that reaches themes that were never really touched upon. When Tony asks his brother Guido how his parents took the loss of Tony, Guido’s answer is beautiful. He says their mother complained to every government and authority and never let it go. Their father however became quiet. Then he became thin. In just one line we see the reaction of those left behind and the impact the moon being blown out of orbit had on them. It conveys both sides of the relative’s reactions and the delivery is spot on. Both actors speak volumes with just a few words. For the aliens to go into so much detail shows how powerful they are. With their nonhumanoid bodies, it is quite logical they have evolved their mental abilities to giant levels. What made them really stand out for the audience was the blood pumping through their veins round the eye and their glowing veins especially when on the surface of the moon in semi-darkness. They look totally eerie like something out of a horror film making their impact even more vivid on the minds of the viewer. With their lack of speed and mobility, they use the humanoids around them to do their bidding for them and build space ships. This suggests they have enslaved other cultures to do this for them and they force Sandstrom to try to murder Koenig and Clive Kander to destroy all his film evidence of the aliens’ presence by blowing up the lab and himself. But the presence of others affects their control, meaning it has to be confined and insular in order for an individual to complete a task for them.
These nameless blobs are by far the most lethal race the Alphans have ever faced and almost succeeded in destroying them. Even nearly fifty years later these aliens stand out as one of the most original and terrifying from the seventies sci-fi genre.
The Time Warriors and Beyond 