Destination: Moonbase Alpha (48 page)

Johnny Byrne was less than pleased with these ideas, as he later explained: ‘ITC didn’t understand what they had; what they were doing. It seemed to me that if they wanted to make an American series, why didn’t they go to
America and make it? And not expect us to try to be American – we were not American. We were what we were, and they were getting a hell of a lot more, very cheaply. And yet they still insisted on having all the advantages of working with Americans and paying the kind of wages that you pay a slave. We were doing it because we loved it, not because we were being paid. We were paid peanuts, and we were treated dreadfully. Every script I wrote was turned into a book, and nobody put my name on any of those stories. I certainly didn’t get any money. So we had an awful lot to complain about.

‘However, had they trusted us to do what we did best, instead of trying to be somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, where we were going to end up pleasing no-one, I think we would have ended up pleasing a lot more Americans, at the end of the day. I feel a little bit seriously annoyed by the people who were forever being dreadful about the stories, who couldn’t make the connection between pace and story [or understand] the trade-offs you have to make. Science fiction is very complicated: you have to explain pretty much everything you see. In a normal contemporary drama you see things and you understand them. In science fiction, you don’t. If you’re not very careful, you can spend 50 years simply explaining everything, and in the end you have nothing. If they’d trusted us – the best team that was possible in
Britain – to turn out a series, they would have had a wonderful series. But who was going to listen to us? And, even, who was going to listen to Gerry Anderson? Gerry was very much on our side.

‘In terms of story content, [the show] was still finding its way, but it did express our philosophy that the further we went out into space the more our understanding grew of ourselves and the environment. Freddy arrived and he was a very personable man – I got on very well with him – but it was clear that we were living in two completely different universes as far as stories and the understanding of drama were concerned. To me, it was going to lose that sense of wonder, of people in an expanding universe whose knowledge was only consistent with their Earthly origins – not people who’ve been out there mucking in and toughing it out with one lot of aliens after another, which usually means galloping around being very sweaty and completely over the top; and, of course, is just deathly boring. It wasn’t so much that he was a bringer of wonder as that he was a bringer of the kiss of death to series. The notion of implanting the worst kind of sub-grade American humour into these things was one of Freddy’s more disastrous ideas. To introduce crass one-liners of the type that you’d find in the lowest grade of sitcom humour in
America wasn’t what we were about, but it was what Freddy wanted to impose on the series. Freddy’s notions of humour were quite unfunny. In fact, the funniest thing about Freddy Freiberger was the notion that he had of what constituted funny lines and drama: they were so utterly appalling that they were hilariously funny. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be communicated to him, because he took it all very seriously.

‘Freddy made some real contributions to the second series. There was more pace, there was more sense of immediacy, there was more believability about some of the characterisations, and so on. Because they were written (in the main) by good writers, even though many of the scripts were re-written by Freddy, the stories did come out as acceptable and up to the mark. He was a lovable, warm, generous man. But he should have been kept a million miles away from
Space: 1999
.

‘We had been constantly under pressure from responses coming back from
America. We would raise the hemlines, drop the necklines, speed the shows up, slow them down, add more characterisation; but if there’s more characterisation, there’s less pace, and so on. We tried to accommodate these things and still keep on an even keel. But Freddy felt that the whole sort of feeling about it should be changed. My own feeling was that the Main Mission set was too depersonalising, that the costumes were fairly depersonalising and there wasn’t enough mix among the actual people we would see on the screen. They all tended to be too youthful, too pretty and too neutral. They needed sort of real flesh and blood. Freddy quite correctly picked up on this, and so some of the major characters left, like Bergman … and one or two characters were brought in. Morrow left. And Main Mission was demolished and turned into Command Centre, which was meant to make it more claustrophobic … This was meant to give it more immediacy and, you know, [a feeling of] real people under stress and all of that. Fair enough. It changed the look of it. It turned it, I thought, into more of a kind of
Star Trek
type series. And in the treatment of it, not the best of
Star Trek
– some of the later – because Freddy did do the third season [of that show], and it had many qualities that put it more in the mainstream of science fiction on television. But to me, despite all the faults that I knew about and that Freddy had partially corrected, [
Space: 1999
] had lost something quite important. It had lost its metaphorical way. It had become just another group of people involved in the nuts and bolts of survival, less in the state of their minds and the state of their feelings and their soul, if you like.

‘To me, these were people on a kind of odyssey, not only physical progression, but also spiritual progression, and the inner world of
Space: 1999
seemed to have gone by the wayside. The problems became more immediate, more containable. They had more blacks and whites – I mean that dramatically – in characterisation, and issues were solved in an hour … In many of the [Year One]
Space: 1999
episodes …, as in life, situations were not always resolved. Certain things we don’t understand. Do we need to understand certain things? Is it best to leave them not understood? And it lost that kind of slight feeling, that nice feeling of people more like us, with our kind of weaknesses and limitations, moving out into the great unknown. Now they were Spacemen as opposed to Earthmen. That was something that couldn’t be helped, given the situation. It was Freddy’s job to change it, to give the Americans what they wanted.

‘I had tried to evolve a system whereby I could bring good science fiction book writers, story writers, into the process. When Freddy came, of course, the whole thing went wrong from that point of view. Freddy had a new job to do. It was his job to make it look as different from the first series as possible. You can’t blame him for that. It was his job to be answerable to the Americans, and he knew the scene. He had worked on science fiction before, and he’d worked on
Star Trek
. And, while in the early days of
Space: 1999
we would always consciously try to steer this different path from
Star Trek
… I think some of our best were equal, if not better than, the best of
Star Trek
, in terms of their stories, and we had the beating of it in technical production. And now the stories went into the stuff that was required for the new situation, and my interest simply dropped back to being a scriptwriter.’

