Lost in Space season 3

The first season of Lost in Space had been a ratings bonanza. Ratings dropped disastrously in the second season. The third season which began airing in late 1967 was an attempt to repair the damage by changing direction. It worked up to a point. The ratings improved substantially but not enough to prevent cancellation.

Lost in Space had painted itself into a corner early on. Dr Smith, the robot and Will Robinson had established themselves in the first season as the most popular characters and that pretty much locked the series into a comedic kids’ show formula. Those three characters came to completely dominate proceedings and the other characters were left with very little to do. The problem was that the comic team of Dr Smith and the robot proved to be much too much of a good thing. Their repartee became predictable and repetitious.

The decision early on in season one to maroon the party on a single planet also turned out to be a major weakness. It became boring and the constant procession of alien visitors to this obscure planet seemed far-fetched. It encouraged storylines that were rather silly and it encouraged a Monster of the Week approach.

Season three’s solution was to get the Jupiter 2 operational again and get the Robinsons back into space. That offered opportunities for a lot more excitement and for stories that are more varied and felt a bit more genuinely science fictional. There was also an attempt to give the series a marginally more serious tone. Not consistently but at least some episodes were less overtly silly. The scripts were also generally better.

There was still the problem that too many episodes were built almost exclusively around the Dr Smith-robot-Will trio. That problem was never solved. One obvious solution would have been a romance between Major West and Judy Robinson but Irwin Allen refused to consider this, feeling it was inappropriate in a kids’ show. Which is odd since it always seemed fairly obvious that Judy was included in the crew for that very purpose and in very early first season episodes there are certainly hints of such a romance. And if you watch the original pilot, No Place to Hide, there is no question that there’s a budding romance between these two characters. It’s fairly clear that Irwin Allen’s original conception for the series was that it would be a science fiction series aimed at a broad audience rather than just children and that it would include a romance angle. It seems to be another case of the series getting painted into a corner. Its initial success with younger viewers made Allen less and less willing to risk a slightly more grown-up tone.

It’s a definite weakness is that the two younger female characters are pushed too much into the background. Penny is arguably the most likeable single character in the show and the few episodes in which she gets to take centre stage are usually pretty good. And in Marta Kristen (who plays Judy) they had a genuine blonde bombshell on their hands who could have been one of the great TV science fiction sex symbols. There’s really only one episode in this third season in which she gets to do the sex kitten thing, and she does it pretty memorably.

The third season is marginally more interesting visually simply because it gets the Robinsons off that wretched planet. We do at least see the Jupiter 2 traveling through space. Most of the new planets they find look just like the old one but at least some stories take place on alien spacecraft or space stations which adds a bit of variety.

When judging Lost in Space you do have to remember that it was targeted at a young audience so while the humour can be a bit cringe-inducing it’s the sort of thing that kids love.

There are some terrible episodes and there are some very good episodes and some of the good episodes are extremely interesting and provide tantalising glimpses of what might have been. Flight Into the Future shows what Marta Kristen could have done had she been given the chance to actually do something.

And there are even more tantalising hints that perhaps at least some of the writers hoped to make Dr Smith a slightly more rounded and much more interesting character. There’s an episode in which Dr Smith, as usual, is in a total panic to save himself. But oddly enough he wastes valuable time (which could have been employed in running away) trying to save Penny. The only plausible explanation is a momentary flash of chivalry. He intends to save his own skin but he can’t just leave a thirteen-year-old girl to her fate. And in Time Merchant we see very definite signs of honourable behaviour by Dr Smith. In this case he is actually willing to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of the rest of the crew. And, intriguingly, once again the motivating factor seems to be chivalry. He would cheerfully sacrifice the lives of Professor Robinson or Major West, but he can’t stand the thought of being cold-bloodedly responsible for sacrificing Penny and Judy. In his own mind Dr Smith is a hero, and heroes don’t betray the trust of innocent girls.

And there is a third episode, The Space Primevals, in which Dr Smith behaves with a considerable degree of decency and courage. There does seem to have been a slowly dawning realisation that Dr Smith needed to be made a bit more three-dimensional.

Episode Guide

Condemned of Space kicks off the third season and it’s an immediate sign of a change of direction for the series. A comet is on a collision course for the planet but that’s no problem since the Jupiter 2 is fully operational. They take off but they still have to dodge the comet and a passing supernova, and rescue the robot who is floating in space. And then they find an alien spaceship. It’s a prison ship, filled with deep-frozen prisoners, but they’re not deep-frozen for long once Dr Smith gets up to his usual bungling. There’s plenty of excitement and there’s a much more science fiction feel to this story compared to earlier seasons. There’s also a guest appearance by the robot from Forbidden Planet, as a prison guard. It’s all fast-paced fun. A very fine episode.

Visit to a Hostile Planet is another promising indication of the show’s change in direction. For starters there’s once again an actual science fiction concept – the Jupiter 2 goes out of control and approaches the speed of light. They get back to Earth but they discover it’s Earth in 1947. And the locals think they’re alien invaders and start shooting at them. Dr Smith makes matters worse by deciding that he can use his more advanced scientific knowledge to make himself supreme ruler of the 1947 inhabitants of Earth. There’s some of the campy tongue-in-cheek flavour of earlier seasons but there’s reasonable plot and we see a new side of John Robinson – when Judy is captured by the locals he threatens to blow their entire town into oblivion.

It’s nice to see Marta Kristen actually getting something to do. Another clever touch is the choice of 1947. That was about the time the flying saucer craze started up and since the Jupiter 2 looks exactly like a flying saucer we now know that it was responsible for the craze. All in all it’s a very decent episode.

In Kidnapped in Space Dr Smith rashly answers a distress call from an alien spaceship and gets captured, and gets everybody else captured as well. The aliens want him to do brain surgery on their leader (he even more rashly assured them he was a medical doctor). It’s not a bad episode, with the giant clock alien being an amusing touch.

Hunter’s Moon is one of the countless TV and movie scripts to be inspired by Richard Connell’s 1924 story The Most Dangerous Game about a hunter who finds hunting people to be more satisfying than hunting animals. In this instance John Robinson finds himself as the hunted after a crash landing on an unknown planet. It’s a reasonably entertaining story.

The Space Primevals is a goofy kind of story about a prehistoric tribe that is being subjected to artificial evolution by a super-computer. And a volcano is about to blow the tribe, and the Jupiter 2 and the planet to oblivion. Despite the campy nonsense this episode does do a couple of extremely interesting things. Firstly it separates Dr Smith from the robot. Instead Dr Smith and Major West spend the entire episode off on their own doing things like getting imprisoned and facing certain death. Having Dr Smith doing all his interacting with someone other than the robot or Will is a very refreshing change. The second interesting thing it does is to put Dr Smith in a situation where he has to be heroic. Not voluntarily of course but if he wants to survive he’ll have to do some hero things. As a result of these two very sound plot devices the episode has an intriguingly different feel to it. Dr Smith becomes a bit more believable and a bit more complex. And Don West becomes a bit more human. It’s enough to make this a successful episode despite its other flaws. And it’s a sign of the third season’s willingness to take a few chances.

Space Destructors is a return to the fairly tired formula of the previous season. Dr Smith finds a machine that makes cyborgs. And the cyborgs will serve him. He gets carried away with dreams of power but of course there’s a catch. The cyborgs that all look like slightly distorted versions of Dr Smith are a nice touch. Guy Williams gets to do an extended sword-fighting scene which must have brought back memories for the former Zorro star. A routine episode.

The Haunted Lighthouse is a lighthouse in space. It’s commanded by a doddery colonel who strangely enough seems to understand very little about the sorts of things you would need to know about to do such a job. The Robinsons end up there through the machinations of a strange alien boy whom Penny has befriended. It’s a lighthearted episode that manages not to be too silly and at least it gives Penny an all-too-rare important rôle. It’s OK.

Flight Into the Future is an attempt to deal with cool science fictional themes. Dr. Smith, Will and the robot land on an unknown planet and there they find the wreck of the Jupiter 2, abandoned centuries before. They have travelled into the future, or at least that’s what appears to have happened. There’s some good creepy atmosphere in this story. The ending is a bit of a letdown although it could have been worse. It’s good to see Marta Kristen given something to do in this episode, playing a space babe from the future who happens to look uncannily like Judy Robinson. This episode at least tries to be a bit ambitious and it works reasonably well.

In Collision of Planets the planet on which the Jupiter 2 is currently temporarily stranded is scheduled for demolition – by a bunch of juvenile delinquent hippie space bikers. And Dr Smith gains green hair and super strength. It’s just as silly as it sounds. A truly awful episode.

The Jupiter 2 is back on the move in Space Creature. An encounter with a strange gas cloud proves to be a terrifying experience. Members of the Robinson expedition disappear one by one. And it’s the fear that proves to be the key. We also get to see a set that I’ve not seen before – the power centre of the Jupiter 2. A fairly decent story.

In Deadliest of the Species the crew of the Jupiter 2 find themselves in trouble with the galactic cops and the robot think he’s found love. The robot romance is of course played for some obvious laughs. A routine episode.

A Day at the Zoo is a bit too much like too many earlier Lost in Space episodes, with a galactic showman wanting to collect our space adventurers as exhibits for his travelling zoo. The best thing about this episode is that the two girls actually get something to do, and in particular Angela Cartwright as Penny gets to do some acting. The under-utilisation of Judy and Penny (both rather likeable characters) is one of the major weaknesses of Lost in Space.

Two Weeks in Space is a pure comedy episode, with Dr Smith tricked by aliens into turning the Jupiter 2 into a resort hotel. The aliens have taken humans form, with two of them being blonde party girl types. Dr Smith falls for one of the blondes, with predictable results. It’s all very thin but it has its amusing moments.

In Castles in Space the space castaways discover a frozen ice princess. Dr Smith accidentally thaws her out. The problem is the Mexican space bandit who is searching for her. It seems a reasonable supposition that he intends to hold her for ransom. Lots of rather uninspired silliness in this one, especially when the bandit gets the robot drunk.

The Anti-Matter Man is one of the more ambitious third season efforts. The Robinson expedition comes into contact with the anti-matter world, in which everything is the exact opposite of what it is in our world. So they have to deal with an evil Dr John Robinson and an evil Major West. This story has some actual science fictional elements and more surprisingly it even has an actual sense of menace. It’s even visually more interesting than most Lost in Space episodes. Guy Williams and Mark Goddard get to be really nasty bad guys. Even Will and the robot are much more interesting than usual. It’s the sort of thing they should have attempted more often. This is getting close to actual science fiction. A very very good episode.

Target: Earth has goofy aliens and a mixture of good and bad science fictional ideas. The bad is the hopelessly overused idea of exact duplicates. The good is the idea of an alien civilisation that is decaying because it’s too conformist and too afraid of challenges.

In Princess of Space Penny is daydreaming about princesses and fairytale adventures when suddenly space pirates show up and inform her that she really is a princess. The danger in telling a thirteen-year-old girl that she’s a princess is that she’s likely to believe you. The princess is needed to keep the rogue machines of the planet Beta under control. There are bit and pieces of good ideas in this story but they’re overwhelmed by incredibly silly ideas and the execution is pretty embarrassing. It’s always nice seeing Angela Cartwright get a chance to be at the centre of things and she does her best but she deserved better. Just too much silliness in this one.

Time Merchant is one of the most fascinating season three episodes. There are genuine science fictional elements involving not just time travel but the buying and selling of time. And Dr Smith gets to be genuinely heroic.

