Space: 1999 premiered 50 years ago this month: 50 Years Ago, One Forgotten Sci-Fi TV Show Briefly Became the Next Star Trek.
I liked it enough as a kid that I collected the bubblegum cards. When the year 1999 rolled around, I planned on rewatching the show, but I never managed to. So to celebrate the 50th anniversary, I started rewatching the show for the first time since the premiere.
The premise is simple—and absurd. Twenty six years ago today, on September 13, 1999, nuclear waste on the moon explodes and propels the moon out of our solar system at FTL speeds and into a black hole. While the 300 people living on Moonbase Alpha have no control over the moon’s trajectory, fortunately it encounters a new planet or alien every week! Nor is there any surprise to discover so many aliens or to have run-ins from the past.
While the show only had two seasons, it recorded 48 episodes in those seasons.
Here are the top 10 episodes according to IMDB ratings, listed according to my own logical order (see other potential orders):
| Episode Name | IMBD Rating | Season | Episode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breakaway | 7.4 | 1 | 1 |
| Voyager’s Return | 7.3 | 1 | 6 |
| Earthbound | 7.6 | 1 | 14 |
| Dragon’s Domain | 8.2 | 1 | 8 |
| Black Sun | 7.2 | 1 | 10 |
| Death’s Other Dominion | 7.2 | 1 | 5 |
| Another Time, Another Place | 7.4 | 1 | 16 |
| End of Eternity | 7.2 | 1 | 12 |
| The Last Sunset | 7.4 | 1 | 17 |
| The Testament of Arkadia | 7.3 | 1 | 23 |
Note that not a single season 2 episode makes the top 10 list. (All the cast except for the two costars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were let go and an alien character, Maya, was introduced, in an attempt to reinvigorate the series.)
I enjoyed revisiting a “planet of the week” series I didn’t remember, though I didn’t enjoy it enough to want to watch all of it, and I certainly missed the verisimilitude of a modern series. Completely episodic, there’s never an episode about the Alphans adjusting to a life without being able to go to and from Earth, for instance. They certainly weren’t set up to be independent from Earth and yet they adjust with no issues. (Why did their spacecraft have weapons?! Who were they to defend against when they orbited Earth?)
And setting a show just 24 years in the future was much too short a time given all the technological developments they posit. It’s funny to see an encounter with Voyager (a fictional Voyager 1) four years before Star Trek: The Motion Picture’s encounter with Voyager (a fictional Voyager 6).
The characters were oddly flat. I can’t tell you what drove any of them, nor did I get sense they were friends. Nothing like the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic.
Like most TV from the 1970s, the show seems slow-paced for today. But I think even for its time it is slow: I’d bet that the average S99 episode has fewer words than the average TOS episode, for comparison, despite both being hour-long shows.
The next Star Trek? Like Star Trek, Space: 1999 certainly had its YAGLAs (Yet Another God-Like Alien), quests for immortality, and even an episode with the same name as TOS episode (“The Immunity Syndrome”). But it lacked the staying power of Star Trek. And it had more horror elements, at least in these top episodes, than Star Trek did.
Though in honor of its 50th anniversary, if you want to play a Space: 1999 TTRPG campaign (?!), Modiphius has you covered.
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