All That Glisters (Space: 1999)

Lore & Background

The episode's plot involves Eagle 4 en route to a planet to mine milgonite, a mineral vital to Moonbase Alpha's life support system. The team discovers a luminescent rock formation that is actually a living petro-form. The rock uses energy beams to control Tony Verdeschi and absorbs the Eagle's water supply. Koenig ultimately kills the petro-form with a modified laser-gun, and the team restores the planet's rain cycle by seeding clouds with nucleoid-active crystals.

Production was marked by significant cast and crew dissatisfaction. Director Ray Austin and the cast disliked the episode; Martin Landau wrote critical notes on his script, calling it poorly told and damaging to his character. Austin reportedly delivered a large rock to producer Fred Freiberger's office with a note naming it "Freiberger." The episode featured the smallest cast in the programme's history, with only five regulars and one guest artist, and no scenes on Moonbase Alpha.

Reception was mixed to negative. TV Zone called it a "dreadful load of hokum," while Dreamwatch Bulletin rated it 6 out of 10, describing it as "above par" but "no classic." John Kenneth Muir gave a positive review, comparing it to a zombie story and praising its visual style, though he criticized the characterization of Reilly and Koenig.

Reader's Guide

The episode is notable for its troubled production and the creative tensions it exposed between the cast and producer Fred Freiberger. Martin Landau's vocal displeasure and Ray Austin's departure from the programme after this episode highlight the behind-the-scenes conflicts that marked the second series. The episode's premise—a living rock that takes over humans—has been compared to the Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark," with scholars noting similarities to the Horta and Maya's role echoing Spock's scientific approach. Despite negative reviews from many critics, the episode has been analyzed for its visual style and its treatment of themes like desperation and compassion. The novelization by Michael Butterworth and a later novel by John Kenneth Muir expanded on the episode's backstory, linking it to the "Space Brain" episode. The episode remains a point of discussion among fans for its ambitious concept and the controversy surrounding its execution.

Did You Know?

• Despite featuring a relatively small cast, this episode did not have the fewest actors in the programme's history—that distinction belongs to 'The Troubled Spirit', which had only four regulars and one guest artist.
• Director Ray Austin did not end his association with the programme after this episode; he went on to direct the subsequent episode 'The Taybor'.

From UFO to the Moon's Edge

The genesis of Space: 1999 traces back through the Andersons' long-running science-fiction output, stretching from Supercar in the early 1960s through their work on UFO. In 1972, ITC chief Lew Grade floated the idea of a second UFO season with one firm condition: it must be Moon-based, since those episodes had drawn the strongest audience numbers. The Andersons and their design team, led by production designer Keith Wilson, dove into pre-production for what was then called UFO: 1999, building out an expanded SHADO Moonbase and a near-future setting roughly twenty years ahead. But as UFO's ratings slipped in both the US and UK, ITC pulled financial backing and the project was shelved. Gerry Anderson refused to let the accumulated design work go to waste. He pitched a reimagined concept to Abe Mandell, Grade's New York deputy, who agreed to fund a new series so long as it avoided any Earth-bound, domestic settings. Anderson's bold answer—launching the show by detonating the Earth—became the spark for the runaway-Moon premise that defined the series.

A Moon in Exile

The central conceit of the series is deceptively simple yet visually staggering: on 13 September 1999, an unidentified form of magnetic radiation triggers a thermonuclear detonation in the vast nuclear waste dumps on the Moon's far side. The blast hurls the Moon out of Earth orbit at tremendous velocity, turning the planet's natural satellite into an uncontrolled vessel careening through deep space. The 311 staff members of Moonbase Alpha, a research station nestled in the Plato crater on the Moon's northern hemisphere, find themselves stranded with no means of return. The wandering Moon serves as both home and spacecraft for the Alphans, who must search for a new world. Their odyssey carries them beyond the Solar System, through a black hole, and across multiple space warps that fling them ever deeper into the cosmos. Along the way they stumble into alien civilizations, dystopian societies, and surreal phenomena humanity has never encountered. Early episodes seeded the idea that some mysterious unknown force was steering the Moon's trajectory toward a hidden destiny, a thread the more action-driven second series largely set aside.

Stars, Guests, and a Global Cast

The pairing of American actors Martin Landau and Barbara Bain as the series' headline stars was a calculated commercial decision. The two were married at the time and had previously shared the screen in Mission: Impossible, and Lew Grade insisted on their casting to make the show palatable to a major US network, over Sylvia Anderson's preference for British performers. The regular ensemble also included Canadian-based British actor Barry Morse as Professor Victor Bergman in the first series, and Hungarian-born, American-raised Catherine Schell, who guest-starred as a different character in the Year One episode Guardian of Piri before stepping into the alien role of Maya for the second series. The show also gave Australian actor Nick Tate a platform for wider recognition. Beyond the core cast, the programme attracted a remarkable roster of guest appearances spanning Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Joan Collins, Julian Glover, Ian McShane, Patrick Troughton, David Prowse, Brian Blessed, and many others, with Blair, Damon, and Blessed each appearing in two episodes as distinct characters.

Structure, Pacing, and the Broadcast Frame

Each episode of Space: 1999 was crafted around a distinctive broadcast architecture. The first series opened with a teaser or cold open, followed by a title sequence that doubled as a fast-cut montage of roughly thirty-plus shots previewing the episode's events while simultaneously establishing the prestige of Landau and Bain, both billed as starring. This opening format deliberately echoed the title sequence of Mission: Impossible, their previous collaboration. The body of each episode was divided into four acts of ten to twelve minutes each, a structure designed to accommodate commercial breaks for North American syndication. Episodes closed with a brief epilogue scene, which in the second series often took a lighter, more humorous tone. The second series streamlined the opening by dropping the montage sequence entirely, reflecting a shift toward simpler, more action-oriented storytelling. The programme was first telecast on Australia's Channel 7 Melbourne on 28 July 1975, with its two series running through 1977; the first was co-produced by ITC Entertainment and Italy's RAI, while the second was produced solely by ITC.