Throughout its 40-year lifespan, Terrahawks has had to endure an uphill struggle for legitimacy from certain corners of the Gerry Anderson fandom. The 1980s Supermacromation TV series, which marked Anderson’s triumphant return to television after several years of personal and professional upheaval, continues to be derided by the more vocal connoisseurs of Anderson’s work. Terrahawks is a series infamous for its emphasis on absurdity and humour within its atypical sci-fi action/adventure trappings that are otherwise so characteristic of any Anderson production. As such, Terrahawks often comes to be dismissed for not being as substantial as the perceived dizzying creative highs of UFO or Space: 1999. Lurking beneath that comedic surface, however, Terrahawks often let slip a far darker edge.
A Generational Split?
Terrahawks‘ divisive reputation isn’t without substance. Where many older Anderson fans in the early 1980s were excited for an Anderson TV series that returned to the attitudes of his later, more serious-faced live action works, they were instead greeted by cackling alien witches and spherical robots voiced by one of the actors from It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. But it’s always worth keeping in mind that Terrahawks courted a younger audience and proved a sizeable hit, lasting for 39 episodes spread across three series and its lifespan extending into the 21st century with new adventures across audio and comics. Terrahawks has evidently weathered its stormy reputation.
Whilst the series’ focus on humour does admittedly drag the series into juvenile territory in spots, some more menacing characteristics are at play. Terrahawks sought to spook its young fans as much as make them laugh. Like so many other Anderson series before and after it, Terrahawks refuses to be pigeonholed into a strictly single genre. Written off as a comedic folly does a huge disservice to a series that fuses palpable human drama and a kind of terror that dabbles between being visually grotesque and psychologically horrifying. For every amusing Zeroid bouncing into action, there’s one of Zelda’s stomach-churning monsters clawing its way to become the latest terror against the Terrahawks.
Zelda’s dominance as Terrahawks‘ main villain is the series’ most aggressive stance at harnessing pure horror vibes. She’s a character who’s the answer to the question, “What if the Mysterons were from the Wizard of Oz instead of Captain Scarlet?” There’s a generation of 1980s kids for who Zelda had the same impact on them as the Mysterons had on a similar generation of 1960s kids. It’s not Terrahawks‘ fault that those same 1960s kids were now 20 years older when seeing Terrahawks for the first time and likely struggled to become as petrified by Zelda as the 1980s cohort.
A resounding sense of fear is hardwired into Terrahawks, from the fantasy-flavoured, unhinged nature of Zelda’s destructive powers to Richard Harvey’s wonderfully eclectic synth-driven soundtrack, able to conjure up darkly intense soundscapes alongside its more triumphant marches.
Mind Monsters & Ultimate Menaces
There’s an abundance of thematically surreal ideas being thrown around in Terrahawks – a hero who’s one of nine clones, able to transplant his brain patterns into eight other physically identical twins, and a villain who emerges from the darkest depths of the cosmos to wage war against humanity, armed with the most bizarre array of fantasy-flavoured powers. The series often showcased these ideas in the most terrifying manners possible. For all of its levity, Dr Tiger Ninestein and Captain Kate Kestral do, in all seriousness, die during the events of the series. Tiger’s clone motif comes into its full effect in Go’l’d when he sacrifices himself to save the Terrahawks from an explosive meteorite. Tiger’s death prompts the arrival of one of his clones to step in and occupy the vacuum left by the abrupt departure of the Terrahawks’ commander. Tiger Ninestein may return to action by the episode’s end, but one of his clones in turn has to sacrifice their own life in service to Ninestein, an morbid concept that’s oddly underplayed in the original series but which would flourish in Terrahawks‘ audio continuation.
Captain Kate Kestral proves more prone to mortality during the events of My Kingdom for a ZEAF. Zelda’s summoning of the time-warping Lord Tempo results in him providing the ultimate demonstration of his powers. He targets Kate and HUDSON by removing a bridge they’re about to travel across, transplanting the precise geographical area where the bridge once stood to a time before its construction. Unable to stop in time, HUDSON careers off the edge of the rugged road with Kate helplessly trapped inside. Lord Tempo swiftly rectifies the situation by reversing time once more, but Mary and Tiger’s immediate reaction to Kate’s ‘death’ remains all too real.
Other specific episodes also firmly display Terrahawks‘ darker attitude. Mind Monster showcases Zelda unleashing a far more psychological threat than the very physical brute force provided by Sram or a Sporilla. A monster proves to be easily defeated, but petrifying the Terrahawks with their deepest fears demands a far more risky solution from Tiger that makes creative use of his ‘data dump’ to end a horrific set of events on a victory. Close Call is the only episode of Terrahawks that feels like a lost episode of UFO that asks more questions than it answers – some of them quite gruesome to contemplate. Investigative reporter Darryl desperately wants to expose the Terrahawks to the outside world, so much so that Zelda acquires him to infiltrate Hawknest and destroy it from within. The episode implies that Zelda uses her mind-bending powers to hold Darryl under her android thumb, but the episode’s climax reveals Darryl to have been an android all along. The strong implication is that Zelda used more than her magic touch to hold Darryl under her influence. Some gruesome biomechanical reconstruction appears to have taken place…
Most bombastic of all is The Ultimate Menace, in which human and android forces temporarily put aside their differences to combat the Zyclon, a omniscient supercomputer lifeform that threatens to extinguish the entire universe. Terrahawks matches this preposterous entity mostly straight-faced, presenting the Zyclon as a colossal yet mysterious mechanical creature, brilliantly designed with a menacing pronged appearance, prowling through the cosmos like a living Death Star. Clearly, there are some dangers in the universe that even Zelda cannot comprehend.
Clearly then, Terrahawks deserves more praise for its free-wheeling ability to shift between the amusingly daft and the hauntingly weird. More often than not, Terrahawks embraces more terrifying territory than its reputation suggests. In doing so, the series acknowledges that our heroes can succumb to mortality. Not everything in Terrahawks is played off as a joke, some of the series’ greatest moments come from when it’s at its most petrifying.
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