The Continuity Guideby Martin Willey
The Continuity Guide
The Year 1 title credits for Barry Morse shows Bergman looking at a perspex sphere with various electrical components inside.
It first appears in Flight control in Breakaway, in the perspex box it normally appears in.
The sphere appears in Victor's quarters in Matter of Life And Death and Black Sun, but it's barely visible at the side of the frame. It has a starring role, outside the box, in Ring Around The Moon. The scene opens with Victor inspecting and adjusting the sphere, very like the title shot (which was actually filmed a few months later, when Alpha Child was filmed). Victor is describing the Triton sphere, so the sphere is a metaphor for it. Victor demonstrates how to "breaks the chain" by pulling a wire to the sphere, causing sparks.
The prop was created by Century 21 Film Props/Computer Printout for the 1972 BBC ghost drama The Stone Tape. It was created at the same time as the green pipe often seen alongside it. More details.
This larger sphere appears in Victor's quarters in Alpha Child, where it is the subject of Jackie Crawford's attention.
The large sphere appears in Voyager's Return in the Experimental Lab (there's an even larger perspex sphere with lights alongside it).
Both spheres are on Ultima Thule in Death's Other Dominion.
The smaller sphere reappears in the Research observation room in The Exiles.
The small sphere is in the Eagle in All That Glisters
Tony's beer making machine includes the smaller sphere, under a rocking lava wave machine (probably a model by Lava-Simplex called the "Adriatic"). It first appears in a shot closely echoing the Bergman credit shot, in Journey To Where. It can be seen clearly in the opening shot and end sequence of A Matter Of Balance, and it appears at the end of Catacombs Of The Moon.
In New Adam, New Eve it gets promoted into Command Center, apparently without the lava wave rocker and the rest of the beer-making equipment.
The larger sphere in TechLab 3 in The Mark Of Archanon. Previously the base was a black box. Now it is a grey box with 3 red rocker switches.
Here is the large sphere in Medical experimental in Catacombs Of The Moon.
The large sphere is in Carolyn Powell's lab in The Lambda Factor.
Both spheres appear in Devil's Planet in the Entra security ward, probing Koenig's brain. The larger one has jagged strips of black tape stuck over it. The smaller sphere is still in a perspex box, but mostly obscured by a mesh in front. Tony's beer making attachments including the lava-wave rocker have gone.
Copyright Martin Willey