Space 1999 – The Making of Voyager – tape 2092

More travels and travails from the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha. An Eagle containing Koenig, Carter, Bergman and Sandra Benes crashes on the way back from a planet. We get to see a medical Eagle, which is nice.

I want to say at this point how much I like Barry Morse in this. His laid-back delivery seems so natural and genuine, it’s a marked contrast from the far more mannered performances, especially from the two American leads. His role could so easily have lapsed into eccentric professor territory, but he was always just a reliable, smart scientist. It was a real shame they dropped him for season 2.

Anyway, something odd has happened to Koenig in the crash. He appears to be badly injured in the Eagle, but he’s also walking about outside in a spacesuit. He gets back to Alpha to find it deserted. It must be a fake moonbase – how else to explain the life support monitor with Koenig’s name misspelled?

Eventually the illusory Alpha fades away, and Koenig meets an alien who welcomes him to their planet. It’s only Peter Cushing, in gold-face makeup.

Cushing shows him the planet, a lovely matte painting that I’ve always loved, as it was an illustration in one of the Space:1999 annuals.

Cushing is a space anthropologist who wants to experiment on Koening. Cue lots of mind games, and Koening being attacked by Robert Smith off of The Cure.

All the time Koening is being experimented, his body is on Moonbase, hovering between life and death. The crew are getting upset by Koenbing’s status, and at the end, it seems he’s dead, but naturally that’s the point at which Cushing lets him go and everyone’s happy again.

The next episode is Guardian of Piri. Moonbase computer is misbehaving. It couldn’t track a nearby planet, and a flight to that planet loses contact as the crew are flying around.

Kano is being a bit “Works on my machine” saying they can’t find a fault in Computer. So he has to connect directly to Computer, which doesn’t look like a pleasant experience.

But Kano also disappears, so Koenig visits the planet. He’s met by guest star Catherine Schell – in a pre-Maya role – as the embodiment of the eponymous Guardian of Piri, which seems to be a giant computer that has ‘suspended time’ for everyone on the planet. I think it’s kind of a Matrix type of deal.

Koenig flies back to Alpha, but everyone there is having a party, clearly affected by the planet’s influence.

Koening attacks the computer. This is basically my approach to debugging.

The next episode is Force of Life. a blue glowy light freezes everyone on Moonbase except chief nuclear technician Ian McShane, who is hit directly by the blue light.

He spends the episode lurching around Moonbase absorbing energy. His name is Anton Zoref, but his girlfriend keeps calling him Ant’n and I like to think his real name is Anton Dec.

After this, recording switches to Sky and the end of an episode of Nowhere Man.

Then, Star Trek Voyager: Inside the New Adventure is a PR puff piece to promote the new Star Trek series. It’s presented by Robert Picardo.

Also included are showrunners Jeri Taylor

and Michael Piller.

Also, Dennis “Danger” Madalone, the stunt coordinator, who gained some fame outside of Star Trek as the writer and performer of the song “America We Stand as One.”

It’s a rather patriotic song, written (I think) after September 11th, as a tribute to those who lost their lives, but I might be imagining that, as his site (America We Stand As One) doesn’t seem to have the story of how he came to write the song any more.

It’s rather special.

The section on Special Effects is interesting. Voyager still used a lot of miniatures, and actual matte paintings. I’d thought that Voyager used a bit more CG for its spaceships.

After this, there’s the start of a Star Trek The Next Generation episode (part 2 of Encounter at Farpoint) when the tape runs out.

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