Best Ever
Science Fiction Series?

On September 13, 1999, a nuclear explosion blasts the Moon out of Earth’s orbit and sends it hurtling through space at impossible velocities. Moonbase Alpha—a scientific installation housing 311 personnel—becomes an accidental generation ship, its inhabitants encountering alien civilizations, cosmic phenomena, and existential questions week after week with no prospect of return. This is the premise of Space: 1999, and if it sounds scientifically absurd, that’s because it is. The physics don’t work. The Moon can’t move that fast. A base that size couldn’t sustain that population. None of it makes sense.

None of it needs to.

Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, fresh from the puppet-based triumphs of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, created Space: 1999 as their most ambitious live-action production—a $6.5 million first-season budget that showed in every model shot and set design. But the Andersons’ real ambition wasn’t spectacle; it was tone. Where Star Trek projected Kennedy-era optimism into the future, Space: 1999 channeled post-Vietnam, post-Apollo, post-optimism uncertainty. Commander John Koenig (Martin Landau, bringing theatrical gravitas to every scene) doesn’t explore strange new worlds by choice. He’s stranded. His people aren’t seeking out new civilizations; they’re trying to survive encounters with forces beyond human comprehension.

The first season, script-edited by Christopher Penfold, operates closer to 2001: A Space Odyssey than to any television predecessor. Episodes like “Black Sun” (the Alphans face certain death approaching a singularity, only to encounter something that might be God), “War Games” (an alien civilization destroys the base in a scenario eventually revealed as test and illusion), and “Dragon’s Domain” (a creature from a previous space disaster haunts an astronaut in sequences genuinely terrifying for 1975 television) treat science fiction as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry rather than adventure plotting. The pacing is deliberate, even glacial by contemporary standards. Scenes breathe. Characters sit with uncertainty rather than problem-solving their way to resolution.

The production design reinforces this atmosphere of existential displacement. Main Mission, the base’s command center, is a masterwork of Ken Adam-influenced modernism: white surfaces, orange accents, the kind of antiseptic futurism that reads as deeply 1970s while remaining timelessly alien. Rudi Gernreich’s costumes—unisex, beige, featuring the single most impractical sleeve design in television history—suggest a humanity that’s left behind distinctions that no longer matter. Barry Gray’s score, drawing on his decades of Anderson collaboration, alternates between lush romanticism and harsh electronic dissonance.

The cast sells the material’s seriousness. Landau and Barbara Bain (as Dr. Helena Russell, chief medical officer and Koenig’s eventual partner) had departed Mission: Impossible under contentious circumstances; here, their natural reserve becomes thematic rather than limiting. These are professionals doing impossible jobs in impossible circumstances, containing their emotional responses because containment is all they have. When Landau allows Koenig’s composure to crack—as in “Testament of Arkadia,” when he must accept that some of his people will leave the Moon to colonize a planet—the effect is devastating precisely because it’s earned.

Season two, retooled under American producer Fred Freiberger (previously responsible for Star Trek’s weakest season), attempted to inject action and aliens-of-the-week accessibility. The shift was commercially motivated—ITC wanted broader American syndication—but creatively disastrous. The addition of Maya (Catherine Schell), a shape-shifting alien, provided visual variety at the cost of tonal coherence. Episodes became monster-hunts rather than meditations. The production design warmed, the pacing accelerated, and something essential was lost.

But that first season—twenty-four episodes of genuinely adult science fiction television, made with feature-film resources and philosophical ambition—remains unmatched in its historical moment. Space: 1999 asks what humanity means when humanity has been cast out, permanently, with no possibility of return to the world that defined it. The Moon’s journey through space becomes metaphor for the modern condition: rootless, directionless, encountering wonders and horrors without framework for understanding either.

The 1999 of the title has long since passed. We didn’t establish moonbases or detonate nuclear waste in lunar storage. But the questions Space: 1999 posed—about meaning in meaningless universe, about community among the stranded, about what we owe each other when the institutions that structured our obligations have literally been torn from orbit—those haven’t aged at all.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Network Blu-ray release of Season One features comprehensive restoration from original film elements.
• Shout Factory’s complete series set offers both seasons with extensive supplements.
• The Space: 1999 soundtrack albums—multiple volumes released across various labels—present Gray’s compositions in full.