My favourite Gerry Anderson episodes – Survival (UFO)

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)

Survival

Unhappy endings were key elements of the most powerful UFO episodes. Survival was no different, following the successful pattern used in Flight Path, A Question of Priorities and The Square Triangle to great effect. As a result, this is an episode that has stuck with me ever since the days of my youth because of the shocking nature of the climax.

UFO was, of course, the complete opposite of what viewers had grown used to in Stingray and Thunderbirds; a natural progression from the grittiness of Captain Scarlet into more mature television.

Survival is all about the suspense and mystery, in this case, the quest to find a UFO hiding on the moon. You’ve probably noticed a recurring theme in my favourite Anderson episodes, such as Dragon’s Domain and A Christmas to Remember. Discovery of the unknown is something Gerry executed really well and is probably why it’s my favourite types of story.

Meanwhile, the theme of this episode is in the title: Survival. You assume at first that it’s referring to how mankind can survive their war with the aliens but, as the episode progresses, it becomes obvious survival is a word that applies to every living being, regardless of affiliation.

What makes that all the more impressive a theme to convey is how dialogue plays such a small part. After Foster gets stranded in the aftermath of the conflict between the UFO and the Moon Mobiles, we get virtually no spoken words. But the silence and the music do a lot of heavy-lifting in a way that’s truly commendable.

We get that suspenseful cello fill Barry Gray uses as an undercurrent (a few years before he perfected it in Space: 1999), some Mysteron fills and the creepy music from Joe’s 90’s Arctic Adventure (which also gets perfected in Space: 1999) all of which blends for a very atmospheric piece.

Alongside that music, the silence of the Moon conveys a sense of how alone Foster is in the lunar wilderness. It then becomes a pregnant silence once we realise he’s being followed. Beyond that, the silence makes an unspoken point about the communication barrier between Foster and the alien.

But as their scenes progress, it starts to signify the wordless, simplicity of the common bond shared by living, sentient beings: the fight for survival. It is easier to achieve that together than as enemies. That’s why the alien saves Foster’s life twice and they end up working as a team.

Another thing that helps invoke that idea is putting the two of them face-to-face. So many of the conflicts between SHADO and the aliens are fought ship-to-ship and it’s much easier to pull that trigger when what you’re destroying is a spinning object.

This episode shows us how much harder it is to pull the trigger when you’re eye-to-eye with your enemy. Even before the alien reveals that he has disarmed the gun, Foster finds himself unable to pull the trigger. The fact that the alien disarmed it before Foster had grabbed it also suggests he had cottoned onto the shared goal already, maybe even before the human did. What does that say about us?

And in terms of that question, that’s why the ending’s pay-off is so brilliantly delivered. The inability to communicate this time is between one human to another and the (admittedly understandable) prejudices of the SHADO officers who rescue Foster burst the bubble of our growing affection for the alien in the same swift and brutal way as the pressure leak did to the Straker balloon in the opening scene of the episode when Bill dies in front of Foster.

Survival is one of those episodes that, every time I watch it, I find myself hoping it will end differently this time; that the alien will get back to Moonbase and Foster will hail it as the hero that saved his life, that it might even have been the very act the two factions needed to end this war. And having the possibility to ask those questions taken away from the viewer in such a ruthless way sums up what UFO does best, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, there are some really interesting sub-plots going on here, especially when Straker offers Mark the Moonbase controller role, who refuses because he’s worried about how people would react to a black man taking the position.

I love this scene for two reasons. Firstly, Straker’s put-down of racial inequality helps UFO nail its colours to the mast, showing contemporary audiences that racism should have no place in a civilised society.

But, at the same time, we get to see Mark really take ownership of what it means to suffer that prejudice. When Straker says “racial inequality all burned out five years ago”, Mark tells the white man that he does not get to be the gatekeeper of whether or not racial prejudice has truly died out. He never experienced it so how would he truly sense a defined ending? That’s an idea as relevant in 2021 as it was in 1970.