Destination: Moonbase Alpha (73 page)

‘“The Dorcons” was a fairly easy one to write. The idea of using Maya was absolutely essential to this story. But it had to be done in such a way that she would be incommunicado – keeping in mind that this was the girl who could get out of everything. So it had to involve people who hunted Psychons and who, once having them, could sort of control them. The idea of taking the brain stem of the Psychon and putting it into an ageing guy, which would regenerate him, was a good science fiction story, but it didn’t have anything awfully profound about it to say about the state of life or the state of the world, or anything.

‘“The Dorcons” failed abysmally for me, because I felt the character of Maya was being pushed into a pale imitation of what a kind of shrinking female of the period was expected to do, which was to cower and shriek. The only one who had done it consistently and brilliantly was Zienia. No-one else could say, “The heat levels are rising,” with quite such alarm and trepidation. I was really quite worried when the heat levels started rising!’

Observations:
‘The Dorcons’ marks the second appearance of transforming spaceships in Year Two. The first was in ‘The Metamorph’, in which Picard stated ‘Molecular transformation. We’ve seen it in the spaceship and the balls of light. Here it is again.’ Mentor’s computer Psyche was capable of transforming matter in a similar manner to the Meson Converter in this episode. As Maya explains, ‘It’s a means of transforming matter into energy and reshaping it in whatever form they like.’

The Dorcons have been hunting Psychons a very long time. Maya states, ‘For centuries they’ve pursued my people. Hunting us like animals.’ It is easy to infer that a certain amount of technological cross-pollination has occurred over the years.

It’s always a pleasure for
Space: 1999
fans to identify ‘The Dorcons’ as the source of the now-famous line, ‘Resistance is futile,’ even if it did become famed due to its later use by the Borg in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
… Perhaps the Borg assimilated the Dorcons?

Review:
‘The Dorcons’ is Johnny Byrne’s most strictly formatted script among all his contributions to
Space: 1999
. There is none of the brilliant mystery of his Year One work, and little of the humanity and discovery of his other Year Two stories. However, this is basically a well-written and well-plotted episode, and within the limitations of a strictly action-adventure format, it can be counted a success. It also seems fitting that the man who was responsible for more
Space: 1999
scripts than any other should be the one to have scripted its swansong.

In the Dorcons, Byrne created an outstanding enemy alien race with a wealth of background information on their society and qualities of personality and humanity underlying their outwardly aggressive nature. They are almost compassionate villains.

The enmity with the Dorcon race adds to the overall richness of the Psychon people, their planet and Maya’s background. Maya remains a fascinating character, always played with charm by Catherine Schell. Johnny Byrne and Fred Freiberger are the two writers who did the most for the dimension and depth of Maya. Freiberger deserves credit for creating her in the first place, as well as for his Charles Woodgrove trilogy and extensive re-writing of Christopher Penfold’s ‘Dorzak’. Byrne made his major contributions to Maya’s characterisation in ‘The Metamorph’ and here in ‘The Dorcons’.

The performances of the regular cast, as well as the guests, are appealing. In particular, Martin Landau and Catherine Schell (pleading for her death, rather than letting the Dorcons take her brain stem) are outstanding. Barbara Bain imparts a fascinating conflict in
Helena as she actually considers killing Maya in order to save her Psychon friend from the torture of the Dorcons.

All three of the primary Dorcon characters are believably written and portrayed. Malic, played by Gerry Sundquist, ends up becoming utterly delusional with his new-found and undeserved power – yelling at the mighty Meson Converter, which provides energy for the Dorcon ship, instructing it to “Obey!” The world-weary Archon, played by Patrick Troughton, is sad about, but resigned to, the fate that Maya must meet. Ann Firbank portrays Consul Varda as a powerful ally to the Archon, and while she is authoritative when necessary, she is also civilised and polite. As personified by Archon and Varda, the Dorcons are not an evil race, and their motivations are valid in the context they are presented in.

