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Nightmare Fuel / Space: 1999

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As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You have been warned.

  • The very premise of the series scared some in a way Star Trek never did. Whenever the base lost personnel, and equipment, that's it. There will be no replacements, and they are in growing danger of running out, especially since they apparently have no production facilities. That makes every death of Red Shirt characters feel like a horrific loss.
  • The episode "Dragon's Domain", and that scene with the tentacled monster dragging screaming personnel into its mouth and spitting out desiccated, char-broiled, smoking corpses...
  • An episode involving a pair of twins with some kind of voodoo power. The girl produced a very lifelike clay bust of Dr. Russel's head and proceeded to sink her fingers into the middle of the bust's face. The resulting scream of agony escaping from Dr. Russel's own fingers as she pressed them over her own face still can haunt nightmares.
  • The fate of Commissioner Simmonds (pictured) in "Earthbound". After forcing his way aboard the vessel of some friendly aliens (who are, conveniently, headed for Earth) and who've agreed to take one Alphan passenger along for the ride (since they have a spare hibernation cubicle), Simmonds awakes inside the glass cubicle only minutes into the voyage. Turns out, the aliens' suspended-animation process has to be specifically calibrated to the chosen individual, and the aliens are asleep, and the cubicle can only be opened from the outside. What makes it nightmare fuel is the fact that the voyage to Earth is going to take 75 years. Simmonds is going to be a skeleton by the time they're near it and the aliens wake up.
  • The fate of Dr. Rowland in "Death's Other Dominion". We don't see his actual demise, but we certainly see the aftermath, and boy is it horrific. As soon as their Eagle leaves the atmosphere of Ultima Thule, a planet that is essentially Shangri-La in space, Koenig and Carter suddenly hear Helena scream, and find Dr. Rowland reduced to a steaming, badly decomposed corpse. Even more horrifyingly, he is still holding Helena's hand when they come upon the gruesome scene.
  • The titular "Troubled Spirit": Dan Matteo's scarred, vengeful "ghost", having returned to prevent the incident that created him.
  • The Nightmare Sequences in "Another Time, Another Place" and "Missing Link". The former has Alpha crew member Regina Kesslann seeing herself as the Grim Reaper, then seeing her distorted image in a mirror and smashing it, while the latter has Koenig surrounded by strange, repulsive creatures, strapped to a chair, and futilely screaming out for help.
  • Balor from "End of Eternity" is an immortal Ax-Crazy psychopath with accelerated healing who demands that the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha submit to his sadistic ways in exchange for the secret to eternal life after they free him from his asteroid prison. He's basically an alien version of Faust. Worse is the ending - he ends up exactly where he started, imprisoned for all eternity, after being Thrown Out the Airlock.
    • From the same episode, the scene where a Moonbase Alpha crew member named Baxter attacks Commander Koenig with a model airplane, shot from Koenig's point of view.
    • Balor's dark paintings of people in situations of pain and suffering are the stuff of nightmares.
  • "Alpha Child" plays out rather like an outer-space version of The Midwich Cuckoos, with an alien changeling named Jarak taking the place of young Jackie Crawford, possessing his body and accelerating his growth. The episode subjects us to such lovely imagery as a grown child trapped within the confines of an incubator and said child psychically torturing his own mother.
  • "Force of Life" involves an Alpha technician named Anton Zoref (played by Ian McShane) who is transformed into a heat-sucking vampire after being exposed to a mysterious alien force. This results in several other characters being instantaneously frozen to death by way of a simple touch. The episode's climax has Zoref incinerated by a laser beam only to be immediately revived as a zombie while attempting to access Alpha's nuclear reactor - the ultimate source of heat on the base. The shot of Zoref's scorched body with its Glowing Eyes of Doom stumbling across the reactor room is one that will haunt you in your dreams.
  • The shot of the body farm in "Mission of the Darians" with the nude corpses lined up on the table. While nothing too graphic is shown, it is nevertheless pure unadulterated Nightmare Fuel.
    • The basic concept of the episode warrants discussion here as well. A massive generation ship containing the last remains of a once-grand civilization has devolved into something out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare following a radiation leak, with the surviving members of the underclass being used as Human Resources for the privileged, something which is demonstrated in all its full horror in a scene where Alpha security guard Bill Lowery is placed in a Disintegration Chamber and broken down to a few base proteins. Word of God states that the whole scenario was inspired at least in part by the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 disaster, in which the crash survivors were forced to cannibalize their dead comrades in order to survive long enough to find help.
  • Torens having his mind drained by Psyche in "The Metamorph". What really sells the scene is the lack of dialogue apart from the horrifying sound of Psyche and the performance of actor Nick Brimble, who fully conveys the horror of someone having their mind literally ripped out of their skull. And once that's all done and over with, Torens is reduced to a mindless vegetable who doesn't even recognize his former colleagues, condemned to toil in the mines for the remainder of his natural life.
  • A more subtle example is the fates of Meta Probe pilots Warren and Sparkman in the pilot episode, who are sent into irreversible comas by an unexplained viral infection. It really highlights the first season's downright pessimistic attitude towards space travel. The scene is made all the more chilling by the harsh blue light of the isolation ward shining down on their motionless bodies.
    • Also from the pilot episode, Nordstrom and Collins going berserk and attacking their fellow base personnel in fits of radiation-induced madness. While it's rather unlikely that magnetic radiation would have the effects presented apart from the cataracts, sudden violent insanity is always prime Nightmare Fuel.

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