Luna Reviews Space: 1999 (Part 4 of 6) · 4:16am Oct 31st, 2015
LUNA REVIEWS
PART FOUR
“Ring Around the Moon”, Production #4, first broadcast January 15, 1976.
The episode started with some ordinary guy (played by Max Faulkner) doing repairs next to a window. Outside the window, the Sun suddenly appeared, only there was an angry eye in the middle of it!
Creepy!
I have nightmares that start exactly like this. They don’t end well.
The Eye/Sun turned the guy into a Moon Traitor, and he started reprogramming Computer in obviously sped-up footage. Poor Sandra observed out loud that Moon Traitor didn’t know a thing about computers.
Number Two ordered Computer Guy to stop Moon Traitor. Moon Traitor beat Computer Guy in a way that made it abundantly obvious that he had super strength.
“Where is your digital god now?”
Number Two, on seeing this, decided that clearly Computer Guy wasn’t manly enough, and that only Number Two could save the day by physically engaging with Moon Traitor instead of just shooting a stun ray at him (it’s a sci-fi TV show—you just know they have a stun ray).
Number Two failed to save the day.
“Smell my hand!”
Koenig, seeing Number Two fail, came to the same idiotic conclusion and also tried to save the day by taking Moon Traitor down in hand-to-hand combat.
Koenig failed to save the day.
I'm beginning to sense a pattern here...
Dr. Russell, who you figured would be equipped with a hypno-spray or something, attempted to stop Moon Traitor with her strength. But she also brought along an unexpected weapon: heightened acting!
This did the trick, as the guy broke free from his brainwashing and begged for help. And then dropped dead.
See, this is the reason why Barbara Bain must always underact: When Barbara expresses her feelings, PEOPLE DIE.
And then somebody shot him with a stun ray.
Well no, that last bit didn’t happen, but come on! Star Trek at least had a security officer on the bridge at all times who wouldn’t hesitate to stun his fellow officers on command. I mean, unless Moon Traitor was the designated security guy—ooh, clever move, evil Sun/Eye, clever move.
If the last episode was about the idiocy of fighting against a black hole’s gravity without the proper technobabble (and philosophy-babble), then this one was about the idiocy of fighting against an alien force field that can do anything the writer wants, no matter how little it makes sense or how bad (for once) the special effects are.
Also, this episode was ridiculously padded, as demonstrated by my description above of what it took to take down that Moon Traitor guy. The plot, reduced to its basics, is about a robotic probe from the far off alien planet Triton taking over people in order to transmit details of human biology to its memory banks, and what happens when it settles on taking over Dr. Russell.
Taking over your enemy’s resident goddess—another smart move for Sun/Eye.
But the method used is ridiculous—either take over and kidnap someone and scan them, or hack into Computer and get the data that way. Instead we have brainwashing and kidnapping and transmitting, and all possible combinations of the three techniques, in order to pad out the run time.
The only good part is at the very end: Koenig breaks into the probe to try and have himself exchanged for the brainwashed Dr. Russell, who has nearly had her synapses burnt out from repeated mental hijackings.
“There are 2.73 lights!”
The paranoid alien computer wants to learn enough about humanity to wipe them out before they travel the two million light years to conquer Triton. Koenig proves to the computer that Triton’s sun ate the planet long ago. The probe then self-destructs, and in the epilogue Bergman muses on the foolishness of spending a lifetime—or a planet’s lifespan—pursuing knowledge and knowledge alone.
Oh, and the “ring” around the Moon from the title was the force field. Which of course is spherical to anybody capable of thinking in three dimensions. Ugh.
Image credits for Part Four:
* The screenshot of Dr. Russell trying to stop “Moon Traitor” was taken from my DVD.
* Everything else was taken from the screenshot collection for “Ring Around the Moon” on the Catacombs site.
I thought ring around the moon dealt with the information transferred: Probe, Helen, computer, probe.