As some other people have said, this was a good episode (in a horrible type of way!). What I do not quite understand though is that the graveyard of spaceships, complete with monster, had moved all that way from when Cellini first encountered them. The monster moving around by itself maybe, but all the derelict ships as well?
shareThey were trapped in it's psychic web is the answer!
Shut the door Mary
JB
There are at least two ways to look at this question. You can see it as not making sense, because the monster and its "web" reappears in a completely different place. OR You can see it as being a creepy mystery, that the creature and its "web" can move vast distances, just to catch a previous victim who escaped. I don't think that the creature moving, probably without a spacecraft, over incalculable distances is a whole lot more reasonable than assuming that IT moves and takes the whole array of derelicts with it.
shareThank you both of you. Both of your answers do make sense. In that when the monster moves, it takes it's web with it. That is probably why it is my favourite episode (in a macabre way). The fact that it is so mysterious.
shareI think more that the group of ships held together by the creature's psychic web move on their own carrying the monster with it. The moon had passed through a black sun and a time/space warp which perhaps catapulted it into the future. In Death's Other Dominion the Thulian's computer identified the year as 2870AD now that could mean that they were sent into the past if you believe the moon is still in 1999/2000 or if you have already seen Another Time/Another Place you can imagine the moon is now in the future where the graveyard of ships has been propelled too after nearly a thousand years too! Or did it too go through a space warp or even duplicated?
Shut the door, Mary
JB
Time and distance are the two fundamental problems with the very basis of the show. I recall doing some back of an envelope calculations a few years back about the Moon initially accelerating at 10Gs for 12 hours and could not explain it traveling at any substantial fraction of the speed of light. So, to get anywhere in months rather than centuries or millennia, Alpha needs lots of inexplicable space warps. If you establish a universe with more "holes" in it than swiss cheese, you have an "in-universe" explanation for just about anything. Maybe the deadly space spider is just a passenger in the space warp that move the web. Maybe (another frequently cited element of the Space:1999 universe is mataphysics - in season one) the psychic connection of Tony Cellini with the spider in the web, caused the reappearance by literally changing the laws of probability. Maybe a lot of things.
shareApparently scientists have identified that star systems in other parts of the universe are much closer together than in our neighbourhood. This wasn't known back in 1975 but has added credence to the series! The moon did seem to be affected by the gravitational pull of the many different planets it passed by which may have added to it's speed or lack of! It did look like it was going into orbit around Zenno at one point (Peter Cushing's Raan's planet) but apart from that we've had a black sun which hurtled them to the otherside of the universe and the Another Time phenomenon which first sent them back to earth and later onto new horizons. In series 2 we learn of another incidental space warp before we see the moonbase and later a third one which hurled the moon five light years ahead but as to whether time was affected as well we don't know and finally Koenig detonated the waste dumps to change the course of the moon away from Tora in Seance Spectre and out into another direction although that was close to the end of the series!
Shut the door, Mary
JB
I really do not think that any information on the distances between stars can excuse the event of Space:1999. Average distances are greater than that between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Distances in the crowded core areas of the galaxy are amazingly less than that but such areas are: a) They are predominantly not the sort of stars that are likely to have systems. b) The closeness of stars makes planetary systems unlikely to be stable AND you have to visualize the appearance of the sky in such a region. It would be far brighter and with many, many more stars brightly visible than any starscape seen in the series.
The many close encounters in the series are just not rationally explainable. Feel free to invoke metaphysics, though, the series often did.
I am happy to either accept it all or make up my own alternate background. I like the idea of a rewritten "Breakaway" in which an ancient alien machine is being secretly researched on the Moon where it was found - as TMA-1 in 2001. The titanic buried machine is activated and either the whole Moon or ( I like this image) a section of it within a sphere of some miles diameter, is moved via space warp. After that Bergman will constantly be trying to figure out how to control the seemingly random operation of the alien space drive.
Alpha Centauri which is 4.3 light years away from us was not the destination of the moon in this series (Go watch Lost in Space for that and perhaps the POTA tv series as well) the moonbase was preparing itself for a manned voyage to Meta, a rogue planet passing by the limits of our solar system and after Breakaway Koenig and Bergman both believed the moon would arrive within that vicinity in a matter of months. But as we know that didn't happen or if it did then maybe they renamed Meta Terra Nova and it must have changed it's colour too from blue to patchy red! The moon was dragged off course by many mishaps like a black sun and an ion storm (space warp) so they made it to many other systems and the dates were never confirmed only in Dragon's Domain, that is until the second series when dates were the in thing of the show!
JB
Shut the door, Mary
Yes, Breakaway ended with the moon, coincidentally (or, possibly, by metaphysical guidance), on a course which was going to carry it close to the newly discovered Meta. Unfortunately this story element, with the strange radio signal from Meta, was never followed up. The second aired episode "Matter of Life and Death" seemed like it might relate, but it does not - as you say, they call the planet they approach Terra Nova and there is no mention of the Meta signal.
My mention of Alpha Centauri was merely because it is the nearest star and, close as it is, 25 trillion miles is a ridiculous distance at sublight speeds... Therefore a lot of unmentioned space warps are required if you want the number of planetary encounters that occur in the show.
The outlook now is that solar systems are closer together in other parts of the galaxy or even universe so if we assume the moon has been displaced into that area of the cosmos then a new planet every other episode or two weeks is not out of order to understand.
The Meta thing is correct but understanding weekly television programmes of the seventies means that no episode can be connected to another outside of the first! I mean you could say that Ultima Thule, Retha, Ariel or any other blue planet the moon passes by could be Meta only that they have changed the name or code for said world. Depending of course on what ordering you use when watching the show...
JB
Shut the door Mary!
The important point is that an area where stars were close enough together to noticeably shorten travel time between them, would be an unlivable environment. Saturated with radiation and containing a mix of star types - many of which only last a few hundred million years before they become a deadly hazard to anything alive within MANY light years... This sort of place would also look a lot different from the space seen in the sky of Alpha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center#/media/File:Hubble_captures_glittering_crowded_hub_of_our_Milky_Way.jpg