The Full Circle

Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections: Space: 1999: Season One: The Full Circle
PLOT SUMMARY: The Alphans investigate a planet which appears to be inhabited by beings resembling Earth's prehistoric cavemen. It is later discovered that some force on the planet is causing the Alphans themselves to revert to primitive behavior.
By BarbF on Wednesday, August 04, 1999 - 11:13 am:

Oooh, what a stinker! I kept waiting for Raquel Welch in her sable bikini to show up. 1999 Years B.C. Oooga-chucka ooga-chucka!


By Douglas Nicol on Wednesday, August 18, 1999 - 3:34 pm:

I take it you didn't like this episode BarbF???


By BarbF on Thursday, August 19, 1999 - 11:35 am:

What gave you that idea, Doug? :)


By Douglas Nicol on Thursday, August 19, 1999 - 3:04 pm:

You saying what a stinker. Or wass it a stinker that Raquel Welch didn't appear???


By BarbF on Friday, August 20, 1999 - 6:54 am:

I just thought the whole episode was a silly load of dinosaur doo...come to think of it, maybe a dino or two would have improved things...


By Douglas Nicol on Sunday, August 22, 1999 - 2:55 pm:

It was a bit silly wasn't it? I wonder if this was a Fred Freiberger prototype script for Space:1999? No, there's no rubber monsters.


By BarbF on Monday, August 23, 1999 - 6:19 am:

No, but there was Barbara Bain in that wig and makeup, so that sort of qualifies as a BEM.


By Erich P. Wise on Thursday, August 26, 1999 - 2:50 am:

But there was also Zienia Merton in a skimpy costume she almost slipped out of...


By Douglas Nicol on Thursday, August 26, 1999 - 3:07 pm:

BEM????
What's a BEM, the phrase is familiar, but I don't remember what it means


By ScottN on Friday, August 27, 1999 - 12:40 am:

Bug Eyed Monster


By Steve McKinnon on Tuesday, August 31, 1999 - 2:55 pm:

Hey, guys, at least the writer regressed the cast into cavemen, and not giant spiders and fish like a certain Next Generation episode did years later. Some silly technobabble about regressive animal genes or some such malarky.
But wasn't it ironic that the stone age Koenig is still the leader of his people?


By Peter Stoller on Sunday, September 10, 2000 - 7:30 pm:

Blah! The most embarrasing episode of Year
1.
Most notable for getting the cast & crew out of
Pinewood and in Black Park for a week of
location. I'd like to read the script as written,
maybe this ill-advised turkey looked better on
the page. Maybe it just looked cheap to shoot.

Out of all the potentially habitable planets the
Alphans came across, in my opinion this is
the one they had the best chance of settling on
and were boneheaded fools for passing it up!
There was nothing to prevent their survival
there except themselves! They would live
either as civilized Alphans or as cavemen, but
their survival was assured either way. People
thrived as cavemen for a long, long time. Once
they'd learned about the mist it was no longer
a cause for deadly misunderstandings, and
its effect was shown to be reversible anyway!

I agree with the reviewers who said it's there
to make the rest of the Year 1 episodes look
really good by comparison and that this
woudn't've been out of place in Year 2.


By tim gueguen on Tuesday, September 12, 2000 - 12:49 am:

It was probably another case of "oops, we spent so much time screwing around with the problem of the week that there was no time left to launch Operation Exodus."


By Peter Stoller on Wednesday, September 13, 2000 - 8:18 pm:

response to tim gueguen:

Yeah, they did employ that cop-out a few times
in order to weasel out of some good planets.
Good observaton.


By Anonymous on Monday, October 22, 2001 - 2:36 am:

Couldn't this episode be seen as ahead of its time? No, really - it's so silly it could easily have been a season two episode! Especially that business of the cavemen's clothes "reverting" to Alpha clothes when they walk through the mist at the end of the episode! Also, I bet Zienia Merton would like to forget this episode as Sandra is written here as a screaming nervous wreck! And what was that about Alan Carter fancying her for one episode only? Didn't Paul Morrow get a teeny bit jealous?


By Craig Rohloff on Monday, January 21, 2002 - 2:32 pm:

Trying to accentuate the positive...
The opening scene of Act 1 (just after the opening credits) is well made. Rapid dialog heightens a sense of urgency, and the views of high-tech travel tubes & launch pad lifts accompanied by primitive stick-and-bone percussion music makes for a nice study in opposites. Even the late appearance of the production credits is a departure from the usual format, and works nicely here. Watch the scene again adnd see if you don't agree. (Come on, it's only a couple of minutes long!)
Too bad the rest of the episode goes downhill from there. There's a somewhat redeeming moment in the epilogue where the question of whether we've come all that far in 40,000 years is posited, but Koenig's cheesy reply lessens its impact.


