COSMIC PRINCESS (1982)
TV-Movie
Article 4536 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-16-2014
Directed by Charles Crichton and Peter Medak
Featuring Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Catherine Schell
Country: UK
What it is: Two episodes of “Space 1999” edited together.

The residents of Moonbase Alpha encounter an alien with a desperate plan to save his planet. They also encounter his shape-shifting daughter.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, “Space: 1999” was one of the big disappointments of my life; after buying into the hype surrounding its debut, I ended up being extremely unhappy with the reality of the show itself, and even though I stuck through its first season, I can only recall a single episode that I liked. The two episodes here are from the second season which I never watched; the local TV station which ran the first season in my area dropped it by the time these episodes rolled around. For the second season, regular Barry Morse was dropped (which for me was a pity; he was the only character that seemed emotionally involved with anything that was going on) and a new character was added; a metamorph played by Catherine Schell, who is the focus of these two episodes. Based on these two episodes, the second season wasn’t much of an improvement; though it looks like the series became a little less remote and distant, it still feels like none of the characters really developed into living, breathing human beings, and it was very hard to really care anything about them. Neither of the two episodes is very good here, and though I may revisit the series some day, I’ll do so without any of the same expectations I had when it first appeared.