Prior to Fred Freiberger’s arrival, and without a firm commitment for a second series from ITC, Gerry Anderson had asked writers Johnny Byrne and Donald James to begin work on initial scripts. In September 1975, Byrne wrote one called ‘The Biological Soul’, which would later be transformed into the transmitted episode ‘The Metamorph’. He also wrote one called ‘Children of the Gods’, of which he was very proud. The latter script no longer exists, but Byrne tells the story of what happened to it:

‘When Freddy came in, he read all the old scripts that might have been used. Of course, he had to junk them, because he was starting his new reign, and such were the dictates of that kind of responsibility. And this one, called “Children of the Gods” … Gerry said to me it was the finest story that he’d ever read. I don’t know where the script is; I haven’t got a rough draft; I haven’t got it in first draft. It got caught up in all the shunting about the studios, and that was in the days before word processors, so I don’t know where it went. It was written; I think Freddy didn’t like it.

‘All I have is a very strong remembrance of what it was – everything is clear in my mind. I saw it as the end of a particular season of
Space: 1999
, possibly as the end of the entire series. It’s about Moonbase Alpha, bit by bit, starting to disappear off the surface of the Moon. By the end of the hook, it’s gone from the Moon. Now when we come back after the titles, we discover that Alpha is on some sort of planet. [We hear the] voices of children: “We are the children,” sounds over the intercoms. Then [the Alphans are] in some kind of structure and there are two children. They’ve got these jewels in their foreheads, and they’re incredibly evil. The kids are very indulged. There’s an alien with the children, called Mentor, and he appears to indulge everything they do, to even desperate extents, where they start killing people. And these children have the Alphans in their power. They have complete mastery of time and space, and they put Moonbase Alpha personnel through weird time trips. Like Carter comes back, his mind completely cleaned, and believes he’s a sort of gladiator from ancient Rome. There’s a fight in it between Koenig and Carter …

‘We discover later on that they – these children and this alien – have come from a future time, back to where they encounter the Alphans. We discover that these two children are Earth children who’ve been kidnapped from some future generation. And we discover that the alien, his people and the Earth people are about to make contact. We discover that the people they are about to make contact with in the far future are the descendants of Moonbase Alpha. And that they are testing the essential humanity of the Alphans by allowing these children to grow in a total moral vacuum, with tremendous power at their disposal, to see whether the Alphans can be trusted as people they could live with. The assessment that this alien makes of them will determine whether this meeting of the two species will ever happen or whether the aliens will simply zap the expanding Earth civilisation out of existence. That’s the crux of it.

‘The judgment is very much against. The children have demonstrated an innate ability to destroy and to really be unworthy of survival … It’s an interesting idea that would have suggested that John Koenig’s people would find a home, they would succeed, they would expand out – and now their existence right back to the very beginning depends on the actions of these children, because the alien is going to simply annihilate Moonbase Alpha and prevent the whole thing.

‘I felt it was a wonderful thing.
Mentor has decided that he wants to show Koenig why he has to be destroyed. You say, “But we’re not destructive,” then look at your offspring. Their essential natures have been allowed to develop with the power to indulge and they are turned naturally to evil. It was a wonderful story … And that, I think, would have been a fitting kind of finale for the season and for the series to go out on, because it would have illustrated their survival. They would have survived, they would have proven their worth through all the trials and tribulations that, as a small community of people, they had somehow managed to survive – not with Captain Kirk’s endless resources, but simply on account of their humanity. It is an interesting speculative thought to imagine what became of Moonbase Alpha. “Children of the Gods” would have pointed to one particular solution, and it was an intriguing one. It was one in keeping with what we had established, I think, and if I have any resentment against Freddy, it is that he didn’t allow that story to get made.’

By
24 October 1975, Byrne had completed his third new script, ‘The Face of Eden’, which would later be filmed as ‘The Immunity Syndrome’. As he recalled, ‘“The Face of Eden” was hacked about unmercifully to make it conform to Freddy’s notion – “Above all it’s got to have drama – above all it’s got to have humour,” and all of that kind of rubbish. It eventually appeared as “The Immunity Syndrome” and managed to maintain some of the stuff that I had put in and the kind of story I wanted to tell: one that would link very, very strongly with what we had been doing in the first series – which was probably why Freddy didn’t like it. But it took a hell of a lot of arguing, so that’s really when I disengaged myself from
Space: 1999
. I got married and came to live up here in Norfolk.’

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF PROFESSOR BERGMAN

The disappearance of Barry Morse’s Professor Victor Bergman following Year One of
Space: 1999
has always been a matter of some mystery and dispute amongst fans. Through my long-standing friendship and working relationship with Barry, and in my capacity as co-author of his theatrical memoir,
Remember with Advantages
, I was allowed access to his personal diaries. Located within his diary for 1975, I discovered notes that do – finally – explain his departure. Barry came very close to telling the complete story himself, but there were always a couple of details he altered – as the very title of his autobiography suggests – with the benefit of hindsight.

So, what has been said about this in the past? Gerry Anderson, in his biography, stated that he felt a great loss to
Space: 1999
with ‘actor Barry Morse being dropped from the second series.’ Incoming series producer Fred Freiberger told the tale like this: ‘Barry Morse’s agent came in demanding a big raise. Gerry made him a counter-offer. Morse’s agent made a bad tactical error, which was sheer insanity for an agent. He said, “No, if it’s not going to be that amount, we’re finished – we’re out.” So immediately Gerry said, “Okay, you’re out.” What an agent should say is, “He’s out – except – I have to check with him.”’