This Friday on 'UFO' ep 26 'The Long Sleep'

This is a class way to end, a brilliantly constructed story with interesting visual presentation. Love the sepia looking color for the flashbacks and the incredible multi coloured LSD sequence together with maniacal laughing.
This sequence of course led to this episode's banning originally. Even here in liberal U.K. it was not shown before midnight until the early nineties.
A sad end for Straker, another female relationship ends catastrophically this time due to Foster's insistence, a future SHADO leader for sure.
The only quibble I have with the plot is believing that houseboat owners leave strange cylinders undisturbed for ten years.
Tessa Wyatt was well known for lots of shows always looking great as she did here in the flashbacks, so it was disconcerting to see her pale looking in the hospital bed, good make up, or maybe no makeup!
The series overall had its faults but it must be remembered when it was made , and is still commercially viable for fan merchandise 40 years on. I may have given the impression of being a UFO nut, not true, it doesn't get into my top ten shows but sneaks into the top twenty for me.
10/10

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The Long Sleep

The waters are awfully icy this morning. Col. Lake informs Straker that a ten-year-old case has just been reopened and asks if he would like to look into it personally. 'Asks' night not be the right word, more like 'taunts'...and then we learn why. The case involved a woman who had been hit by a car and sent into a coma. The man that hit her was Straker, and the woman has just woken up. The way Lake lets her boss know borders on cruelty. Straker has such a look of guilt on his face that he can't object.

Under the care of Dr. Jackson, Catherine Frazer rebuilds her memories of the accident and the circumstances that led to it. As a young woman she had just run away from her parents and spent the day with another youth she had just met, Tim Redman. Tim also was an escapee with nowhere to go, he running from academia. Together they wasted a day in an abandoned farmhouse. At night, Tim introduced her to drugs. While they were high, they encountered by chance a couple of aliens planting a device in the barn. What fun!

Imagine the poor aliens' bewilderment at these two crazed humans who steal the key to the device to play tag with, lead them on a merry chase to the roof, and then one of these mad terrestrials leaps off the roof to his own death. Imagine poor Tim, who thought he could fly.

Now imagine poor Catherine. She awakes the next day to see Tim's body dragged away by the aliens and witnesses the UFO fly away. She hitches a ride to return to the city only to have to flee the driver who tries to molest her. She runs right into the path of one Ed Straker.

It's Ed that Jackson calls in to help revive her memories (that's right, Jackson, the girl's state is fragile so call in Mr. Tact). She has no family now, her parents died waiting for her to recover.

Someone else is waiting. Tim was revived by the aliens ten years ago, programmed, and stationed as a sentinel to watch over Catherine. As long as it may take, they want that key.

Something about Cathy's tale has Ed spooked. In 1974, three days prior to colliding with Cathy, a UFO was spotted over Turkey. A few hours after that Turkey was rocked by an earthquake that killed 80,000 and leveled a city. (note - that places this episode as taking place in 1984, so it has now been four years since our introductory episode 'Identified'). Somehow Straker makes the leap: the UFOs destroyed the Turkish city, therefore they must have been about to do the same to rural England. (Really? Not, say, London?) Yes, it must have been a bomb! No, not the plan, I mean literally a bomb - and it's still there!

Indeed it is. A bomb, barely covered by loose soil hastily tossed ten years ago, in a farmhouse no one has set foot in for ten years, not even local kids looking for diversions. Yep. Not only that, the key is still on the houseboat it landed in, the boat that still sits on the same patch of river under the bridge Catherine threw it from. The chase is on because now Tim knows, and so does Straker. they both obtained the final lost memory with the use of an alien serum that sped up Catherine's heart rate as a side effect. Tim used it on her and carelessly left it behind. To stop him it must be used on her again. For once, Straker is unable to make the call that endangers a life, and the morally inscrutable Jackson is reluctant as well. It's Foster who insists. Turkey, 80,000 people dead...Straker put the fear into him. Ed, though...you'll remember the last time someone he was responsible for was in a hospital waiting for him to make a choice. Ed has come to care about Catherine.

