The contrasts that Martin Landau portrays between John Koenig and his menacing evil duplicate hit the right balance, allowing the other characters justifiably to doubt the latter without being certain they are correct. Barbara Bain’s performance is also particularly effective. Her reaction as she touches the icy cold skin of the evil Koenig is one of surprised confusion, but her look of total shock when her lover so formally and inappropriately calls her ‘Dr Russell’ is the key to her absolute conviction that he is not the man she loves, and it visibly frightens her.
The possibility that a duplicate Koenig could enter Alpha and take over, leading the base to its doom, is a chilling one. It brings into question the command structure of the base, and the potential for a dictatorship to become entrenched. This isn’t a new concept – having been touched on in previous episodes such as ‘Death’s other Dominion’ – and it will be returned to in the later episode ‘The Seance Spectre’.
Zienia Merton’s appearance is a welcome sight in ‘Seed of Destruction’, adding valuable dimension to the camaraderie amongst the command team. Her role provides a chance for some dramatic moments, and reminds viewers how much her presence means to the series, and how much she is missed when she is absent.
It is interesting to see Maya and Tony use their Commlocks as sonic weapons, which is an ingenious twist on a common piece of Alphan equipment. It is also noteworthy that reference is made to a ‘black sun’ being the cause of the destruction of the original Kalthon home world. That Year Two has continued referring to black ‘suns’ (rather than ‘holes’) – a distinctively Space: 1999 term – is a valuable piece of series continuity.
The concept of the planet Kalthon being held in a form of stasis on a microscopic level is appealing, and could have withstood deeper consideration in the script. But, ultimately, the episode is not really about Kalthon, but about the Alphans themselves, and how they relate to each other with an imposter in their midst. This is a character-driven episode, with significant conflicts between the command staff, and that is where its greatest strength lies.
When Helena and Alan are finally about to take command away from the tyrannical double of Koenig, it’s richly rewarding to see the real Koenig walk into Command Centre and calmly, quietly and quickly convince his friends that he is indeed the real Commander. The only disappointing element of the resolution is that it ends up being the parting in the duplicate Koenig’s hair that finally convinces everyone he’s an imposter, rather than the accumulation of the seriously out-of-character behaviour and paranoia he’s previously displayed, or his endangering of Alpha. Besides, the hair parting should have been noticed earlier by others, and certainly by Helena. But that is an issue with the resolution of the episode, and not the story itself, which is very strong.
Notably, this is another Year Two episode that simply ends after the culmination of the dramatic events, rather than tacking on a feel-good closing scene. ‘Seed of Destruction’ remains a classic.
Rating: 8/10
2.14
THE BETA CLOUD
Screenplay by Charles Woodgrove (Fred Freiberger)
Directed by Robert Lynn
Selected Broadcast Dates:
UK LWT:
Date: 18 December 1976. Time: 10.55 am
Granada:
Date: 13 November 1977. Time: 1.15 pm
US KRON (San Francisco):
Date: 22 January 1977. Time: 7.00 pm
Credited Cast: Martin Landau (John Koenig), Barbara Bain (Helena Russell), Catherine Schell (Maya), Tony Anholt (Tony Verdeschi), Nick Tate (Alan Carter), Zienia Merton (Sandra Benes), John Hug (Bill Fraser), Albin Pahernik (Kreno Animal (Maya))
Guest Star: David Prowse (Cloud Creature)
Uncredited Cast: Robert Reeves (Operative Peter Reeves), Roy Everson (Les Johnson), Harry Fielder (Gerry), Mark Smith (Cloud Voice)
Plot: A strange illness sweeps over Alpha, and an Eagle returns with a huge creature aboard. Sent by the Beta Cloud, this monster attempts to steal Alpha’s life-support system.
Quotes:
Cloud: ‘Sarcasm in your present circumstances is hardly a defence – accept your fate.’
Tony: ‘Open!’ … ‘Close!’ [Verbal commands for opening and closing doors, which are repeated endlessly throughout the episode.]
Tony: ‘Psychon is my favourite planet.’
Alan: ‘Maybe I’ll think better sitting down.’