In The Promised Planet the Jupiter 2 finally reaches its destination, Alpha Centauri. But it’s not what they expected. They find a planet ruled by kids. It’s a pretty disturbing place. We get to see Penny go-go dancing, which is fine. We also get to see Dr Smith go-go dancing, which is not so fine. This one tries to satirise 60s youth culture, with at least some success. It does perfectly capture the combination of shallowness and spitefulness of the Flower Children. This episode is possibly Angela Cartwright’s finest moment in the series. Apart from the go-go dancing she is given the opportunity to give a subtle and sensitive performance as Penny is trapped between the seductive pleasures of  a world of carefree fun and her attachment to her family. Underneath the surface camp it’s actually not a bad episode.

Fugitives in Space sees Major West and Dr Smith convicted by an inter-galactic court for helping a prisoner to escape from a prison planet. Now that same prisoner wants to help them escape but Major West has a feeling this might be a bad idea. Some quite good alien makeup effects in this one but otherwise it’s pretty routine.

In Space Beauty that unscrupulous entrepreneur and showman Farnum B. Returns and he’s trying to persuade Judy to enter a galactic beauty pageant. The question is whether winning the contest would really be a good idea. And maybe she should have read the contract before signing it. A fairly silly episode but at least it’s one of the rare episodes in which Judy Robinson gets something to do.

The Flaming Planet is almost a great episode. Dr Smith’s tomato plant causes the spacecraft to crash on a planet which was once the centre of a mighty empire. Now there’s one warrior left but he still dreams of further military glory. It’s a good plot and it’s reasonably well developed but it’s let down by the excruciatingly awful and irritating plant creatures.

The Great Vegetable Rebellion is generally regarded as being the worst ever Lost in Space episode, although it has to be admitted that it has some stuff competition. This is the notorious talking carrot episode. Dr Smith pays an unauthorised visit to a planet that contains only vegetable life. Unfortunately for him these are intelligent vegetables. Even more unfortunately for him he is soon going to become an intelligent celery. This is all too typical of this series. The basic idea, of a planet on which plants have evolved intelligence, had potential but the treatment of the idea is irredeemably silly.

Junkyard in Space presents our intrepid spacefarers with a crisis. They are trapped on a junkyard planet and they have no food. The robotic junkman in charge of the planet makes a deal with Dr Smith but the price he demands is very high and can he be trusted? There’s really not much to say in favour of this uninspired episode. A disappointing end for both the season and the series.

Final Thoughts

The third season is the story of missed opportunities. Some good episodes, and some promising indications of a bit more character complexity, but too many episodes that are too silly and too campy. Still, it’s not an entirely bad season. Recommended for fans of the series.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea season 4 (1967-68)

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea got off to a great start. The first season is about as good as American TV science fiction gets. It has a perfect blend of espionage, political intrigue and not too outlandish science fiction elements. The second season is almost as good, albeit with some slightly more outrageous elements. Things really started to fall apart in the third season. The budget was cut and it shows, the series degenerated into endless Monster of the Week stories, the monsters were often lame, the scripts were weak and there’s too much out-and-out silliness. There are some good episodes but the series was clearly in trouble. Season four, which went to air in late 1967 and early 1968 was a bold attempt to get the series back on its feet.

There was a move away from Monster of the Week stories, there was at least a partial return to the very successful season one formula, there was some investment in new props (such as the full-size rear section of the Flying Sub) and gadgets, an effort was made to improve the special effects and the scripts were stronger. There was a focus on keeping the action happening. There were some good sets. Everyone seemed to be making a bit more of an effort. Even the opening credits got jazzed up a little.

With many science fiction TV series there’s a problem with networks getting more penny-pinching thus leading to declines in production values. There’s no real sign of that here.

The cast remained unchanged but there are signs that most of the regulars are trying a bit harder. Richard Basehart tries to vary his performances, sometimes adding amusing touches of irascibility and sometimes mixing them with an appealing hint of whimsicality. On occasions both David Hedison and Bob Dowdell (as Chip Morton) get to stretch their acting talents just a little.

Part of the problem with the third season was that Irwin Allen was trying to make three science fiction series all at the same time – Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel. It was not surprising that some of the focus was lost. When The Time Tunnel was (very unfortunately and very undeservedly) cancelled it allowed more attention to be given to the final seasons of the two surviving series both of which represented marked improvements on the previous year.

Season four might be a little uneven but the best episodes compare very favourably to the best stories of the first two seasons. The series was showing definite signs of getting back on its feet. Its cancellation at the end of this season must have been quite a disappointment to everyone involved.

Episode Guide

In Man of Many Faces Admiral Nelson assassinates rival scientist Dr Randolph Mason. Of course we know that can’t be true, and Captain Crane knows that can’t be true, but can he prove it? Admiral Nelson and the slain scientist were bitter rivals. Nelson is convinced that Dr Mason’s latest project is not merely dangerous, it could destroy the world. But that doesn’t mean that he shot Dr Mason.

The Seaview somehow has to reach Dr Mason’s secret installation within 24 hours or the Moon will crash into the Earth. That’s not the only problem for Seaview and its crew. Thee’s a killer on board, and he can take on the appearance of any crew member.

The plot might sound hokey but it works quite well in practice. This is a well-executed episode which doesn’t look as cheap as many later season episodes. The best thing though is that it’s a return to the formula that made the first season so terrific – a combination of thriller and science fiction elements with no monsters in sight. An extremely good episode.

In Time Lock Nelson is kidnapped by Alpha, a collector of military memorabilia in the distant future. What Alpha actually collects are generals. Famous generals of history. Then he turns them into mindless automatons. This collector’s agents have taken over the Seaview’s lab. There are various attempts by Seaview’s crew to recapture the lab, while Nelson makes various attempts to escape his obviously crazy captor.

Time Lock actually has a few interesting ideas but they’re not fully developed. You might think collecting historical generals and turning them into zombies is pointless but there is a reason behind it. Nelson’s growing suspicion that what Alpha is doing might be illegal in his future society and that this might be used against him is potentially interesting but not quite enough is made of it. Budgets were very low in the fourth season and that’s a problem in a time travel episode that really needed its future society to be fleshed out a bit. Time Lock is a missed opportunity but it’s not a total failure.

The Deadly Dolls are puppets belonging to puppeteer Professor Multiple. He has been entertaining the crew. He was supposed to have gone ashore after the show but he’s still aboard and now his dolls are taking over the ship. The idea of having the crew replaced by exact doubles is one of more overused tropes in 60s science fiction television but in this case it’s done with style and wit, and a certain amount of intelligence. Plus the episode features Vincent Price as Professor Multiple. There’s obviously the potential for a great deal of silliness in a story such as this but in fact it mostly succeeds in being clever and slightly sinister rather than silly. And there are some actual science fiction concepts as well. Overall a very good episode.

Fires of Death plunges us straight into the action in spectacular fashion, with a volcano erupting and the Seaview being tossed about like a toy in a bathtub. What they’re trying to do is to stop the volcano from erupting since it’s going to destroy half the southern hemisphere. Scientist Dr Turner aims to be able to stop it. It soon transpires that Dr Turner is no vulcanologist – he’s a 500-year-old alchemist mining the volcano for elixir stones to prolong his life. To assist him he has a century-old golden man. The whole thing is completely nuts but the action is non-stop, the effects are remarkably good and somehow it all works. It’s great stuff.

In Cave of the Dead Commander Van Wyck (guest star Warren Stevens) and Admiral Nelson are aboard the Flying Sub investigating the disappearance of four Navy ships. They find something very strange indeed. After flying through a storm that wasn’t there the Flying Sub is forced down by gunfire from a square-rigged sailing ship and they find an island, where there is no island. In a cave they discover skeletons, an old dagger and a curse. Is it the curse of the Flying Dutchman? Now this is an episode that in season three would have been nothing but full-on silliness with pirates with outrageous accents but in fact Cave of the Dead tries to be a bit cleverer than that. It actually tries to rely on building an atmosphere of subtle unease. Admiral Nelson has seen all these strange things but no-one else can see them. He starts to think that he knows what’s going on but there’s no way he’s going to be able to make anyone believe it.

William Welch isn’t one of the more high regarded television writers of the era. The word hack has been applied to him. In this story however he does a pretty decent job.

There are no goofy social effects or silly monsters and there’s some real creepiness and some real suspense. Even when Nelson figures out what has to be done it seems impossible that he’ll be able to it. A very fine episode.

In Sealed Orders the Seaview has to deliver a neutron warhead to Cook Atoll for testing. There’s a radiation leak and then the crew starts to vanish. Other strange things happen as well. It’s another attempt to get away from the Monster of the Week formula and to create an atmosphere of weirdness and unease. Some very simple social effects are used quite cleverly. Even the revelation at the end is reasonably plausible. A good episode.

Journey with Fear is the Chip Morton in Space episode. The Seaview is tasked with launching a manned outer space mission but ends up on Venus and is captured by aliens from another planet. It’s an ambitious episode that works reasonably successfully.

Terror is another alien invasion story, but this time it’s plants from another planet. The good news is that there are no guys in rubber suits masquerading as killer plants. The only plant we see is an orchid in a pot. Which means no goofy special effects. The plants just take over people’s minds. There’s nothing startling or wildly original here but at least it’s not cheesy. An OK episode.

With Fatal Cargo we’re back to guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster stuff, with a white gorilla running loose on Seaview. But this is a kind of unstoppable super-gorilla, controlled by a mad scientist. This one is definitely cheesy. Not one of the better episodes.

Rescue is very much a return to the spirit of the first season. No monsters here, just a taut  multi-stranded thriller story. Seaview is searching for a secret hostile underwater submarine base. Seaview gets disabled and is lying helpless on the sea floor. The Flying Sub gets sunk. It’s a race against time to rescue Captain Crane in the Flying Sub plus there’s an enemy submarine lurking about plus there’s a saboteur aboard. This episode is notable for Admiral Nelson being continuously irritable and exasperated although to be fair he can hardly be blamed given that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. It’s an adrenaline-rush episode and it’s excellent.

The Death Clock plunges us straight into the action. There’s an accident in the reactor room. Captain Crane gets a hefty dose of radiation and is left in a coma. While in the coma in sick bay he shoots Admiral Nelson. He never left the sick bay, and yet he did. But did he shoot the admiral today or tomorrow? And is it now tomorrow, or maybe it’s yesterday? Captain Crane is going to have to do something about tomorrow but a very dangerous man will try to stop him and that dangerous man is Captain Crane.

So obviously this is a time-travel episode and it’s a pretty good one. No monsters in this one but some puzzles, some paradoxes, some chilling moments and quite a bit of cleverness. David Hedison gets to do his cold-blooded psycho killer thing which he does to very good effect. This really is a top-notch fourth season episode.

Secret of the Deep is a monster episode but not a bad one, and not too silly. A senior Allied intelligence officer joins the Seaview to track down a secret underwater base run by renegade scientists. The scientists have created giant mutant sea creatures capable of destroying all American shipping, the aim being to blackmail the government. The monster stuff isn’t overdone, there’s a fine villain and that villain’s ultimate fate is a very nice touch. Overall not outstanding but an acceptably enjoyable episode.

Blow Up begins, as the title suggests, with an explosion aboard the submarine. Admiral Nelson miraculously survives thanks to a new emergency breathing device but he seems changed, and not in a good way. He’s paranoid and unstable and he makes decisions that could be leading to disaster. This is a psychological drama episode and it’s quite good but perhaps stretches credibility a bit. Richard Basehart gets to do some serious scenery-chewing. At least there are no monsters.

