I'm sure that Fred Freiberger was a good producer and a decent man, but not everyone who dealt with him had the same experience. David Gerrold has spoken quite bitterly of his experiences with him on Star Trek's 3rd Season, and while Bob Justman was tactful in his discussions about what happened that year, it's clear he wasn't giving a glowing review. (To be fair, Justman was correctly displeased about having been stepped over, and by the middle of that season, he left the show.)
But I digress - getting back to Space 1999 Series Two, I'll just quote from Martin Landau's interview in FAB Magazine #46, published in 2003: (And I'll note that these are Martin Landau's own comments - I don't endorse them, or even agree with all of them - but they are his opinions and beliefs and should be understood as such.)
"...These were the things that were never spoken about, particularly in the second year when certain things would be written in the scripts that totally went against what we had established about the characters in the first year. I mean, we would have things where Koenig would make a pre-emptive attack without any motivation whatsoever, so I would go to producer Fred Freiberger's office and say, 'This is ridiculous, this is totally against Koenig's philosophy.' And he said 'What are you talking about?' So I said 'He would never do this. He would not make this unilateral decision and blow people away. It's totally against his character.' He says 'People won't notice' and I said 'What do you mean people won't notice? People watch this every week...' and I would fight like a tiger with him and often lose those fights because there we were, we had to shoot something that day and I was becoming a bad guy for standing up for the rights of the show and the integrity of the character. I never wanted to do that, to corrupt the film-making process that way because that is not the way that I work, but I often felt that I had to because I felt that we owed it to the viewers. Then I would fight and we'd do some rewriting to make it a little more palatable, but very often I would lose the battles because we had to get on and shoot something. I would often try to write on my feet, working with the director on the spot to try and make it possible to do it in a way that it wouldn't totally offend me first of all, and then ultimately offend the viewers."
"I was always concerned with the integrity of the show. It was never an ego trip for me or anything like that. It was just the fact that I began to understand Koenig and his philosophy, his ideology, his very innards, and there were situations where I knew that he would rather commit suicide than do what some of those scripts had him doing. I mean, he would never let anyone else put themselves in a position of jeopardy if he felt that he could deal with it in a better way, and even though there was danger, the well-being of the Moonbase and the majority of the people was always utmost in his mind. If it came down to a question of someone having to sacrifice something, he would always weigh the possibilities and would never do anything foolhardy. But in the second season, I wound up doing things in several epiosodes that were absolutely against the grain of the character, and that can be very frustrating for an artist who cares about the subtext of the character."
"I was never crazy about the metamorph character. I mean in terms of what that show meant, it suddenly took on a different shape and I felt that it wasn't really the show that I had raised my hand to do initially. It became a little more conventional. I feel that the trajectory we were on in the first season would have grown into itself, the look of the show and everything about that would have eventually found its audience. Mission: Impossible was not a success the first year and we barely stayed on. It was the summer reruns and the second season that began to make it a big hit, and then it became an enormous hit and ran for seven seasons. We were almost cancelled three times during the first year, but we stuck to our guns and the show caught on. We never compromised it, even though it wasn't getting the numbers, because we knew we had something good. Compromising it doesn't help, but people start panicking and want to change things that make it more ordinary. If begin to believe everything that you read and hear, then you're a weakling and that's what happened with Space: 1999, unfortunately. You have to be strong because you get whacked on the head a lot in this business. I could take the comparisons to Star Trek and the criticisms because I didn't believe them. I new what we were and I knew where we were heading, but suddenly we took a detour and I feel that was our downfall."
"I never wanted to succumb to the pressures that were coming from the States and so on, and bringing Freddie in... I mean, I don't think that Freddie was an untalented man, but I do think that the Star Treks that he produced were the less good ones, frankly. We were not like Star Trek and there was no need to become more like it - that was giving up. Shows like Black Sun were intelligent shows and they were provocative, they were different, they were unique unto themselves and the style of the show was our own. The fact that there was more colour on the show in the second season was not a good thing. There was look, it had a feel. The costumes that Rudi Gernreich were unisex, but you coudl tell from a long distance away what someone did. In the army to this day, you have to get really up close to someone to see what the hell their duties are, so that design for the Alpha uniforms was intelligent. The second you saw someone with a white sleeve you knew they were medics. You knew that the astronauts were wearing orange sleeves and the Main Mission people had red sleeves and so on. I had the only charcoal grey sleeve and the collar too, so you knew immediately that I was the commander from a hundred yards away, which is very important. Those were intelligent choices and the army could learn something from that. Those kinds of things were diminished in the second season when we started getting orange jackets, jazzing it up and doing stuff that I felt was impure."
