Rating: 9/10
1.24
THE TESTAMENT OF ARKADIA
Screenplay by Johnny Byrne
Directed by David Tomblin
Selected Broadcast Dates:
UK LWT:
Date: 21 February 1976. Time: 11.30 am
Granada:
Date: 5 March 1976. Time: 6.35 pm
US KRON (San Francisco):
Date: 3 January 1976. Time: 7.00 pm
Credited Cast: Martin Landau (John Koenig), Barbara Bain (Helena Russell), Barry Morse (Victor Bergman), Prentis Hancock (Paul Morrow), Clifton Jones (David Kano), Zienia Merton (Sandra Benes), Anton Phillips (Bob Mathias), Nick Tate (Alan Carter)
Guest Stars: Orso Maria Guerrini (Luke Ferro), Lisa Harrow (Anna Davis)
Uncredited Cast: Suzanne Roquette (Tanya Alexander), Sarah Bullen (Operative Kate), Loftus Burton (Operative Lee Oswald), Ann Maj-Britt (Operative Ann), Andrew Dempsey, Michael Stevens, Andrew Sutcliffe, Maggie Wright (Main Mission Operatives), Tony Allyn (Security Guard Tony Allan / Irwin), Quentin Pierre (Security Guard Pierce Quinton / N’Dole), Shane Rimmer (Operative voice), Robert Reitty (Luke Ferro voice dubbing)
Plot: The Moon is stopped dead in space by an unknown force near the planet Arkadia. As power levels begin dropping, the Alphans are forced to consider evacuating to the planet, and a reconnaissance mission is launched. Once there, they learn the true origin of humankind. The Arkadian influence remains, and leads two Alphans to stay on Arkadia to sow the seeds of life on the world from which their ancient ancestors originated.
Quotes:
Koenig: ‘Our struggle to survive in a hostile universe had long erased the memory of the cataclysmic disaster that first hurled our Moon out of Earth’s orbit. The recent events that occurred on the planet Arkadia have revived that painful memory and forced us to reconsider our purpose in space.’
Kano: ‘Computer’s not a crystal ball, Commander. She can only predict on specific data.’
Koenig: ‘… A force, an indefinable intelligence, did exist on the planet …’
Alan: ‘When the ship’s sinking, the rats are the first to leave.’
Luke: ‘If it is Alpha’s fate to be the sacrificial lamb, so be it. Don’t you understand? It was no accident that brought us to that planet. Our destiny is clear. Preordained from the moment the Arkadians set foot on Earth.’
Luke: ‘Be warned. Any attempt to stop us will fail and bring down upon you the terrible forces of chaos and destruction.’
Helena: ‘You’re going to a living Hell.’
Luke: ‘No, Doctor. We are going home.’
Koenig: ‘We must keep faith and believe that for us – for all of mankind – there is a purpose.’
The Testament of Arkadia: ‘I, the guardian, salute you. We are an accused people. We who caused our own destruction have paid the price of ignorance and greed. To you who seek us out in the ages to come, we salute you. The desolation you find grieves we few who will soon die. Our civilisation gone, our world Arkadia poisoned, dying. We who caused our own destruction. No need now to tell of the final holocaust then our world flamed in the inferno of a thousand exploding suns. Arkadia is finished. But she, Arkadia, lives on in the bodies, hearts and minds of those few who left before the end, taking the seeds of a new beginning, to seek out and begin again in the distant regions of space. Heed now, the Testament of Arkadia. Neither past nor future; you who are guided here, make us fertile. Help us live again.’
Filming Dates: Tuesday 11 February – Tuesday 25 February 1975
Incidental Music: The musical score is one of the most effective in the series and incorporates library pieces ‘Picture of Autumn’ by Jack Arel and Pierre Dutour (heard during Luke’s and Anna’s experience in the cave), and ‘Suite Appassionata – Andante’ by Paul Bonneau and Serge Lancen (featured throughout the episode, including as the Eagle journeys to Arkadia, and as the Alphans explore the planet, as well as during Koenig’s opening and closing entries to his journal). Both pieces were from the Chappell Recorded Music Library.
