This tries so hard to be serious sci-fi, but I can't watch this episode without imagining the Maytag repair man desperately trying to shut off that washing machine...

I read that someone in the production team got the use of a foam making machine and decided to write a plot round it.
Unusually tacky for such a normally high quality show. Guess we all have our off days.

This one just seems like mainly a rehash of "Ring Around The Moon" - crew member gets possessed, starts typing real fast on keypads and transmits computer information to alien intelligence.

However, the finale is of big-screen calibre and makes the episode worth watching - this in spite of the fact of the cheesy-looking soap suds. Someone who tuned in at this part and didn't know any better must have thought the Alphans had let Bobby Brady take over the laundry duties.

Is "Kelly" a first name or a last name? If it's a last name, even his girlfriend or wife calls him that. Wouldn't she be less formal and use his first name?

What? That was an episode of Space: 1999 - and here all these years I thought it was a Mister Bubble commercial!!!

Perhaps Kelly is his only name, as in the fashion of certain popstars and entertainers. If thats the case he no doubt is considered rather pretentious by some of the other Alpha crewmembers.

Goofiest-sounding line in quite a while comes
from Kelly: "YOU MUST NOT TOUCH MY
BRAIN!"

--The Alphans excel at failing in this episode;
they cannot communicate with the brain, they
cannot save Kelly, they cannot retrieve their
nuclear charges to implement a course
correction and they cannot save the brain or
themselves from the collision. They can only
ride out this silly-looking storm that has the
power of scrubbing bubbles, (they work hard
so you don't have to!) They couldn't even
"STOP THE BLOODY FOAM!" on cue.

--It harkens back to that scene from Mr.
Roberts; Ensign Pulver has set off a large
homemade firecracker in the ship's laundry.
The next thing you see is an enormous wall of
suds rolling out the hatch and down the
corridor. The scenes in Space Brain are just
as hilarious.

My good firend's German wife calls him by his last name most of the time, an European thing I do not know. My German wife calls me by my first name or no name which leads to some confusion with my daughter and me. Oh, well. The show was done in Britain. Does the actor that played Kelly look familiar. Trivia: What was his charactor in Star Wars?

I'm gonna hazard a guess at "his" character in
Star Wars without checking any sources, just
trusting my instinct: he played Uncle Owen,
didn't he?

Shane Rimmer, who played Kelly, is a very familiar face once you know who he is. He's been in numerous British made productions, including several James Bond movies. His most notable Bond role was as Captain of the USS Wayne in The Spy
Who Loved Me. As I understand it he was a good friend of Gerry Anderson's and was the voice of Scott Tracy on Thunderbirds. He also appeared in a couple of episodes of UFO and was the voice of Koenig's shuttle pilot in "Breakaway." He was a rebel ground crewman on Yavin in Star Wars.

That is correct. He is the one who askes Luke if he would like a new R2 unit as the one that was being loaded was a bit beat up. Sorry I could not respond as my power supply went out after a power outage.

Maybe those bubbles were WISK detergent--
"No more ring around the moon, er, collar!"

In the Eagle cockpit, when Carter is setting the controls for the Eagle to fly into the Brain and explode, he mentions the time for detonation as 18.45, but when he keys the number in, he doesn't put in that number!

Maybe what he keys in isn't the time of detonation but an arming code.

Watching this one today the foam didn't bug me. I wonder if people would have had less complaints if it had been coloured, making it look less like detergent.

Cleaning Day on Alpha...for that deep down cleansing that removes even tough deposits of lunar soil tracked in through the airlocks!
Actually, this one was one of my favorites as a kid, and still doesn't rank as one of the worst in my opinion. The ending was a bit of a downer (firmly in keeping with Series 1's dark tone). Sorry to keep bringing up the novelizations, but the ending in there actually had the Brain intervening on its own behalf by "pushing" the moon slightly out of harm's way; the foam acted as a cushion of sorts for the Alphans and a barrier for the Brain. As for which ending I prefer, it depends upon my mood.
I recall a Star Trek: Voyager episode with a very similar premise to Space Brain...Voyager is trapped within a spaceborne entity whose sentience the crew doesn't recognize until they try to blast their way out...the conflict becomes one of saving the crew at the cost of the entity's life, or saving the entity at the cost of the ship and crew. I wonder where the ST:V writers ever came up with that idea!

There's a similar premise in an episode of Star Trek Animated.

Nit: when Koenig turns his eagle around to dock with the "bomb" eagle, the two spacecraft appear to merge together...obviously a slight error in the optical placement of the fx elements. (I understand that in Series 2, fx shots were planned out on a grid to avoid such things from occurring.)
By the way, Shane Rimmer was also in Rollerball.

Regarding whether Kelly is the character's first name or last name...I think it's his last name, since it appears on his spacesuit helmet. (Helmets consistently had last names on them.)