With Deadly Amphibians we’re back to guys in rubber suits. The amphibians are an advanced race living beneath the sea and they want to take over the world, using Seaview’s nuclear power. Naturally the Seaview gets sunk (yet again) and for good measure the Flying Sub gets sunk as well. And the amphibians have some nasty powers that make things look pretty grim for Admiral Nelson and his men. As guys in rubber suits episodes go this one is not too bad. And at least it’s fast-moving. Kind of fun.

The Abominable Snowman is, yes you guessed it, a guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster episode. The Seaview is sent to Antarctica to rescue the Paulson Expedition but when they get there they find a tropical paradise. And crewmen start getting brutally killed. And the two survivors of the expedition are unconscious so they can’t answer any questions. Of course the viewer knows that an abominable snowman is loose on the submarine, but where did he come from? There is an explanation, but it’s not very good. This one might have worked better with a less silly monster – there’s no reason why the monster has to look like an abominable snowman. A routine monster episode.

In The Return Of Blackbeard the legendary pirate Blackbeard, dead for two hundred years and more, takes over the Seaview. He intends to blow up the yacht of the Shah (of Iran presumably) and retrieve the priceless golden throne of Solomon. This one relies too much on ideas the series had already used too many times. On the other hand Malachi Throne is insanely outrageous as Blackbeard, Del Monroe has fun playing Kowalski as a pirate after he’s been recruited as Blackbeard’s First Mate and Richard Basehart gives a very amusing tongue-in-cheek performance. Enjoyably goofy.

A Time To Die is quite ambitious when it comes to ideas. The Seaview’s clocks start doing strange things. They encounter a giant undersea reptile which proves to be merely inquisitive. They suddenly lose all radio contact – with everybody. Admiral Nelson starts to get really concerned when the submarine surfaces and he takes a look at the night sky. Those constellations are not in the right places. The night sky did look like this once, a very very long time ago. Someone is playing tricks with time. The tricks with time idea is developed reasonably well. Henry Jones is great fun as the mysterious Pem. This otherwise very good episode is let down a little by some very poor special effects but it’s still a fairly strong story.

Edge of Doom presents Admiral Nelson with an unpleasant situation. Seaview has to deliver a vital piece of equipment but Nelson has been informed that there maybe an impostor among the crew and the impostor may be Captain Crane. He will have to lay a trap for the impostor, and hope that the information he has been given is correct. Apart from the exact double angle (which was always a far-fetched and clichéd plot device) this is a reasonably tense spy drama episode with no silly monsters. And David Hedison’s performance is pretty impressive.

Is The Terrible Leprechaun really the worst-ever episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? I’d have to say yes. It’s basically a very routine episode about threats to yet another secret defence installation at the bottom of the sea. But with leprechauns. The leprechauns make a mediocre episode truly awful. Maybe with a whimsical approach it might have worked as a Lost in Space episode but apart from the leprechauns everything is taken dead seriously, which just makes it worse.

Nightmare has a nicely mysterious opening. Captain Crane is test flying the Flying Sub when he receives a radio message from Seaview indicating that they’re in trouble and that he must return to the submarine immediately. This happens moments after Lee sees a UFO. When he gets back to Seaview it appears to be deserted but he can still hear the crew. And them some guy he’s never seen before tries to kill him. And all this is in the first  few minutes! This episode has plenty of tension and lots of paranoia. Excellent stuff.

Savage Jungle is an alien invasion story. Large parts of Italy have suddenly been overrun with tropical jungle. When the Seaview arrives to investigate it gets turned into a jungle as well. The aliens are trying to change the whole planet into a steamy primeval jungle with an atmosphere suitable for their lifeforms, and fatal to humans. The miniaturised jungle fighters are a nice touch. The special effects are pretty good, especially the submarine trapped by underwater vegetation. The interior of the sub totally infested with jungle plants looks terrific. And to top it all off, it has a decent plot and an excellent villain. A very fine episode.

The Lobster Man is a guy-in-a-rubber suit story but with a few interesting elements. A crustacean from outer space has crash landed in the ocean and Seaview has picked him up. He’s not your standard shambling monster. He’s highly intelligent, polite and articulate and everything he does is calm and deliberate. But what is his agenda? Is he friendly or hostile? No-one is sure. A reasonably well thought-out script although it’s just a little bit flat at times. Still a fairly decent episode.

Man-Beast is a monster story but it tries to be an intelligent monster story. Captain Crane is the guinea pig testing a new ultra-deep diving technique but it has one slight side-effect – it turns him into a werewolf! It’s a silly premise but handled reasonably well. It’s kind of fun.

Flaming Ice is an alien invasion story. As usual the aliens went Seaview’s nuclear reactor. To get it they threaten the submarine with death by freezing and death by roasting. While the plot isn’t dazzling this one does have a lot going for it. It has Australian actor Michael Pate (always fun and a favourite of mine) as the alien leader. It has  great makeup effects. The sets are excellent – the ice caves are exceptionally good. It’s a very visually impressive episode. On the whole this one works for me.

Attack is another alien invasion tale. Seaview is searching for a flying saucer that went down in the ocean. Admiral Nelson and Kowalski in the Flying Sub find it, or at least the aliens find then. Aboard the Seaview there are other problems. There’s a stowaway named Robek and he claims to be an alien, but a good alien who wants to save them from bad aliens. Aliens have tried that line before so Captain Crane isn’t exactly convinced that Robek is telling the truth. Maybe this one’s a bit too reminiscent of too many earlier episodes but it’s still decent enough.

No Way Back is the final episode of the season, and of course the last ever episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It was not a bad way for the series to bow out. It certainly starts in spectacular fashion. Seaview is blown to bits and everybody is killed. And this before the opening credits! This can’t be the way things end, can it? Of course things turn out to be more complicated. Mr Pem, the megalomaniacal inventor of a time travel machine (from the earlier episode A Time To Die), has returned and he’s back to his old tricks. Now he persuades the Admiral to let him build a new time travel device, to save Seaview. Admiral Nelson naturally doesn’t trust Pem but he has no choice other than to go along. In the course of which he meets Benedict Arnold, aboard Seaview.

Thee’s not much in the way of special effects in this one but it’s a decent story and it has a bit more emotional punch than most episodes (appropriate given that it was the final episode). And Mr Pem is a delightful villain. On the whole a worthy ending to a great series.

Final Thoughts

The fourth season turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. A vast improvement on the previous season, and while it’s not consistently up to the standards of the first two seasons the best episodes rank right up there with the best of those seasons.

The final season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Highly recommended.

Lost in Space – No Place to Hide (unaired pilot, 1965)

No Place to Hide is the unaired 1965 pilot episode of Lost in Space and it provides a fascinating look at the original concepts behind the show. It differs from the first episode of season one (The Reluctant Stowaway) in many ways, some obvious and others more subtle but no less important.

The basic premise, that the Robinsons are to be the first family sent into deep space to begin the task of him colonisation, is the same. There is however a voiceover narration in the early part of the episode (it’s actually supposed to be the voice of a controller at Alpha Control) which explains a lot of details that The Reluctant Stowaway glosses over and adds information that gives the mission a slightly different character. The spaceship is named the Gemini 12 rather than the Jupiter 2.

The most obvious difference is that there’s no robot and no Dr Smith. It soon becomes clear why it was so vital to add Dr Smith to the cast. He was so incredibly useful in plot terms – he could always be relied upon to lose or break some piece of vital equipment or cause some other problem that would put everyone in danger and thereby create the necessary dramas. And of course in The Reluctant Stowaway it’s the extra weight he adds to the spaceship by stowing away that causes them to become lost. In No Place to Hide the Gemini 12 runs into a meteor storm that damages the ship and sends them wildly off course.

It’s also interesting that in The Reluctant Stowaway the Robinsons seem to be a typical American family chosen more or less at random, with John Robinson and Don West seeming to be the only qualified members of the crew. In No Place to Hide they’re all incredibly highly qualified experts in a variety of vital fields. Don West is Dr West rather than Major West and he’s a genius scientist. John and Maureen Robinson are also both genius scientists. Even Penny is a zoologist, and Will is a scientific prodigy. The one odd exception is poor Judy – she’s an aspiring musical comedy star!

The Gemini 12 crash lands on an unknown planet. Within six months they have established a base camp and they’re growing food and domesticating animals. Then things start to go wrong and they’re plunged into a series of dangerous adventures. Some of these adventures would be recycled for use in early season one episodes.

Most of the characters are pretty much the same. Despite their impressive scientific qualifications they do not, with the exception of John Robinson and Don West, appear to do anything scientifically impressive (although of course it could be assumed that Maureen and Penny are making their contributions in the areas of food cultivation and animal husbandry).

The overall tone is fairly serious. Of course the tone of the first half dozen or so episodes of the first season is also fairly serious compared to later episodes but without Dr Smith and the robot there are no actual comedy moments at all in No Place to Hide.

There’s at least a token effort to establish a romantic relationship between Don and Judy. Since No Place to Hide takes itself rather seriously it’s likely that the original idea had been to aim at a wider audience rather than specifically a juvenile audience so it’s possible that the intention had been to develop this romance angle a bit more fully. One of the minor problems with the series was that with the lack of focus on this romantic pairing Judy ended up being a character without any really defined rôle.

I don’t recall there being so much emphasis in The Reluctant Stowaway on the idea that if the mission had gone as planned the Robinsons would have spent 98 years in suspended animation before reaching their destination.

The spacecraft-in-flight special effects are a bit iffy, especially during the meteor storm, but they’re not noticeably worse than those to be found in other television science fiction series of that era. On the other hand some of the other effects are quite decent and it’s obvious that some serious money was spent here. Overall it’s visually quite impressive by 1960s television standards. The inland sea sequences are thrilling and very well done with some fine miniatures work.

No Place to Hide is most definitely worth watching if you’re a dedicated Lost in Space fan or an Irwin Allen fan. Like the first few first season episodes it offers a tantalising hint of some of the directions in which the series might have gone.  It seems fairly clear that when this pilot was made the intention was that Lost in Space would be a real relatively grown-up science fiction series that would appeal to a wide audience. Watching the pilot you can see why changes had to be made but you can also understood why it was picked up as a series.

No Place to Hide is included as an extra in the season one volume two DVD boxed set (or at least it’s included in the Region 4 edition). I have no idea if it’s also included in the more recent complete series releases on DVD and Blu-Ray.

I reviewed the early relatively serious season one Lost in Space episodes a few years back. That post can be found here.

The Time Tunnel (1966-67), part two

The first part of this post appeared back in April.

The Time Tunnel was released on DVD in two half-series sets (and later as a complete series set). The second half-season set opens with The Revenge of Robin Hood pitching Doug and Tony into the middle of the tumultuous quarrel between King John and his barons in 1215, and Doug and Tony will have to help in an attempt to free Robin Hood from the clutches of the king. This one is kind of fun.

Visitors from Beyond the Stars propels Doug and Tony into the past but with a futuristic touch. They’re caught up in an attempted alien invasion of a small town in Arizona in 1885. The silver-skinned aliens with their robotic speech patterns might seem silly but they’re really mean. They want protein. Lots of protein. In fact they want all of the Earth’s protein. They intend to leave nothing living behind them.

Meanwhile General Kirk, back at the time tunnel control centre, is getting very excited by UFOs. This was 1967 and the UFO craze was still a huge thing.

