The vast universe of Space: 1999 is riddled with fascinating cosmic mysteries. However, one of the series' most unanswerable questions occurs behind the camera, rather than in front of it. During the course of the series' production from 1973 to 1976, 48 episodes were produced between two series. As part of that intensely productive process from script to screen, several proposed story outlines ultimately never made it to screen. 

Just how many unmade episodes of Space: 1999 are there? Could these story outlines and scripts have resulted in classic adventures of Moonbase Alpha that we'd never see? Let's examine several of Space: 1999's unmade episodes!

Early Series Proposals

When developing the series' format out of the ruins of pre-production work initially commenced for a proposed second series of UFO, many series proposals were drafted by Group Three Productions. Comprising of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and long-time Century 21 colleague Reg Hill, each of these proposals outlined many narrative, character and design aspects of the series, each one building on the details of the other as all the various factors were fleshed out to greater degrees.

One of the later series proposals includes numerous story outlines, each of them no more than a couple of sentences. Some of these proved foundational for future episodes, such as War Games, The Last Sunset and Testament of Arkadia. Several other outlines, however, went unproduced.

The Mono Menace - alien life, bred from a single cell, with a single purpose: destroy the men from Earth.

The idea of a rapidly accelerating extra-terrestrial cell which threatens Moonbase Alpha would be realised in Space Brain.

The Trojans: Aliens infiltrate Moon City. Their leader: a female.

Possibly the germ of the 'battle of the sexes' attitude embraced by The Last Enemy.

Another Earth: A compatible planet seems to be found - but all is not what it seems on the Utopian world.

There's some skeletal links to Another Time, Another Place, Guardian of Piri or A Matter of Life and Death. However, this outline bears a strong similarity to a pair of unrealised story outlines from Jerome Coopersmith and Irving Gaynor Neiman.

Revolution: The Commander's authority is challenged, as an unexpected space hazard threatens to destroy Moon City. 

Not immediately applicable to any Year 1 episodes, but the idea of Alphans rejecting Koenig's authority would be the driving premise behind Year 2 episode The Séance Spectre, although any resemblances to Year 1 were rejected by the time scripts for Year 2 was underway.

It's entirely possible that not all of these preliminary outlines were intended to become fully completed scripts. Rather, they may have simply served as extra ammunition to convince financiers and broadcasters of Group Three's intentions for this new out-of-this-world series. Towering above these outlines in their notoriety is Zero-G, the half-hour pilot script of Space: 1999 written by Gerry and Sylvia themselves. The Anderson's much briefer instigating adventure provides a far more separate series of cataclysmic events which dramatically build up to the fantastic wrenching of the Moon from Earth's orbit. This effort would ultimately be disregarded in favour of Christopher Penfold and George Bellak's Breakaway script.

Three Lost Classics?

At least three unrealised story outlines produced for Space: 1999's first series are known to exist. Victor Pemberton's Planet of the Eye was written some time in 1973 and boasts many strikingly familiar elements that would be repurposed into other episodes during the making of Year 1. Pemberton himself boasted some impressive science fiction TV credentials prior to Space: 1999, including Doctor Who and Timeslip.

In Planet of the Eye, Moonbase Alpha comes into contact with a series of strange meteorites that expand in size when examined, along with a deadly planet encased in a red mist that harbours statue-like skeletons. The Alphan responsible for examining the meteorites, Alex Danilov, grows increasingly volatile, with the revealation that his mind had been split in two. Danilov's warped mind is transmitting information from the planet itself, revealing the world to be some manner of biological organism that feeds off of passing space travellers. Moonbase Alpha is threatened further when more meteorites emerge, enveloping Alpha in a red mist and threatening to consume the base's inhabitants. 

There's an abundance of components at work here that would find their way into future episodes; almost too many to be a coincidence! The idea of an Alphan bearing a split mental state would be seen in Another Time, Another Place; the rampaging mist would be employed in Space Brain; the Alphan used as a transmitter between worlds - and the fact that the alien world appears to boast some biological make-up - in Ring Around the Moon. All of these episodes were written by the series' editorial staff, who presumably had ready access to story submissions. 

In Alpha People, John and Helena discover a planet inhabited by a seemingly Earth-like qualities, ideal for the Alphans to take refuge on, as well as advanced beings who perform no work whatsoever. The Alphans are eventually overwhelmed by these advanced people who demand that they in fact should be released from this world, only for several of them to inexplicably vanish out of existence, replaced by other beings. The horrible truth is that this seemingly ideal world only permits its inhabitants to live for a shockingly brief period of time. 

Alpha People brings striking comparisons to Guardian of Piri with its overt themes of decadent lives of intense pleasure when intelligent beings are stripped of responsibilities or purpose, all of which masks something far more sinister. Jerome Coopersmith would have been one of many American writers undoubtedly picked to appease Space: 1999's higher powers, who demanded that the series be made up of transatlantic talent. Coopersmith had a hugely distinguished career across television and theatre from the 1940s onwards, writing for several anthology dramas and a lengthily stint on Hawaii Five-O.

A Breath of Death by Irving Gaynor Neiman sees the Alphans caught between the peaceful Medlians and the warlike Meds. The aggressive Meds imprison the Medlians on the moon of the Meds' own world, due to Medlians born with absolute passiveness. The ideal qualities of the moon cause a schism on Alpha as to whether or not force should be used for the Alphans to show their dominance. They eventually realise that by pursuing these methods, they're no better than the marauding Meds. 

