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Breakaway | |
| Writer: George Bellak Director: Lee H. Katzin Cast: Roy Dotrice (Commissioner Simmonds)
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Commander Koenig is sent up to take control of Moonbase Alpha after a mysterious virus scuppers a vital space probe mission. He discovers that magnetic energy from the nuclear waste dumps is responsible - but before he can sort the problem out, the nuclear waste explodes and blasts the Moon out of Earth's orbit...
The fabulous future:
We see a glimpse of 1999's space
programme at the beginning of the episode - the Meta Probe and the Space Dock.
The latter demonstrates a rare example of the series rejecting the imagery
established by 2001 - intead of the movie's space wheel, here we have
a space station comprised of interconnected cylindrical modules. Interestingly,
it looks somewhat like the International Space Station that's being planned
right now (assuming that NASA don't change the design yet again...) The series
was made when Skylab was a current project - the US space station was converted
from the third stage of a Saturn V rocket. The modules of the Space Dock also
seem to be rocket booster stages, a logical interpolation on the part of the
modelmakers of the then-current technology.
| Conversations between Koenig and Simmonds reveal that the running of the space programme is dogged by politics. Simmonds attempts to cover up the potential disaster resulting from the incapacity of the Meta Probe astronauts - not even telling Koenig about the severity of the illness. He's worried about a forthcoming meeting of the International Lunar Finance Committee which he fears will cut off further funding if they realize the Meta Probe could be a failure. This is a believable picture of the way the space programme works in reality, and far more cynical than previous Anderson series where the advance of technology could never be halted by something as mundane as money. Thunderbirds and their ilk were created at a time when the Wilson government was promising "the white heat of technology", and NASA was forging ahead in a race to the Moon that Kennedy had initiated in a fit of cold war defiance. By the mid-seventies, Kennedy's dream had been fulfilled. Congress had cut back NASA's funding, and the Apollo project was curtailed. These days, NASA has to pull every trick it can think of to secure funding. Just look at the fuss over the meteorite that might or might not have contained evidence of microbe life on Mars. You can almost detect the hand of Commissioner Simmonds in that... Moonbase Alpha exists as a scientific research station, and a staging post for space exploration missions; its third function is to monitor the nuclear waste dumps on the far side of the Moon. Simmonds says, "Atomic waste disposal is one of the biggest problems of our times." In the real world, atomic waste is really quite a small problem - it's dangerous and it has to be treated with care, but it's hardly of the volume where we have to think about sending it to the Moon! In the world of Space: 1999, it certainly appears that nuclear energy has become the world's major power source. This is in keeping with earlier Anderson series, which always postulated a labour-saving nuclear-powered future. Again, this is born of that "white heat of technology" ideal. Space: 1999 was created at a time before the public became aware of the inherent dangers of nuclear power - Three Mile Island was yet to happen. As things have turned out, nuclear power hasn't supplanted coal and oil as the major source of electricity, and it probably won't for many years to come - if ever. Despite thus embracing the nuclear age dream, Space: 1999 shows a certain amount of caution and wariness in raising the question of the disposal of nuclear waste. And it's significant that complacency over the issue is the cause of the disaster that blasts the Moon out of orbit. (Or so it appears at first...) Remember, this was still some years before the general public became aware of environmentalist ideas, and long before politicians started to jump on the bandwagon. We can only imagine that public concern will no longer allow the storage of nuclear waste on Earth - quite an accurate prediction of the way our attitude to the nuclear industry would change. The sick astronauts are kept on life support in the Medical Centre. This consists of a single unit placed over their chests which seems to be monitoring their life signs - no wires, no tubes, no drips. Medical technology seems to have come along considerably! The Computer collates the information, and is able to pronounce when brain death has occurred. Its announcement that Astronaut Sparkman's body functions are being kept going only by the machines is all Helena needs to turn off the life support. She doesn't consult with Sparkman's family - or (if there is no family) with some kind of medical ethics board. This suggests that doctors now have very great powers to make decisions of life and death. Helena acts merely on the basis of Computer's conclusion, and refers the decision to no one else - not even Koenig. This begs the question of whether euthanasia is legal in 1999... The last signal the Alphans pick up from Earth is a news broadcast reporting on the gravitational effects and seismic disturbances on Earth following the breakaway. This broadcast - a single presenter sitting in a plain studio - is nothing like modern tv news programmes, with their flashy graphics, fast editing, on-the-spot reporting beamed live by satellite. It seriously dates the show. (2001 falls into the same trap - the television interview with the Discovery crew is so terribly sixties.)
