User Reviews

Wandering around in deep space Moonbase Alpha comes across another planet Terra Nova. It all looks good until suddenly the Dr Russel's long-assumed death husband appears. He's warning the people from the base not to enter the planet. even as it looks like earth it will be the end of humanity of the base.

The weakness lays in the fact that Koening does want to go to the planet. By doing so disaster happens. I found this one rather a bit boring because it's a lot of blah blah going on. What did look good was indeed the planet itself. It's clear that you can spot that it was done n a soundstage and not on location but hey, does anyone remember Star Trek.

This episode couldn't stand the time and is a bit of waist of time. But look, Space 1999 became cult so maybe you have to sit through it after all.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

"Space: 1999" was, in my opinion, an extremely uneven series--with some very good episodes and just about as many bad ones. I watched all their shows in their first run and have decided to recently watch them again. While "Matter of Life and Death" is not a truly bad episode, it's definitely not a good one.

The show begins with yet another new planet appearing near the wayward Moon. This one looked very promising as a new home, as it was no inhabited and seemed pretty hospitable. However, a bizarre thing happens--something that, inexplicably, no one seemed THAT perturbed about occurs. Dr. Russell's long-assumed dead husband appears!! Now considering he was lost on a Jupiter expedition years earlier AND they are now 19012392347213130813132 from Jupiter, you'd think people would question this just a bit!! But, Russell just assumes the guy is her hubby and the rest seem rather ambivalent about all this. I'd be screaming and dancing about saying "A DEAD GUY JUST APPEARED OUT OF NO WHERE 19012392347213130813132 MILES FROM WHERE HE WAS LOST!!! HOLY CRAP!!!". But again, the reaction is oddly muted.

When this bizarro apparition begins emitting lightening bolts AND tells them that no one should land on the planet because it means death, what does Koenig do?! Yep, he orders a landing and plans to colonize the place!! How stupid can you be?! And, when they do land, trouble naturally breaks out and an incomprehensible and crazy resolution occurs!!!

You know,...now that I wrote about the plot and thought about it more, it really WAS a bad episode. Watch it if you want...but it's far from the better shows in quality and writing.

It's bad enough that, like a lot of Space: 1999 episodes, this one is a 15-minute story dragged out to 50 minutes. But what makes this one truly maddening is the characters' idiotic acceptance of an unbelievable situation: the sudden appearance of Dr. Helena Russell's long-presumed-dead husband on an Eagle--returning from, of all places, an investigation of an inhabitable planet. Dr. Russell accepts without doubt that it is in fact her husband, and (even more maddening) Commander Koenig accepts it, too. And of course this "person" is left unguarded in Medical: They're going to let him rest up and then question "him" later. (I mean, it's not like these people have ever run into any tricky aliens before, right?) A big chunk of the episode is taken up by this person engaging in the obvious nefariousness while the crew of Alpha remains oblivious. Of all forms of contrivance used by lazy script writers, the "stupid character" one is the most annoying, and this episode has it in spades. The only possible value in watching this episode is to see the stupendously bad ending. It's as if the writers woke up on the set after an all-night bender only 10 minutes before the end of filming and made up the ending right there on the spot. Other than seeing what has my nomination for Worst Episode Ending of the Entire Series, avoid this entry unless you're positively writhing-around-on-the-ground desperate for a Space: 1999 fix.