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Big Finish: Breakaway

This is a review of the first 2-CD audio drama, based on Breakaway. There are spoilers below.

The title theme is a version of the Gray theme, with a bit of Geoff Love. Music is used as bumpers between major sequences. This is all original; there are no callbacks to Gray's incidental themes. We hear a lot of original sound effects including bleeps, alarms and Eagle engine sounds (of course there's sound in space). The travel tube sounds a little like a kettle heating up. There's even something that sounds like the UFO sound effect at the end, maybe hinting at the future story direction.

There is no narration, which is occasionally confusing, especially in action sequences. The audio format means the script uses a several devices to ensure the listener knows what's happening. First is the use of the newscasters, led by an interviewer named Petra, who interviews Koenig and Simmonds. The travel tube has an automated voice announcing the destinations, like a metro train. Characters often talk to each other over the radio (video?) from different locations. When they walk, they are apparently wearing heavy boots, which unfortunately brings to mind the coconut halves from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The biggest problem is action is hard to follow. There is a lot of screaming and sound effects, and usually some character trying to describe the action but not always successfully. If you've seen the episode, you know what's happening in the breakaway or when Collins goes mad, but the new action sequences such as the equivalent scene with Sian Springer are confusing.

The reworking of the plot is similar in ambition to E C Tubb's novel Earthfall, but still follows the structure of Bellak's episode quite closely. We hit the same story beats, with some changes. An early one is that Koenig's Eagle arriving at Moonbase Alpha is affected over navigation beacon Delta and crashes. The Meta Probe is a more important plot strand.

Meta is not a wandering planet entering the solar system, it is five light years away. The Meta Probe has a Queller Drive which will propel it to 0.8 of the speed of light, a flight that will take 5 years, 5 months. Many of the crew will be in "cryonic" sleep. This is key to the breakaway, which we'll look at later. Jim Nordstrom was the Meta Probe navigator. The backup commander is Sian Springer, who suffers a similar fate and is replaced by "Meta liaison officer" Alan Carter. Only the Meta Probe crew and Eagle pilots are affected by the unknown illness. There is no mention of waste disposal crew. The nuclear waste in the episode was stored in Area One and Area Two, but here it is Sector One and Sector Two. Sector One is near the outlying areas of Moonbase Alpha, on the near side of the Moon, and the explosion is seen on Earth. Navigation Beacon Delta isn't Sector One, but you have to fly over Sector One to reach it.

The newscast includes an awkward joke based on the series title: "coming up later we go to New York for the latest on the nuclear waste treaty talks, but right now for all you space enthusiasts out there, it's space 1999." This is repeated several times. At the start we get some heavy-handed scene setting.

"After the Apollo missions of the 1960s and early 1970s, space exploration was very nearly abandoned as public pressure mounted for money to be concentrated on problems down here on Earth. By a whisker, funding was granted for a base on the Moon. After its initial classified military duties, that base was greatly expanded and converted into the international moonbase alpha we know today. Three hundred and eleven personnel serve in a perfect self sustaining artificial environment. Their mission statement, to forward the frontiers of human knowledge and science. And most recently, that mission has included hosting the Meta Probe which is due to be launched from a platform orbiting the moon. But now, even the international space commission has senior council members who are highly sceptical about the benefits of spending vast sums of money on sending a few astronauts to a planet five lights years away, which may or may not be inhabited."

Because of the Meta Probe launch, there are hundreds of civilian spectators on the base, and when Koenig arrives in Main Mission it is full of children. Strangely, none of the spectators seem to be press, because the only newscasters they speak to are on Earth. Koenig wants to evacuate the civilians, but Eagles cannot be spared from the waste dispersal operations. Later we learn there was actually 1120 on the base just before the breakaway, and after just 331.

There may be lots more Eagles. The Eagle taking Koenig to Alpha is Eagle 4409 (four four zero niner).

The Computer announces the date at intervals: "13 September 1999. Daylight cycle commences." We hear each date from 9th September. The ungainly phrase doesn't help (space operations use zulu time, so the jargon is just twaddle). There's a subplot that Koenig and Bergman don't get any sleep for several days, until they are yawning loudly. Shockingly, Helena gives them stimulants, after which they fall asleep. Anyone who's had to deal with multiple-day shifts, or even travelled a few timezones, will find this unconvincing, and you would have thought both of them as experienced space travellers would have learned to cope a bit better than this, and Helena would have been dismissed for gross negligence.

Despite this device trying to increase tension, it is slow moving. It is two hours of characters talking or arguing, while the plot advances glacially.

Some elements, such as the introductory newscast and meetings with Gorski, were in the Bellak script, but cut from the episode; however, no original dialogue is used from these scenes. Some of the dialogue is taken directly from the original ("Coffee, Commander Koenig?"). Several of the actors have strong accents, particularly the roles played by Glen McCready: the Russian Gorski, a Yorkshire Morrow and the Australian Alan Carter.

Carter is the only one to sound like the original actor, although in the more cheery Year 2 mode. Alan gets assigned to be commander of the Meta Probe, and he is the sole survivor when it explodes.