We see Ed in the waiting room. it's a nicely understated callback to 'A Matter of Priorities' without exposition or otherwise being obvious. I like the direction of this episode very much, the work of Jeremy Summers who also directed The Psychobombs. The flashbacks scenes are in sepia, until that gives way directly to shifting bright color filters for the pharmaceutical high. It's an effective transition. The script is by the same David Tomblin who gave us The Cat With Ten Lives, Reflections in the Water, and three episodes of The Prisoner. Just what the aliens get from killing by the tens of thousands is unclear, but it doesn't exactly hurt their aims either. One might speculate that it throws nations into chaos as cover for the aliens to do their work. Real-world answer is likely the same fuzzy spec script communication that resulted in 'Destruction': they're aliens so they must want to kill us all (and who said anything about body harvesting?) You might wonder why the aliens don't simply send another key on the next UFO headed our way, as in 1974 SHADO was probably not up and running yet, but it may be a matter of resources - notice they left a human drone behind to deal with it instead of their own personnel. That's a minor matter. What counts is that this is the rare episode that lets us have a little backstory for our civilian characters, not much but enough to invest in them, get to like and root for them.

Alas, this is UFO so things come to a sad end. Tim accomplishes his task and essentially falls over dead. SHADO techs fail to disarm the bomb, so they employ a miniature rocket to send it into space. Returning to the hospital, Ed finds that Catherine died as Tim did: their life force spent. Catherine aged rapidly. Jackson doesn't have any answers but guesses that the aliens brought Tim back to life by stealing some of her life essence.

Tim and Catherine met, perhaps fell in love, and spent one glorious day together. They spent ten more years apart but locked together, and died still tied one to the other.

Lake's anger at Straker has vanished, replaced by empathy for his pain and for Catherine. Ed goes home alone.

10 'Century 21' logos. Even those thrilled me as a child, part of the ritual of watching every Sunday around noon like seeing the old UA symbol appearing before Bond flicks when they aired on the ABC Sunday Night Movie.

And so UFO comes to a close. Plans were shaping for a second season in which SHADO would expand their forces, the aliens would step up their fight, and much of the action would take place on and around the Moon. Unfortunately the show was dropped by ITC. Not ready to give up entirely, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson took what they had and created Space: 1999.

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Oh, no! I can't believe we'll never see again Interceptors doing what they do best: intercepting UFOs. We'll also never see Sky 1 launching from the Diver part of Skydiver anymore. All is gone.

Clearly this doesn't seem to be an episode intended as a series finale. Otherwise they wouldn't have spent so much time with a new character, while all regulars were mostly ignored. Not the good-bye the folks at SHADO (HQ and Moonbase) deserved.

I felt the flashback scenes took a little too long, though I liked the sepia tones and the romantic atmosphere of the 1960s they wanted to convey. The scenes between the busker and the girl in London reminded me of so many romantic films of the 1960s, perhaps Jules Et Jim or Rome Adventure.

The use of color was particularly clever when the nostalgic sepia tone was replaced with vibrant colors (or "colours") with the characters under the influence of LSD or equivalent. But there was a slip: when she woke up, she looked into the horizon and saw the UFO taking off in a rural landscape, but that part was in color. Obviously the didn't give the miniatures sequence the same photographic treatment they gave the live scenes, so they didn't integrate well.

The secnes of the "boy's" demise were weird. For some reason he had super strength, and then he just dropped dead in the very place he had died 10 years before, his clothes magically transformed into those he wore a decade earlier, and then he turned into a skeleton... WTF???

And then Straker goes to the hospital to see the girl and finds the corpse of a decrepit old lady. At that moment I thought, "there you have it, you played fast and loose with medical ethics and you killed her with that mystery drug." But no, Jackson has a whole explanation ready. Using one of his fantastic insight leaps, he states that the "boy" had sucked her life essence and would live decades more with it. In other words, anotehr WTF moment.

The bomb threat was forced too. And it didn't help I didn't catch the Turkey reference when they quickly mentioned it to justify all of Straker's insights about the bomb and its destruction power. I kept wondering what made they think the bom would be so destructive. And the dialogue didn't help, giving alarmist warnings abut a bomb that looked more like a 1980s' Simon electronic memory game.

E.g. "it'll split England in half," "then, good-bye England," "thousands may die!", "the tidal wave alone will destroy the coasts of every country around it." (OK, that last one was overkill.)