And just to make sure there’s sufficient mayhem, the local Apaches are about to launch a large-scale raid on the town.

The goofy silver makeup and the kitschy spaceship are major highlights. I couldn’t help liking this one despite its very high silliness content.

Kill Two by Two drops Doug and Tony onto a tiny Pacific atoll, which is not very far from a slightly larger atoll called Iwo Jima. It’s February 1945 and things are about to get rather hot and our time travellers are going to be in the middle of an extremely fierce battle. But they have more immediate problems to worry about – they have to fight their own private little war with two Japanese soldiers who are the only troops left on their tiny island.

This is a tense episode but it also has some emotional depth. There are questions of honour and it turns out that there are worse things than death, like forgetting who you are. One of the best episodes of the series.

The Ghost of Nero is an oddity. Our time travellers have landed in the middle of the First World War, on the Italian Front in 1915. They’re in a villa belonging to an Italian nobleman who claims to be a descendant of Galba, emperor of Rome (very briefly) after the overthrow and death of Nero. The Germans are planning to use the villa as an artillery observation post. The German officer in charge is played as a typical cruel sadistic thug and things are looking grim for Doug and Tony and for Count Galba.

This is all rather strange. In 1915 Italy was not even at war with Germany (although the Italians were at war with Germany’s Austro-Hungarian allies). I get the impression that the scriptwriter also assumed that the Germans in the First World War were pretty much the same as the Nazis.

But that’s not the end of the strangeness, since Nero’s ghost is stalking the villa, in fulfilment of Nero’s dying curse. His ghost is there since Nero’s tomb is in the basement of the villa. The fact that the historical bits about Nero (and all the historical bits in this episode) are not exactly historical and are in fact pretty much fantasy is a bit of a worry since The Time Tunnel is a series that usually tries not to depart too outrageously from history. And it’s also a series that at least pretends to be true science fiction with no fantasy or supernatural elements. The appearance of a ghost is therefore very disconcerting.

And there’s also a guest appearance by Mussolini! This episode is totally insane. Is it insane in a good way or a bad way? I’m still not really sure. All I can say for certain is that scriptwriter Leonard Stadd really really hates Germans.

The Walls of Jericho is, as the title suggests, a Bible story. Giving a science fictional treatment to Scripture was perhaps a little risky back in 1967 but it manages to be quite respectful without being too stridently preachy. It’s an episode that couldn’t be done at all today since it comes down firmly on the side of faith. It’s quite cleverly done, with Doug and Tony finding themselves cast as the two spies sent by Joshua to infiltrate Jericho. This is one episode where the sudden appearance of oddly dressed strangers who claim to be from another time doesn’t actually surprise anybody. The Israelites assume they’re messengers of the Lord while in Jericho it’s assumed that they’re sorcerers.

It’s a story that could easily have come to grief but it’s more successful than you might anticipate. Full credit must go to James Darren and Robert Colbert, and also to Whit Bissell, who express a quite sense of belief without making an embarrassing song and dance about it. Myrna Fahey is good as the harlot Rahab who shelters the two presumed spies and Australian actor Michael Pate has fun as the hardbitten lecherous captain of the guard in Jericho.

Idol of Death lands Doug and Tony in Mexico in 1519 where the conquistador Cortes is searching for a golden mask sacred to the local Indians. Possession of the mask will make his conquest that much easier. Doug and Tony however team up with a young Indian chief to thwart the wicked Spaniards. Fairly entertaining.

Billy the Kid obviously lands Doug and Tony in New Mexico during Billy the KId’s short but busy career as an outlaw. This is one of those episodes that centres around the central truth of time travel (as far as The Time Tunnel is concerned) that history cannot be altered. So Doug cannot kill Billy the Kid, even though that’s what he has just done. On the other hand Billy the Kid can certainly kill Doug or Tony without altering history.

In Pirates of Deadman’s Island Doug and Tony fall into the hands of pirates in 1805, just as a United States Navy squadron under Stephen Decatur is about to attack the Barbary pirates. The pirates also have in their hands the nephew of the King of Spain. The Barbary Wars represent a colourful and somewhat neglected episode in American history, which happens to make a pretty good basis for a Time Tunnel adventure. The episode is a bit corny and contrived but it’s a pirate tale so that just adds to the fun.

Chase Through Time is one of the episodes in which the time travellers travel forward rather than backward in time. In fact they land a million years in the future, in a human society modelled on bees. There’s also the added difficulty that a spy in the present day has planted a nuclear bomb in the time tunnel complex and has escaped into the future as well. Doug and Tony have to chase him across a million years of time to force him to reveal the location of the bomb. If the bomb goes off they will never get back to their own time. This story tries hard for breathless excitement and it succeeds reasonably well.

The Death Merchant is an attempt to get clever, with an extra unauthorised time traveller tagging along. A kind of stowaway in time. The stowaway is Niccòlo Machiavelli. The evilest man who ever lived! Which is of course grossly unfair to poor old Machiavelli. In any case somehow or other the Time Tunnel has accidentally plucked Machiavelli from sixteenth century Italy and dropped him onto the battlefield of Gettysburg in 1863. Where he proceeds to wreak havoc, and it’s not easy for Doug and Tony to stop him since Tony got a blow on the head and now he thinks he’s a Confederate officer and he thinks Doug is a damned Yankee. Machiavelli’s presence has also overloaded the Time Tunnel. So this is an episode with a lot going on and it actually doesn’t work too badly. It’s actually thoroughly enjoyable.

Attack of the Barbarians lands Doug and Tony in another fine mess, right in the middle of Genghiz Khan’s Mongol hordes. Well actually Genghiz Khan is now dead which sort of makes things worse since there’s now a war between his successor, Kublai Khan, and his grandson Batu. Doug and Tony throw in their lot with Kublai Khan’s great general Marco Polo. Tony also finds time to fall in love with Kublai Khan’s daughter. This episode is notable for Dr Ann MacGregor (Lee Meriwether) losing her grip completely and deciding that Tony should be left in the thirteenth century because he had found True Love. John Saxon gets a more straightforwardly heroic role than usual as Marco Polo. Marco Polo’s forces are heavily outnumbered. If only they had some gunpowder! It’s a reasonably fun episode.

In Merlin the Magician Doug and Tony help to launch the career of a young English king named Arthur Pendragon. They fight Vikings on his behalf and they play a part in introducing him to a young lady named Guinevere. The main problem here is that the guest stars don’t quite have the stature or the presence to convince as larger-than-life characters like King Arthur or Merlin.

In The Kidnappers a time traveller from the future kidnaps one of the Time Tunnel’s key personnel – Dr Ann MacGregor. General Kirk takes a gamble, sending Doug and Tony to the same future time to which Dr MacGregor has been taken. They find a highly advanced civilisation several thousands years in the future. A highly advanced civilisation, but perhaps not a very humane one.

Raiders from Outer Space is very silly. Doug and Tony find themselves in the middle of a war between the British and the followers of the Mahdi in the Sudan in 1883 but there is a third party involved as well – aliens who are trying to destroy the Earth as part of a game. There’s some outrageous hammy acting from the guest cast, and some truly atrocious alien make-up effects. On the other hand there’s lots of action and it has a certain 1950s Z-grade sci-fi movie charm.

In Town of Terror it is 1978 in Cliffport Maine and alien invaders are about to steal all the Earth’s oxygen. This is another episode weakened by very poor makeup effects. The liens have also taken over the townspeople, which could have given the story an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work since that would require some uncertainty about who is an alien and who isn’t, and that’s all too obvious. Not a really successful episode.

Overall The Time Tunnel is a rather underrated series. It’s no sillier than the average television science fiction series and it at least handles time travel in a slightly more sophisticated manner than Doctor Who. It’s an uneven series and it seemed to go into a bit of a decline towards the end but there are some very decent and very entertaining stories and it has its moments of cleverness.

Irwin Allen often gets unfairly blamed for the problems that afflicted his sci-fi series when in fact the problems were mostly caused by the insistence of the networks on dumbing down science fiction series at every opportunity.

And while Irwin Allen’s series do have their problems they do at least mostly avoid the preachiness that makes so many episodes of other series such as Star Trek and The Twilight Zone such heavy going.

The complete series DVD boxed set includes some fairly interesting extras so it’s well worth getting.

The Time Tunnel is silly at times but it’s fine entertainment. Recommended.

Time Travelers (TV pilot, 1976)

Time Travelers is more than a little unusual in being a collaboration between Irwin Allen and Rod Serling. It’s a TV-movie that was actually made in 1976 as a pilot for a TV series that never eventuated. Irwin Allen had had some success with his 1960s series The Time Tunnel. The Time Tunnel achieved very good ratings but was cancelled after a single season due to some rather unfortunate bungling by network executives. Irwin Allen clearly thought (probably correctly) that the time travel idea still had potential.

The script for the pilot was written by Jackson Gillis from a story by Rod Serling but in fact it’s obvious that Irwin Allen had considerable input since the end result clearly bears a fairly close resemblance to The Time Tunnel.

A frightening epidemic has struck the United States. The cause is obscure and the mortality rate is extremely high. It appears to bear an uncanny resemblance to a disastrous mid-19th century epidemic. Scientists like Dr Clint Earnshaw (Sam Groom) are convinced it’s the exact same disease. A Chicago doctor by the name of Joshua Henderson had apparently had some startling successes in treating the illness back in the 1870s. Almost all his patients recovered whereas almost all of every other doctor’s patients died. It seems that despite the primitive state of medical knowledge in the mid-19th century Dr Henderson had somehow stumbled upon the cure.

Sadly all of Dr Henderson’s records were destroyed in the infamous Chicago Fire of 1871, If only it were possible to travel back in time to talk to Dr Henderson! To his considerable surprise Dr Earnshaw is contacted by a man who claims that such a thing is possible. The man, Jeff Adams (Tom Hallick), gives the impression of being more of a cowpoke than a scientist. Jeff invites Dr Earnshaw to fly with him to a secret location where a top-security research establishment is to be found. Of course the man is obviously some kind of lunatic, but lunatics are not usually given access to jets by the White House and they don’t usually work at research institutions run by Nobel Prize winners. Maybe this guy isn’t a lunatic after all.

A few hours later Jeff and Dr Earnshaw are in Chicago, and it’s 1871. The only problem is they were supposed to arrive on October 4 but it’s actually October 7, so in just over 24 hours the whole city will be an inferno and any chance of contacting Dr Henderson or seeing his records will be lost. It’s a race against time!

Irwin Allen’s enthusiasm for science fiction was longstanding but this story taps into his later and even more famous obsession, disasters. In fact it’s as much a disaster movie as a sci-fi movie. The Chicago Fire of 1871 was a very big deal, raging for three days and killing 300 people.

My first impression is that the main set in the time travel complex in The Time Tunnel was much more impressive. The Time Tunnel’s control centre looked expensive and stylish and lavish whereas the equivalent in Time Travelers looks small and cheap.

The period stuff in 1871 Chicago is done reasonably well. As with The Time Tunnel Allen relies heavily on footage from earlier 20th Century-Fox movies, in this instance the footage coming from the 1937 In Old Chicago. The period scenes make very effective use of outdoor sets built for Hello, Dolly!

Sam Groom and Tom Hallick are quite adequate as the two time travelers. They’re totally overshadowed by Richard Basehart’s bravura performance as Dr Henderson. Richard Basehart overacting is always a particular joy to watch.

