Destination: Moonbase Alpha (28 page)

Quotes:

• Victor:
  ‘Well, John, as far as I can see there’s nothing else here. It’s a one-room world.’
  
• Balor:
  ‘How can you value life if you do not fear death?’
  
• Balor:
  ‘A thousand years of reflection have convinced me I was right, and now I have the golden opportunity to prove it, with you.’
  
• Koenig:
  ‘You’re evil, Balor. And what you offer is evil. We will resist you and what you stand for.’
  
• Balor:
  ‘I’m going to make you suffer, Koenig.’
  
• Helena
  :
  ‘We must learn to leave some things alone.’
  

Filming Dates:
Wednesday 9 October – Wednesday 23 October 1974

Incidental Music:
The score, as with that of ‘Force of Life’, is greatly enhanced by electronic library music. Featured here are ‘Videotronics No. 3’ by Cecil Leuter and ‘Cosmic Sounds No. 1’ by Georges Teperino (both previously heard in ‘Force of Life’), ‘Experiments In Space – Malus’ (heard while the Alphans set up the explosives on Balor’s asteroid) and ‘Experiments In Space – Dorado’ (heard while Balor fights Alphan guards outside Medical Centre) by Robert Farnon, and ‘Stratosphere’ (heard throughout the episode in scenes featuring Balor, such as when the alien heals Koenig’s wounds, and when he confronts Helena in Medical Centre) by David Snell. All of these tracks were from the Chappell Recorded Music Library.

Commentary:

Johnny Byrne:
‘“End of Eternity” is not one of my favourite stories. It started off with a very good idea. First the discovery of finding a creature entombed in a rock, then discovering that the guy has powers of regeneration, which means that he’s immortal. Then discovering that he’s a psychopath. How do you kill an immortal killer? That was what really got me going on it. In the playing of it, in the confines of Main Mission and the other places, it should have been a story in many ways that required opening out onto another landscape. I felt it was too claustrophobic and too confined.

‘It was a tense story. The idea of the confrontation between it and Koenig – it’s like Jack & The Beanstalk and the Giant – you know, trying to outwit the giant. It all worked, I think it all hung together very well. But for some reason it’s not one of the ones that I like. I felt that I’d just turned out a decent story for that slot… I didn’t feel inspired writing it, I just felt it was a writing job, and I tackled it the best way I could. I think it had to do with the nature of Balor: he was very one-dimensional. He was a psychopath, and the moment you say that to yourself you make people very single-minded. All they want to do is destroy. He never had any real reasons to do so. That, to me, is
not
good drama… It had all the potential for action, for movement, for pace and things like that. But on reflection, if I had looked and tried to work harder at that I think I could have made him a much more interesting and
subtle
destroyer, and at the end of the day, a more effective and permanent one. When he turned nasty there seemed to be a fairly arbitrary decision and there was no real build-up, I think, to his unmasking. And he should have had another purpose, a higher purpose, than simply the urge to indulge in mindless killing.
That
, I think, was the weakness of it. Other than that it worked as a sort of action-adventure story because of the way it was shot, the acting, the production values and the dramatic elements in the story.

‘I felt that the character had not been fully exploited. He was a character who had some very interesting qualities about him. And I’ll tell you how I was going to bring him back. In the third series, we would be scooping up some mineral rich particles somewhere in space. They would be brought back to Moonbase to be used in some way. And once back in a living environment Balor would re-form out of these particles, because he had been atomized, and essentially he is immortal – spontaneous regeneration – so he would only ever be in a form of stasis. He wouldn’t be dead. And we would have had Balor back, and we would have had a much more interesting examination of what type of person, and what type of psychology motivated him. He was a very favorite character of mine, but I felt disappointed because I think he was worth more on screen. And Peter Bowles, I thought, gave a wonderful portrayal. He was genuinely frightening, I thought.

