Space: 1999

I’m frightened to report that I popped an episode of Space: 1999 tonight into the VCR, specifically, “Dragon’s Domain”.

Space: 1999 was a childhood favorite of mine, and I still had fond memories of it in young adulthood – but at that point memories are all they were, since I hadn’t seen an episode in years at that point. In the 90s I found a couple of videotapes of episodes at an SF convention and plonked down some ridiculous price to pick them up.

They’re, you know, not very good.

The acting could be best described as “wooden”. Martin Landau shows less range than William Shatner at his most Shatnerian, Barbara Bain seems vaguely similar to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, and Barry Morse seems like a slightly drugged Isaac Asimov. Eeg.

The story involves a carniverous, hypnotic, disappearing space alien which lives in a sargasso of spaceships which somehow moved itself from the edge of Earth’s solar system to a location much further away. (Though remember that this is the series in which the mon is blasted out of Earth’s orbit at faster-than-light speeds, and yet which slows down to sublight speeds when it enters another solar system.) The creature is defeated through nonsensical means (with an axe).

And honestly this is pretty typical of an episode of the first season of the series. The second season turned from emphasizing the horror of outer space to becoming an action/adventure series, but it wasn’t really either an improvement or a decline; the whole series was just fatally flawed.

And yet, watching this episode tonight there are brief moments when I think, “This could have been cool.” The laser pistols are neat. The scenes with the Eagles flying above Moonbase Alpha evoke a certain feeling, that humans are surviving even in this barren environment with only a bleak hope. The notion that by this episode they’d been drifting in space for over two years. And of course the Eagles have that cool modular design. There’s also a throwaway moment when Commander Koenig (Landau) mentions that his predecessor on the base had left a bunch of junk in his office which Koenig was going through and salvaging, which made me think that of course any human habitat is going to build up junk as people fail to clean it out, but in these peoples’ circumstances that trash could be treasure indeed. The series is completely oblivious to the more profound implications of these little ideas, it’s just an adventure series. But still.

Sometimes I daydream what it would take to try to resurrect Space: 1999 as a serious science fiction series. It’s a mind game, since the series is so ludicrous by any serious SF standards, far more so than the original Battlestar Galactica was. You could have an experiment with an alien device go awry and drop the moon into the network of wormholes across the galaxy. Really play up the challenge of trying to keep 300-odd people alive on the moon using technology which we might actually achieve in a century or so, and how their mental state changes when living in isolation from the rest of humanity for years. Have some really alien aliens, not just guys with big hair and forehead bumps, or even just pull in the old chestnut of humans on Earth just being an offshoot of an older, starfaring species (which popped up in the original series, too). I’m not saying it would be a great series, but what would it take to try to make it a good one?

All very silly, I know. Space: 1999 will remain a bad TV series which has been mostly forgotten by almost everyone who ever watched it. But somehow there’s just enough there to make me think stuff like this, that maybe there’s something here that could have worked, in other hands, given a different treatment.

After all, something makes me pop that videotape in once in a while to watch an episode. That’s not something I ever feel moved to do with, say, The Six Million Dollar Man.

GrimJack at ComicMix

John Ostrander and Timothy Truman have brought back their creation GrimJack at the web site ComicMix, in a lengthy new series entitled The Manx Cat. GrimJack was one of the best comics of the late 80s, an inventive, no-punches-pulled pulp/adventure/noir strip with an anti-hero protagonist, set in the magical/science-fictional city of Cynosure. The new story does a great job of catching new readers up on GrimJack’s world and background, and it’s a neat story, too. I’m enjoying it more than the mini-series from IDW from a couple years back, Killer Instinct.

Check it out.

Incidentally, the original GrimJack series from First Comics had the interesting twist later in its run of having GrimJack be reincarnated repeatedly, and after 50-odd issues about the original character he jumped forward 100 years into a new body. That new character’s arc played itself out over about 30 issues, and then the plan was to have him jump forward again, but First went out of business before that happened. These new stories (Killer Instinct and The Manx Cat) take place early in the career of the first GrimJack, so they’re really prequels to the original series. Which is a little disappointing since it means there’s not so much Ostrander can do to move the character forward, but they’re still fun reads.

Quiescence

I’m not feeling too typative (ha) lately. I’ve been pretty busy with hobbies and such over the past week. For instance, tinkering with my Magic decks, playing some Magic with Subrata on Sunday, watching Battlestar Galactica, reading Dan Harrington’s two new books on poker cash games, finally finishing the first volume of Terry and the Pirates, cooking dinner rather often, etc. etc. On top of that we bought some new chairs for the upstairs porch and put them together, I planted some new flowers up there, and I’ve been doing some ongoing cleanup of the study (you wouldn’t believe how many old manuals and computer CDs and DVDs I have to throw out).

So my brain hasn’t been in a journalling place lately. But maybe soon.

I am looking forward to the upcoming long weekend, though!