Into Infinity (Gerry Anderson’s The Day After Tomorrow)
At Space Station Delta, the starship Altares is preparing for an unprecedented mission: the first manned interstellar mission, utilizing a photonic drive that will create a time dilation effect relative to Earth; any messages the Altares crew sends back from Alpha Centauri will reach the descendants of the mission controllers who helped launch the ship. The Altares is crewed by two families, and even the children are fully trained in the technical and scientific aspects of the mission.
Activation of the photonic drive goes off without a hitch, but contact with Earth is now measured in years instead of minutes or hours. Altares’ visit to Alpha Centauri takes place on schedule, but an unexpected fault activates the photon drive again, throwing the ship off-course at nearly the speed of light and completely out of touch with Earth. With a star threatening to go supernova at any moment, and a black hole that might crush the Altares, the mission and the crew are in jeopardy.
written by Johnny Byrne
directed by Charles Crichton
music by Derek Wadsworth and Steve CoeCast:
Brian Blessed (Tom Bowen), Joanna Dunham (Anna Bowen), Nick Tate (Captain Harry Masters), Don Fellows (Jim Forbes), Katharine Levy (Jane Masters), Martin Lev (David Bowen), Ed Bishop (Narrator)
Notes: A pilot that never made it to series, Into Infinity first aired in the United States as part of NBC’s occasional “Special Treat” program, and then aired in the UK a year later under the title Gerry Anderson’s Day After Tomorrow). Devised by Gerry Anderson (of Supermarionation, UFO, and Space: 1999 fame) and Space: 1999 script editor Johnny Byrne (also responsible for a few episodes of Doctor Who, including The Keeper Of Traken and the character of Nyssa), Into Infinity was made between the first and second seasons of Space: 1999. As the Altares plunges into the event horizon of the black hole toward the end of the show, a psychedelic sequence ensues which eerily anticipates – in great detail – the bizzaro ending of the 1979 Disney movie The Black Hole. The producers of the later movie were aiming for something cerebral, quasi-spiritual and ambiguous a la 2001: a space odyssey, but the similarities in the hallucinatory sequences near the end of Into Infinity and The Black Hole are striking.
LogBook entry and review by Earl Green