And then it exploded in space and it was... well... underwhelming. I guess I was expecting something like this: (explosion at the 3:25 mark)

https://youtu.be/P6oyiDqrDrg

The very final scene, however was perfect. I imagine the show couldn't have ended with a better visual cue: Straker walking away from the camera in a one-point perspective scenery à la Kubrick.

I'd say the legacy this episode leaves are the scenes of the characters under the psychedelic influence of hallucinogenic drugs. Something bold at that time, I admit, and incredibly dated now. All in all, UFO deserved a much better send-off.

Good night UFO. I'll miss you, but I'm glad you're leaving.

"The Long Sleep" gets 7 bad trips to rural England.

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Let us give thanks that this is the last week of UFO. In this episode we learn that LSD and aliens don't mix.

The episode begins with Straker learning that a 10 year old coma victim is finally regaining conscious. It's significant not just because Straker's car put her in a coma but she also was involved in an UFO incident prior to her accident.

Straker goes to the hospital and the girl tells him a story of how their fates intertwined. The events are told in a sepia colored flashback that take place in 1970 London. The hippie girl (Tessa Wyatt) leaves her country house and heads to London and finds a hippie guy (Christian Roberts) at the Piccadilly Circus. They spend the day in London and go off to the country together and end up at a farm house. They decide to take some LSD which was probably a mistake because aliens are right next door. The two young people are oblivious about the reality of the situation and begin frolicking with the aliens. The aliens chase them and Tim does a swan dive off the top of the barn and seemingly dies.

The girl is oblivious to the reality off the situation when she sees the aliens take away Tim's body. She then finds a cylinder and runs away from the farm. She runs off and hitches a ride with some rapist. She runs away from him and inadvertently into Straker's car.

Now in the future Straker feels that the 10 year old cylinder is very important and puts all SHADO to work trying to find this device even though he has no idea of it's importance.

We learn that Tim isn't really dead and working in the hospital. Also he seemingly hasn't aged. He gives her a drug to elicit information about the cylinder and he learns that she threw it in a house boat. Straker & Foster learn of the whereabouts of the cylinder and go chasing after Tim. They go to the barn where they find Tim setting up the cylinder into a detention device. The struggle with Tim and then he just kind of dies in front of them and turns into a skeleton.

They decide to excavate the cylinder container and rocket it out into space for detonation. They come back to the hospital and see that the woman aged about 50 years and has died.

Random Thoughts and Questions:

*Is there any reason this wasn't broadcast until 1973?

*I remember Christian Roberts as "Denham" from "To Sir With Love"

*It's utterly ridiculous that the houseboat hadn't moved in 10 years let alone that a weird "cylinder" would still be in the same place unnoticed by the owner.

*How exactly does Straker know where the farm house is located???

*It's awfully convenient that Straker happened to be the one that ran into a girl who just had a UFO incident.

*The aliens also have this unbelievable power to create earthquakes?? Let's see they can Stop Time, create Earthquakes, Control people's minds, Bring the dead back to life, Harvest body parts, fly in interstellar travel but for the most part they act like the Keystone Cops.

*How does Straker determine that "they" have an Earthquake device. This is another of those massive leaps of faith on this show. He deduces that the Aliens created a massive Earthquake in Turkey. From what evidence??

*Why the hell didn't the Aliens look for the cylinder earlier or why didn't they just make another God damn cylinder in the ensuing 10 years??? They can stop time but they can't make another cylinder??

*What's the point of creating a massive Earthquake in England??

*Actually what was the point of Aliens constant flights to Earth??

*They don't really explain how they bring Tim back to life after he falls off the roof.

*So big huge rockets can just take off and land in the English Country side unnoticed??

It was a pretty good episode with some good twists and turns but there were a lot of plot holes in it. I give it a 7/10

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Random things:
Did everyone want the week off?
This episode felt like one of those spin off episodes where they use an existing show to springboard a new show. I know it was not, if for no other reason than both the girl and boy died.
I am so glad the aliens knocked the girl out when they did. With that laughter I was about to climb through the TV and do it myself.