Aliens and strange worlds:
Meta is a rogue
planet that has entered our solar system. It is passing just close enough to
the Earth for a precisely timed mission to reach it and make a manned landing.
An unmanned probe takes close-up pictures of the planet, revealing it to have
an atmosphere of impenetrable blue clouds (but see Does science
really work that way? below) - and also that it is transmitting a regular,
repeating signal - which Commissioner Simmonds takes as evidence of intelligent
life on Meta. (Still, we've seen how desperate he can be to secure funding for
the space programme, so we might assume he's blowing the discovery out of all
proportion to make it seem more significant. A regular radio signal need not
necessarily be evidence of intelligent life - the planet could have an
unusual rotating electromagnetic field for instance.) We never find out any
more about Meta, since the problems on Alpha scupper the probe mission. |
Explosions:
Breakaway features
probably the biggest explosion in the history of British television - the
eruption of Disposal Area Two, that blows the Moon out of Earth's orbit.
We see a series of explosions erupting from the ground - destroying the
Eagles flying above - before the whole waste dump is blown apart, and a
fireball rises above the lunar surface like the dawn of a new sun. It's an
impressive sequence. The Space Dock also breaks free of its orbit, and seems
to spiral away before it blows up - presumably it's caught in some kind of
gravitational eddy. Compared to this, the earlier major effects sequence -
the flare-up of Disposal Area One and Koenig's Eagle crashing onto the lunar
surface - seems quite mundane, though the latter is superbly executed.
| The Eagle that shuttles Commissioner Simmonds to the Moon has an orange passenger module, perhaps denoting that it has VIP facilities. We never see this again in the series.
Mysterious unknown force:
On the surface,
everything that happens in this episode seems fairly straightforward:
magnetic energy from the nuclear waste dumps is the cause of the mysterious
infection - and ultimately of the explosion that blasts the Moon out of orbit.
But isn't it just a little suspicious that this happens when a mysterious new
planet has entered the solar system? - and starts to beam out indecipherable
signals? |
Does science really work that way?:
The episode opens with a caption proclaiming that we're on the "dark side of
the Moon" - the only problem is that there is no dark side. All areas of the
Moon are illuminated by the Sun's rays at different times during a lunar
month. I assume that they mean the far side (the one which faces permanently
away from Earth) - which of course is perfectly well illuminated whenever we
see a New Moon on Earth. I wonder whether the title of Pink Floyd's mega-selling
album had stuck in someone's head when the episode was made...
| When Koenig suggests that the back-up crew will have to be made ready to fly the Meta probe, Alan Carter rejects the suggestion by saying: "We can't do it - calculations, co-ordinates..." Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? Is he saying the back-up crew won't be able to operate the ship? The point of having a back-up crew is that they can step into the shoes of the primary crew at a moment's notice. Helena confirms that they have been through the same training programmes, indeed lived indentical lives to Warren and Sparkman. There shouldn't be a problem. Even assuming that nuclear energy is more widespread than it is in real life, and that the decision has been made to get nuclear waste off Earth - we have to ask whether sending the waste to the Moon is really a sensible solution? Wouldn't it just make more sense to load it into a rocket and blast it off into deep space? Taking it to the Moon requires more effort and more fuel. Firing it off into space, we could just forget about it. Taking it to the Moon, it has to be unloaded, stored, and then constantly monitored to ensure it's safe. (Or dire consequences will ensue - as indeed they do...) The build-up of atomic waste is producing unprecedented levels of magnetic energy, and this is responsible for the "illness" affecting the base - diagnosed by Helena as an unusual form of brain damage. Since people are worried these days about cancer and brain damage caused by the electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones, this seems reasonably plausible. (Whether the nuclear waste could produce such energies isn't as certain...) Still, I do wonder what kind of "brain damage" can seemingly boil the eyes of those affected, and even disfigure the skin... The blue atmosphere of Meta doesn't seem very likely. A rogue planet travelling through space between solar systems wouldn't have the heat of a sun to sustain it. Any atmosphere it did have would surely be frozen solid. If there is life on Meta, it can't possibly be "life as we know it" like Simmonds suggests - there would be no sunlight, water, oxygen, all the essentials of our own biosphere. Anything that had evolved on Meta, given the conditions that must exist there, would be unrecognizable to us. If the nuclear waste dump is on the far side of the Moon, wouldn't the explosion send it hurtling towards the Earth, not away from it? No less a luminary than Isaac Asimov, whilst generally deriding Space: 1999, suggested that the Moon's original orbital motion would keep it from actually colliding with the Earth, and would merely make a very close transit with resulting abnormal tidal effects. The news report of gravity disruption would fit quite well with that scenario - earthquakes along the San Andreas fault, in Southern France and Yugoslavia (not "the former Yugoslavia" notice, but who could have predicted what happened there?)