Wouldn't it be prudent for someone to have removed all useful items from the bomb eagle before sending it on it's kamikaze run? I'm refering to all the equipment (storage containers and the like, even if they were empty) on the shelves by the nuclear charges; surely Alpha can't afford to waste anything, even something as mundane as a container.

I'm surprised they sent an entire Eagle. That's many tons of refined materials they're throwing away, not to mention a very serviceable spacecraft. The Alphans could easier send a missle or missles, they ARE rocket scientists after all.

Who's going to clean up the crashed Eagle and it's potentially ruptured cargo of nuclear charges? "Not I", said the former worker at Nuclear Waste Disposal Area Two. "Let the suds do it!"

Hey, it looks like I'm not alone with my concern over equipment! In a similar vein to your above post, Peter, I'd also wondered why the remote Eagle that crashes in NDA2 in "Breakaway" had a passenger module. I SUPPOSE it was a recon module, with the onboard computer wall to aid in analyzing whatever data was found, but still...
Is the fact that we think of things like this a sign that we are true fans, who like to imagine what the events on screen would be like if they were really occurring?
And to those of you who want to say "Get a life!" or something, I have one, thank you very much. It's just nice to escape once in a while!
By the way, "Let the suds do it" was hilarious! It's hard to come up with new jokes about the foam after all these years, but that one was good.

The remote-controlled Eagle in "Breakaway" carries a passenger module because an Eagle isn't meant to be operated without some central module in place. An Eagle isn't properly balanced without one, and undue stress on the spaceframe will occur if you fire the main motors harder than is needed for modest maneuvers like exchanging pods. In "Dragon's Domain", Tony Cellini breaks the rules of proper Eagle operation when he speeds away at full throttle to reach the derelict Ultra probe first. Without a central module in place he's probably bending the spaceframe out of alignment with all that thrust. When he seperates the command module the rest of the Eagle "falls away", and you have to wonder if they lost that one too or disptached a cargo Eagle or two to recover it.

Oh yeah, the Eagle in "Breakaway" was specifically equipped to monitor magnetic levels, and that equipment must have been aboard the module. They didn't figure on the Eagle's flight systems being overwhelmed by the magnetic surge.

Hey, that's brilliant! I never considered the structural support angle before, which is amazing considering how much I like the Eagles...
On the other hand, there was one instance where a module-less Eagle is used: Collision Course. One of the Eagles placing a mine on the asteroid just has a line hooked up to the main truss between the forward and aft modules.
This has almost become its own topic...shall we continue discussing it over on the Sink: 1999 board?

I'd like to see a whole other board somewhere for people to discuss the nitty-gritty details of what it takes to operate and maintain Alpha's infrastructure and resources, including Eagles.
Alpha was probably never intended to operate self-sufficiently for so many months or years, independent of support from the Earth and orbital facilities. It would be interesting to figure out what the Alphans would have done to make it so. (It might even have made for a good early episode to see the Alphans coming to grips with the reality of their situation and having to make hard decisions that they'll have to live with for the foreseeable future.)
But yeah, let's talk Eagles over at the Sink. I'll bring cake and coffee...

I'm more of a hot chocolate guy, myself, but I'll see you over there!

the foam was not "Wisk" it does not make enough suds I think it was "ALL" which was made by LeverBrothers a British company.lol

Don't try this at home!

Confusion surrounds the brain's effect of communications at the start of this episode. First internal comms seem to be down, but Alan can call the standby Eagle crew on the intercom.

The Keonig says that the only communication with the launched Eagle is the crew's lifesigns. (Why would lifesign telemetry be working if voice radio is not?)

Finally, the Eagle crew talks to Main Mission, and Kano is receiving data from the Eagle's computer.

The disappearing-moonbuggy-on-the-launchpad nit is back (when Keonig takes off).

In this episode they did a mostly good job of keeping the clocks straight. Two nits: the episode starts at 3:10, but when Bergman and Russel meet in the corridor, the clock reads 12:00.

The Eagle crash occurs at about the time the nuclear charges were due to go off (18:45), but the next scene, which appears to be very soon after, is at 2:15.

what sort of data could Kelly get from a spacewalk that neither Main Mission, Carter, or the Eagle's sensors could get?

Sounds like an excuse to get him outside. But why? Couldnt the 'brain' take him over just as easily from the cockpit of the Eagle?

I found the "hollow commpost" nit (started on another board somewhere) that proves the props only had two sides. Koenig lands after the remote eagle crash, travel tubes to the main part of the base, runs past a commpost in a corridor, and enters Main Mission. Look carefully just before he runs past the commpost: a crewman walks behind it, and you can see into and through the commpost's data ports/printout slots to the wall beyond... the crewman obscures the wall. (This occurs around 41:30 track time, just after the start of Chapter 5.)
Normal eye-level shots never catch the hollowness of the prop, but this particular shot was a low-angle shot looking up at the slots. They were also backlight by white light panels in the wall.