You’ll come across some people who will try to tell you that everything good about this TV-movie is due to the great Rod Serling, and everything bad must be due to the awful Irwin Allen. That’s plausible if you’re a true believer in the Rod Serling cult, which I most certainly am not. Serling has always struck me as a wildly overrated writer who took himself incredibly seriously and was over-praised by critics. I’m always inclined not to subscribe to the popular view that Irwin Allen was a hack. Most of his TV series actually started very well, with quite good concepts, and then got progressively ruined by ill-judged interference by network suits. Even Lost in Space was genuine science fiction for the first few episodes. The Time Tunnel had been a pretty decent series and Time Travelers is essentially a remake of that series.

Time Travelers deals with time paradoxes exactly the way The Time Tunnel dealt with them. It doesn’t agonise over all the scientific details but it does make it clear that you can’t change the past. Even when you think you can it turns out to be an illusion. History stubbornly refuses to get changed.

Time Travelers deals in greater depth with an issue that The Time Tunnel did touch upon in some episodes, namely the basic overwhelming tragedy of time travel. As a time traveler you’re interacting with people who are in fact already dead. You might grow to like them, you might even fall in love with them, but if history has doomed them there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t bring them back to the present day, and you can’t elect to stay in the past permanently yourself. It’s not just that the people you’re interacting with are long dead, it’s also that the societies you visit are long dead as well. You might think you’d like to stay in 1871 Chicago forever but you can’t. These things would clearly be a very major emotional issue for any real-life time traveler and Time Travelers deals with them sensitively but without wallowing too much in sentiment.

Time Travelers doesn’t have any actual action sequences but it has effective dramatic tension and it manages to achieve suspense even when you know, as the characters, know, some of what is going to happen. It has at least some emotional depth. It’s reasonably well thought-out science fiction. The premise that a doctor a hundred years ago had somehow stumbled upon a great medical breakthrough might be a little far-fetched but it has to be said that it’s developed fairly logically and sensibly.

In fact I get the feeling that this was the kind of reasonably intelligent TV science fiction that Irwin Allen was always hoping to do. He was destined always to be thwarted, always forced by commercial pressures and network interference to accept a massive dumbing down of his original concepts.

Unfortunately with Time Travelers he found himself thwarted once again with the network declining to pick it up as a series.

Rod Serling’s strength was his attempt to add psychological complexity to genre television but his big weaknesses were his tendencies towards manipulative sentimentality and preachiness. Fortunately Jackson Gillis’s screenplay mostly avoids excessive sentimentality and entirely avoids preachiness.

Time Travelers is offered as an extra on the Time Tunnel DVD set (at least it’s included in the complete series set although I’m not sure about the half-season sets). The transfer is not fantastic but it’s perfectly watchable and since it’s a free bonus feature I guess we shouldn’t complain.

Time Travelers is on the whole surprisingly satisfactory. Recommended.

Land of the Giants, season 1 (1968)

Land of the Giants was the fourth of Irwin Allen’s 1960s science fiction TV series. It aired on the US ABC network between 1968 and 1970.

The suborbital spaceliner Spindrift on a routine flight from Los Angeles to London encounters a strange cloud and loses control. The crew eventually regains control and lands successfully but pretty soon it becomes obvious they wherever they have landed it certainly isn’t London. Somehow they have ended up on a planet inhabited by what appear to be normal humans except they they’re enormous. And everything else is enormous, and potentially dangerous simply because of the scale.

There are only four passengers on board the Spindrift. Why anyone would build a spaceliner for scheduled services that can only carry four passengers is a valid question but from Irwin Allen’s point of view it made sense. With the pilot and co-pilot and one stewardess that made for a regular cast of seven which was ideal for this sort of series.

The basic setup is certainly reminiscent of Allen’s earlier Lost in Space series. It has a small group of people stranded on an alien hostile planet. It even has a character roughly equivalent to Lost in Space’s Dr Smith in the person of Commander Fitzhugh (Kurt Kasznar), who is cowardly and conniving but manages to strike up a kind of friendship with the young Barry Lockridge who is just a little older than Will Robinson. Fitzhugh though is less of a purely comic figure than Dr Smith and he has considerably more complexity.

Although Land of the Giants obviously had the potential to be even sillier and more high camp than Lost in Space the admittedly slightly far-fetched subject matter is approached reasonably seriously (and if you rewatch the the first few episodes of Lost in Space you can see that Irwin Allen originally intended it to be at least a semi-serious sci-fi series). And while the setup is remarkably similar to that of Lost in Space it’s still a very good setup. The really major difference between the two series is the genuine ever-present sense of danger and struggle in Land of the Giants. When you’re effectively only six inches tall then absolutely everything is dangerous and everything is a challenge.

The really interesting, and courageous, decision by Irwin Allen was to dispense with monsters. The giants are terrifying but they are not monsters. The giants’ world seems to be identical in almost every way with 1960s America. The giants are just regular folks. They are to be feared mostly because the giants’ government wants to capture every “little person” on the planet (and there are quite a few of them from previous space missions that had suffered the fate of the Spindrift). What the government intends to do with them is an unanswered question but it’s a fair assumption that the best they can hope for is to be kept in captivity and used pretty much as lab animals. A reward has been offered to anyone who finds little people and hands them over to the government, and human nature being what it is there are plenty of people willing to take the money. So the giants are a very real threat, but they’re not evil and they’re not monstrous.

As the first season progresses Inspector Kobick of the Special Investigation Department emerges as the principal villain but even he is not a monster – he’s doing his job and while he might be over-zealous and ruthless he’s not actually evil.

This posed a challenge to the writers who had to maintain a constant feeling of danger without being able to resort to evil monsters. On the whole I think they managed quite well. The humanness of the giants also adds a subtle touch of paranoia – some giants really are friendly and trustworthy but you can never be sure.

Land of the Giants was an incredibly expensive series. On the whole the money was well spent. The special effects mostly work quite well. The massively oversized props (matchsticks several feet long, a cotton reel the size of a 44-gallon drum, etc) look good. The Spindrift itself manages to look kind of bizarre, kind of goofy but kind of cool all at the same time. Some of the techniques used are pretty simple – using lots of low-angle shots to make the giants look huge and menacing and lots of high-angle shot to make the castaways look more vulnerable. Simple, but effective.

The US broadcast order bore no relationship whatever to the production order. I think it’s highly desirable to watch the series in production order. While there are no actual multi-episode story arcs the growing menace of the Special Investigation Department emerges more effectively if you watch it that way.

The way the giants are handled in the early episodes is very interesting. They’re menacing but in a subtle and indirect way. They look like very ordinary humans but they seem to be oddly lacking in emotion. At this stage we don’t know if they really are emotionless or whether they simply don’t see the tiny humans as actual people – whether they regard these miniature people as alien animals of some kind, worth studying but not worth treating with respect. But it’s all kept very ambiguous which is very intriguing.

The Episode Guide
The opening episode, The Crash, sets things up efficiently enough. The Spindrift is stuck on a planet of giants and her power cells are exhausted. The nature of the giants is kept cleverly ambiguous. We have no idea at this stage if they’re actively hostile or not. There are a couple of terrifying encounters with domestic animals – on a planet of giants dogs and cats are very scary creatures indeed.

It’s obvious that the Spindrift’s crew members –  Captain Steve Burton (Gary Conway), his co-pilot Dan Erickson (Don Marshall) and stewardess Betty Hamilton (Heather Young) – are resourceful and are determined to do what’s necessary to survive. It’s also obvious that some of the passengers are likely to cause problems.

The DVD release also includes the original unaired pilot version of The Crash. A number of changes were made in the broadcast version which went to air in September 1968. A couple of very poorly executed action scenes were added, and a lot of the scenes filling in the backgrounds of the characters were eliminated. That’s unfortunate because those scenes make spoilt rich girl Valerie (Deanna Lund) and arrogant engineer/tycoon Mark Wilson (Don Matheson) much more understandable. On the whole I think the unaired version is the better version but by 1968 Irwin Allen had become painfully aware that what the networks wanted were monsters so in the broadcast version he gave them monsters.

The second episode to be filmed was The Weird World, in which the castaways discover that they are not the first humans to find themselves on this strange world. Even more importantly, there may be a fully functional spaceship they can use to effect their escape from the planet.

In The Trap Betty and Valerie are caught by giants and an ambitious and dangerous  rescue mission has to be mounted to save them. There are lots of tensions among the party over this.

The Bounty Hunter presents new dangers for our space travellers – the giants are now actively searching for them and rewards have been offered to anyone who finds them or their spaceship. We also get a bit more insight into what the giants are really like.

In The Golden Cage another human is discovered on the planet. A beautiful girl, in a specimen bottle left out in the woods. To Steve this is an obvious trap. Mark however doesn’t see it this way – he is determined to rescue the girl. The girl, Marna, had been a passenger on a spacecraft that disappeared fifteen years earlier. She seems like a nice girl but she’s convinced that the giants are her friends and mean no harm. To Steve this is more evidence that Marna is part of an elaborate trap laid by the giants. This is an excellent episode.

The Lost Ones are a bunch of juvenile delinquents who are also marooned on the planet of the giants. They’re almost as much of a menace as the giants. This is one of those 60s TV episodes that tries to be hip and happening and in touch with youth culture. Such attempts never end well and this is an irritating episode.

The worst disaster that could befall our space castaways strikes them in Manhunt. A giant finds the Spindrift. The giant in question is an escapee from prison and he may be hoping to using the Spindrift as a bargaining counter to get his sentence reduced. The escapee then manages to get himself into real trouble and is facing certain death until Captain Burton decides the castaways have to save him. The question is, will the giant show gratitude or will he betray them?

Framed is a very convoluted and rather far-fetched tale but it is ingenious and it’s another episode in which the interactions with the giants are not necessarily always hostile. The giants are just like anyone else. Some are evil, some are good, most are in-between. And Captain Burton again decides to help out a giant who’s in trouble – he’s been framed for a murder but the castaways know he’s innocent because they witnessed the murder. The way in which they try to prove the man’s innocence is quite clever.

The Creed forces the castaways to make a very hard choice. Young Barry is desperately ill and needs medical help. But can they afford to trust a giant to provide that help?

The Flight Plan is an interesting idea but it does include a plot device that really stretches credibility. OK, I know the whole series stretches credibility but this idea just stretches it too far for my liking and undermines the necessary suspension of disbelief. The castaways encounter another castaway but there is something about this guy that makes Steve Burton just a little suspicious. The guy does however claim to be able to find a supply of the special fuel that the Spindrift requires so there’s a definite incentive to trust him.

Underground seems to confirm something that has been vaguely hinted at in other episodes – that the land of the giants has a government with certain totalitarian tendencies.

Double-Cross sees the castaways involved in a jewellery heist planned by a couple of ruthless but not overly bright giant crooks. It’s not a bad story but it’s the visuals that make this a really fine episode. The special effects are extremely good, the low-angle shots emphasising the size of the giants are particularly effective and the boy-in-the-lock sequences are very clever.

In On a Clear Night You Can See Earth the castaways try to steal a lens (which they need to recharge the solar batteries) from a giant but the giant turns out to be a mad scientist. In fact he’s totally insane and severely paranoid but he has come up with an invention that poses a serious threat to the castaways. Somehow that threat has to be neutralised, by whatever means may be necessary. Not a bad episode but the seeing Earth in the binoculars thing is a pretty silly.