When asked about what made the first year so different: "It was just its own piece. It had its own style. It had its own writers. It was more metaphysical, it was more ethereal, it was more like true science fiction instead of space opera. It was new. It didn't look like anything else, it didn't feel like anything else, it was its own person and the characters were their own people. They would have grown on the viewers because we would have gotten to know them. They were strangers and everyone wanted us to be like someone else. That's always the case at the beginning of a show and we shouldn't have done any of that."
"There was a certain stoicism in Koenig on the one hand, but then not at all on the other because he was very emotional. If you look at a show like Collision Course, there were times when he went bonkers and absolutely lost it, but he didn't try not to let anyone see that - even though there were times when he was locked up by his own people because they thought he was losing it. It was a different kind of show and that's what people had to understand. People had to believe in it as a concept piece unto itself, but unfortunately that didn't happen. I think that Gerry Anderson is a very talented man but he was forced into this ITC thinking: get an American producer, add more colour, put monsters in the show, do this, do that, all of that stuff. I guess they had to make those compromises to get the second season going, but to this day, I think that if they could have stuck by their guns and been allowed to make a second season like the first, we would have gone on and done a third and fourth season."
Asked about what could have happened if there had been a third season: "I think if it had continued along the way it was going, it wouldd have found its own level, the way that water finds its own level and truth finds its own level. I think that the show would have subtly found its own life and texture. It's true that we almost went to a third season and the reason we didn't probably was because Lew Grade got into feature films and our budget for the third season was about the same amount of money he needed to promote and market the major motion pictures he had in the can. It literally got right down to the wire whether we would go into a third season or not and in the end it came down to dollars and cents. Unfortunately, none of Lew Grade's movies ever did well and he would probably have been better off spending that money on Space: 1999 and putting us on again, because we would have had a larger syndication package."
"If we had gone on and done a third season, I would have tended to hope for moving back toward the first season more in terms of ideas and storylines, and get back to certain kinds of basic things. With Catherine on board, of course, we would have had to introduce the metamorph into that context, but I think we could have used it differently, in a less superficial and comic strip way. Because, you know, some of those monsters we had were pitiful. They didn't look very good. They looked like rubber suits and that always bothered me. I said 'My God, we're talking life and death here and then one of these silly clown outfits comes walking by and it looks like we should put a laugh track on this show.' I mean, some of those alien characters - like the one that breathed chlorine in The AB Chrysalis - they were just pitiful, you know, because no one had enough time to make these things. You read a script and there's this creature in it, so a bunch of guys get together and make this thing and cover it with a bunch of rubber and suddenly it's got this great significance because it's one of our leading characters in the next show! We were looking at these things and saying, 'My God! This would be good on Saturday Night Live or Monty Python but not on Space: 1999!' Now I have to say that we had wonderful make-up artists on the show and they were all terrific, very talented people, but when you get a script five days before you go in front of the camera and suddenly you need an alien character that breathes carbon monoxide and gives off laughing gas or something...well, it's tough."
About how they came to the show: "I think when we first arrived, people didn't know what to expect from Barbara and myself. I think the producers and directors had previously worked with other American actors who had come over to England and misbehaved a bit, and I think that maybe we had inherited a legacy from them. We're professional actors and we had left Mission: Impossible at the height of its success - not for the reasons that were stated but because we just felt that the integrity of the show was being affected by the new people who were taking over at that time. Anyway, when we came over to do Space: 1999, I think people expected us to be difficult to work with, but I think over all we lived that down to some degree."
Now, Landau's comments should be taken with more than a few grains of salt, but these are his unedited opinions about the series and about his work on it. I believe he has completely misunderstood the point of Army uniforms, and his rationale for leaving Mission: Impossible sounds like a rewrite of what actually happened. But to be fair, he's not just pointing a finger at Fred Freiberger - he's also saying that he thought Gerry Anderson should have taken a stronger position about the kind of show they were making. And to be fair, Gerry Anderson himself says the same thing when he's asked about it.
I remember enjoying Series Two when I saw it as a child - it was instantly more approachable and understandable than Series One, and at the time I recall Starlog Magazine breathing a sigh of relief about the new episodes. The feeling at the time was that the first year was too cerebral, with too much emphasis on some Mysterious Cosmic Force that never really gets named, and too many abstract concepts. With the second year, there was always a solid sense of exactly what was happening and what the point of the story was. In the years since then, I've grown to appreciate the first year much more, as the concepts have become more interesting to me. But I can easily see how people can prefer the second year for its grounding.
![Space: 1999: The Complete Season One [Blu-ray]](http://cdn.hometheaterforum.com/f/f6/50x50px-ZC-f67d34cd_B003ES5JDI-51ay9VIN1OL.jpg)