Commentary:
Barry Morse: ‘Following completion of “The Testament of Arkadia”, we returned to shoot extra scenes for some previous episodes, “The Last Enemy” and “Space Brain” among them, and finally we finished shooting the first series on 28 February, 1975. But my final day of work on Space: 1999 was Friday 11 April 1975, when I was called upon to return to Pinewood Studios to do some post-synching.
‘“The Testament of Arkadia” featured a world destroyed by its people’s technology and nuclear war. Well, there’s another philosophical subject I think might have been explored a bit more thoughtfully…’
Zienia Merton: ‘You found if an extra person went down with you to a planet, then he would be killed off or left behind, as in “Testament of Arkadia”. I know this was because of [the dictates of the] writing, but I do think they could have thought a little more about it.
‘I think I was on three sets on that last day filming, because we were finishing the last episode, I was dubbing a previous episode, and I was picking up shots on another episode. And I just said to whoever it was, “For God’s sake, wheel me in and tell me what I’m doing, honey, because I don’t know where I am!” Because what you have to remember is that we were also having to dub episodes as we went along, so there was always a backlog. Yes, I think I am right. On the last day I was on three shows – dubbing one, filming one, and picking up on another, which was the one I did with Caroline Mortimer, “The Last Enemy”.’
Johnny Byrne: ‘“The Testament of Arkadia” had a strange genesis. There was a requirement to do a script, and David Tomblin started talking over ideas, and in essence much of what finally came out stemmed from the kind of story David wanted to do. I then had always considered that life did not begin on Earth, but was brought to Earth. It’s not the kind of story I would normally write. Somehow the logic of the situation plus my close collaboration with David pushed me that way, and I found myself doing a story that had this kind of connotation, and once I had launched on it, it had to be pursued to the very end.
‘It has a strange kind of eerie quality about it. It looks out of place in the welter of all the Space: 1999 stories. It has, I think, a serious message. It was bedevilled, like many of the stories at that time, by the fact that we had to use Italian leading men because of the money connections with Italy. And many of them couldn’t speak English very well, and it was a big problem. They brought in a wonderful man who would dub these voices, Bob Rietti. He can simply stand there and speak in their voice and correct it and re-dub it. A lot of Luke’s stuff was re-dubbed. They would take sometimes only a word in a sentence and this guy would pick it up perfectly.
‘The idea that we may have been influenced by a superior intelligence in our distant past is a very valid one and a very profound one. It’s certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility to assume that something strange has happened to the people of this planet. About 15,000 years ago, it seems that there was a sudden burst of knowledge and creative activity that, after millions and millions of years, accelerated the pace of evolution and pitched humankind into being the dominant species on this planet. Now, archaeologists may give you all sorts of explanations as to how this came about, but any other reason is just as valid. You could say the human gene-bank was, in some way, seeded with knowledge by visitors from outer space, totally transforming the thinking on this planet. Less than 100 years ago, the Wright brothers were flying something with a bit of string. Now we’re flying to the Moon. That development has taken place in only 100 years. If you take that pace of development, or if you take how fast that development can happen, you see that something quite remarkable did happen in that very short time all those years ago, in terms of human understanding, social organisation, technology and all the rest of it.
‘I think “The Testament of Arkadia” showed the effects of under-budgeting. For one reason or another it had less money available for it and so, in terms of production value
s, it didn’t quite measure up to some of the others … That’s my feeling about it. But I thought it was quite well directed and it was quite eerie and spooky in a strange way. Well, it’s not one of my favourites. But I feel it’s quite a special one, quite outside the stream. I always felt very uneasy about it because its statement was so direct. And it had too much of it related to a purely spiritual impulse in terms of the characters. So much had to be taken for granted. Luke being taken over by this force was a kind of religious obsession, but it was never adequately explained how … Well, we knew that the motivation was because at the end what we’re saying is, “We left Adam and Eve”, and it’s an Adam and Eve story. It’s starting again … The Adam and Eve story is a very primal type of story in our consciousness. It’s difficult to say whether it’s purely biblical, some form of inspiration, or whether it maybe matches up to some sort of race memory that we have of a time when we all did live in some kind of land of plenty, a veritable Eden. There’s a symbolism in the Adam and Eve story that is good for all time and, I think, whether you’re religious or not, it has a kind of sense to it – a philosophical sense.
