Episode Guide: Year One
Title: "Dragon's Domain"
Within this page: Overview | Backplot | Plot Synopsis | Unanswered Questions | Analyses/Observations | Comments | Memorable Lines
Overview
Astronaut Tony Cellini is faced with a demon from his past -- literally.
Production Number: 023 (Season One)
- filmed Monday, January 27 - Monday, February 10, 1975
Original U.K. airing week: 23 October 1975 (ATV Midlands)
Original U.S. airing week: 5 December 1975 (syndication)
Written by Christopher Penfold
Directed by Charles Crichton
Backplot
- In the year 1999, lunar nuclear waste storage dumps have exploded, due to magnetic radiation, sending Earth's moon into interstellar space. The inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, unable to escape, are seeking a new home.
- The Earth had an active deep space probe program in the 1980s and 1990s; the Ultra probe, like the ill-fated Meta probe from "Breakaway" was chartered to explore a distant star system.
- The Alphans have encountered with the generational ship Daria in the prior episode, "The Mission of the Darians."
Plot Synopsis
(From the original ITC Press Release.)
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A macabre monster in outer space... an eerie graveyard of lost spaceships. Real or imaginationation? Years of mental torment reach a terrifying climax
Tony Cellini (GIANNI GARKO) is a man of contrasts. He is tall, strong, rugged and an all-round sportsman. But he is also a sensitive, imaginative poet. The two aspects of this Alpha astronaut are, perhaps, responsible for the plight he has found himself in, and Commander Koenig (MARTIN LANDAU) and Dr Helena Russell (BARBARA BAIN) disagree emphatically about him. Cellini and John Koenig are old friends and Koenig is staunchly loyal in trusting Cellini's integrity; but Helena has always had doubts about his mental stability believing him to be a suppressed hysteric.
The mystery surrounding Tony Cellini is revived when he appears to go berserk and tries to take off, entirely alone, in an Eagle command module. He is restrained and kept under examination in the Medical Centre as Koenig and Helena again argue about the drama which developed from a space probe of which Cellini had been in command before the moon broke away from its orbit.
The longest journey ever undertaken by man was launched to confirm the discovery made by Professor Bergman (BARRY MORSE) of a new planet given the name of Ultra. Accompanied by medical expert Dr. Monique Fauchere (BARBARA KELLERMANN) astro-physicist Dr. Darwin King (MICHAEL SHEARD) and radiation expert Dr. Juliet Mackie (SUSAN JAMESON), Cellini set out on the hazardous probe.
Only Cellini survived, after a fantastic escape, with a story the experts refused to believe - the story of an eerie area of stationary spaceships, a graveyard in space, with a terrifying outcome with the opening of airlocks, admitting a gruesome, rampaging mass of writhing tentacles. Cellini's desperate lashings with an axe saved his life, but the others fell victim to the monster.
Cellini has lived with the nightmare ever since. Now by a chance in a million, the moon has drifted into that area again, but only he realizes this. Can he now vindicate himself? Trying to do so involved his Moonbase colleagues in a crescendo of horror...
SCREENPLAY BY CHRISTOPHER PENFOLD
DIRECTED BY CHARLES CRICHTON
Guest Stars:
GIANNI GARKO
DOUGLAS WILMER
with
PRENTIS HANCOCK as PAUL MORROW
CLIFTON JONES as DAVID KANO
ZIENIA MERTON as SANDRA BENES
ANTON PHILLIPS as DR. MATHIAS
NICK TATE as ALAN CARTER
BARBARA KELLERMANN as DR. MONIQUE BOUCHERE
MICHAEL SHEARD as DR. DARWIN KING
SUSAN JAMESON as PROFESSOR JULIET MACKIE
Unanswered Questions
- How was the Ultra Probe able to travel across interstellar space, farther than the Moon had traveled up to this episode? Should this episode have taken place earlier in the first season, not as the penultimate episode for Year One?
Analyses/Observations
Comments
- This episode was originally intended for Nick Tate's Alan Carter character in the lead role.
- The Voyager probes, Meta probe, the Ultra probe -- all interstellar probes which Earth developed for deep space planetary exploration. What propulsion could have enabled the Ultra probe spacecraft to venture to the distant planet Ultra? Was it akin to the propulsion used on the Voyager spacecraft? Was a space warp or wormhole used to reach (and return from) Ultra?
- Writer/Script Editor Johnny Byrne commented (from an interview with Tim Mallett and Glenn Pearce and a 1982 interview with Carsten Andresen), "As for using the Octopus monster as a dog toilet - the prop had ended up on the back lot. I often took my two lurcher hounds to Pinewood and exercised them off the lead on the extensive back lot. One was a male hound. As such any standing object was sprayed, not as a sign of his master's disapproval of a particular episode, because he was marking out his territory." The same story surfaced in an Johnny Byrne interview with John Muir.
- Actor Gianni Garko was born in Zara, Yugoslavia. His acting career spans over half a century.
- Actor Michael Sheard (Dr. Darwin King) [Official site] has a notable career in numerous movies and television shows, including "All Quiet On The Western Front", "Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade", "Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back", "Les Miserables", and "Force Ten From Navarone", among others.
Memorable Lines
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