There are some intriguing parallels here with Year One’s ‘Mission of the Darians’, inasmuch as both episodes explore the lengths to which societies are willing to go in the name of survival, and both question whether the end justifies the means. Koenig actually states to Varda, ‘What are you doing – justifying your actions to me or to yourself?’

Less impressive are the sets, which are simplistic and fail to convince that they are anything more than false walls in a movie studio. Undoubtedly the production was even more limited by budgetary concerns as the season drew to a close. While the open ceiling sets of alien ships in Year One conveyed a vastness and a mystery (see both Arra’s ship in ‘Collision Course’ and Gwent in ‘The Infernal Machine’), here – lacking the atmosphere and mood of those earlier shows – it just seems cheap. In contrast to the sets, the special effects are top-notch, and the bombardment of Alpha is spectacular.

‘The Dorcons’ closes the series with a solid if unremarkable story packed with decent drama and adventure. It certainly isn’t one of Johnny Byrne’s finest scripts. It suffers from a jarringly inappropriate closing scene in which the sense of levity betrays the seriousness of the preceding events and deaths on the base, and the plot gets bogged down during Koenig’s run-around on the Dorcon ship, but it is reasonably enjoyable science fiction television nevertheless.

Could there have been a superior last episode? Certainly. ‘The Immunity Syndrome’, for one, could have closed the series in a far more emotionally satisfying way, and with a slight rewrite could also have provided the Alphans with a new home. Johnny Byrne’s un-produced script ‘Children of the Gods’ would also have been a marvellous note to end on. While ‘The Dorcons’ fails to draw the series to a close, the positive aspect remains that the adventures of
Space: 1999
effectively never ended. The Alphans were left out there, drifting through the universe on Moonbase Alpha …

‘The Dorcons’ also returned the series to the timeless topic of immortality, which resonates as the perfect theme for the final episode of
Space: 1999
. It can even be interpreted as a plea for the immortality of the series itself.

Rating:
8/10

Barbara Bain was quoted in 1976 as saying, ‘Last season we got into blinding snowstorms. We got involved in interplanetary wars. You see, we have no control over the path we’re travelling, so anything can happen. It would be very conceited of us to think we humans are the only form of life. There are so many possibilities. Who’s to say there aren’t other beings living in totally different environments?’

Looking back on the comparison between the two seasons of Space: 1999, Bain said, ‘You know, a good script is a good script. So if it’s less this or more that, if it’s a good one, you’re happy. I couldn’t evaluate it by season. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t know how to begin. You [fans] could probably do it better than I could, because you’re a little more on the outside looking in. I wouldn’t know.’

Christopher Penfold relates his impressions of Year Two: ‘I’ve heard Gerry express regret at the way the ITC influence affected the second series … What we wanted to do with the first series was to make it very believable in human terms – whatever the questionable physics of the whole premise … The series asked questions about the way we live now and where we’re going in our lifetime, and it was bold enough to tackle the big philosophical questions, confident it could take the audience on the trip … I think the influence of Fred Freiberger was to really jack up the input of the monsters and to go much more for space fantasy. He may have attempted to make the second series funnier, too, but we had no sense in the first series that the situation was a funny one. I hope the individual episodes had an appropriate level of humour along the way, but we weren’t making a comedy series. Looking back on the first series now, people refer to it as a kind of thinking person’s science fiction. I’m very flattered by that. I wasn’t interested in the monsters that came with the second series.’

Interviewed at a
Space: 1999
convention in New York City in 2000, Penfold also said: ‘Twenty-five years ago we had a lot of fun in a studio at Pinewood. The results came and went on British television. It felt like an interesting and thoroughly enjoyable episode in my life. Twenty-five years later I find here an appreciation of the work that we did that I’ve never come across before. What is to me so remarkable is the depth and quality of that appreciation.’