‘It didn’t really examine that process of spiritual possession, which I’d like to have done. I think that’s where it sort of falls down for me. But again, writers are never, never satisfied. It’s one of those stories I can look at now and feel very nervous about when it’s coming on, but feel okay about at the end. I thought the performances were well done and that the scenes in the cave where they discover that it’s Sanskrit, and all of that, were very spooky and effective … When it came to it, I enjoyed constructing the story: the idea of arriving on a planet, discovering something peculiar in a cave, and discovering words written in Sanskrit. This latter part interested me enormously, because I’m deeply versed in the history of the ancient Celtic civilisations of Ireland – the pre-history of my own country. The Gaelic language is one of the most ancient of all the Proto-European languages. It’s immensely old – in its most primitive form, its alphabet is only 16 letters, which makes it more primitive than any other. It has very strong links with so many of the other most ancient languages like Cheldeic, Sanskrit and Syriac. I found connections with all of this in the story. We were talking about Sanskrit, the primal Indo-European language, and the fact that it was here and that it was saying something important invested the story with a certain profundity that you either addressed or you chose to ignore. I believe that if you’re going to do this kind of story, you have to go for it on the nose, so the fear that I had about writing it was matched up with the demands of such an important and profound theme, which you couldn’t avoid even if you wanted to. That was one of the great things about the first season of Space: 1999 – you had to take things to their logical conclusion, otherwise they lacked all credibility.
‘It seemed to me to be too “on the nose”: making a very direct form of statement about who we were, and the way in which the story was being driven, to the point where we were imposing a very definite form of religious context into it. Now, although I’m not a practicing Catholic, I am an Irish Catholic, which is like saying that I have Catholicism “genetically coded” in my system. I was a very devout Catholic growing up, as most people of my generation were, and that spiritual exercise is what develops your spirituality. If you practice Catholicism or not, that expanded presence inside you is there and it finds an outlet in all sorts of other different ways: in humanism, in philosophy, in understanding, and in a speculative consciousness – that is, the capability to not dismiss things because they’re not provable. The most important thing is to accept that there are mysteries to life and that if things are not provable, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist. This, to me, is a fundamental part of my development as a writer: that I don’t need to prove things to know that they are real.
‘If you look at many of my stories, they do have this slightly spiritual quality about them. Philosophical implications of meeting yourself; the problems of the inanimate force taking you over – the one you can’t communicate with, it’s simply using you and disposing of you, in a way. Man proposes and God disposes. The story of the Darians. Again, there’s a spiritual element in it: people desiring to stay alive at any cost, and the effect it has on their spirits – they all have this element of … moral uncertainty or spiritual uncertainty.
‘To my knowledge the MUF element was never discussed or consciously developed in the sense that we’ve now come to understand it … The operative word above is “consciously”. As the stories began to explore the implications of what had happened to the Alphans, and the truly awesome nature of their plight, we the writers started to follow where it took us; one of the advantages of a format not unchallengeably carved in stone … “The Testament of Arkadia” was written completely blind to the knowledge that it was closing this kind of loop. All the more remarkable when you consider that it was never planned to be anything other than a stand-alone episode. It raises the interesting thought of how Space: 1999 might have developed if this element had been pre-planned. Speaking personally, I’m glad it wasn’t. The fact that it revealed itself the way it did says far more about the series and its potential than a possibly mechanistic application of pre-digested MUFfery. In time, I’m sure it would have come together in a way understandable to the Alphans, but that’s another story.