Tony: ‘Maya, I love you.’
Maya: ‘It won’t get up again.’
On-screen Date: 1,503 days since leaving Earth orbit.
Filming Dates: Monday 26 July – Friday 6 August 1976
Additional scenes filmed Tuesday 21 September – Wednesday 22 September 1976
Commentary:
Zienia Merton: ‘Three months after I [initially] left the series, I got a call from lovely Barbara. She said, “Zienia, darling, how are you?” I said, “Fine.” She said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Not a lot.” She said, “Would you consider coming back to Space: 1999?” I said, “Yeah, it wasn’t a big walk-out.” The point was that the parts had been getting smaller. I had been getting about half a day’s work [on each episode. But at the same time], because I had already been on series one, and it’s a small business, people thought I was under contract. So I then wouldn’t get offered work elsewhere. So I’d walked, as they say. But Barbara was very sweet. She said, “Would you talk to Gerry?” I said, “Yeah, I’m not proud.” So she said, “I’ll get Gerry to call you.” So Gerry called me and said, “Zienia, will you come have lunch with Freddy and me?” So I went and had lunch with them. Gerry, being Gerry, didn’t say very much. Freddy spent the time saying, “I’m having to spend so much money on this series. I’m having to spend this … and I’m having to spend so much money here, and …’ Money, money, money. I said, “What are you trying to tell me? That you’re having to spend a lot of money, and there’s a lot of inflation about? Because I understand it: I’m the number one cutback.” I said, “Last time when I did Space: 1999 I was under contract; I am not now. You pay me like casual labour. I know about cutbacks … If you are that poor, I’ll take you out to lunch!”
‘Anyway, the reason they wanted me back was that Barbara and Martin had it in their contract that they would go on holiday. So one episode wouldn’t feature them very much. [Remember that] they had got rid of Prentis and Barry, Clifton and Anton. They suddenly thought, “We’re going to have an episode where we don’t know anybody. Last year’s audience won’t know anybody, so we’ve got to have some old face back – any old face.” So they bumped me into “The Beta Cloud”, and that’s why I went back. But they still didn’t want to know about me. It was still; “We ring Zienia one day before we need her.” Well, I was lucky and got a call from Norway to do a feature movie there. I left about three or four episodes before the end [of Space: 1999]. At the time, we weren’t sure whether or not there would be a third series, and I decided to gamble.’
Catherine Schell: ‘In [‘Beta Cloud’] there was a scene [we planned], just a joke, between Tony Anholt and me. He’s been injured and is in the sickbay, where I come and visit him. He’s reading old Earth magazines, and in one of them is a picture of me as Catherine Schell, and he goes, “Oh wow, she’s a good looking chick.” I tell him what terrible taste he has, and then I metamorphose into Catherine Schell before I leave the sickbay. However, Barbara objected to the scene and it was eliminated. There was another thing – I’m not sure if it was in her contract, but I found it quite strange … Each episode would end on a freeze frame, but it never, ever ended on a freeze frame of me. It happened to everyone else, but never to me, and I’m quite sure it had something to do with Barbara’s contract. I suppose her way of thinking was that business was business. She was looking out for herself. I don’t think that I would ever have thought about doing something like that in a contract for myself. However, she’s American and she was brought up in the American schools, and that’s how they think – they look out for their
own careers.’
John Hug: ‘A few years ago, I watched one I was in – “The Beta Cloud” – which was my favourite, for the selfish reason that [it gave me] probably my biggest part. I enjoyed that. It was great working with David Prowse … He is a sort of gentle giant. He speaks with a West Country accent; he doesn’t sound at all like a monster. He’s about 6’ 5” and he had polio as a kid. He compensated for that by doing workouts and became an incredibly strong man. It was in “Beta Cloud” that Tony Anholt and I had to fight this big monster that David played. They made him about 7 feet tall, but he had this scene where he had me tucked under one arm, and Tony – this 12 ½ stone person – jumped on his back. We were not exactly little, skinny people. You’d have thought he would have moved when this big guy jumped on his back, but he hardly moved at all.
