kerravonsen | Eating My Words

Yes, I take it back. Season 1 of Space: 1999 is not scientific, though it still may be better than Season 2. I've recently watched three of the first episodes, and the writers needed to be chained in front of a television showing the Discovery Channel, for a week. Even that would give them an improvement on the basic science mistakes they made.

Like what? Um... "We forgot one type of radiation -- magnetic radiation!" Just change a word or two folks, just two words, please? And of course, we already knew that the amount of accelleration needed to blast the moon out of Earth's orbit so fast that the people on Moonbase Alpha were too far away to be rescued... would have killed everyone on Moonbase Alpha anyway. Particularly with those weak windows of theirs that can get cracked by the force of one man bashing his helmet against it. That was episode 1. They do get plusses for pointing out that an intense magnetic field can do brain damage, though. And also for the misdirection about what the common denominator of the "illness" was.

Episode 2 demonstrated that the writers came across the word "anti-matter" somewhere and thought that it sounded cool. Not to mention that they just hop onto this planet teeming with life, and it doesn't ever occur to them here, or at any time later, that it might be wise to put all explorers under quarantine in case they brought back a space bug. Or the other way around.
Oh, and the fact that Eagle spacecraft don't appear to have airlocks.

I skipped Episode 3 for the moment, but that's the one where they demonstrate that they don't know what a Black Hole is.

Episode 4 I just watched, and I guess I'm supposed to forgive this one because the writers weren't to know what computers would evolve into -- but, gee, talk about security-by-obscurity. Apparently the only thing stopping any random person from accessing the base computer is that one has to be a programmer in order to understand how to interact with it. And it spits out all these cute slips of paper. And solves problems on the level that would require a genius AI like Orac to do... Let's see, what else? Oh, they construct their Eagle spaceships so that the vital emergency manual-to-automatic switch is just out of reach of the pilot if he happens to be suffering from like, too many gravities, as might happen in an emergency situation. Of course that one is just dramatic licence.
Oh, and then there's the "tell the Evil Machine that its people are dead, and it will blow up" cliche. Mind you, with this one, one could possibly argue that the original creators were so paranoid that they gave the thing an auto self-destruct. Considering that the probe had ostensibly been watching mankind for thousands of years just in case humanity should become a threat to the beings in a system billions of light years away, I'd call that pretty paranoid.

And of course, Commander Koenig suffers from Heroitis, where he always goes off on missions himself, instead of sensibly sending somebody else -- unless of course somebody has to die, in which case it's a mission on which neither Koenig nor Carter gets sent, or, at least, not both of them together. I like Carter, though. Maybe it's because he's an Australian. And I like Professor Bergman, even though he doesn't know the difference between magnetism and radiation.

I'm definitely going to have to watch the rest of the episodes in a MST3K mood.

Interestingly enough, a lot of these episodes demonstrate huge dichotomies in abilities, the implications of which are completely ignored, in a sort of six-impossible-things-before-breakfast kind of way. I think the writers were more interested in the last five minutes of pontification at the end of the episode, than actually thinking about what they were doing.

For example -- in the third episode, the alien probe apparently has the ability to take over a human being from a distance (and burn out their brain in the process) and know enough about programming this particular computer (it was explicitly stated that the victim didn't know any programming) to be able to make the zombified human type into the computer at superhuman speeds -- I mean, why didn't they just attack the computer directly? Or, if the human-takeover was their "exploit" to get at the computer, they'd only need to do it once, just to insert their virus into the computer and make it start beaming all the info they wanted. I guess when you're thinking in terms of 70's style computers, the concept of a computer virus is a bit beyond one. On the other hand, if they could take over a human being at a distance, what would they need to get at the computer for anyway?

A similar dichotomy with Moonbase technology. They have these nifty doorkey-videophone things... and the image is in black-and-white. (Hmmm, I wonder where all the cameras are?)
Another example of heroitis is that the security folks seem to have these nifty stun-guns, but there's never a security man anywhere near when you need one, so we're always reduced to fisticuffs and impressive shots of the beserker-of-the-week throwing people into the air or fighting them off with one hand.

Hmmm, which is worse, having a berserker-of-the-week, or having a babe-of-the-week?