I checked out the hollow commpost, Craig. Thanks for pointing it out.

From a long ago post: This one just seems like mainly a rehash of "Ring Around The Moon" - crew member gets possessed, starts typing real fast on keypads and transmits computer information to alien intelligence.

This plot was also used for a Next Gen episode featuring Barclay. However, Barclay survives the episode...just loses the brain boost.

As for the name Kelly...maybe he was given a strange birth name and prefers his last name. Think of Montgomery Scott on Star Trek and his predilection for being called Scotty...even his romantic interest, Mira Romaine, calls him Scotty (and passionately, too!) in The Lights of Zetar.

Based on an idea by Curious on the Sink 1999 2 board, here's my list of improved effects for "Space Brain":
Wayland says the object he & Costeau are approaching looks like a "giant space anemone." Well, actually it looks like a slide of spray-painted ink spinning around in a circle, backlit (or frontlit) by multi-colored lights. It's not the worst effect, but I'd like to see just what a giant anemone effect would look like. It could even keep the multi-colored lights.
Hide the "hollow commpost" nit.
Fix the "merging Eagles" optical so we can't see through them.
Have a docking tube attached to Koenig's Eagle (I think I discussed docking tubes on the "Earthbound" board. Or maybe it was "Guardian of Piri." Or both.)
Some of the front-projected antibodies approaching the moon look a little too front-projected; they don't integrate well into the moonscape. (Usually, it's a pretty effective effect, though.)
The moon never does appear to be passing through anything solid, and certainly doesn't seem to "tear through it like a bullet" as Koenig intones in the ep's coda. Again, if an anemone-like effect were added to give the Brain some solidity, this would help.

And I can't resist... The Brain: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?"

With the description of a 'space anemone', I would have expected to see a visual more resembling that in Trek's "Immunity Syndrome".
The scenes of the antibodies attacking the Eagle and the shot of the antibody-covered Eagle are rather awful. I'm surprised the effects crew didn't come up with a simple technique to show the antibodies wrapping themselves around the Eagle. In the 1955 "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" the scenes with the squid wrapping itself around the Nautilus simply reversed the film of the model squid being pulled away from the Nautilus. In reverse, it dramatically looks like it is wrapping itself around the sub (Dragon's Domain used the same technique for a shot where the creature wraps a tenticle around a rope). Such a technique could have effectively been used for the antibodies attacking the Eagle. An Eagle covered with what looks to be shaving cream is shown. Later, more of this shaving cream attacks an Eagle on a lauch pad.

The shots of the 'meteor' zooming past the rescue Eagle and plunging towards the base were beautifully done. The scenes of the meteor rolling on the surface and being picked up by the cargo Eagle look a bit too 'miniature'.

One thing always comes to mind when I think of this ep: the dramatic use of Holst's "Mars, Bringer of War". It is so perfectly suited for this ep. Wonderful!

Space: 1999, and this ep in particular, helped spawn my interest in classical music. Not long after I first saw this episode, I remember actually looking forward to a PBS program that aired a concert featuring Holst's The Planets suite. The first album of classical music I bought (well, actually my parents bought it for me) was The Planets, with Andre Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra... it had a nice photo of a solar eclipse on the cover.

"Cosmos' with Carl Sagan also used "Mars, Bringer of War"(for a segment on Mars). When I heard that music in Cosmos, I immediately thought of "Space Brain". Space Brain would be unthinkable without that music...just like 2001 would be unthinkable without Strauss's classic music.

Music can have a powerful effect on one's enjoyment of a film/television program. A good example of this is the silent film "Metropolis".
The last time I saw it was in the 1980s on PBS. The print was very faded and scratched and the film was accompanied by some awful 1970s' music: simplistic with some weird electronic sound effects thrown in. I was very unimpressed.

A couple of monthes ago, Turner Classic Movies ran a digitally remastered new edition with its original symphonic score. I was amazed by the original score (the music was magnificent). I wasn't aware that a 1920s silent film had such wonderful music written for it.

I just thought about that because I remembered reading a post somewhere that someone would have liked to see some Y2 eps of S99 with Barry Gray music. Sometimes, I"m shocked when watching a Y2 ep of Space:1999: some of the music is incredibly bad. If more serious music was used in some eps, I wonder how much it would improve them.

I don't wish to slam Derek Wadsworth here, his Hawaii Five-O inspired theme for Year Two is excellent and some of his themes and stings are great at adding the proper mood for the moment, but the bits used to punch up exciting action scenes are most often not. They tend to make a cheesy scene even cheesier. With the obvious need to save money on Series Two one wonders why they commissioned an entirely new set of musical themes and scores instead of recycling all of the Barry Gray tracks they already had.

