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.

( the gory details )

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?