By Craig Rohloff on Tuesday, March 05, 2002 - 12:59 pm:

Thanks to Alan's good judgement, he, Victor and David DON'T drive the moon buggy into the mist, and thereby don't regress into cavemen. If they had, would the moonbuggy have regressed into a Flintstone-mobile? ;)


By Todd Pence on Tuesday, March 05, 2002 - 6:15 pm:

LOL, Craig.


By Sophie on Tuesday, December 17, 2002 - 4:29 pm:

OK, not much point nitpicking the premise, as it's clearly science fantasy, not fiction. I'll mostly stick to nitpicking the production.

I did like the effects for the planet rotating in space. I got a real sense of how BIG a planet is, and I can't say that about some modern shows.

I also liked the view out of the flying Eagle's front port, with the instruments surrounding the port.

Onto the nits.
The moonbuggy nit is back: then the Eagle comes up on the launch pad lift, there is a moonbuggy on the pad. When the Eagle takes off, the moonbuggy is gone.

Carter falls into a HUGE pit, like a mammoth trap. Did the Alphan's dig that in the short time they were cavemen?

When Carter is in the pit, he makes no attempt to pick up his commlock before trying to escape.

When the caveman picks up Carter's commlock and sees Sandra on the screen, for some reason she can't see him.

Bergman and Kano are coming to Sandra's rescue, and they ask her to have a meal waiting?!?!

Why exactly does Sandra 'wild horses wouldn't drag me out of here' Benes open the Eagle hatch, allowing herself to be caught?

With all these disappearances, Bergman, Kano and Carter eat and sleep in an outdoor camp?!?! Are the Eagles that uncomfortable?

OK, Sandra has to change into animal skins because her uniform is ripped. But why doesn't she keep her shoes??? I pity the actress running barefoot through the woods.

So, this timewarp mist changes clothes, hair length colour and style etc, makes equipment such as commlocks and lasers disappear, but it leaves caps on teeth? (That's how Dr Mathias determined the identity of the dead caveman.)

After figuring out (on Alpha) that the cavemen are really the Alphans, and realising that Carter may kill them, the best solution is to fly all the way to the planet and drive to the cave to stop Carter? They left him alone down there with no communications?

Helena is last into the mist. Oddly enough, she is first out the other end.

What does Helena mean when she says to Keonig at the end, "We almost lost you." ? True, caveman Keonig almost died, but Helena should have no memory of that.


By Sophie on Saturday, January 04, 2003 - 8:38 am:

Wear these trousers, with fur?!? Have you no sense of fashion?

I asked before why Sandra doesn't keep her shoes when she changes into the cavegirl furs. The other question is, why does she discard her trousers when only her tunic is ripped?

(At first I wondered if the uniform was one-piece, but it isn't.)


By CR on Sunday, January 05, 2003 - 7:01 am:

Maybe she did so to appease the caveman leader, so she wouldn't incur his wrath by refusing to wear the fur instead of her uniform. Sort of a twisted "when in Rome, do as Romans do" idea.


By Douglas Nicol on Sunday, January 05, 2003 - 8:54 am:

This is one of those episodes that hasn't stood the test of time well.

It wasn't great then, and it's certainly not any better now.


By CR on Thursday, February 06, 2003 - 1:05 pm:

I can't believe I didn't point this out before...

There's a reconnaissance team that doesn't respond to hails from Alpha. What do we do? Let's bring their only means of escaping the planet (or of even communicating with Alpha for that matter) back to Aplha to see if anyone's onboard!
From the "Eh, the crew might be dead; let's at least save the Eagle!" files.


By ComfortablyDumb on Thursday, February 06, 2003 - 2:16 pm:

well, with the way Alpha trashes Eagles, it might have been the prudent thing to do ;)


By Sophie on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 1:49 am:

CR: I can't believe I didn't point this out before...

Ditto :)
One would have thought that if they can bring the Eagle back by remote, they could also activate the internal cameras and just look to see if anyone's on board!


By CR on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 6:55 pm:

I just noticed I misspelled Alpha as "Aplha." Oh, well, Retha is just Earth mixed up, so I'm being consistent with the episode! :)


By Peter Stoller on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 8:39 am:

The alien races encountered in Space: 1999 are almost always well advanced technologically and culturally. Their minds are much further removed from base animal-brain behavior than the comparatively primitive Alphans. In this episode the aliens are primitives who turn out to be the Alphans themselves.

