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Reviews
Space: 1999: Devil's Planet (1977)
Season two continued to improve
Koenig: "We do not commit mindless violence."
Elizia: "Then you do deprive yourself of pleasure."
What a line. And with this episode, Space: 1999 meets Roger Corman (...while anticipating similarly red-spandexed-clad-female warriors of Octopussy... surely, I'm not the only one to notice?). So many of these season two episodes harkened back to the previous season one themes ("The Troubled Spirit" = "The Lambda Effect," "Guardian of Piri" = "The Bringers of Wonder"), this might be seen as a companion piece to season one's similarly suggestive male-vs-female, "The Last Enemy." This was one of the more memorable season two episodes, especially considering it consists entirely of just Koenig, an alien guest cast and the Alpha "B" cast of red jackets. The "night shift" Alpha actors shine here; Ed, Bill & Alibe all make an impression (Ed's Sam Dastor is the only link between the previous "Dorzak" episode and this, John Hug pretty much steals every season two scene he's in, while Alibe makes us cry despite of the fact we haven't seen her before). Perhaps due to necessity, the alien culture here is given a complex nuance that we rarely see in other episodes. Overall, another welcome uptick in quality seen the underrated second half of season two.
Space: 1999: The Immunity Syndrome (1977)
The best of season two
I've always considered this the best of season two, and one of the highlight ensembles of the entire series. It features what is certainly one of the most memorable Eagle crashes, and a secondary "reentry glider" crash thrown in for extra measure (...though I'm still not entirely clear what Helena and Maya accomplished by coming down). Based on a season one script which been floating around for a while, this episode posits a fascinating question: what if a planet were to reject visitors to its surface in the same way a body rejects a virus? The direction, the visuals, the cast (everyone's here) and even the haunting sound design of this planet result in a compelling episode. The sets were reused from the previous "Devil's Planet" (a title you could have flipped with this episode). The title was borrowed from a Star Trek episode (and its guest artist was likewise a Star Trek alum, an actor so good that I wondered why on earth we hadn't seen this guy "Travis" before). And as anyone watching nowadays might notice, the resolution is reduced to another "deus ex machina" recording of an older alien species realizing, "Oh, I found the the solution, and it almost worked, so I'll stash it away in the closet so you can conveniently use it," that we'd already seen in Freiberger's "Space Warp". The last five minutes of the episode absolutely should not work, but somehow (by intention, accident or editing) manage to thread a needle of Freibergian-inspired nonsense, as the mysterious Burning Bush Catalyst gives Landau a moment to provide another one of Koenig's wonderful classic lines. There was a cinematic quality and an all-out effort to this episode (from cast and crew) that almost, for a moment, gave me a hope of what a season three could have been.