‘When we did the fight scene, there were cushions on the set [for us to fall on], but I had just dislocated my shoulder. I had my hand in a sling until we went to do the shooting. Dave said, “Don’t you worry about it. Just you relax. Tuck your arm in and leave it to me. Just don’t move your arm.” So he picked me up, tucked me under his arm, chucked me onto a desk, got hold of my legs and flipped me over – [and] I landed on cushions and kept my arm tucked. I didn’t do anything that was likely to get my shoulder injured. But it was really nice working with him – he knew exactly what he was doing. He was so gentle with us. Tony and I were chucked around a bit, but with clever editing it looks much more violent than it actually was. That certainly was my favourite episode.
‘What was quite interesting in the second series [was that] Maya had been turning herself into all sorts of leopards and tigers, then in “Beta Cloud” she became a bee. Whether this was true or not [I don’t know], but we put it down to budget restrictions. As we got further on, the budget constraints seemed to come in, so it was, “Ah, no, we can’t afford the giraffe, so let’s have her turn into a bee. Something cheaper.”’
Dave Prowse: ‘They asked me if I would do this episode of Space: 1999. I was playing this creature that was trying to steal the life-support from the Moonbase. Every stuntman in London versus me! They burnt me, they electrocuted me, they gassed me, they shot me, they did everything you could possibly think of to try to kill me during the episode. And eventually Maya turned herself into a bee, flew inside my ear and cross-circuited my circuitry, and that was the end of me.’
Bloopers: Maya transforms into the same Kreno monster she became in ‘The AB Chrysalis’ but, displaying an utter absence of continuity, while in the former episode the monster needed to breathe chlorine, here it breathes Alpha’s atmosphere with no problem.
Tony Anholt holds his Commlock upside down while standing outside the Hydroponics Unit speaking to Carter.
Pay attention when Sandra Benes is watching the temperature monitor: in close-up the temperature is seen to drop from 20 to 15, but in the wide-shot the reading drops from 10 to 5.
Observations: The absence of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain from the bulk of the episode was due to them being on a scheduled holiday break.
Review: If you’re looking for a satisfying plot, you’re looking at the wrong episode. What ‘The Beta Cloud’ excels at is excitement: dynamic music, Maya transformations, bizarre alien creatures, and all of Alpha in peril. ‘The Beta Cloud’ is action-packed and fun, but undeniably juvenile.
The second of the ‘Woodgrove trilogy’, this is the weakest of the three scripts penned by Fred Freiberger. It lacks the character development at the heart of the earlier ‘The Rules of Luton’, and the accompanying powerful performances from Martin Landau and Catherine Schell, and similarly it lacks the superior performances of Barbara Bain and Nick Tate that will form the core of the subsequent ‘Space Warp’, a show that will also feature a memorable turn by Catherine Schell and a brilliant display of miniature special effects. While all three of Freiberger’s scripts are hollow run-around exercises, this one has the least to recommend it.
It is oddly fascinating watching the Alphans fall, one by one; succumbing to some alien sickness and knowing no cure to save themselves. Then, with most of the base unable to fight, the threat of the monster from the Beta Cloud arrives – in fact, if this were a B-movie, it could very well be called The Creature from the Beta Cloud.
This is, in some senses, a lobotomised version of ‘End of Eternity’ from the first season. How do you stop an unstoppable alien? If you want to be fascinated by the possibilities of this idea, or the underlying motivations of the alien threat, watch ‘End of Eternity’. If you prefer turning your brain off prior to watching television, tune in to ‘The Beta Cloud’. What does work quite well here is the direction by Robert Lynn, in his second and final contribution to the series. He injects a stronger sense of pace into this episode than his counterpart Val Guest was able to bring to ‘The Rules of Luton’.
There are impressive performances from Zienia Merton in an unaccustomed lead role that gives her more to do than most of the rest of Year Two, an out-of-action Nick Tate and Martin Landau (in a very small role). The story, though, is truly Maya’s and Tony’s. Freiberger creates what could have been a strong character-building scene where Tony professes his love for Maya’; but unfortunately he then undermines this by putting what amounts to a retraction into Tony’s later dialogue, simply to create an amusing joke for the end of the show. There is also some astoundingly bad dialogue, including the following:
Maya: ‘Give me a fix on its position.’