Could they have been any vaguer when Straker says something like ‘when this is over’ and she says ‘I understand’? WHAT? This is how miscommunications happen. “He did ask me to marry him” “No, no I was asking her out to dinner!”

I find it a little rude for Straker and Foster to have an argument about giving her another shot in front of the ‘patient’.

Could it be someone (many) in production found the wonders of drugs before the move to the new studio? Seems like a lot of experimentation was going on and reflected in the last two episodes.

Sorry, not a fan.

5 out of 10

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by michaellevenson1 » Love the sepia looking color for the flashbacks and the incredible multi coloured LSD sequence together with maniacal laughing.

Indeed, that was a great touch in the episode and I'm sure it was bold at the time. I even thought of you as I wrote about the "colours". Unfortunately the concept hasn't aged well. Now "trippy" scenes most often have a comedic mood, and often a 1960s sountrack and visual style. Take a look at Homer Simpson's Guatemalan insanity pepper trip.

https://youtu.be/BceHGzsDVLY

This Star Trek scene was also revisited with modern technology to reveal Kirk's hilarious ordeal with drugs.

https://youtu.be/cY0RiGvHOTQ

I may have given the impression of being a UFO nut, not true

Wow, you could've fooled me!

by Simian_Jack » It's Ed that Jackson calls in to help revive her memories (that's right, Jackson, the girl's state is fragile so call in Mr. Tact).

Yeah, and I was thinking someone could've reminded Straker that yelling questions at an emotionally fragile girl is not the best way to gain her confidence.

Somehow Straker makes the leap: the UFOs destroyed the Turkish city, therefore they must have been about to do the same to rural England. (Really? Not, say, London?) Yes, it must have been a bomb!

Honestly I didn't even know they had cities like London in this show. I thought all of England was just a big bucolic place, which would be lovely, if not for the aliens lurking in the woods.

Anyway thanks for the "Turkey" clarification. They mentioned it quickly and I missed and the whole thing made even less sense to me.

They spoke about the deleterious effects so much ("good-bye England") that I was expecting a quantum fusion bomb that would obliterate England, make a hole in Earth's crust and end all life on the planet.

Just what the aliens get from killing by the tens of thousands is unclear, but it doesn't exactly hurt their aims either.

Yes, the aliens' goals were never clear. Like in the previous episode, in which I wasn't sure what the aliens planed to do with one ship in the movie studio. Well, destroy SHADO HQ, I suppose.

by JohnQ1127 » Let us give thanks that this is the last week of UFO. In this episode we learn that LSD and aliens don't mix.

Truth be told, the drugs themselves were innocuous. Tim died because he though the could fly. If he had strapped himself to a chair or something he would've tripped only in his mind, harmlessly. The aliens, on the other hand, are never good company, drugs or no drugs.

*Is there any reason this wasn't broadcast until 1973?

Even though the episode has a clear anti-drug message, I guess even acknowledging young people used drugs was an uncomfortable situation for a network.

*I remember Christian Roberts as "Denham" from "To Sir With Love"

Oh, yeah, thank you for the reminder.

*The aliens also have this unbelievable power to create earthquakes?? Let's see they can Stop Time, create Earthquakes, Control people's minds, Bring the dead back to life, Harvest body parts, fly in interstellar travel but for the most part they act like the Keystone Cops.

And they also have the power to control the mind of a cat. And if you have cats you know how hard it is to control our little furry friends.

*Why the hell didn't the Aliens look for the cylinder earlier or why didn't they just make another God damn cylinder in the ensuing 10 years??? They can stop time but they can't make another cylinder??

Yes, that was hilarious. I assumed 10 years would be more than enough time to order another cylinder from "Home Office." They could've sent a telegram.

LOST CYLINDER -(STOP)- SHOULDA LISTENED TO YOU AND BROUGHT SPARE 1 -(STOP)- SEND ANOTHER CYLINDER -(STOP)- BETTER YET SEND 2 JUST IN CASE -(STOP)- SINCERELY CAP %$%&#*3t% AWAY TEAM -(STOP)-

*So big huge rockets can just take off and land in the English Country side unnoticed??

Well, the English are very reserved and they don't mind with other people's business. So out of politeness nobody asks why a rocket took off for space from the English countryside. 

by lorkris » I am so glad the aliens knocked the girl out when they did. With that laughter I was about to climb through the TV and do it myself.

