Dragon's Domain

Lore & Background

On Moonbase Alpha, Captain Tony Cellini experiences a vision of a nameless enemy that he perceives as a mass of light and piercing sound. He attempts to take off in an Eagle Transporter but old friend Commander Koenig stuns him with a laser first. Dr Russell believes that Cellini is dealing with unresolved trauma from a mission to the exoplanet Ultra in 1996, before the Moon was ejected from the Solar System. On reaching their destination, the crew of the Ultra Probe, piloted by Cellini, encountered a collection of derelict alien spacecraft. When the crew docked with one of the ships, they were attacked by an enormous, shrieking, tentacled creature with a single luminous eye and a fiery maw. The monster hypnotised Cellini's shipmates, devoured each of them alive, and then regurgitated their charred remains. Weapons had no effect on the creature and Cellini was forced to flee, blasting the command module free of the probe ship to use as an escape pod. After six months alone in space, Cellini reached Earth. His accomplishment was quickly overshadowed by mass disbelief of his horrific story. The World Space Commission ruled that there had been no creature and that the other crewmembers had been killed in a decompression accident. Cellini remained in Russell's psychiatric care until Koenig was made commander of Alpha and gave him a position at the Moonbase. Cellini tells Koenig and Russell that his attempt to leave Alpha was in response to a feeling that the creature is near and he must face it again. When the Moon eventually drifts near the spacecraft graveyard, Ultra Probe is revealed to still be docked. Koenig prepares to investigate in an Eagle. Determined to face the creature alone, Cellini hi-jacks the Eagle and docks with the probe. The creature re-appears, with Cellini attacking it with a fire axe before it seizes him in its tentacles. Koenig arrives with reinforcements in a second Eagle, and witnesses Cellini perishing in the same way as his crew. Koenig deduces the creature's weakness is its eye and destroys it with Cellini's axe. As the Moon leaves the graveyard, Russell closes Cellini's medical file. While talking with Koenig, she muses that when the Alphans eventually find a new home, they will need to reinvent humanity's mythology. She suggests a new fairytale: Tony Cellini and the Monster; akin to Saint George and the Dragon.

Reader's Guide

The story, a take on Saint George and the Dragon, was originally conceived as a vehicle for Nick Tate as Captain Alan Carter. Reports indicate that Martin Landau influenced the production staff to rewrite Tate's part as a one-off guest role. Fulfilling their agreement with RAI, the Italian production company co-funding the first series, Italian actor Gianni Garko was cast in the role of the tortured astronaut, now named Tony Cellini. Garko, though a talented actor, was not a fluent speaker of the English language, and asked Tate to help teach him his lines in English. Many of the spacecraft miniatures seen in the graveyard sequences had been used before in the series. Reports indicated that the visual effects crew shot a sequence including Star Trek's USS Enterprise and Doctor Who's TARDIS, but the footage was never used. The episode was adapted in the sixth Year One Space: 1999 novel Astral Quest by John Rankine, published in 1975. Some contemporary reviews were negative, with the Bristol Evening Post writing that the episode's "plastic octopus-like monster" takes the audience "back to the bad old days" of "amateurish space fiction of the-little-green-men variety". Later reviews considered the episode to be one of Space: 1999's best. SFX magazine rated it "A-plus", calling the flashbacks "extremely effective" and the monster "superbly nightmarish". A retrospective by Nerdist named "Dragon's Domain" the best episode of the series. John Kenneth Muir argued that the episode "feels like a direct precursor" to the science fiction horror film Alien (1979) and its sequel, Aliens (1986).

Did You Know?

• The final shooting script was dated 21 January 1975, with blue-page amendments dated 29 January 1975 and yellow-page amendments dated 30 January 1975.
• Live-action filming took place Monday 27 January 1975 through Monday 10 February 1975.
• The blue quilted nylon jacket worn by Bergman would be used in the second series as Carter's excursion jacket.
• Commissioner Dixon's office on Earth was a redress of M's office from the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.