Beta Cloud: ‘Our relative positions are of little consequence.’
Verdeschi: ‘Who are you?’
Beta Cloud: ‘Who we are is too complicated for your comprehension.’
Verdeschi: ‘Try me.’
Beta Cloud: ‘Time does not permit.’
Fraser: ‘We’ve got time. A lot of it.’
Beta Cloud: ‘You are in error. You have very little time.’
Tony: ‘What do you want?’
Beta Cloud: ‘Your life support system.’
Verdeschi: ‘You mean we just give it to you?’
Beta Cloud: ‘We have sent for it.’
Maya: ‘We can’t exist without it.’
Beta Cloud: ‘Neither can we. So we must deprive you of yours.’
This lengthy exchange displays how lazy the script is – not one detail has been worked out in advance. What is the nature of the Beta Cloud? Where is it in relation to the Moon? What is the nature of the beings inside it? Why do they need Alpha’s life support system? None of these questions – so obviously posed in this dialogue – is answered. All are diverted with weak comebacks that are supposed to sound mysterious or threatening.
Moonbase Alpha’s giant surface laser cannons fire here for the first time, which is a positive on the effects side of the production, but unfortunately the realisation of the Beta Cloud itself is a massive disappointment.
The original script ran short and is obviously padded with endless repetition to bring it up to full length. It lacks any trace of substance and subtlety vital to quality Space: 1999 episodes. Certainly, it features the fantastic music of Derek Wadsworth to great effect, but the problem is that without this pulsing score driving the pace, the episode would be completely tedious. The resolution, as well, is an absolute letdown. Once Maya realises the creature is a robot, she is able to fell the giant and end the crisis in a convenient matter of moments. But why does the Beta Cloud then disappear? Were the alien beings so close to death that they instantly perished when their robot was defeated? Did they not have a second robot they could send to Alpha? If they require a piece of Alpha’s technology to survive, they must be a technological society, and if they can build a big hairy robot, they must be able to build spaceships of their own – right? What becomes obvious when one considers these aspects of the script is that the writer, Fred Freiberger, did not give them any consideration! And if the writer didn’t care enough to provide a back-story, or any logical motivation at all for his monster, then why should an audience care for the
filmed show?
As intelligent and challenging science fiction, this totally fails to make the grade. But as an empty piece of pure bug-eyed-monster sci-fi silliness, ‘The Beta Cloud’ has few challengers.
Rating: 4/10
2.15
SPACE WARP
Screenplay by Charles Woodgrove (Fred Freiberger)
Directed by Peter Medak
Selected Broadcast Dates:
UK LWT:
Date: 4 December 1976. Time: 10.55 am
Granada:
Date: 14 August 1977.
US KRON (San Francisco):
Date: 8 January 1977. Time: 7.00 pm
Credited Cast: Martin Landau (John Koenig), Barbara Bain (Helena Russell), Catherine Schell (Maya), Tony Anholt (Tony Verdeschi), Nick Tate (Alan Carter), Zienia Merton (Sandra Benes), Jeffery Kissoon (Ben Vincent), Peter Porteous (Petrov), Tony Osoba (First Security Guard), John Judd (Second Security Guard), Trevor Thomas (Refuel Eagle Pilot Gary), Andrew Lodge (Grasshopper / Captain Duro), Suzanne Heimer (Nurse)
Uncredited Cast: Robert Reeves (Operative Peter Reeves), Quentin Pierre (Security Guard Pierce Quinton), Jack Klaff (Security Guard), Nick Hobbs (Security Guard – Medical)
Plot: Alpha enters a space warp and is catapulted light years from its last position – but Koenig and Verdeschi have been left behind in an Eagle exploring a derelict spaceship. The duo must find the precise window into the space warp to return to Alpha, but the chances are a million to one. Meanwhile, Maya has developed a high fever and is beginning to lose molecular control.
Destination: Moonbase Alpha Page 47