‘My reservations at the time about “End of Eternity” had to do with my own perhaps overly ambitious hopes for the story. I felt constrained by the episode length when writing it. However, since it had to play within 50 minutes, I concentrated much more closely on how scenes played than was usual. Instead of unraveling the historical and cultural reasons why Balor behaved as he did, the emphasis hinged more on the psychological. The circumstances of his discovery suggested the outcast; an outsider consumed with a lust to dominate for its own sake – in essence a power freak. He was less interested in the exercise of that power than a total abasing acceptance of it by those he’d left behind, and even more so the Alphans, given their relative powerlessness. Everything he did on Alpha after his release was motivated by that psychopathic compulsion.

‘It’s arguable that nobility of spirit is universal, not purely human. That being said, this seemed an opportunity to put an alien beyond reach of anything remotely human in his interior make-up. In the event, I went for an irredeemable form of personalized evil, but one that had an impact on humans.

‘That’s why I called him Balor, after a vengeful Celtic god of darkness, also Baal, the related Phoenician god. Human sacrifice was offered up to Baal, especially first-born children who were burnt alive while encased within his statue. The Phoenicians were a cultured and very powerful nation, yet this most primitive form of superstitious evil flourished among them. If there is a weakness in Balor’s portrayal, it’s that I failed to adequately clarify the nature of the civilization that produced him. On screen this showed up as fudged motivation for his apparently motiveless need to kill.

‘Balor is on a par with the being which infiltrates Alpha in “Force of Life”. Both were meant to portray an observable, but incomprehensible alien imperative at work. In “Force of Life” it was sensed rather than seen and generally speaking it worked. In “End of Eternity” the imperative was seen but not sensed strongly enough. I think Balor needed a stronger cultural context for his actions. I smiled when I later saw how Sigourney disposed of the alien in
Alien
…’

Bloopers:
Just before the door to Balor’s asteroid prison explodes, Martin Landau walks past the character Mike Baxter and says, ‘Excuse me, Jim.’ Jim, of course, is the actor’s rather than the character’s name.

Balor heals Koenig’s wounds after Mike Baxter’s attack, but how does he get the blood out of the Commander’s uniform?

Observations:
Some scenes were edited out of this episode before it was televised. These featured Commander Koenig covered in gruesome blood after being beaten nearly to death by Mike Baxter. They were deemed too graphic for mid-1970s television. The scene as it stands in the episode is still very disturbing. Dried blood remains briefly visible on the floor, which is highly effective on its own. It is often the case with horror, that the most terrifying aspects are the ones imagined by the viewer, not the ones displayed with visual gore.

This is the only episode that features yellow lighting panels in Main Mission. They have previously been white or green, and following this episode they will become orange (or red in the case of the emergency lighting in ‘War Games’).

The lighting panels in Commander Koenig’s office also change in this episode from white (as they have been since ‘Breakaway’) to yellow.

Balor’s exit from Alpha – being sucked out of an airlock – could have been an inspiration for a similar scene in Ridley Scott’s
Alien.

Review:
‘End of Eternity’ opens with a dynamic prologue. The blast explosion that opens up the asteroid is very impressive on screen, with the chunks of rock floating up instead of down. Balor’s terrifying paintings were by production designer Keith Wilson: these chilling, nightmarish visions of torture, pain and destruction are brilliantly executed.

The stylishness of the direction is undeniable; some of the most effective sequences play out with the natural sounds and dialogue completely subordinated to music, as when Helena dramatically calls, ‘John!’ into her Commlock, shockingly breaking the silence. Director Ray Austin utilises striking visual techniques throughout the episode, including numerous examples of first-person camerawork (such as when Balor is roving through the base, and when Baxter is beating Koenig with a model plane and the camera takes on the viewpoint of the aircraft). This approach, combined with the outstanding cacophonous score, creates tension, suspense, and more than a little terror. ‘End of Eternity’ fits in perfectly with such other horror-styled episodes as ‘The Troubled Spirit’, ‘Dragon’s Domain’, ‘Force of Life’ and ‘Alpha Child’. Most similar to ‘End of Eternity’ would be ‘Force of Life’. Both are Johnny Byrne scripts featuring one man (whether alien or possessed by an alien force) on a rampage through the base, causing death and destruction. Both feature similar menacing walks down the corridors of Alpha and effectively serve to probe Alpha’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses. ‘Force of Life’, though, is the superior of the two segments.

