My favourite Gerry Anderson episodes – Dragon’s Domain (Space: 1999)

I recently guested on a Gerry Anderson podcast called Keep and Destroy, where fans of his shows discuss their favourite episodes and critique (for want of a better word) some of the others.

As today is International Gerry Anderson Day, I thought I would publish some of my notes from the podcast, going into a bit more detail about some of the best episodes.

Narrowing it down to just five was, of course, really difficult, as there are possibly hundreds of entries I could have made. So, if any of your favourites don’t appear, try not to shoot the messenger!

My favourite episodes:

• Dragon’s Domain (Space: 1999)
• Sun Probe (Thunderbirds)
• A Christmas to Remember (Stingray)
• Survival (UFO)
• Avalanche (Captain Scarlet)

Dragon’s Domain

I had to do a bit of maths to work this out but I’ve worked out that my dad first showed this classic episode of Space: 1999 to me when I was no older than six. It was probably a mistake, because I spent the last year we lived in our first house (which we left in 1999, ironically) absolutely convinced that Tony Cellini’s monster lived inside my bedroom closet. I used to stare the door all night until I fell asleep thinking, if I stopped looking, the monster would emerge, hypnotise me and turn me into a skeleton.

You might think I’d annoyed with my dad for that. Well I probably had cause – even after that too. He introduced me to Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds album soon after Space: 1999, so H.G. Wells’ Martians replaced Cellini’s monster as my bogeyman from the ages of about seven to 12.

But believe it or not, there was some method to his madness because, when you think about everything he introduced me too, apparently UFO was too scary. I didn’t watch that until my mid-teens after growing up on Space: 1999 since the age of six!

All jokes aside, watching Dragon’s Domain back as an adult has helped me appreciate how much they manage to achieve in just 50 minutes. In a way, it’s a compressed version of Aliens (1986), a two-hour motion picture, into one television episode. The flashbacks are part of how well they achieve this as they help build up the characters, especially in the way they show backstories for the ones we already know, and how they ramp things up into the final showdown.

I also loved Space: 1999 episodes that dealt with the fallout of historic Earth-based stories. Learning about failed missions in A Matter of Life and Death, Death’s Other Dominion and Voyager’s Return helps build up and cultivate the mythos of the show and Dragon’s Domain plays really nicely into that existing world-building.

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Although, of course, this episode is all about character-driven drama. Even though Cellini is someone the audience has only just met in Dragon’s Domain, the writers do an excellent job of using flashbacks to help us become emotionally invested, mainly because Cellini’s arc plugs directly into a conflict between main characters John Koenig and Helena Russell, developing their relationship along the way.

Gianni Garko is fantastic actor for Cellini too, especially his performance in the hospital scene opposite Helena, where he highlights how irrational he has become after fighting the monster; surviving and arriving home only for nobody to believe his story. This only makes the spectre of the creature more terrifying. I mean, it’s horrible enough as it is, but watching Cellini’s descent into madness really drives the horror home.

What also makes this episode successful is that, even though it’s primarily a horror episode, it still draws on Gerry’s old formula for Supermarionation in terms of tone balance. Even though we have tentacles, blood suckers, fire breath and a whole slimy fantastic story, we still have some humour laced throughout, specifically with the running joke of Alan Carter getting punched.

There’s some irony about that in a way because one of the original plans for this episode was to have Alan fulfil the role of Cellini. That idea actually might have been really good, by the way. I have always the writers used Cellini more in Space: 1999, considering the strong link with Koenig’s past. It makes sense that he dies but fleshing him out before this episode would have been excellent. If they had done that with Alan, it really would have been some meaty television although perhaps a bit too much for a contemporary audience to take. Alternatively, had they gone with Alan for this episode and not killed him off at the end, then maybe the payoff would not have been so impactful.

That said, anyone who has read the Powys Media books, which fill in the gaps between seasons one and two and continue to longer story in a seasons three or four, will know that Cellini does get a good treatment there. I won’t say any more for fear of spoilers but their series is REALLY, REALLY worth checking out for any die-hard Space: 1999 fans who haven’t delved into them yet.

On a more trivial note, in Dragon’s Domain, we also get to see the shiny-blue Moonbase pyjamas on show quite a lot with all of Cellini’s night-time exploring of the base. I must say, I always wanted to have a pair like that because, somehow, my dad owned some. For me, the uniformed Moonbase Alpha pyjamas are essential nightwear for a nishe science fiction fan.