External links
- "The Bringers of Wonder, Part One" at IMDb
- Space: 1999 – "The Bringers of Wonder, Part One" – The Catacombs episode guide
- Space: 1999 – "The Bringers of Wonder, Part One" – Moonbase Alpha's Space: 1999 page
| "The Bringers of Wonder, Part One" | |
|---|---|
| Space: 1999 episode | |
| Episode no. | Series 2 Episode 18 |
| Directed by | Tom Clegg |
| Written by | Terence Feely |
| Editing by | Alan Killick |
| Production code | 41 |
| Original air date | 4 August 1977 [1] |
| Guest appearances | |
| |
"The Bringers of Wonder, Part One" is the 18th episode of the second series of Space: 1999 (and the 42nd overall episode of the programme). The screenplay was written by Terence Feely; the director was Tom Clegg. The final shooting script is dated 23 June 1976. Live-action filming took place Wednesday 25 August 1976 through Tuesday 28 September 1976 (with a two-day interruption on 21 and 22 September to film additional material for "The Beta Cloud"). [2] A day of second-unit filming was completed on Tuesday 30 November 1976 [3] This was the series' only two-part episode.
While flying an Eagle, Commander Koenig takes leave of his senses and starts performing daredevil stunts near Moonbase Alpha's atomic waste domes. Controller Verdeschi fears that a crash will cause a nuclear explosion. Koenig hits a dome and suffers grave concussion. Arriving in a rescue Eagle, Captain Carter and scientists Bartlett and Ehrlich retrieve Koenig and return him to Alpha. Dr Russell places Koenig in an experimental neuromedical device – the Ellendorf Quadrographic Brain Complex – to prevent coma.
Alpha's sensors detect a vessel approaching faster than the speed of light. It is a Superswift, an Earth ship theoretically capable of interstellar travel. Its appearance surprises the Alphans, who understood that the Superswift project had been cancelled. They are even more shocked when the vessel lands and the crew reveal themselves to be long-lost family and friends. The captain, Guido, is Verdeschi's brother. Russell embraces Dr Shaw, her mentor from medical school. Sandra Benes and Dr Vincent are reunited with their fiancés, Peter and Louisa. Bartlett greets fellow scientist Professor Hunter. The new arrivals are an advance party; transport ships are en route to take the Alphans back to Earth, which at faster-than-light (FTL) speeds is just hours away.
Peter and Hunter slip away to Medical and psychically manipulate an orderly, Sandstrom, into sabotaging the device treating Koenig. Seeing this over a video monitor, Vincent forces Sandstrom away, though he is briefly detained by the mental control of Louisa, which puts him in a trance. Russell sedates Sandstrom.
Koenig awakes with no memory of recent events. When he sees the Earth visitors, he reacts violently, perceiving them as terrifying alien creatures. Russell is forced to stun him with her laser sidearm. Shaw scolds Louisa for failing to restrain Vincent, which has allowed Koenig to live. Louisa asks Shaw why their group fears Koenig when they could just manipulate him like the others. Shaw says that something is blocking their psychic link to him.
Guido and Shaw work together to take over Kander, a records clerk with a resistant mind. Finally succumbing to the aliens' control, he is compelled to start a fire and is consumed by the flames. As the Alphans extinguish the fire, Guido and Shaw tell Verdeschi that he must dispatch a return party before the Moon's course takes it out of range of Earth. They manipulate Verdeschi into choosing Carter, Bartlett and Ehrlich for the mission. The three men depart in an Eagle, imagining it to have been upgraded for FTL travel. However, their destination is not Earth, but the waste domes.
Meanwhile, "Shaw" enters Medical and begins to smother Koenig.
On the strength of his first script, "New Adam New Eve", Gerry Anderson and Fred Freiberger commissioned a second submission from writer Terence Feely. Pleased with his treatment (entitled "The Globs"), the decision was made to expand the story into a two-part episode. [2] Freiberger planned these episodes to have the same grand scale achieved by the first series on his limited budget. Amortising costs over two segments allowed for a large guest cast and more expansive sets. [4] During live-action shooting, Feely went away on holiday for a month. On his return, he was unhappy to learn that Freiberger had heavily re-written his scripts. The change he most objected to involved the early revelation of the aliens. In his version, he had hidden their true appearance until the final scenes of part one, when the 'Doctor Shaw' jelly being moves in to kill Koenig. He had wanted the audience to believe Koenig really might be insane. [2]
A character moment for Helena was cut for time in which she reminisces with Doctor Shaw how the first patient she lost was her father, who had died of a massive heart attack in their home while she was still in medical school. [5] The epilogue scene where Maya and Verdeschi were attacked by Sandstrom was altered for budgetary and logistical reasons. In the 23 June 1976 draft, Maya would transform into a python to subdue the crazed orderly; [5] by 24 August 1976, amendments had Maya changing into a Kendo warrior instead. [6]
Attentive viewers will recognise actor Stuart Damon from his previous appearance in the first-series episode "Matter of Life and Death", where he played Parks, the unfortunate survey-mission pilot. Costumes, props and sets re-used in this episode include: (1) The blue lizard animal Maya transforms into when angered by Diana Morris was a re-painted version of the Kreno animal, previously seen in "The AB Chrysalis" and "The Beta Cloud"; (2) The Ellendorf quadragraphic brain-complex prop was a re-vamped version of the Dorfman artificial-heart test machine from "Catacombs of the Moon"; (3) The nuclear-waste domes were cannibalised from the spherical towers seen in "The AB Chrysalis"; (4) The interior of the pilot ship was originally seen in the earlier Gerry and Sylvia Anderson production UFO as various ShadAir transport planes.
The score was re-edited from previous Space: 1999 incidental music tracks composed for the second series by Derek Wadsworth and draws primarily from the scores of "The Metamorph" and "Space Warp".
The episode was adapted in the fourth Year Two Space: 1999 novel The Psychomorph by Michael Butterworth, published in 1977. The author would make the jelly aliens the psychically-synthesised minions of a massive non-corporeal space amoeba (which was also the unseen antagonist in the previous segment "The Lambda Factor"). The sentient amoeba was dying and required a massive influx of radiation to rejuvenate itself. It would manipulate the Alphans with the lambda-wave effect to provide the explosion that would be its salvation. [7]