Anton Phillips commented: ‘The first series had an epic sense about it, as well as size and scale. You felt that money was being spent on it. They wanted something that looked good and had a sense of class and style, which I think we achieved … With the second series, they cut costs, brought in American producers and so on, and the quality of the whole thing plummeted, I feel, considerably. It became a bit gimmicky; it was no longer about people whom you and I could identify with. We were talking about 1999, a year that was just down the road, and all of these people were our brothers, sisters, loved ones or whoever, who happened to be working out of town and one day got blown further out. By the time we got to the second series, that concept had been blurred somewhat and
Space: 1999
lost that sense of identity. The production values had gone down, things looked cheaper and, in the end, the truth of the matter was that many people
didn’t
like the second series as much as they did the first.

‘The other thing that bothered me, of course, was the dropping of some of the cast. Dropping Barry was disastrous, along with Prentis and
Clifton. It would be like
Star Trek
dropping Uhura and Chekov to cut costs. They had managed to build up a sense of family week after week. The audience had gotten to know these people and suddenly all of that was lost. What’s the point of disrupting a formula that people had seen, accepted and tuned in to?

‘When the second series started up, I think there was some question as to whether or not they were going to ask me back. And then they decided to ask me back … I had a clear idea of what [payment] people like Catherine Schell and Tony Anholt were getting, which was considerably more than I was. So we then went into negotiations. We had decided, my agent and I, what I would do it for. It took the two episodes I did do for them to agree to my terms. By that time, I had actually decided I didn’t want to be in it. I had been on the set, and the atmosphere was so different. It had been a really warm, friendly atmosphere when we had done series one. There had been a genuine sense of camaraderie: a real ensemble thing, amongst cast and crew, everybody. There had been something really nice about it, and it wasn’t there in series two. It just wasn’t there … The whole feeling on the set just wasn’t as good as it had been before. And half the people I knew weren’t there. I just thought, “I don’t really need this.” So I decided I really didn’t want to be in it. Also, by then, I had other offers, and I thought, “What the hell – I’ll take the other offers.” So I told my agent to tell them, “Thank you, but no thank you.”

‘What happened with the first series was it took over a year out of your life, and then in England they didn’t show it for another six months or so. So I was out of the public eye, and I was out of the eye of casting directors. People thought I had died in that time. They thought I’d gone back to Jamaica, or gone to America, or gone to the Moon, for all they knew! It took me almost a year just to get back into show business. So I weighed the pros and cons and decided I wouldn’t carry on with
Space: 1999
.’

Zienia Merton recalled: ‘Anton was another [who left]. He got fed up, like me. They weren’t writing for him, so he wanted to do other work … It’s not actually to do with money – it’s the respect people have for you, so they can pay you money. That is why I walked. If I’m not under contract, I’m not breaking anything. I said to Freddy, “Don’t you understand? If you’re not writing for me, there’s no point my being here.” I thought it was an easy concept to grasp.’

As Johnny Byrne pointed out, the Alphans of Year Two represented the antithesis of the concept that
Space: 1999
started out with: ‘If there is a difference between what we were doing in series one and series two, it is that in series one we were Earth people, and in series two we were space people. [The Alphans] were there in series two to kick ass … In the first one they were there to understand what it was they were doing, why they were feeling as they did, and why everything was so strange and disturbing, and how to deal with it.’

Byrne also noted, however: ‘Without Fred there wouldn’t have been a series two. We must accept that, and we must acknowledge that. I have a vested interest, because my life had been involved in series one. So, if Fred had succeeded, at the end of it all there would have been a series three. Then maybe the dust would have settled and we could have forged something that was greater than the sum of those two individual parts. So I realised that the pull of these incompatibilities – the pull it was exerting in terms of stories, characters, situations and basic premise as I understood it – was taking me away from something that was very familiar to me and into something that was unfamiliar. And for me it wasn’t sitting at all well with my perceptions of the series.