Bonnar's Koenig is as earnest as Landau but more aggressive at times. At first he comes across as a little dim:
"I'm not even sure why you're sending me to Alpha"
Simmonds replies "To calm a few jittery nerves. I need someone running Alpha who's fully dedicated to the Meta mission"
Soon he's clashing with Gorski and Simmonds. "I've got people dying up here." (there are several versions of this line)

Hayward's Bergman is a sounding board for Koenig, but the script doesn't give him much personality, while Sandra, Kano and Morrow are even more functional. The performances are fine, but the script gives them little to work with.

Simmonds is the major antagonist, smooth and cunning but more of an obvious villain than Roy Dotrice, with a lot less nuance. He's a politician who wants to get the Meta Probe launched, but is oddly uninterested when Koenig and Helena suggest the Meta crew could be affected by the illness in space. This is more of a script problem than a character flaw. It's a bigger role than the episode. At one point he fires Koenig as Commander, and flies up to assume command of Moonbase Alpha himself.
"John, you're throwing away your career."
"Better than more lives."
As he flies to Alpha, Simmonds is interviewed again, and, unwilling to mention he has replaced Koenig, still refers to him as commander. Koenig takes it to mean he is reinstated.

Simmonds has one of the dumber lines in the script a little before the breakaway: "Just how bad could this explosion be? Could it affect the moon's orbit? Wouldn't that cause catastrophic damage to earth? I've got family down there" Although Bergman's following explanation of why the moon couldn't be blown out of orbit is a clumsy attempt at fixing the science of the original series.

Creasey's Helena is very different to Bain. She is impertinent and pugnacious. She is openly antagonistic to her superiors; in an early scene she tells Gorski to "Do something useful for once in your damn life", and then dismisses him as "Asshole". When she meets Koenig, she greets him with "Welcome aboard the good ship Cover-Up". Helena is a strong character, so much so it unbalances the story and overshadows the other characters. When Gorski and Simmonds threaten her with a disciplinary board, she probably deserves it. She's soon on Koenig's side: "Given that Simmonds is a card-carrying idiot, I'm all aboard the good ship Koenig. For now." Apart from being petulant, she doesn't do much to advance the plot. Like the episode, Simmonds and Gorski are suppressing the news of the illness. Here, she's also denied access to experts at Mission Control on Earth. When she finally gets access, they don't help.
"What about the diagnostic team at Earth mission control?"
"They've drawn a blank too."
"All those experts?"
"Yeah just imagine that, just as dumb as little old me"
It's another dead-end plot line, which only exists to allow Helena to be angry.

Her medical judgement is suspect. She gives stimulants to Koenig and Bergman to keep them awake, and an extraordinary attitude when she sees the unconscious Simmonds after the breakaway.
"Hey, is Simmonds dead?"
"Aren't you forgetting your Hippocratic oath?"
"Oh yes, that. I must have hit my head. Ouch, and so has he. Never know, might knock some sense into him."

The effects of the mystery illness are more radical here. From the start of the story, we have "gravitational anomalies", lightning, and Koenig's Eagle crashing. Nevertheless, the characters continue to concentrate on the sickness of the pilots, and forget to investigate the crash.

Eventually Kano and Bergman uncover deliveries to the defunct sector 1, but the details are redacted. The computer also recorded heat rises and gravitational anomalies. Sandra deduces the unknown delivery to sector 1 triggered the inert waste material to produce "exotic matter". We never find out what the delivery was or why it was hidden. The term "exotic matter" is pretty vague for scientists to use (technically it refers to matter that violates the null energy condition, particles with negative mass). Both Alan and Simmonds find the term amusing, surprising for senior staff working with scientists. How do they detect exotic matter? There's no such thing as an exotic matter detector, and if you had one why would you put it in a waste dump?

Bergman then recognises the Meta signal, which is being beamed at the Moon, is affecting the reaction. Says Helena "If it's deliberate, what the hell kind of message is that? Hi there, planet Earth, we're cooking your nuclear waste for you?" Sector 1 burns up, and they activate a plan to disperse the waste at sector 2. When Koenig orders the Meta Probe to launch, the Queller drive cuts in early. Bergman says "I think the Queller drive is warping space around us." They find themselves in unknown space, far from Earth. "Some form of negative matter was being produced in huge quantities, catalysed by the overloading Queller drive."

This is based on a superficial summary of a Morris–Thorne traversable wormhole, which is stabilised by an envelope of exotic matter. Of course, the details of this are far beyond what a science fiction drama could discuss. Here it's just jargon, and any understanding of the science is going to spoil it.

Science wasn't a great strength of the original series, and this drama certainly embraces that. One of the more spectacularly dumb moments is when Koenig orders Alan Carter to launch the Meta Probe immediately, which will send it anywhere but Meta. After the breakaway, they don't recognise any of the constellations, until Alan points out they are the constellations seen from Meta. The planet is only five light years away, and most of the stars in recognisable constellations are hundreds of light years away. The constellations will be almost exactly the same.

Having at last got the Moon in space, Koenig makes an announcement to all sections of Alpha. "As we are, we have power, environment, and therefore a chance of survival. Our leaving Earth behind, without its moon, may mean we are the last survivors of the human race. So we have to look to our future survival. September 13th 1999 marks a new beginning for us all out here in space."

With the scenario now set up, the audio dramas can concentrate on space adventure. Helena needs to calm down a bit, and it would be nice to give Bergman more to do. Future stories need to pick up the pace a bit; a Moonbase Alpha status report/ Dragon's Domain journal narration would help and follow the spirit of the series.