Is there some message in the series that humankind is relatively savage and primitive?
We're our own worst enemies? "You carry with you the seeds of your own destruction…"


By Anonymous on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 3:30 pm:

this is news? I think the 'carry the seeds of your own destruction' goes back to the Book of Genesis :)


By CR on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 9:42 am:

This episode blatantly asked the same same question: Have we really come that far in 40,000 years? (Koenig's reply was really not all that helpful.)


By Anonymous on Monday, July 21, 2003 - 11:37 am:

this approach is far more realistic than Star Trek, where high-minded explorers are always trying to remake the universe in their own image. In S1999 every ep is an example in how far humankind has yet to go.


By Anonymous on Wednesday, February 04, 2004 - 7:17 pm:

As with "Rules of Luton", this story had a similar precursor from a Lost in Space episode- "The Space Primievals".


By Curious on Sunday, February 15, 2004 - 12:53 pm:

Early in the episode, Koenig discovers what appears to be a dinosaur footprint. Thank heaven one didn't show up, or this would have turned in a campy mess such as "One Million B.C.".


By CR on Sunday, February 15, 2004 - 4:51 pm:

Since dinos & humans didn't co-exists, I'd always pictured the footprint as that of a giant sloth or something. (OK, it sure looked dinosaur-like, and you're right, Space: -1,000,000 would have been pretty silly.)


By Curious on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 2:24 pm:

It would be neat if a giant CGI Ice Age mammal such as a mammoth were added.


By CR on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 6:59 am:

I could have sworn someone on one of these boards once mentioned the possibility of cleaning up some of the special effects flaws for this series; adding a few new elements would be a nice touch, too, as long as it didn't get too distracting or gimmicky.


By Curious on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 2:20 pm:

"Eye of Triton" a reworking/edited version of "Ring Around the Moon" was shown at the "Main Mission 2000" convention. It featured some all new CGI effects. Too bad one of the worst episodes was improved. Still, it would have been nice if this could have been provided as an extra on the DVD set.


By CR on Monday, April 12, 2004 - 6:02 pm:

Based on an idea by Curious on the Sink 1999 2 board, here's my list of improved effects for "TFC". (OK, this promises to be my shortest list yet!)
I really can't think of too many fx clean-ups... on the "The Last Sunset" board, I mentioned making the stunt doubles look like the actual actors by "pasting" the correct faces onto the stunt doubles' bodies; in "The Full Cirlce," Carter's face needs to be added to the stunt double who falls into the pit.
Fix that cardboard cut-out Eagle on the planet's surface! (Just replacing the command module is all it would take.)
The "ray gun" effects seem a little less well-executed than usual in this ep; maybe it's because of the greenish color of the beam (something we haven't seen before or since, IIRC).
That's about it. I liked the shots of Retha, especially the ones where the Eagles were descending out of orbit... this planet even has atmospheric haze!


By Mark on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - 7:36 am:

The effects in this ep are great. I love the scenes that intercut from showing the actors in a moonbuggy (framed by an Eagle doorway) to a minature shot of the moonbuggy beyond the Eagle.

When I was a kid, I thought the miniature landscapes were incredibly realistic. Viewing it now, they look 'miniature', but they're still well done. Also as a kid, I thought the scene where Helena disappears into the mist was incredibly eerie. It seems a bit hoky now, as I would be more inclined to ask what sort of phenomenon could cause that 'change'. It's great fun,though, to just overlook that detail and enjoy the story.

Although the depiction of the cavepeople wasn't particularly sophisticated (more in the tradition of "One Million B.C. than "Walking with Cavemen"), I like that the director generally refrained from going overboard and 'camping' it up. No cavegirl catfights in this one!


By Peter Stoller on Monday, April 19, 2004 - 10:44 pm:

Despite her nervous state Sandra is able to pick up on the clues and recognize the cave people as Dr. Russel and Commander Koenig before anyone else does. Why then does she later crack Koenig on the head with a big rock, three times no less? Doesn't she know that's likely to kill him? Maybe she's so panicky she's not thinking straight.

By the way, dig those completely smokeless campfires. I guess they couldn't light real wood fires on the soundstage.


By Mark on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 6:05 am:

Sandra was depicted as being panicky in other eps too. She'd be the first one to scream. She even faints once.
I would presume the reason she hit 'caveman' Koenig is that she has no desire to stay and become part of their 'cavepeople' society. I think just about every modern person would have that reaction. She figured that other Alphans would be around looking for her. She'd want to escape to get to them.