Some similarities may be drawn with The Last Enemy, another adventure in which the Alphans find themselves caught between two warring races and declaring their non-violent stance in alien conflicts. The moralistic realisation of the Alphans' use of violence certainly slots into the humanist core of Moonbase Alpha. 

Pat Silver and Jess Lasky Jr contributed to numerous ITC series of the 1960s and 1970s, leading to them being recruited to write for Space: 1999. The Full Circle marks their only contribution (a script apparently heavily reworked by director Bob Kellett), the pair wrote two further scripts - The Silent Music and The Valley of the Giants, also known as Bat out of Hell. Little is known of the story details of either script, but it's intriguing to note that, according to Silver in 2012, these were written as scripts and not simply left as proposed story outlines. 

The Children of Year 2

There's far less record of unproduced story outlines for Year 2 than the aformentioned efforts from the making of Year 1. Whether that means far less story material went unused or less documentation took place of unfilmed scripts is tricky to determine. With the series' format locked in by this point and an entire series' worth of 24 episodes to call on as a frame of reference, it's believable that less material went unused. Fred Freiberger's cost-cutting measures surely played a role in keeping prolonged developmental delays to a minimum. 

The development of an untitled script by Hull-based playwright, screenwriter and novelist Jim Hawkins is described in details in All Sections Alpha: The Making of Space: 1999. Biographer Tim Heald captures a closely collaborative conversation between Freiberger and Hawkins in mapping out how Hawkins' proposed script was progressing and how it could be improved. For whatever reason, this script went unrealised.

Former Year 1 script editor Johnny Byrne made several contributions to the second series. He wrote two scripts between the making of Year 1 and Year 2 - The Biological Soul and Children of the Gods, along with an earlier script intended for Year 1 - The Immunity Syndrome. Two of these scripts were reformatted to suit the renewed Year 2 format, while Children of the Gods was replaced by an entirely new adventure; The Dorcons. Byrne revealed Children of the Gods in 1982 in the pages of Danish Space: 1999 fanzine Intercomm One. During his interview, he also revealed this intriguing nugget of intel as to the writing of Year 2:

"When Freddie (Freiberger) came in he read all the old scripts that might have been used. Of course he had to junk them because he was starting his new reign and such were the dictates of that kind of responsibility."

Was Byrne referring to scripts written for a second series that ultimately went unused? If so, it's unusual for fully written scripts to have been developed, commissioned and fully written when a second series remained unconfirmed before Freiberger stepped in. Byrne was an exception here; in his role ad script editor, he would have had more responsibility to craft scripts for a second series to smooth itself into production. Like so much else of Space: 1999, precise details remain out of reach. 

Children of the Gods would have been another cautionary tale of humanity's destructive vices, as Byrne goes onto explain his interview: "It's Moonbase Alpha bit by bit starting to disappear off the surface of the moon. Then it reconvenes - that's the end of the hook, voices of children 'We're the children', sounds over the intercoms. Then they were in some kind of structure and there are two children, they've got these jewels in their foreheads and they're incredibly evil. The kids are very indulged, they have complete mastery of time and space and they put the Moonbase Alpha personnel through weird time trips. Like Carter comes back, his mind completely cleaned, he believes he's a sort of gladiator from ancient Rome.

There's a fight in it between Koenig and Carter and there's a guy who was the heavy. They gradually work it out: These children were kidnapped in the future. The man who's controlling the whole thing belongs to an another race and Koenig's race or these children's race and their are about to make contact at this moment in time in the galaxy somewhere. There was an effort made to discover the fundamental nature of human beings, so these people kidnapped two of the children and brought them up in complete indulgence, allowing their natural instincts to entirely rule their lives. The crunch is why they've come back for Moonbase Alpha is because... these children are the descendants of John Koenig's people on Moonbase Alpha."

Byrne wasn't beyond delivering terse critical summaries of his own work for Space: 1999, yet he held this unfilmed script in high regard, as apparently did Gerry, with Byrne recollecting that Gerry told him "it was the finest story he ever read." Year 2 was more than capable of yielding high-concept sci-fi dramas, such as New Adam New Eve and time travel, such as the events depicted in Journey to Where. But with more thuggish monster-of-the-week types taking priority over philosophical concepts, Children of the Gods doesn't appear to make room for such leeway, or indeed offers much room for reinvention into the Year 2 format without drastic alterations. Better to make room for episodes in which a pre-Star Wars David Prowse gets whacked in the groin. 

The script ultimately became novelised by William Latham and published by Powys Media in 2013 as part of the publisher's long-running continuation of Space: 1999, set in their own Year 3, and titled Johnny Byrne's Children of the Gods.

It's uncertain how many classic (or lesser regarded) adventures of Space: 1999 we may have been robbed of, but through these selections of archive material comes a renewed appreciation for the complicated process of developing a story from script to screen on Space: 1999's cosmically ambitious level.

Discover the fascinating history of Space: 1999's troubled production with All Sections Alpha: The Making of Space: 1999 by Tim Heald and Fred McNamara! You can also enjoy some of these unrealised stories thanks to David Hirsch and Robert E. Wood's Maybe There: The Lost Stories from Space: 1999!

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