Ghost Town is clever, scary and creepy. Crossing a force field brings our travellers into what appears to be a perfectly ordinary, normal-sized small town. It seems like they have somehow made it back to Earth. In fact they’re in a model village full of toy houses and toy cars, a village constructed by a giant, albeit a giant who is a kindly eccentric old man. He clearly intends to keep these little people as pets. That’s a bit disturbing but there is worse news to come out. The old man’s grand-daughter looks like a sweet little girl but she’s a psychopathic demon child from Hell and her intention is to torture the castaways to death.

The model village works really well. It looks normal but somehow not quite right. It’s just a bit too perfect. And the fact that the village looks so cute and innocuous makes the whole story quite unsettling. A very good episode.

Brainwash further develops the conspiracy theory thing involving the giants and their intentions towards the little people. Unfortunately the brainwashing technique that drives the plot is very silly – it’s like magic shaving foam! An episode with good bits and bad bits. The device of having a member of the Spindrift’s crew captured by the giants and needing to be rescued is starting to get a bit old.

Terror-Go-Round is yet another episode in which the castaways get captured by giants. At least this time they get captured by a circus and circuses do have the potential for fun. There’s also the added danger of being eaten by a giant bear. I must admit that this time the method of escape is pretty ingenious.

Sabotage pits the castaways against their most dangerous and ruthless enemy yet, the corrupt and fanatical security chief Bolgar (played by Robert Colbert who of course starred in Irwin Allen’s The Time Tunnel). If Bolgar’s scheme works there will be nation-wide panic and all the little people will be hunted down and killed. But Steve thinks he can come up with a plan to thwart Bolgar. It’s a bit contrived but it works and this episode does have a genuine sense of menace.

In Genius at Work a 12-year-old giant boy scientific genius has invented a formula for making small animals very large, which of course means that it can turn little people into giants. My own view is that in a science fiction series you can get away with one outrageous assumption, such as astronauts marooned on a planet of giants. But when you start adding further outrageous assumptions, such as a special formula that can turn a little person into a giant, you’re basically resorting to magic. It’s lazy writing, and it also destroys the suspension of disbelief. It’s basically cheating.

In Deadly Lodestone the implacable and malevolent Inspector Kobick of the security police has come up with what he believes is a fool-proof gadget that will allow him to track down and capture the Earth people. The totalitarian nature of the giants’ society is becoming ever more obvious, although the surprising thing is that that society is presented as an odd mixture of Cold War stereotypes about eastern bloc countries and all-American elements.

Night of Thrombeldinbar represents a definite turn towards whimsy. Mr Fitzhugh is mistaken by a couple of giant orphan boys for Thrombeldinbar, who is a magical folkloric figure who can grant wishes. Fitzhugh has his faults but he likes kids and feels sorry for the boys and sees a chance to cheer them up. Unfortunately he doesn’t know about the fate that awaits Thrombeldinbar according to time-honoured custom. While there’s some definite sentimentality neither this nor the the whimsy is pushed too far and this episode is at least an interesting change of pace.

In Seven Little Indians the castaways find themselves on the run in the zoo as Inspector Kobick comes up with another plan to capture them.

Target: Earth seems to promise a chance to return to Earth, but it will involve putting a great deal of trust in a giant scientist. The scientist has designed a guidance system to take a rocket to Earth but he needs help to make it work and only the castaways can provide that help.

Rescue is interesting since for once the castaways are being a bit pro-active, putting themselves forward in an attempt to rescue two trapped giant children.

Return of Inidu is a change of pace with an illusionist on the run and a haunted house. It’s not a bad idea and it’s amusing and different but the illusions are a bit unconvincing and it therefore stretches credibility fairly thin.

In Shell Game the castaways have to convince a giant woman that they can make her deaf son hear in exchange for their freedom. This one perhaps veers a bit too much into heart-warming territory.

The Chase provides a pretty decent season finale with some suspense and with Captain Burton having to make a tough decision – can he trust Inspector Kobick enough to make a deal with him? And maybe Kobick is not the only giant willing to make deals.

Series Overview
Land of the Giants suffers from some of the same self-inflicted weaknesses as Lost in Space. The fact that the adventurers’ spaceship is disabled means they’re stuck in the same place episode after episode. That’s good news for the producers since it keeps production costs down but it does get rather tedious. It also tends to impose certain limits on the stories, which almost invariably involve one or more of the party getting captured by giants and needing to be rescued by the others.

Land of the Giants is also limited by the decision to make the giants the only alien species (with absolutely no monsters), and to make them completely human-like and their planet completely Earth-like. Overall that was a good decision but it means the writers needed to show some imagination and cleverness, and unfortunately in practice there isn’t always quite enough of that imagination and cleverness.

The series’ big strength is that the group dynamic is quite interesting. As the commander of the Spindrift Captain Burton more or less inevitably assumes the leadership of the group. And it’s just as well that he does. The other crew members and passengers are well-meaning but they’re just not the stuff that heroes are made of, and not only do they need leadership, they need very strong leadership. They are inclined to be impulsive and impatient and reckless and short-sighted. The biggest problem is Mark Wilson. He’s a brilliant engineer and he’s brave and resourceful, but he’s also arrogant, pig-headed and impetuous and his judgment is simply atrocious. He always thinks he’s right, and he’s almost always wrong. Steve Burton is basically the only grown-up in the group and leading the group is like leading a group of small children who are enthusiastic but disobedient. Gary Conway handles this very well, making the character a generally easy-going guy but you can see the steel underneath. He really does have what it takes to be a leader and he’s quite prepared to make unpopular decisions and stick with them. Steve Burton is a likeable guy but he’s the boss.

It also has to be said that a certain amount of genuine thought has been put into the disadvantages, and the advantages, of being very very small in a world of giants. And visually the series is generally very well executed.

Despite the very similar format Land of the Giants is definitely much less campy than Lost in Space. Apart from a few blemishes it’s surprisingly successful in avoiding outright silliness. It was a bold move to approach this kind of material in a straightforward non-campy way but it works.

The DVDs
The first season looks extremely good on DVD. There’s not much in the way of extras but there is a very good interview with star Gary Conway. Conway comes across as an actor who gives his job a certain amount of thought and he’s still very enthusiastic about this series. He makes one extremely interesting point. At the time they were making the series the actors wanted it to be more character-driven which is something Irwin Allen strongly resisted. Conway now believes that Allen was right (and I agree with him). Getting sidetracked by the characters’ emotional dramas would actually have weakened the series, just as it has weakened so many series over the past thirty years or so. It’s unusual to come across an actor who can see this so clearly.

Summing Up
Land of the Giants is much better than it has any right to be. It’s far-fetched but it’s skilfully executed, the effects are mostly exceptionally well done (certainly by the standards of 60s network television) and it’s entertaining. Highly recommended.

Eleven Days To Zero, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea pilot (1964)

It’s always interesting to see the subtle changes between the pilot episode of any series and the series proper. As I’m now almost at the third season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea it’s an interesting time to look back at how it all began.

What makes it especially interesting is that there are several different versions of the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea pilot to choose from. The Region 2 season four DVD boxed set includes as extras the original unaired version of the pilot, the also unaired recut version and the original broadcast version.

Eleven Days To Zero, the pilot episode of Voyage, was interestingly enough shot in colour although the first season would be shot in black-and-white. That first version of Eleven Days To Zero now seems to exist only in a slightly battered black-and-white print. The episode was subsequently recut and that recut version survives, in colour and in excellent condition.

Eleven Days To Zero was written and directed by Irwin Allen and it gives us a fine taste of what is to come in the first season – plenty of action, big ideas, the fate of the world in the balance, good special effects and extremely good acting.

The world’s leading seismologist has predicted a devastating earthquake in the Arctic (presumably an undersea earthquake) that will unleash tidal waves that will devastate coastal areas throughout the northern hemisphere. Millions of lives are likely to be lost.

Admiral Harriman Nelson (Richard Basehart)  and Dr Fred Wilson (Eddie Albert) however have a plan to save the world. They will detonate a nuclear device in the Arctic which will nullify the effects of the tidal waves. Admiral Nelson’s super-submarine the Seaview (which he designed himself) will carry the device to the Arctic.

It’s a dangerous plan and they only have eleven days in which to accomplish it but there’s another problem – a sinister international force is determined to prevent the Seaview from carrying out its mission. They have already assassinated the Seaview’s former captain and  they narrowly missed killing Nelson as well.

With a new captain, Commander Lee Crane (David Hedison), the Seaview sets off on its mission.

It seems that the odds are stacked against the Seaview. They face a depth charge attack from the air, they’re stalked by a hostile submarine and subjected to drone attacks. And that’s without mentioning the giant squid.

The major change in the recut version is that more focus is put on the Seaview’s new commander. In the original version it is implied that the crew don’t fully accept him at first, until he has proven himself, and that in his early career he had a reputation for being unimaginative. This sub-plot is beefed up considerably in the recut version, with the implication that Crane is a bit of a martinet and that he is initially viewed with definite suspicion by the crew.

The change is a positive one, adding not only more human drama but a bit more depth to Captain Crane.

The recut version also adds the suggestion that even Admiral Nelson is not at first entirely sure he’s made the right decision in accepting Crane as commander of the Seaview.

There’s a definite Fu Manchu vibe to this episode (something I thoroughly approve of) although the chief villain also has, somewhat bizarrely, just a hint of a kind of malevolent Noël Coward about him. Either way he’s a fine super-villain.

Irwin Allen obviously realised he’d need some fairly impressive visual effects in the pilot if the series was going to have any chance of being picked up by the network. And the effects are generally extremely good, especially when you get to see the episode in colour.

Of course when you’re almost at the end of season three watching Eleven Days To Zero serves as a reminder of just how terrific Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was in its early glory days. The combination of fairly plausible science fiction with spy thriller elements was uniquely effective and made the first season without question the best American sci-fi television of the 60s.

Whichever version you choose Eleven Days To Zero is worth seeing again.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea season 3 (1966-67) – part 2

I posted on the subject of the first half of season three of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in January. This current post is basically just an episode guide for the second half of the season.

The Brand of the Beast is the kind of episode that, for better or worse, gained season three its reputation for fairly silly monster stories. The Seaview is racing to save a group of scientists on a sinking ship. The reactor overheats and Admiral Nelson has to risk radiation poisoning to fix it. Now of course the great fear that haunts everyone who works with nuclear energy is that if they get a heavy dose of radiation they’ll turn into a werewolf. In fact of course this can only happen if you’ve already been exposed to the werewolf virus. On the other hand on a vessel the size of Seaview it’s pretty much a certainty that there will be at least one crew member who carries the werewolf virus, and of course in this case that person is Admiral Nelson.

So we get the admiral running amok and smashing all kinds of vital equipment and almost sinking the Seaview. Which is fun even if it’s kind of silly. What makes this episode more interesting than you might think is that both Captain Crane and Chief Sharkey are put in positions where their loyalties conflict with their duties and they have to make agonising decisions. And the actors really do try their best to carry it off. The ending is ludicrous but it’s ludicrous in a fun way.

The Creature is typical season three stuff. A somewhat unhinged scientist has created an artificial life form and (perhaps unwisely) released it into the sea. Now this seaweed monster has grown huge and it’s decidedly unfriendly. Admiral Nelson wants to destroy it but that’s not easy as the monster starts taking over the minds of the Seaview’s crew. This is all pretty much stuff that has been done before. A very weak episode.

