So another year of horror comes to an end. A difficult year I understand, and now a tale of horror so great it’s infamous with fans of the show.

And now though you ran away before, Nephrite, you are here to join me.

Ah so this was your revenge for escaping John Carpenter was it? I can understand. Although why lock the doors? The locking system in your territory seems…excessively elaborate.

Oh trust me, its best the door remains closed.

I have talked about Space 1999 before with the first episode Breakaway now we skip ahead through season 1 to one of its most famous episodes and repeatedly voted as the scariest episode in the series, in fact it might be one of the scariest episodes of a non horror series, and scarier than most real horror.

I can safely promise our readers that Sgathaich is not speaking hyperbolically! This story is famed for causing nightmares. And it is a reputation it earns!

Dragon’s Domain

The 8th episode of the first season, we open to narration by Dr Helena Russell saying how it had been 877 days since the moon had been blasted out of the Earth’s orbit. We see the bed of Captain Tony Cellini who, experiencing a weird phenomenon, attacks the wall with an axe. Shortly after he tries to steal an eagle (the spaceships) before he is apprehended.

What happens next is a flashback showing his past. How he was the captain of Ultra Probe Mission, a deep space mission to investigate a planet that could be a new hospitable world for humans. We see him and his crew and everything going well with them about to try landing, but we hear that no landing was ever done and we are shown why. This is where it gets scary.

While on the other side of the planet they find in Space a bunch of abandoned space craft from aliens (I want to make it clear the space ships have nothing to do with the planet, the planet was where the ultra probe was going but they find these in Space unrelated to it.) Docking with one of the ships in hopes of discovering true deep space travel they open the door to nothing but darkness and wind before a strange horror manifests with tentacles and a glowing eye. This horror pulls people in by mesmerizing them to stop resisting before its tentacles grab them and pulls them under, spurting out their chard corpse… YES IT VOMITS OUT THEIR CHARD CORPSE!

AAAAAGH! Just oh god the image of what he is describing is…so unsettling disturbing!

We find Toni Cellini was the only survivor through a solo journey of months and was almost dead when he was found, only for people to assume he was the cause of his crew mates deaths and that the monster wasn’t real since the computers readings read nothing alive there.

Imagine it, a man came face to face with a monster, lost everything THEN went through hell to survive, and is called a mad man.

Indeed. Many peoples of the finest spirit and purest intentions were broken in mind, body and spirit by far less after all. Even things which never truly existed can break someone if that allow themselves to be lost to their own fears and terrors of the mind.

The flashback ends, but soon the ships are found on the Alpha’s computer, will they too face the fate of everything that found these ships, and what of the monsters? Something that according to science shouldn’t exist?

The tale builds horror and tension. You realize that what you saw happen to the crew of the Ultra Probe is the fate of what happened to the crews of all the other ships which leaves a chill in your spine.

The power of the imagination always takes the horrific and amplifies it beyond all control and conception after all. This…thing…whatever it may be…is inherently Lovecraft an is it not? There is a reason why after all that it gained its infamy. Your revenge certainly took an interesting form…but I have to commend you. Your imagination came in good use. Although I can promise you I may well get my own revenge one day…

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