DESTINATION MOONBASE-ALPHA (1978)
Article 4984 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-10-2015
Directed by Tom Clegg
Featuring Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Catherine Schell
Country: UK
What it is: TV-Movie of two episodes of “Space 1999”

Moonbase Alpha is visited by a spaceship from Earth, which has developed faster-than-light travel and is offering to take them all back home. However, all is not what it seems, and Commander Koenig is the only one who sees the truth about the visitors…

Yes, it’s another TV-Movie edited from two episodes of a TV series, but at least the two episodes in this case are of a two-part story, so it’s not plagued with the lack of focus that often happens when they try this sort of thing. The episodes are “The Bringers of Wonder”, part one and two. The two episodes are from towards the end of the second season, so it doesn’t suffer near as much from the stodginess that plagued its first season. Still, I’m not impressed with the writing in these episodes; some of the exchanges of dialogue are embarrassingly awkward, some of the behavior of the characters doesn’t make any sense, and it’s become pretty obvious by this point that the character of Maya the Metamorph (who only came on board during the second season) had become an all purpose plot convenience. The opening crawl kicks the action about 100 years down the line to the year 2100; probably somebody figured out that the technology seemed too advanced for 1999. The copy I found was on YouTube, but it’s a little suspect; it runs for two hours and thirty minutes and looks like it has another episode tagged on (which I didn’t watch, as all my references only mention the two episodes I did watch), and I suspect that I may not be watching the movie version, but the opening credits attached to the two episodes. At any rate, it’s not a very impressive affair, and though the second season seems to have addressed some of the problems with the first season, it still comes across as pretty weak.