In Death from the Past the Seaview finds a strange structure on the sea floor. Inside this structure Captain Crane and his men find – Nazis! Live Nazis, who think World War 2 is still raging. The structure is a weapons lab, full of secret weapons. The Nazis, who don’t seem to be aware that 35 years have passed (and who haven’t aged since 1944), want to take over the Seaview for the Führer. Not a very impressive episode.

The Heat Monster is not entirely a bad idea. A foolish Norwegian scientist guides an alien entity to Earth. The alien is a heat creature and it’s obviously not friendly. The script is fairly pedestrian which is a pity since the special effects are reasonably good and the Arctic setting is terrific (and is used to good effect).

The Fossil Men is another monster story. The monsters are rock men, as in men made of rocks. Naturally they have evil designs on the Seaview and its crew. This is one of a number of season three episodes in which Richard Basehart and David Hedison give the impression of playing things, part of the time at least, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Amusingly the episode starts with Nelson reading sailors’ tales from the 17th century about  horrific events after ships are destroyed in a maelstrom. The Seaview is about to encounter exactly the same fate. The rock men look pretty good, even if they are guys in rubber suits. This is a thoroughly enjoyable episode and even its weaknesses have the effect of adding to the fun.

In The Mermaid a secret mission has to be delayed because Captain Crane is off chasing a mermaid. This is the kind of story that all too often brings a science fiction series to shipwreck. It’s extremely difficult to get the tone just right. It has to be a bit whimsical but kept within limits, there has to be a touch of humour but it can’t be played for broad comedy and it has to have a slight suggestion of a dream-like atmosphere but without going too far. They almost pull it off. The first half of the episode works perfectly. Then it disappointingly turns into another guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster episode. On the plus side Diane Webber makes an adorable mermaid, John Lamb’s underwater photography (including footage from his odd but interesting feature film The Mermaids of Tiburon) is gorgeous and David Hedison’s performance is excellent. This should have been a terrific if  offbeat episode. Despite its flaws there’s still a lot to like about it. I don’t think writer William Welch can be blamed for the way the episode loses its way – by this time the network had made it pretty clear that they wanted monsters and that’s all they wanted so he probably didn’t have much choice about throwing in the monster stuff.

The Mummy starts intriguingly enough. The Seaview sneaks into the port of New York, Nelson and Crane use the Flying Sub to steal ashore incognito and they return with a 3,000-year-old mummy in a case. Even before the opening credits we have reason to believe that the mummy may not be quite dead, and something odd is happening to Captain Crane.

Strange things start to happen. Things like sabotage, and crewmen getting attacked. It’s as if someone or something is determined to prevent the mission from being accomplished. Mind you, the mission itself sounds rather unlikely anyway.

The mummy itself is pretty dismal but the story is fun if you don’t try to make sense of it. In fact you can’t make sense of it – most of the questions you want answered don’t get answered. And at the end Admiral Nelson tells Crane that some things are best left unexplained, which pretty much sums up this episode. For all its faults I enjoyed this one.

Seaview is on a mission to exercise control over the launch of an interstellar space probe when the submarine is engulfed by what appears to be a black void and one by one the crew gets taken over by an alien entity in Shadowman. It’s an idea that had already been used once too often. This episode is drearily unimaginative and is made worse by its all-too-evident cheapness. It’s not that the special effects are poor. They’re non-existent and it’s an episode that desperately needed special effects.

Is No Escape from Death the worst-ever episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? It certainly has to be a contender for that title. The Seaview sinks (which is no big deal since it sinks in nearly every episode of the third season) but this time it sinks really badly. This episode is mostly a succession of clips from earlier episodes, many of them in black-and-white just to make it more insultingly obvious what has been done. It was a way to keep the budget at absolute rock bottom, and by this stage that was obviously all that mattered.

The best thing that can be said about Doomsday Island is that it doesn’t look as cheap as the episodes that preceded it. In fact there are things about it that look quite impressive. Unfortunately the aliens themselves are very poor guys-in-rubber-suits monsters. This is your standard space aliens taking over the world story, with the first step naturally being to take over Seaview. One or two good ideas in this story, and an enormous amount of silliness.

After a succession of disappointing episodes things get back on track with The Wax Men. The Seaview takes on a strange cargo – crates filled with wax statues reputedly from the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Only that’s not what’s in the crates. They actually contain robotic wax dummies of every member of the Seaview’s crew, plus one small but very malevolent clown. The clown is actually a diabolical criminal mastermind and the robotic wax dummies take over from the crew and allow him to gain control of the submarine. The clown has made one miscalculation – the real Captain Crane is still at large and he wants his submarine back.

This one has a genuinely creepy atmosphere. The wax robot crew members are wonderfully but subtly sinister. There’s also terrific paranoia – Crane is entirely alone and has no way to fight back. He’s just waiting until he gets hunted down. The effects are very good. David Hedison does well as Crane starts to crack under the pressure. Michael Dunn (best remembered perhaps as the evil megalomaniac Dr Loveless in The Wild Wild West) makes the clown convincingly deranged and menacing. And there’s a nicely surreal feel to proceedings. This is enhanced by the wise decision not to over-explain things (and not offering an explanation adds to the terror and mystery). One of the best episodes of the season.

Deadly Cloud is another alien invasion story that utilises too many tired ideas that the series had used too many times before. The aliens have the ability to take control of members of the crew and turn them into obedient robotic zombies. Even with the threat of the world ending in 20 minutes’ time this story can’t work up any real suspense or excitement.

Destroy Seaview! again relies on plot devices that were becoming all too familiar but at least there are no monsters. We also find out how to deal with a nuclear reactor that is about to go critical – you just shoot it, with lasers. An OK episode.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about season three is that Richard Basehart and David Hedison continue to put real effort into their performances. With the increasing silliness of the stories there must have been a temptation either to lose interest or start hamming things up but by and large they resist those temptations, although Basehart does occasionally succumb. Basehart took himself quite seriously as an actor and wasn’t especially happy making the series, and was also drinking rather heavily. David Hedison seems to have taken a more realistic and more philosophical view – the series was fun to do and it paid well.

The real problem with season three is not that it had become locked into a Monster of the Week formula, but the fact that the budget was woefully inadequate for following such a formula successfully. Some of the monster stories (such as The Mummy) might have worked quite well with a bit more money spent on them. I also get the impression that the writers were starting to accept that no-one really cared about the series any more and as a result they were not exactly motivated to produce dazzling scripts.

Season three does have its moments but it’s heartbreaking to see the sad decline of what had been the best American sci-fi series of the 60s.

The Time Tunnel (1966-67), part one

The Time Tunnel was less successful than Irwin Allen’s other 1960s TV sci-fi series, running for a single season on the American ABC network from 1966 to 1967.

I wrote about The Time Tunnel a few years back but I’ve now had the opportunity to watch a lot more episodes and my views on this series have changed somewhat so I think it’s appropriate to take another look at it, and in a bit more depth.

The premise is a good one – a top-secret U.S. government time-travel project. Although the technology is very advanced in theory in practice it doesn’t work so well and our two unfortunate time-travellers are hopelessly lost in time, shuffled from one historical era to another but with no way of returning to the present. So it’s a bit like Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space but with the heroes lost in time. It is however notably lacking in the high camp excesses of Lost in Space. In fact as time-travel series go it takes its subject more seriously than you might expect. There is for example a much greater awareness of time paradoxes and the inherent limitations of time travel that you don’t find in Doctor Who.

One of the things for which The Time Tunnel is sometimes criticised is the very extensive use of footage from various 20th Century-Fox historical movies. I don’t really see this as too much of a problem. It’s done quite skilfully and in any case a series in which every episode takes place in a different historical period and always at a time when major historical events are unfolding would have been astronomically expensive to make without the use of existing footage.

Of course this technique means that the series is limited to dealing with historical events for which 20th Century-Fox had suitable colour footage from their movies but since the studio had made a lot of movies by 1966 this was not a major constraint.

All American science fiction television programs of the 50s, 60s and 70s had budgetary problems. Science fiction television is expensive to make and there’s really no way to avoid spending a lot of money if you want decent results. This tended to make the networks very nervous, and tended to make them fairly hostile to science fiction. Network execs figured that if cop shows and westerns could be made dirt cheap then why risk big money on science fiction shows? Most American TV sci-fi series in this era had limited runs, not necessarily because of poor ratings but simply because the bean-counters were unwilling to continue spending money on series they considered to be risky to begin with.

The usual pattern was for the first one or two seasons to be fairly visually impressive and then the producers would find themselves having to deal with sharply reduced budgets in later seasons. The most successful of all Irwin Allen’s series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, suffered rather grievously in this respect in its third and fourth seasons. The use of existing footage helped to keep The Time Tunnel’s budget within reasonable limits but it was still inevitably a lot more costly to make than a cop show. It’s therefore not entirely surprising that the series was cancelled after a single season despite very good ratings.

Doug and Tony, the two heroes of the series, always seem to arrive at a particular time and place in which something incredibly historic is about to happen. It’s a bit unrealistic but after all the aim is to provide entertainment so it’s forgivable.

Science fiction writers tend to agonise over the dangers of time paradoxes and to take two different approaches to the question. One approach stress that time travellers would have to be very careful not to change history as this could have disastrous consequences in the present. The alternative point of view is that even if you tried to change history the Universe would not allow it to happen and history would stubbornly follow its allotted course. The Time Tunnel seems mostly to adopt the latter approach. Doug and Tony do on many occasions try to change history but they seem doomed always to fail. In some episodes they seem oblivious to the problem while in others they seem to be very aware indeed of the impossibility of changing history.

There is one curious unexplained aspect of this series. What exactly is the purpose of the Time Tunnel? Obviously it’s time travel, but for what purpose? It’s established very early on that any attempt to change the course of history is doomed to fail. So why is the U.S. government spending billions on the project? We do get a tantalising hint in the episode Secret Weapon that the CIA might have an interest in the project.

It’s also interesting to compare this series with another Irwin Allen series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which began its run two years earlier in 1964. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a celebration of American scientific and technological prowess, with the Seaview being a shining achievement. The technology in The Time Tunnel on the other hand is ambitious but it’s a fiasco. The tunnel is supposed to be able to send people to a specified time period but it doesn’t work properly and can send them anywhere. It’s supposed to be able to bring them back again but it can’t. There’s supposed to be a mechanism that will allow the controllers to contact the time travellers but it doesn’t work. The controllers are supposed to be able to pinpoint the time travellers’ exact position in time and space but it only works intermittently. This is a seriously unsuccessful piece of technology!

Rendezvous with Yesterday was the pilot episode. The DVD release of the series includes the unaired extended version of this episode. Irwin Allen himself directed it and shares the writing credit as well.

An ultra-secret US government project is getting very close to unlocking the secrets of time itself and making time travel possible, but when the pesky Senator Leroy Clark (played by Gary Merrill)  turns up to find out exactly how the many billions of dollars poured into the vast project have been spent they have to admit that they haven’t done any actual time travel yet. They’re sent mice back in time, or at least they think they have but they can’t be sure because they’ve never been able to get the mice back to the present. Senators being annoying creatures Clark wants to close the whole project down unless they can demonstrate some real results right now. As in today.

Horrified by the thought of seeing the project shut down the young and headstrong Dr Tony Newman (James Darren) volunteers to be the guinea pig. He is told that such a thing is out of the question. It is much too dangerous. He goes into the time tunnel anyway.

