Hey does anybody remember the old Space: 1999? It was really schlocky and the setup was so unbelievable even I as a young child didn’t buy it. And that setup was this: You’ve got this moonbase. Then there’s this huge nuclear explosion that was so powerful that the moon just sort of up and wandered off and ends up passing strange and exotic locales. Yeah, right.
Still it was kind of fun in an over-the-top sort of way. I think someone could do a new series today with a slightly different premise and still give the writers enough leeway to have fun with it.
The Setup
The year is 2999. There’s civilization throughout the solar system. Transportation is comparatively cheap and common, though a bit slow. There is no interstellar travel except for a handful of robotic probes sent to nearby star systems.
The Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede are set aside as nature preserves because they both have life of their own in their deep subsurface oceans. Europa is the moon that gets all the attention and big research money because it has what we would consider a real ecosystem with complex life somewhat like we find in the deep sea on Earth.
Our show takes place on Ganymede. Its oceans hold much less interesting simple single celled life. The exobiologists that get assigned there mostly wish they were on Europa, but you take what you can get. Also on Ganymede is a supposedly secret military base, but it’s something of an open secret. Because of Ganymede’s status as a nature preserve it shouldn’t be there at all, but it’s fairly small and doesn’t seem to do much so no one has ever really said much about it.
The opening of the pilot episode takes place on the exobiology research base. This provides an opportunity to get the audience to know some of the main characters as well as do the background setup that explains what I set out above. Life on the base is fairly boring. Or should I say uneventful, as actual boring is involved whenever they send a new probe down beneath the surface.
Then the show switches to the military base. As it turns out they are experimenting with a powerful new energy source. It’s buried below the ground to shield its presence from prying eyes, but not too far so that it’s actually affects the ocean below. At this point we get to know the characters at this end, from the military commander of the base to the technical personnel.
I think we all know what comes next. There’s some horrible accident. Let’s say a big solar flare happens just as an important test of the energy source is taking place. It super-energizes and unbalances the energy source to such an extreme that it warps space itself! And thus via this accident the moon Ganymede disappears into this man-made wormhole and appears in an unknown location far from home, perhaps millions of light years away in another galaxy altogether.
The last part of our pilot would show the two teams getting together and doing what they need to do to set up a sustainable colony. The show would end with the discovery that the energy source is still unstable and has to be “set off” from time to time in order to avoid it destroying the moon itself. So they set it off, once again traveling through the warped space to parts unknown. Thus we have an explanation for why it ends up in a different star system for each episode.
The First Season
I’d say that the first regular season episode would be to an uninhabited star system somewhere so that we can have more time to flesh out the main characters. Maybe have a minor crisis like they have to send out shuttles to find some rare mineral that they need for some reason. Also a good chance to show off whatever special effects can be pulled together for a strange but lifeless star system.
After that we spend the rest of the season bopping about from star system to star system, encountering strange alien civilizations as we go. The exobiologists will be key to understanding and dealing with these aliens while the military may be needed to protect them from time to time, depending on the script.
The first season would end with a crisis as they discover the subsurface ocean is starting to freeze now that they’re away from the gravitational effects of Jupiter. And in the cliff-hanger ending of the last episode of the season it would be revealed that there’s some sort of mysterious alien intruder that’s infiltrated the exobiology station!
The Second Season
It’ll turn out the space-suited alien is from the deep oceans of the moon itself. They’ve been hiding their ecosystem all this time because they were afraid of the surface dwellers but the freezing of the ocean has forced them to make an appearance. Fortunately the crew figures out a way to direct some of the awesome energy of their power source down to the oceans below in order to keep them from freezing up, and thus the series continues, albeit with the new twist of having our “alien” buddies along for the ride …