‘You could see that, by the end of the first 24 episodes, we were learning to deal with things in a slightly more efficient way. We were getting slightly less surprised, but with that was coming a greater understanding, and in that sense it was a series about hope. We concentrated this kind of extraordinary process, which will take a much longer period of time, obviously, in real life, and projected ideas about what would happen if this occurred and how we would respond. So, yes, there were stories that simply dealt with the nuts and bolts of science fiction, that looked back, but many of them dealt with situations that looked forward – to encounters and the confronting of certain kinds of problems. I would like to have seen more of it in the context of action-adventure, but whenever it happened, I thought it worked well.
‘It could have been one of those stories that would have fitted more comfortably into a longer time-frame. I’d like to have done it as a longer story, but it simply wasn’t possible. I am told that people like it very much. It does express a certain spiritual aspect of my own upbringing and background, and I’d like to feel that the element I brought to it was reverence where reverence was due – not a backhanded attempt at it. And if that came through, then I would feel that I had succeeded even in that small way.’
Observations: This episode was constrained by being produced at the end of the season, after most of the money had already been spent. However, there is no obvious visual evidence of a lack of budget, or of a production limited in any way.
Alpha’s silver jackets are seen again, having previously appeared in ‘Black Sun’, which was the other occasion when Alpha became cold enough to scrape frost off the Main Mission windows.
Review: ‘The Testament of Arkadia’ utilises flashbacks and narration for the second time in the series: the first being in the immediately preceding ‘Dragon’s Domain’. Here it is Koenig who provides the narration, adding tremendously to the atmosphere of the episode as he reflects in his journal on these events, and indirectly on many other significant elements from earlier in the season. From the Kendo match between John Koenig and Luke Ferro in the opening moments of the episode, the viewer is faced with a unique instalment to the series.
The script is one of Johnny Byrne’s best, paired again with David Tomblin’s direction. There is a lot here in common with their earlier pairing, ‘Another Time, Another Place’, including similarities in overall style and tone and of course in the visual depictions of future Earth and Arkadia. Additionally, the shot of the Alphans walking out of the Eagle onto the planet surface was re-used from that earlier episode. Sections of Byrne’s dialogue contain an atmospheric poetry, as when Koenig says in
his voice-over: ‘Overpowering impressions crowded in on us as we stepped out onto the alien planet: a sense of timeless solitude, the silent touch of an empty world, the total absence of life. Death had visited this world – so our data told us – and as we moved on we could feel it closing in around us like a shroud.’ This story advances an array of underlying themes and concepts of the series and creates new ones.
The special effects are all competent, and the shot of the Eagle flying towards Arkadia at sunrise is absolutely beautiful. The Arkadia planet surface is a superb set, with dead trees and a rocky landscape featuring mountains in the background and gentle winds. It is an atmospheric locale that matches in perfect harmony the tone of the script and spirit of the direction.
As in the early episodes of Year One, there is a logical, believable, systematic survey of an alien world, and the discoveries here are astonishing. It is rewarding to see the Alphans going about their morning routine as the Reconnaissance Eagle nears Arkadia and paying attention to plant and soil analysis – all lending authenticity to their exploration of an alien world.
The cast perform with clear emotions and subtlety. More than almost any other episode, this one has an undeniable soul. There is a history, an epic feeling to the Alphan journey and a richness to the characters and their interactions with each other. The range within the characterisations and performances is wonderful. Watching the original team of Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, Prentis Hancock, Nick Tate and Zienia Merton in their final episode together shows how successful a union they were. All their performances are award-worthy. Clifton Jones and Anton Phillips also give performances that rank amongst their finest in the series, although their parts here are smaller. Hancock has the second largest part in this episode and gives an impressive performance in one of Morrow’s strongest showings as Main Mission Controller. One small example of the degree of subtlety between the characters comes when John and Helena are seen sharing a cup of coffee on their Eagle flight to Arkadia – they aren’t flagrantly advertising their relationship, but through this simple act it is clear they are intimate.
Destination: Moonbase Alpha Page 27