He ends up in 1912. That’s not so bad, especially when he meets a charming and friendly young Englishwoman, Althea Hall (Susan Hampshire). And he’s on a passenger liner and it’s a sunny day and the sea is calm. This is not bad at all. He doesn’t start to worry until he sees the name of the ship. It’s the Titanic.

The project is supposed to have a way of keeping track of time travellers but despite ten years of work and billions of dollars the whole time tunnel thing still has a lot of bugs in it. They do locate Tony but his buddy and close associate on the project Dr Doug Philips (Robert Colbert) realises that the only way to rescue him is to go into the time tunnel itself to bring him back.

So we now have two scientists hopelessly lost in time.

In One Way to the Moon Doug and Tony are transported ten years into the future, onto a spaceship bound for Mars. The difficulty is that with two extra passengers the spaceship is now dangerously overloaded. There’s plenty of action and excitement and there’s the neat twist of an important character in 1968 watching his future self in 1978.

End of the World is a clever idea. Doug and Tony are in the middle of a mine disaster in 1910 but no-one wants to help rescue the trapped miners because there’s no point – Halley’s Comet is about to hit the Earth and everyone is doomed anyway. Doug and Tony have to find a way to convince the townspeople the world isn’t going to end, which means they have to convince the great Professor Ainsley that his prediction is wrong and that the comet is not going to hit.

Crack of Doom takes our intrepid time travellers to the year 1883, to a little island named Krakatoa where a volcano is about to erupt. In fact the whole island will blow up, the explosion making the most powerful H-bomb seem like a toy. The explosion was heard 3,000 miles away. And the Time Tunnel has dropped Doug and Tony onto the island the day before the eruption. Apart from trying to save themselves they also hope to save a curmudgeonly vulcanologist and his daughter.

In Massacre the two time travellers find themselves at the Little Big Horn just in time to see Custer lead his men to disaster. This episode gets a bit heavy handed at times.

Devil’s Island takes Doug and Tony to the infamous French penal colony in French Guiana. Naturally they arrive right at the time that the prison’s most famous prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, arrives. Doug and Tony are mistaken for prisoners and have to endure various horrors at the hands of the sadistic French commandant and the brutal French sergeant of the guards. There is an escape plan afoot but could it be a ploy by the evil French government to kill Dreyfus? The writers of this episode seem to have a few issues with the French! Not a great episode.

In Reign of Terror those dastardly French are up to evilness again! This time it’s the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette is about to have her head chopped off and Doug and Tony are drawn into a plan to save her (which of course they know is impossible). In any case they have enough trouble trying to keep their own heads on their shoulders. Quite a good episode.

Secret Weapon is a spy thriller episode set in eastern Europe in 1956 and Doug and Tony find out that the time tunnel is not as unique as they’d thought. This is the first episode that really plays around with the time travel concept in a creative way rather than just as an excuse for adventures in other historical period. It’s also the first episode that gives us a hint as the actual purpose of the Time Tunnel. It’s intended as a weapon. It’s a weapon that both sides in the Cold War are trying to develop. This is the best and most interesting episode so far.

The Death Trap has quite an amusing setup. There’s a plot to assassinate Lincoln, in 1861, and the would-be assassins are Abolitionists!

As far as The Alamo is concerned the title pretty much explains it. The trick for Doug and Tony is to get out of the Alamo alive. A reasonably good episode.

Night of the Long Knives takes Doug and Tony to India, to the North West Frontier, in 1886. Naturally they run into Kipling, and they get mixed up in a planned rebellion. Lots of stock footage in this episode (from King of the Khyber Rifles) but there’s also plenty of action and excitement even if the plot is totally unoriginal. I happen to be fascinated by this area of history so I loved this story.

It’s rather surprising that we get to episode fifteen, Invasion, before we get our first conformed Nazi sighting. Nazis were everywhere in 1960s action adventure TV series. In this story Doug and Tony are in Cherbourg, two days before D-Day, and the Gestapo is convinced they are spies. Doug gets brainwashed into believing he’s a Nazi. This is an OK episode.

That takes us up to the halfway point in the series. There’ll be another post at a later date covering the rest of the episodes.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea season 3 (1966) – part 1

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea debuted on the American ANC network in September 1964. The first season remains one of the finest moments in the history of American television science fiction (although to be strictly accurate this first season was as much an espionage series as a science fiction series). The network wanted a lighter tone for the second season and thus began the slow tragic decline of a once-great series. The second season is actually still pretty good though. The decline really started to become apparent with the third season in 1966.

Apart from a move towards even more monster-of-the-week stories the third season also suffered from budget cuts, the perennial curse of American TV sci-fi in this period. There just seemed to be no way to convince the American TV networks that sci-fi just cannot be done both cheaply and well.

The third season is by no means a complete washout. The overall trajectory was downhill but there were still very good episodes.

The season opener, Monster from the Inferno, should have been a disaster. It’s pretty much a catalogue of sci-fi clichés. A rock found on the sea floor turns out to be not a rock but an alien brain. Naturally the evil alien brain wants to take over the Seaview and naturally it feeds on nuclear energy. Naturally it sets out to accomplish its aim by taking control firstly of the unfortunate scientist responsible for bringing it aboard, and then Captain Crane. Against the odds it actually works. Director Harry Harris approaches directs this episode with a great deal of gusto. There are some fine underwater miniatures sequences. The special effects work. Most of all it’s fast-paced and exciting and you don’t have time to worry about plot holes.

The Werewolf sounds like it’s going to be a particularly goofy episode, and it is. The Seaview has to prevent a radioactive volcano from destroying the world. Naturally where you have lots of radioactivity you’re going to have werewolves, and so the island on which the volcano is located is home to a werewolf. Things get really worrying when a member of the crew is bitten and turns into a werewolf and worse still Admiral Nelson is bitten as well. Somehow a vaccine must be found in order to save the admiral. Definitely goofy but kind of fun if you’re in the mood.

There are lots of very good ideas in The Day the World Ended. An ambitious Senator is aboard the Seaview to inspect Admiral Nelson’s latest invention, the X4, a device that can track every nuclear submarine in the world. Strange things then start happening. Kowalski shoots a fellow crewman, thinking he’s a monster. The Seaview loses all contact with the outside world. The X4 tells them that every nuclear submarine in existence has suddenly disappeared. Nelson sets off for Washington in the Flying Sub, to find the city completely deserted. There doesn’t seem to be anybody left on the entire planet outside the Seaview.

All excellent ideas, and the good news is that the execution is perfect. William Welch’s script is subtle and clever, Jerry Hopper’s direction is taut, the pacing is good and the atmosphere of confusion and paranoia builds very nicely. Scott Homeier is terrific as the smooth and arrogant Senator. The regular cast members are all in top form. The best news of all is that some real money was spent on this one. There’s effective location shooting and there’s some superb footage of the Flying Sub. Even the monster that Kowalski sees works once you understand what is really going on. A very tense very exciting story. Not just one of the best of season three but one of the best-ever Voyage episodes.

Night of Terror on the other hand is a good example of just how poor the third season could be. Admiral Nelson and two companions are marooned on an island. There’s a strange fog that seems to produce hallucinations. There’s a very lame monster and some silliness about pirate treasure. We know from the start that most of this stuff is just hallucinations so there’s no sense of mystery or unease.

In keeping with the overall tone of the third season there’s a good deal of silliness in The Terrible Toys, with not just an alien spaceship but malevolent clockwork toys. It is at least reasonably well-executed silliness and some of the toys (especially the little guy with the axe) do manage to be at least moderately menacing.

Deadly Waters is a kind of throwback to the first season. There are none of the monsters and general silliness that usually characterise the third season. It’s just a tense and exciting story of survival and it’s a very good one. The Seaview has to rescue a diver trapped on a sunken submarine. The diver turns out to be Kowalski’s brother but the shock of his narrow escape from death has had an unfortunate effect on him. He’s lost his nerve completely. It doesn’t help that due to an extraordinary sequence of bad luck the Seaview itself sinks. Now they’re trapped on the bottom of the sea, they’re below their crush depth so the Seaview is slowly breaking up, and their air is running out. And those are just their initial problems. Things just keep going from bad to worse. In fact every single thing that could go wrong does go wrong.

The script is an endless catalogue of disasters and mishaps but it adds up to a terrifically exciting episode.

Thing from Inner Space is a straight by-the-numbers monster story. A television scientist believes he has discovered a sea-monster and persuades Admiral Nelson to help him to capture a specimen. The monster turns out to be real nasty, but luckily Admiral Nelson is a lot smarter than most sea-monsters. This episode really has very little going for it.

In Deadly Invasion what appeared to be a meteor storm turns out to be something very different. These aren’t meteors, they’re tiny spaceships! Tiny, but very dangerous. This is a full-scale invasion. You might expect the tiny spaceships to contain tiny aliens but they don’t. They do contain aliens, of a sort, and like most television sci-fi aliens they want to get their hands on nuclear energy. Lots of it. This episode is a mix of good ideas and bad ideas and doesn’t quite come off but it’s still kind of fun.

The Death Watch is a controversial episode among fans. It’s a pretty decent idea but there are a lot of plot holes. Admiral Nelson boards the Seaview to find it empty. There’s no-one else on board. The Admiral seems to be behaving a little oddly. You could understand that he might be puzzled and annoyed to find that the entire crew has disappeared but he appears suspicious and paranoid, and his paranoia seems to be centred on Captain Crane. He thinks Crane is going to try to kill him. We soon discover that there is someone else on board – Captain Crane. He seems utterly obsessed with the idea of killing the admiral, because if he doesn’t the admiral will kill him. And there’s a third person aboard, Chief Sharkey, but whose side is he on?

And while Nelson and Crane are hunting each other who is controlling the ship? Someone or something certainly is. And where does the sexy female voice come from, that keeps issuing puzzling warnings?

This script definitely needed a bit more work done on it On the other hand the execution can’t be faulted. Leonard Horn directed and he did a splendid job. He keeps the action and the tension ratcheted up and makes great use of the Seaview as an arena for a fight to the death. Special mention should be made of David Hedison’s effectively chilling performance. Despite its flaws this is an exciting episode and it’s a third season story with no silly monsters!

The Plant Man is exactly the sort of episode that gave the later seasons a bad name. Twin brother scientists create giant walking mutant plants. The evil twin dreams of taking over the world with an army of plant men. It’s a guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster of the week episode with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

The Lost Bomb by contrast has no monsters, but it has a great deal of suspense and excitement. A bomb powerful enough to destroy half the world ends up on the sea floor after the plane carrying it is shot down. The Seaview has to find the bomb and disarm it but they’re being stalked by a hostile submarine. The bad guys (and they’re nicely villainous bad guys) really seem to be on top in this episode and time is running out for the Seaview and for the world. A terrific episode, almost up to season one standards.

The Haunted Submarine was obviously a budget-saving episode. In fact it’s so cheap they didn’t even need to pay a guest star – they just got Richard Basehart to play a dual role. The Seaview encounters a square-rigged sailing ship which tries to sink them. It’s skippered by a long-dead ancestor of the Admiral who has a bargain, possibly an evil bargain, to offer. This one isn’t just cheap, it looks cheap. It’s not much of a story but with a bit of imagination to provide a suitably eerie atmosphere and a bit of a swashbuckling feel it might have worked. Sadly there’s no imagination at all in evidence and it all falls flat.

So the first half of season three is very mixed indeed. A few excellent episodes, a few more that are silly but fun and a few duds. Disappointing after the first two seasons but the good episodes are very good and they’re enough reason to keep watching.