It called my attention that the aliens took a page out of Straker's playbook. The way to stop a hysterical woman is striking her.

I find it a little rude for Straker and Foster to have an argument about giving her another shot in front of the ‘patient’.

Yeah, that was awkward.

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I’d be less than honest it I didn’t admit I was a little disappointed with this episode. I had not looked up any information on it, but had heard the implication that this was definitively that last episode of the series. So I expected something well…definitive about it – the death of a character, a big reveal about the aliens, something very significant. From the title, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe it was about Straker going into suspended animation for some reason and waking up later to see how SHADO had progressed over the years. But none of that happened; it was a story that could have just as easily aired earlier in the season. Now, this is not to say it was a bad episode; it wasn’t. In fact, it was different and well done. Just not as unique as I was expecting.

Like last week’s show, this wasn’t your typical opening. The initial alien attack had taken place ten years earlier and the link to the present day was a young woman waking from a ten-year coma caused at least in part by Straker accidentally hitting her with his car. The story is told on two levels – the present and the past. The past is done by shooting in not just in black-and-white but in sepia tones. A psychedelic trip is then filmed in bright colors as a contrast. The trip also includes some slow-motion and wide-angle camera work to make it more surreal. Best of all is Catherine’s laugh during the trip – a combination of thorough amusement with wild abandon that was very effective. For me, this was probably the highlight of the show.

The story concerns the aliens having set a huge bomb that would inflict damage similar to a quake in the London area. As they tried to set it ten years ago, Catherine grabbed one of its vital pieces as a game and later tossed it away. Her new boyfriend Tim, whom she had just met, was apparently killed by a fall afterward. But he was gathered up by the aliens, repaired, and programmed to recover the missing piece, and insert it into the bomb – no matter how long it took. And so Tim hovered in the background until she came out of the coma and then injected Catherine with an alien truth serum to find out where she threw the missing part. By the time SHADO catches on, she’s already told Tim the truth that she cannot recall again. Foster suggests injecting her with the remaining serum Tim left behind. For once, Straker is the one in doubt – hesitant to risk her life with another injection. But Foster and even Cat herself persuade him to do it. The part is found only after Tim has reinserted it and then allowed himself to die. Fortunately, SHADO is much more advanced than 10 years ago and they are able to fly the bomb into space to explode harmlessly.

The tag scene has Straker called back to the hospital. With his track record, I expected him to be told that Catherine had either lapsed back into a coma or died because of the second injection. Then he would feel guilt about it, but he would survive. Instead it turns out that the girl has died – of old age. The aliens somehow sucked away her remaining years and gave them to Tim in case he had to wait 50 years or so for Cat to wake back up. When he died, the years went with him and she aged and died in seconds. So, Straker is in the clear. She would have died anyway and would much have preferred saving hundreds of lives with her last actions, which she did. And so ends the UFO saga. Our last lesson is that the aliens could manipulate future years in people, making them even more powerful.

Random thoughts: How were they able to suck years away from Cat if they never had possession of her? Was it something Tim did to her sometime during her ten year coma?

Again, Straker is able to guess the alien’s motives. When he hears aliens were burying something, he instantly guesses bomb. And he also deduced that a quake in Turkey ten years ago was actually an alien bomb.

It appears that in some areas of England, houseboats are parked for ten years at a time. Worse still, a stray cylinder thrown into an open area among other controls goes completely unnoticed for ten years as well.

The powers of the aliens for mind control have been demonstrated before in “Kill Straker” and “The Psychobombs” as well as other eps. Here they control someone’s actions for ten years without even being nearby. However, in earlier shows, they seemed to do it long distance. Here, they did drag this man to a ship, so it’s quite conceivable that he could have been under their most powerful type of mind control.

Finally, a word about Tim’s priorities. He says he was a doctor who operated on a young boy for 15 hours, managing to save his life. Then he saw a news report about men killing each other in war, and quit his profession to march in peace rallies. As a doctor, he could have save dozens or even hundreds of lives. As a protestor, he may have caught people’s attention occasionally; but protests did not end the war. He wasted a golden opportunity for nothing, and ultimately just became an empty alien shell doing their bidding.