By Peter Stoller on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 7:33 am:

It's clear she clobbers him in order to escape.
She probably considered but rejected the notion he was actually the commander. Bergman does the same thing when he thinks he recognizes John but later finds the 'real' Koenig.


By Mark on Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - 9:51 am:

Since there is no rational explanation for Koenig's situation, one could understand Sandra's confusion!


By Curious on Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 6:07 pm:

MUF!


By Adam on Thursday, November 04, 2004 - 1:03 pm:

Obviously Sandra didn't want to be violated by caveman Koenig!
Sandra is just too sexy in that cave-girl outfit! The whole implied sexuality of the relationship with Koenig, Russel and Sandra is the hottest thing I've seen on the show so far (besides the naked chicks in A/B Chrysalis). I think at this point, I gave up on this show as serious SF, and started enjoying it as B-movie.

There are some wonderfully terrible lines to add to the camp-

Kano: "I hate back seat drivers."

Dr. Bergman: "Lucky for you you've got a thick skull."

It's too bad they didn't have lines like this in "Space Brain."


By Curious on Monday, January 03, 2005 - 5:50 pm:

When Koenig reappears in the mist, he's sporting a large bruise. When he gets back to Alpha the bruise is missing. It's also missing when he returns to the planet to rescue Sandra. Speaking of Sandra, that poor woman. Everyone is after her in this ep! Alan wants her, as does Paul, caveman-Koenig and the cave-spearman. Apparently, cavewoman Helena wasn't enough for our prehistoric Koenig. Did he also put the moves on cave-Kate? She's in that cave too!

This episode kept up the first series' high standards for sets; the set for the cave people is pretty impressive (especially compared to some of the tin foil caves seen in classic Trek).

Everytime I watch this ep, I try to keep a straight face, but I always laugh when cave-Helena lets out her primal screams (over the injured Koenig). It's a guilty pleasure, to be sure, but, I still think this is an entertaining episode. As with an X Files ep, just suspend a bit (alright, a lot) of disbelief!


By Tim on Monday, January 21, 2008 - 3:00 pm:

A long time ago, another fellow named Tim wrote:

"It was probably another case of "oops, we spent so much time screwing around with the problem of the week that there was no time left to launch Operation Exodus."

Well, this is the same reason why Gilligan and Co. never got off the island. If they did, end of series!

At the little discussion at the end, I wonder if Sandra ever told Koenig that she was the one that tried to cave his head in with that rock!


By Tim McCree (Tim_m) on Monday, December 15, 2008 - 10:30 pm:

Years later, a Doctor Who story would also be called Full Circle. I believe they filmed in the same location!

Okay, the mist de-evolved Koenig and Co., but what happened to there clothes and technology?

Alan is not too bright in this episode? A whole group has vanished, and he goes wandering off, BY HIMSELF!!

When the cave-Alphan attacks Alan in the pit, why doesn't Alan just grab his laser and stun cave guy?

When Sandra opens the Eagle door (and what in God's name possessed her to do that), and the cave guy attacks, why doesn't she just grab a laser and defend herself?

Poor Sandra, was she along just to be the "damsel in distress"?

Why do Bergman, Kano, and Alan sleep outside, when they know there are unknown hostiles around?

The cave that the cave-Alphans are living in has furs, walls covered in diagrams, and bones. How did they get all that done so fast?


By steve McKinnon (Steve) on Sunday, April 04, 2021 - 9:01 pm:

There are 17 Alphans on the planet; 7 aboard Eagle 6, the first ship to visit the planet. Koenig, Helena, 2 orderlies and 2 nurses on Eagle 1. Alan and Sandra on Eagle 2. Bergman and Kano on Eagle 3.
And we thought Kirk's landing party to Vaal's planet was big!

If the cavemen only exist beyond the mist, how did that one reach the Eagle with Sandra in it?

And when he took her back to the caves, he couldn't have gone through the mist, or else Sandra would have turned into a cavewoman.

Bergman states that night lasts just 2 hours on this planet. How? Unless it spins so fast, and has a 4 or 5-hour day, how could it remain dark for just 2 hours and anything more than 3 hours for daylight? Maybe a double-star system that illuminates more than 50 % of the planet?

Koenig stuns Alan to stop him from shooting cavewoman Helena, instead of just yelling, "ALAN! STOP!" Also, Alan set his laser to 'kill', but Koenig couldn't have noticed that.

As Barbara Bain performed her grunts and screaming, I wonder if she ever thought to herself, "I REALLY miss Mission: Impossible!"


By Tim McCree (Tim_m) on Monday, April 05, 2021 - 5:53 am:

Yes, but all those parties didn't go down to the planet at the same time.


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