Peter Bowles is dramatic and inspired as Balor, conveying the depths of his psychosis. Balor is undoubtedly one of the most effective and frighteningly memorable alien adversaries that Alpha encounters. He is made all the more menacing through the manner in which he is filmed – camera angles amplify his height, with size equating visually to power. Assisting the perception of power and menace are Balor’s black costume and Peter Bowles’ expressive features. Balor’s false history of his planet Progron is compelling, and does raise enough questions to provide motivation for Koenig to doubt him. Balor’s own motivation comes from the depths of his disturbed mind and his lustful pleasure at inflicting pain and suffering. This is summed up when Balor urges Koenig, ‘Accept the challenge, Koenig. Surrender to the exquisite forces of pain and suffering, and you will transcend your limitations.’ His confrontations with both Koenig and Russell are spine chilling.

The flaw of the episode relates to Balor himself: the driving influences that caused him to become evil are never stated. He is, purely, evil. As Johnny Byrne has said, being a psychopath isn’t necessarily enough to drive a successful story, and Byrne himself would have liked to have made Balor a much more ‘subtle destroyer’.

There is some nice series continuity as Helena says, ‘We know immortality is possible,’ recalling the Alphans’ experiences in ‘Death’s other Dominion’. And, as in that earlier episode, immortality is again shown to be a trap – or a form of imprisonment – with Balor literally imprisoned in his asteroid cell. ‘End of Eternity’ is largely a display case for the showdown between Koenig and Balor, and their final confrontation features a decidedly Western motif – almost as if they were the stereotypical sheriff and outlaw dueling on a dusty street. While the focus is clearly on Koenig and Balor, Helena does have a very strong role and makes an indelible impression on the episode. The remainder of the cast are largely underutilised.

Mike Baxter’s quarters are well decorated with models of aeroplanes and pictures of early space missions. These are the keys to the dreams and aspirations of the character, and they tie in very well with his fate: being grounded due to a damaged optic nerve. And since Baxter’s love is flying, when he attacks Koenig it is symbolically appropriate that he uses a model plane as the weapon.

Unlike with many other successful episodes, few questions remain unanswered at the end of the show (although one might wonder what the point was of blowing up Balor’s asteroid – so it would regenerate around him, perhaps?) Not a profoundly philosophical episode, or a very thought-provoking one, ‘End of Eternity’ is fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, this is a fearsome script, complemented most notably by the direction, soundtrack and the menacing characterisation provided by Peter Bowles. If Johnny Byrne were to have had the opportunity to bring Balor back for another episode, he undoubtedly could have added layers of depth and subtlety, but as it stands, ‘End of Eternity’ is a darkly distinctive entry of
Space: 1999
.

Rating:
8/10

1.17

WAR GAMES

Screenplay by Christopher Penfold

Directed by Charles Crichton

Selected Broadcast Dates:

UK              LWT:

             
Date: 27 September 1975.               Time: 7.00 pm

             
Granada:

             
Date: 17 October 1975.               Time: 6.35 pm

US
              KRON (San Francisco):

             
Date: 25 October 1975.               Time: 7.00 pm

Credited Cast: Martin Landau
(John Koenig),
Barbara Bain
(Helena Russell),
Barry Morse
(Victor Bergman),
Prentis Hancock
(Paul Morrow),
Clifton Jones
(David Kano),
Zienia Merton
(Sandra Benes),
Anton Phillips
(Bob Mathias),
Nick Tate
(Alan Carter)