Overall, I give the episode 8 memorable laughs.

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Plans were shaping for a second season in which SHADO would expand their forces, the aliens would step up their fight...(simian_jack)

Speaking of a second season, I came across these proposed second-season episodes for UFO. I assure you they’re as genuine as my story of the Prisoner’s bubble riding on horseback, or Netflix dropping EARTH 2:

“Actions Speak Louder” – After staving off yet another attack of three UFOs at once, Straker fears they might send out four or five next time and argues with Henderson for funds to build two more interceptors. Henderson says the only available funds were those bookmarked for a language-translation machine for Dr. Casey. “That’s words!” protests Straker. “Actions speak louder!” Henderson gives in and three months later two more interceptors (and two more entrance slides, a bigger launch area etc.) are completed. The aliens attack with four UFOs, and they take them all out. Then, Straker meets with Henderson to gloat. H tells him that Dr. Casey just got his funding two weeks ago and his language machine translated an incomprehensible message from space recorded two months ago. The translator identified it as one of the UFOs arranging for a secret meeting of all the planet leaders on Mars. Unfortunately, it took place last month. If they’d known about it then, they could have taken all the leaders out at once. “Well, I guess words do have some merit,” chuckles Straker. “No,” says Dr. Casey. “You were right. Actions do speak louder!” after which he grabs a baseball bat and chases after Straker.

“Final Conflict” – In a flashback, the truth about the absence of Alec Freeman, Lt. Ellis and Lt. Sanders is revealed. It seems they were all fired after taking the position that the UFOs should be called IFOs. After losing the argument and their jobs, they depart with Alec angrily saying, “Take your proposed name and say it backward!” It isn’t until the episode ends, that Straker realizes in dramatic fashion that Alec was saying “O, F U!”

“Wrong Number” - Three UFOs sweep past the moon. The3 interceptors get 2, and the other one escapes to Earth, hides in the English forest…you know the drill. Meanwhile, Straker is harassed by constant phone calls with no one on the line. Eventually, it is traced to one of his staff. It seems the aliens tried that brainwashing UFO again, but the alien didn’t speak our language as clearly and told him to “Call Straker!” (And this will air after the one about getting 5 interceptors just to confuse the heck out of everyone.)

“Attack on Parliament” - The aliens plot to assassinate the newly elected Prime Minister – who happens to be a woman. (This script was ultimately scrapped, as one of the producers insisted, “Even in the 80’s, there’s no chance in Hell we’ll ever elect a female Prime Minister.”)

“Pipe Dreams” - Pipe organs begin to disappear from churches. It seems one of the aliens...Oh, did I do the “didn’t speak our language as clearly” bit already? Never mind.

“Shore Leave” - Foster takes two weeks off (Oh, good. A chance for other cast members to be highlighted.) Nothing much happens at SHADO, but Foster stumbles across…and he single-handedly….wait a second. Written by Michael Billington? I might have known!

“Meltdown” - When the aliens set off a nuclear explosion in Chernobyl, Straker manages to make it look like their nuclear reactor had a meltdown. (Say, that was an eerie coincidence…)

“Brimfin Saves the World” – I have no description what this one was about, but I loved the title.

“Time after Time” - In the series finale, Ed is accidentally shot by an actor who thought his gun was a prop. As he prepares to go under for surgery, he bemoans that no one will care about his passing. Meanwhile, Foster is in charge of SHADO and investigates an alien device in a secret labyrinth. After setting the charges, the aliens close in on him and he hides in the device which looks like a glass booth. He disappears just as the bombs go off and destroy the machine. Paul lands in the middle of a road and the driver swerves and crashes into a pole to avoid him. Foster gets the man to a hospital, where he learns that he has gone back in time two years. He also finds out that he has simply replaced his past self, who disappeared suddenly and without explanation. He thinks aloud that he knows about the future alien plots and he can help deal with them more effectively this time around. In 1982, Straker wakes up after a successful surgery to find his ex-wife and son anxiously waiting for him, and he isn’t surprised at all. It seems that driver Paul ran off the road was the one who had been destined to hit Straker’s son and now history has changed for the better. (Well, I had to have one nice one.)

Oh, the lost possibilities...

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