It always seemed to me that the women carefully stayed in the background so that we couldn’t quite tell.
A few years back there was a buzz about a UFO movie reboot but that seems to have evaporated. The even had a website up with SHADO elements. I hope someone else picks up on this and runs with it.
“I may be uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien!” — King George V.
Considering what he did for a living, he had to be.
The show was good but very dark. The idea that loved ones are taken and their body parts added to extra terrestrials some of which come back to earth.
Of course we’d be boned if that actually happened.
Straker’s psychology is interesting. Not a typical TV show hero, especially in the 60’s/70’s. He could care less about who he runs over. Letting his son die was an interesting story on tradeoffs - do the needs of the many really outweigh the needs of the few? Or the one? That’s one thing. But he was willing to murder Paul because he wouldn’t shut up about seeing a UFO. Kill him/give him a job? The decision went down to the wire.
He’s so singularly focused on fighting the alien threat that he demands every bit of resources. Henderson knows the threat is real, but he also knows he can’t bankrupt the world to fight it. Win the war but lose the peace, as it were.
The aliens haven’t come in force yet. Maybe they never will. (The unofficial canon is that they didn’t get resoundingly defeated so much as they just…stopped.)
And who is to say who is right? Where is the study to show whether three more Interceptors or another Skydiver or something else is the best use of money to stop the threat? And at what point do you stop hiding and let everyone know about the threat? The show works because the “hidden government” was a popular idea back then. It makes a cool show. But at some point you have to fish or get off the pot.
As I noted earlier, Straker is the best man for the job. But I don’t see him having a happy retirement. If he even makes it that far. The stress must be tremendous.
He’s the “stud” character, right. He banged that chick in Delotek Affair?
So he hired him instead or killed him later in the series?
I never made it to the end of the series. So it ended with them giving up? The aliens tech was weird. They have warp capabilities but hand held weapons that sounded like machine guns.
They were machine guns.
Did anyone else wonder after watching the episode Close Up how the ship/satellite was able to follow the alien ship? No one in the show has said we have FTL capability, which (I think) the aliens do, so how does a non-FTL ship follow an FTL ship back to the alien planet?
Also, how in the world does a “fully tested” technology miss that the satellite doesn’t include information on range and magnification, thus making the pictures “useless”? That’s pretty damned basic information, and even in 1970 (or before), I would expect satellites were including that information as a matter of course.
A wizard did it.
You just have to accept some things are just wrong. Like how can you make an airplane that can stand being submerged deep in seawater and still expect it to work. Or that someone thought in flight retrieval of lunar shuttles was a good idea.
It’s like what I said in another thread - writers don’t know how BIG space really is. They think the alien’s home world is a day or so away.
I figured the probe malfunctioned on the trip. It was supposed to give range and focal length info, but it failed.
Oh, I know. These things just pop into my head. I can’t help it.
It’s like when I watched the Good Omens segment tracing Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship through the millenia. AD 537 (or so), and here we have King Arthur’s court and both of them are in full plate armor. Took me right out of it for a minute or so.
I mean, in the Good Omens world, King Arthur was real and plate armor existed about 800 or so years before it did in our world, but it tripped my inner nerd.
Well, you’re right. It’s a stupid mistake.
If they’d just say “we recovered an alien ship and reprogrammed it to fly home with cameras, and return” then not only would it make more sense, it skips the whole issue of FTL completely. Whatever star drive the aliens have, we don’t have to know how it works, and neither does SHADO. It even gives an excuse why the probe sent back useless data.
Because you certainly can’t radio data back across interstellar distances.
(of course, what good does getting pictures of the homeward even get you? WHERE it is is much more important. Like Vasquez said, “Look, man. I only need to know one thing: where they are.”)
This show was set just 10 years into the future. So it was predicting things for 1980. I think most similar shows shoot for 30 years or more in the future, so it is still interesting, but with a bit more wriggle room.
In this show, racism is solved in the next 5 years. Actually knowing that aliens exist might be one of the best cures for racism. We would not seem so different from each other compared to an alien race.
I was also thinking that it is strange that FTL travel is never brought up as a big deal. In the show it is referred to as SOL or speed of light. The aliens have it, Shado refers to it all the time, up to 2.4 times SOL. Which might be a problem for non magical observers. And if an earth probe followed the UFO back to their planet, we must have it too. As Morgyn said.
Not only do the aliens have FTL, the can accelerate from 1 SOL to 2 x SOL in a flash. Pretty big advances over ten years.
Why don’t the Aliens visit earth on a trajectory that does not involve a close pass by the moon?
I got my daughter to watch a bit yesterday. She thought the submarine mesh (fishnet) shirts for men and women were hysterical.
I agree, using an alien spaceship for the trip to an alien world would have been a better idea.
On the other hand if we can refuel, reprogram, modify and fly an alien ship remotely, we probably have a pretty good idea as to how it works.
It’s been years since I watched U.F.O.; but I loved it as a kid, and I have the DVD box set. I’d have to watch it again to see if I learn anything. (With a wife, it’s hard to find time to watch my DVD collection. The Prisoner is sitting under the TV, she gave me the The Man From U.N.C.L.E. box set for Christmas a few years ago, there’s Lost In Space… Not to mention Thunderbirds, Stingray, Space: 1999…)
One of my prized possessions growing up was my UFO lunchbox
Fishnet boobies!
I’d like to think the aliens use some sort of “star gate” for FTL jumps, rather than a warp drive-type. It fits their level of tech in their ships better. Somewhere out beyond, say, Neptune is a jump point, so their ships only have to fly millions of miles instead of light years. It explains how SID can see them coming - they can only come from the (known) gate(s), so it doesn’t have to watch the entire cosmos. But the aliens are crafty. They have tricks they try to sneak some past.
Then the Interceptors would, er, intercept them somewhere around Mars. When they are done, they have to make a big curve flight back to the moon. Bet it takes a day or more to get back.
So SHADOs B142 probe maybe sneaked through the gate with the returning UFOs, or they figured out the signal that activates it, or whatever.
As an aside, I love the show. We adopted a black dog that came with the same “Shadow”, but we made it officially “Shado” on his paperwork.
Is THAT what SOL means? I don’t recall hearing anyone define it, so I thought it had something to do with the solar system. Thanks! “speed of light” makes *much *more sense.
ETA: They’ve obviously developed some advanced space travel tech, since people are essentially commuting to and from the moon in a few hours rather than the 3 days of the Apollo flights.
Supposedly the TV Series “Space: 1999” was a follow on series to “UFO”.
And in that series, the Moon traveled to other star systems almost every week (and then slowed down enough to allow the planets to be visited).