Episode Critics
Compiled by Martin Willey

4. Ring Around the Moon

Very bland and forgettable, and indeed some of its plot elements resurfaced in Space Brain later in the season. As far as stories go, Edward di Lorenzo's tale is very poor, and the direction from Ray Austin surprisingly lifeless. Helena...is turned into a zombie- Ms Bain's acting stretched to the very limit of raw emotion. The music is nice, the models are nice, the effects are nice... but this cerebral stuff was simply not fitting in well as a filmed SF adventure series. Rating 3/10 (Anthony McKay, DWB, 1993)

The worst episode of the first series. It's all very much B-movie stuff. (Richard Houldsworth, TV Zone, 1993)

This is about as bad as Year One gets: same standard of production values and acting as the rest of the season- just a terribly dull episode. C-. (Chris Bentley, SFX 20, 1996)

Probably the weakest episode of Series One. Though the premise of the story is interesting, the script itself is extremely flat. For far too long nothing happens to advance the plot. (John Kenneth Muir, Exploring Space: 1999, p31)

** (fair) (James O'Neill, Sci-Fi On Tape, p272, 1997)

The musical score adds greatly to the drama, from eerie sound effects to the action disco track used to accompany the spacesuited Alphans onto the lunar surface. Ring Around The Moon is marred by some bad astronomy, which confuses the terms galaxy and universe, as well as an apparent lack of certainty from the writer as to what the point of the whole episode actually is. There is a degree of repetition and a limited amount of story logic in this episode. Ring Around The Moon is not nearly one of the best episodes, but it is still admirably effective. 7/10 (Bob Wood, The Future Is Fantastic, 2001)

Standard plot, standard aliens, standard resolution. It's competent, but no more. 2/5 (Alasdair Stuart, SciFiNow #10, 2007)