I remember reading in Tim Heald's The Making of Space: 1999 part of a chapter where people were pretty excited about how small music cues could be played in a loop in order to save time & money and eliminate the need for a full orchestra to play an entire song. Personally, I don't think that was such a good idea, though I do understand the economics behind it.

Good catch CR! That was Mars from Holst's The Planets. Best part about the episode.

My wife suumed it up best - bubblebath from hell! Quite a lame effect.

One major nit nobody mentioned - in the beginning of the episode, how can Carter talk to the Eagle when communications around the station are out?

Have you noticed that Eagles not commanded by Carter or Koenig meet bad endings? The Voyager Board had the acromyn ASBTD - Another Shuttle Bites the Dust. I propose AEBTD - Another Eagle Bites the Dust for this Board. What do you all think?

LOL!

I think we've been overlooking the obvious regarding Kelly's name; is it his first or last name?
My guess is that when he was born his father was drunk or didn't understand the difference between 'surname' and 'given name', so Mr.Kelly wrote on the birth certificate;
Kelly Kelly.
It's his first AND last name.

More than likely "Kelly" is his last name which has become used familiarly as a first name, as sometimes happens. Perhaps his actual first name is something unweildy or not given to casual address. For a good example, nobody on Star Trek EVER calls Mr. Scott Montgomery or Monty, it's always "Scotty". I also once had a co-worker whose last name was Ross, but everyone called him "Ross" as if it was his first name.

Dallas, Kane, Parker, Lambert, Brett, Ash and Ripley: working-class astronauts with casual attitudes, but they never used each other's first names either, even in a very stressful situation.

CR, would you add a tether to Kelly's and Carter's space suits? Tethers were introduced in the second season episode "The Exiles", but they are absent from the first season. At least, Kelly should have some sort of jet-pack, more compact than the ones tested by Shuttle astronauts in the early 1980s.

I just think it's silly to go out of the Eagle in deep space without something to bind you to your spacecraft. And frankly, I don't think they had anything to gain by having Kelly take a space walk! They could have found a better way to do it. Maybe Carter leaves the cockpit to do something, and while he's away, the Space Brain "scans" the cockpit and links up to Kelly's brain. Carter returns and finds him comatose. However, that you can't fix in your contemplated CGI fixups.

...I guess they got their hands on the same foam machine that the Rolling Stones used for their "It's Only Rock and Roll" video from '74. Almost as much as I love the Stones, I love Holst's "Mars," but I was rather annoyed to hear it used in this way.

Whether they used it for dramatic effect, or because it was cheaper than comissioning Barry Gray to do another 5 minutes of music, the result is horrible. They are nowhere near Mars, nor is there a war on the moon. The Space Brain's intentions are in fact peaceful.

But the thing that really ruins this episode for me is Koenig's handling of the remote-controlled Eagle. Why didn't he manually pilot the damaged Eagle back, and have someone bring his back by remote control? Then he declares the Eagle ! How much time would it have taken them to go out there and recover the nuclear charges?

I say that this ruined the story because the first forty minutes of this episode are actually very good. The story reminds me of "Contact" with Jodie Foster.

One more nit: Shouldn't a meteor impact make a crater just like the thousands of others on the moon, instead of rolling around...like a rolling stone? Perhaps the organic material surrounding the meteor acted as a cushion? This would explain how it was able to penetrate their shield as well.

Plus, the "meteorite" (formerly Eagle 1) hit the lunar surface at an oblique angle.

The 'meteorite' of the compacted Eagle was also of much greater weight than an ordinary meteor, so the impact crater should have been quite sizeable. I would have expected it to penetrate below the lunar surface . Alpha would have had to call in an excavation team then!

When I first saw this episode in 1975 I thought the music was original, so I was surprised that it was from Holst's 'The Planets', and even went out and bought the album! Awesome track for Mars.

Carter (or Nick Tate or the director) clearly flubs the setting of the coordinates for the nuclear charged-Eagle. He says "1 - 8 - 4 -5" as requested, but his fingers press 1 - 5 - 7 - 4 ! Way, way off! We see Nick Tate lean down towards the console, then a close-up of (supposedly) Alan's fingers pressing the buttons, then another long shot showing Nick Tate standing up. So was 1 - 5 - 7 - 4 the original number in the script and it was filmed like that? Because I zoomed into the keypad on my DVD and the numbers are clearly marked.

The WWE has a female wrestler named Kelly Kelly.
Of course, that's just her stage name.
If Kelly wants people to just call him by his last name, he must really, really hate his first name! Jebediah Perseus Kelly, or something like that!

I'm wondering why they didn't get Kano to connect to the computer again, rather than risk Koenig. And how did they connect Koenig without brain/computer implants?

The novel, The Forsaken, has Alpha discover one of the planets that the Space Brain looked after, and what happened to said planet when the brain was destroyed.