Helena Russell - Character Development

Character Development

Following the Moon's breakaway from Earth, Dr. Russell and the other Alphans have one encounter after another with mysterious and often hostile alien races and inexplicable forces. In the second episode, she encounters her long lost husband, Lee Russell, who had been declared dead after the Astro Seven mission to Jupiter on which he was serving was lost. He is discovered living apparently alone on a habitable planet named Terra Nova by the Alphans. In the episode's climax, he revealed that he has been transformed into a being who is far superior to normal humans, possibly anti-matter in nature.

In Series One, Helena Russell often appears to be a somewhat cool, emotionally flat individual, especially in responding to the various crises which occur during the first season. However, over the course of the first series, she develops an emotional attachment to John Koenig. Koenig is equally smitten with Helena. At their first meeting in Breakaway, there was an obvious spark of attraction; subsequent episodes indicated a growing, if discreet, relationship (see Matter of Life and Death, Black Sun, et cetera). In an alternate future, Helena married Koenig, only to lose him in an Eagle crash. In Missing Link, she was seen in throes of an emotional struggle as her professional duty required her to terminate the life-support systems of the man she loved. In War Games, her feelings for him allows her to tap into an alien power to bring him back to life after his having been fatally shot, and later rescue him from certain death after his having been marooned in space.

Professionally, Helena had more failures than successes during the first series as the Moon traveled through a universe beyond human understanding. She is unable to save Regina Kesslann, a woman who is living in both the present and future after the Moon's passage through an unexplained space phenomenon, especially after she apparently manifests a 'second' brain. She also loses Technician Anton Zoref to a heat-absorbing life force and Botanist Dan Mateo to a paranormal force raised from the depths of his own mind. After being co-opted by the Space Brain in the episode of the same name, Astronaut Kelly also dies despite her best efforts at freeing him from its influence. She herself is a victim of the Tritonians as she is turned into a tool for relaying information from Alpha's main computer. Fortunately, the Triton ship is destroyed before they would have burned out her brain.