Television and Cinema Verities: Breakaway Edition

"It's interesting, but the thing that is pinpointed as the weakness of Space: 1999, the premise, is in fact the stepping stone into everything that happened, all those inexplicable things. 

And if you take the even larger arc view, you seem to learn more about the series. 

In your book, you spotted an overall arc, and I think you are right. It is there, but it has this almost subconscious kind of sweep.  On most normal TV, the writers look for the purpose of it all, what is the point of it all.

I think on Space: 1999 it is nearly subliminal. The very circumstances of this story, this epic journey, became I believe, an unconscious arc. 

Had we been aware of it, perhaps we would have taken on a more directed theme. Unconsciously, we started seeing similarity and patterns, and a way things could happen. The further into the show we got, the more we mirrored the Alphans in their situations, because it was happening to us on that very level. That carried over into the stories, the way in which the humanity of the thing unfolded."

- The late, great Johnny Byrne, story editor and writer on Space: 1999 Year One (1975 - 1976), discusses the season's story arc, in an interview I conducted with him in 2000.