Star Trek fans
have for decades decried Fred Freiberger's work on their favourite series.
This seems somewhat unfair, as there are some excellent episodes in Trek's third year (Spectre of the
Gun, The Enterprise Incident and The Tholian Web to name just three) while the show's reduced budget was
hardly his fault and restricted the scope of the stories it could tell. Crucially, Star Trek's creator
and guiding light, Gene Roddenberry, had very little involvement, taking the title and salary of Executive Producer while
spending his time unsuccessfully trying to get a Tarzan project off the ground.
A New Vision
The
first season of Space: 1999 was the personal vision of Gerry Anderson, Christopher Penfold and Johnny Byrne,
but that series had been cancelled. In effect Gerry Anderson was now making a new series with the same concept and sets
and some of the same cast. If the new show was going to be someone else's version of the series, Gerry decided that
person should have credit as Producer. Fred Freiberger was thus promoted from Script Editor to the vacant position of
Producer, Anderson taking no official credit for Space: 1999 Year Two, despite being de facto executive producer.
His only on-screen credit was the series description as 'A Gerry Anderson Production'.
Freiberger's first action on arriving at Pinewood was to
head for the screening theatre and watch eight episodes of the series. His assessment of the series and views as to
what needed to be done to remedy the faults were the subject of a memo to Gerry Anderson, which was forwarded to Abe Mandell
and later published in Tim Heald's invaluable book The Making of Space: 1999. One wonders which episodes
he watched, as aside from the production values Freiberger has nothing good to say about the series and is particularly scathing
about the writing:
But after your production values ....what?
Everything goes downhill. The format people are one-dimensional without any clearly defined characters. They motivate
nothing in terms of the action. They stand around talking instead of "doing". Therefore, the episodes are
mild instead of dynamic, driving, searing. The relationships are plastic and meaningless. And a major fault with
the series is a lack of humour...
The basic science fiction concepts are usually
valid, but the dramatizations of those concepts are poorly executed. The stories are not properly structured and in most
cases lack a cohesive developing plot line. And again I must mention the lack of humour.
With comments like this, damning the writing of the series on every
level, it's little wonder that Johnny Byrne, despite liking Freddie Freiberger personally, didn't feel able to work with him.
With all the changes both in front of and behind the camera, Gerry Anderson recruited an old
friend to the production. Frank Sherwin Green came on board as Associate Producer, having served as Production Supervisor
on the between-seasons production The Day After Tomorrow. Green was a hugely experienced Production
Manager and Producer whose career stretched back to the 1930s. His career took him into the orbit of legendary low budget
film producer Harry Alan Towers, where Green was Production Manager on several of his TV series. At this point he gave
his struggling film producer friend Gerry Anderson a hand by recommending him for the job of directing an episode of the series
Martin Kane, Private Investigator. This proved to be an auspicious event, as not only did the money
help to keep AP Films afloat, the filming also provided Gerry with his first meeting with a young actor called David Graham.
Changes and a Changeling
While the cast was approximately the same size, several
changes were made. Paul Morrow and David Kano left with no on-screen explanation, as did Victor Bergman after the producers
were unable to agree with Barry Morse's management over his salary. An explanation regarding Bergman's disappearance;
that he had died due to a faulty space suit, was scripted but never used. Two new major characters were introduced in
the form of Security Chief Tony Verdeschi, played by The Protectors regular Tony Anholt, and Maya, an alien
with the power to change her form.
Anholt took on the action-man second lead previously occupied by Nick Tate as Alan Carter,
whose character was somewhat sidelined. Indeed Carter was originally not even in the shooting script of opening episode
The Metamorph, his lines being originally assigned to a character named Mark MacInlock. At an earlier stage,
when Freiberger was preparing the writers guide for Year Two, the Chief Eagle Pilot role was name Gary Wolusky. This
renaming of characters even extended to Verdeschi, who only gained his final name a couple of days before filming began, having
previously been called Simon Hays. Hays was originally envisaged as an amalgam of Victor Bergman and Paul Morrow, to
the extent of having a Bergmanesque artificial heart, before evolving into his final characterisation.
