Another Time, Another Place (Space: 1999) - Production Notes

Production Notes

• 'Another Time, Another Place' was Johnny Byrne's first original script for the series after his original six-week stint on the Space: 1999 production staff was extended to full-time script editor. He started with the concept of the worst thing he could imagine happening to the Alphans: hitting a 'mad cloud or particle storm in space' that causes their bodies to separate into duplicates. With that concept forming the episode's hook, he then had to conceive the next four acts of storyline to reach the conclusion of the Alphans coming face-to-face with themselves. The story would highlight the cyclic nature of human experience—the catastrophic failure of the 20th Century 'techno-man' resulting in a new beginning of the process emerging from the ashes; this idea would be featured in several of Byrne's scripts for the series.

• The final shooting script contained an unfilmed scene where Koenig, Helena and Carter, making their way to the settlement, encounter the top twenty metres of the Santa Maria satellite tower sticking out of the ashy soil, thus establishing this Earth as their own after the occurrence of some great holocaust. There is also a reference to the solar system containing eleven planets; this was changed to nine in the revised draft to make the dénouement of their being back in our solar system more obvious to the viewer.

• The 'This Episode' montage in the episode's opening credits contains an unused effects shot: two glowing geodesic domes sitting on the devastated Earth surface, surrounded by smaller metal pods. No mention of this shot is found in the script, leaving viewers to speculate if these were meant to be structures built by the Earth settlers (greenhouses, perhaps) or some of the mysterious ruins of the vanished civilisation Bergman mentioned.

• With its alternate-future setting, the episode showed the logical progression of the series' two ongoing relationships: the marriage of Koenig and Helena, whose understated 'love-at-first-sight' romance originated in 'Breakaway', as well as Morrow and Sandra, whose chaste affair began during 'Black Sun' after the death of Sandra's astronaut beau.