What the hell happened there?:
So was it
human error or divine influence? There's nothing accidental about the nuclear
explosion - there is a purpose behind it, as The Testament of Arkadia
later makes abundantly clear. And given Collision Course will establish
that rogue planets are a catalyst for universal change, it becomes simple to
work out what's happening here. I believe that the planet Meta is the cause
of all that happens to Alpha. The signals it beams out are not an attempt to
communicate with Earth - they are the source of the magnetic radiation that
triggers the explosion of the waste dumps. (The "brain damage" is just an
unfortunate side effect.) If this is the intervention of higher powers, it
might explain away the scientific implausibilities - why the Moon doesn't
just blow up, but is launched relatively intact on its space odyssey. It's all
part of the scheme of things... |
Order! Order!:
Well, this is obviously the
first episode - but it still creates a few problems. The ending is virtually
a cliffhanger, implying that the Moon is fast approaching a close transit of
Meta, and that the Alphans may find their future there. Unfortunately, this
is not followed up in any subsequent episode. So this episode just leaves the
Meta storyline hanging, without resolution. We just have to assume that the
Moon passed by Meta, and the Alphans continued their journey. (Maybe they
attempted a landing, maybe they didn't - but they never mention it again...) |
Notes and observations:
In this episode,
Benjamin Ouma makes his one and only appearance. He is in charge of Computer
and fulfils exactly the same role played by David Kano in the subsequent
episodes. There's never any explanation for Ouma's disappearance nor Kano's
replacing him.
| Barry Gray's score is dramatic. Of particular note are the low, throbbing strings that recur throughout the episode to accompany the scenes in the nuclear waste dumps. They add to the sense of unease and impending menace. The credited writer, George Bellak, was originally hired as script editor, but left the production soon after completing this script. Story Consultant Christopher Penfold then rewrote Bellak's script. The original version, titled The Void Ahead was a ninety minute version. Though essentially the same story, many of the supporting characters had yet to finalized; there were also a number of additional scenes which filled in character detail - most notably a sequence where Gorski visits Koenig to rubbish Helena's theories about the "infection"; and a scene where Helena explains the reason for Gorski's animosity - that he made a pass at her which she didn't reciprocate. Koenig has obviously been stationed on Alpha before (as Dragon's Domain later makes clear.) He and Victor clearly know each other well, and most of the crew are obviously pleased to see him back. (His relationship with Helena, whom he hasn't known before, is initially frosty however.) It's clear that Koenig must command a great deal of loyalty and respect from many of the Alphans - how else could he hold the discipline of the base together after the events of this episode - in circumstances where ordinarily you'd expect it to go to pieces - you'd expect the crew to buck against the authority of a man who's just been imposed over them - who's only been there four days and yet is telling them that they cannot even attempt a return to Earth.
Verdict:
"Now we're sitting on the biggest
bomb man's ever made." Tense isn't the word. From the very first scene, the
episode piles on the sense of impending doom, successfully glossing over its
many implausibilities simply by not letting up. The dramatic build-up leads
to a conclusion that doesn't disappoint. One of the best opening episodes in
the history of television... | |
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