They had the assistance of the MUF. According to the Andersons, Moonbase Alpha was being…guided? Watched over? by a mysterious unknown force. That’s sort of why they ended up all over the place. The MUF was “sending” them to where they needed to be. Alpha had a role to play in the galactic story, they just weren’t told what it was.
This admittedly wasn’t made clear at all. To use Gerry Anderson’s own quote back at him, how understated can something be before it becomes unstated?
If you want to enjoy the show at all, you just have to believe that. Because without the MUF, the moon won’t even leave the solar system in the lifetime of anyone still alive on it.
I always figured Collision Course is the introduction to the MUF and Alpha’s role in the universe. Arra knew Alpha was coming, and eagerly awaited the transformation it would bring. Alphans don’t understand it any more than the Overlords in Clarke’s Childhood’s End understood what they helped bring about.
On the other hand, I recently watch Black Sun but I had a different take. Alphans didn’t survive the passage through the black hole. But, their consciousness did. At the singularity, they became “as gods”, superbeings similar to the Organians. They knew all, understood the universe. It is sort of made clear in Koenig’s and Bergman’s conversation.
Going through the black hole made the Alphans transcendent. They could have done anything. Return home. However, their primitive minds were too rational, to trapped in conventional thinking. Instead of accepting their advance and joining the galaxy’s superbeing community, all they could imagine to do was to…put everything back the way it was. So they “emerged” from the black hole, not knowing that they themselves did it.
So humans missed out on advancement. They weren’t ready. But someday, they may get another chance.
SOL was speed of light. There was one episode where SID mentions the UFO speed in SOLs and then starts a sequence of call outs of the distance as it approached; which in my anal retentive youth I timed and calculated and found out that the miles clicked off in the given time interval tracked with the speed being that multiple of ‘c’.
I actually thought of a (good?) reason to do this on the way home tonight.
We know that SHADO is headquartered in the UK, yes? There is *nowhere *in the UK from which you can launch or land a rocket without thousands of people seeing and hearing it and knowing about the launch facilities, and there goes your cover.
On the other hand, launch and retrieval of a ship that’s, essentially, a space shuttle-type vehicle from a plane in midair is something you can do anywhere over a whole lot of empty ocean that the UK happens to sit next to. And it seems to me that if you can do a midair fueling, then a docking is … okay, it *is *harder but still not out of the realm of possibility.
Not only that, but IIRC, at least one of the companies going for the Space X prize planned to do just that: carry the spaceship up to 50,000 or so feet (I forget how high up), then drop it and let it fire up its rockets and go. Admittedly, this is a spaceship to LEO, not one that can go to the moon, but the concept is plausible.
Launching is fine, though there has been examples of trouble doing that. But you could make it work.
Recovery? That just sounds like a collision waiting to happen. Any rough wind could make a successful recovery impossible. It always looked so smooooth on TV.
The one that bugs me more than, say, Mindbender, is The Square Triangle. While pursuing a downed alien, SHADO stumbles across a murderous love triangle. A woman and her lover are in the process of killing her husband. SDADO does the non-flashy thing and wipes their memories of the alien, but Alec notes that that isn’t going to stop her from killing her husband, and he notes they can’t tell anyone without giving away their existence. The last scene implies that she did just that.
But that’s just stupid! They don’t have to necessarily go to the police, but an anonymous note? Hey, bloke your wife is planning to kill you? How does that give anything away?
Sure it’s not technically “their business”. But a little compassion doesn’t cost anything. It wasn’t a question of priorities. They lose nothing by intervening. As it is, through inaction they allowed an innocent person to be murdered.
Last night I finished watching the last episode on YouTube. Despite the (to our 21[sup]st[/sup] century eyes) cheeziness, a lot of it holds up surprisingly well. And I didn’t remember a single episode from when I watched it during its initial run, so at least it was always unexpected. Sometime in the next few days I think I’ll start watching Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. Nothing like rediscovering your childhood!
They really needed a better fight coordinator, though. Or better stuntmen. Or both. Probably both.
