Now is my chance to liveblog an episode of Space 1999

The family is away. I have the house to myself. What should I watch that no one else in the family would watch with me?

SPACE 1999. Episode: Mission of the Darians.

00:30 Middle school geometry is used to express awe:

"Twenty miles long by five miles wide!"

"A hundred square miles of space ship!"

00:33. I was going to make fun of the characters for being unsurprised that the aliens speak English, but rewinding I see the inserted the line "Signal decoded." But how did they decode it?

Battlestar co-creator Ron Moore said that the Eagles were the coolest looking spaceship ever. He's right.

Dramatic music!

This Episode: Funky Music! Absurd Costumes! Guest Star Joan Collins!

And once again, people get information from computers by reading cash register receipts.

Again, Barbara Bain is stuck in the smurfette role.

360 degree panning shot, starting with the character speaking. When the camera returns to the spot where it started, the speaking character is no longer standing there, but we can still hear him.

Dwarfs! Mute Dwarfs!

Now a violent big guy.

Sinister dwarf hand.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by how the Space 1999 guns were different than Star Trek phasers.

There is going to be a taking off the space suit helmet reveal.

The dwarfs are enemies of the big guys.

AAANND... the aliens do speak English after all. The nice thing about Space 1999 is that once you accept the basic premise that they are all on the moon, which has been blasted away from earth and is now wandering to all the interesting parts of the universe...well, anything else is plausible.

We first meet Joan Collins with a long shot of her hips and thighs. In fact, we see the hips and thighs, then get a whole nother scene, and ontly then do we get the face reveal (also featuring silly headgear.)

The weird headdress has a matching wig.

"You have to understand, apart from this small area, our ship is a wasteland."

"out of 15 thousand darians, only 14 survived intact."

Throw the dwarf in the glass elevator!

Throw the just introduced for this episode character in the glass elevator!

"Have you considered how similar our situations are? Our ship? Your moon? Both victims of an unfortunate disaster."

Premise reveal (?) Lost generation ship offers to team up with lost moon.

AND NOW BARBARA BAIN MUST WEAR THE SKIMPY OUTFIT!

"A hundred years. Its a very long time."

The show accurately predicted that chunky shoes would be hip in 1999.

The aliens are eating people! Maybe each other! Will they eat our heroes?

Ahh, they don't eat each other, they eat the people lower than themselves. It is a metaphor.

The food people are rising up against the eating people, but the eating people are only doing it to preserve "the undamaged genetic material of our race."

Glowing orbs.

Here I am, doing my paperwork in my super short bright pink dress.

"You Darians have one of our people. A WOMAN. I want you to take us to her."

The eating people use the food people for transplant organs and for amino acids that run the ship, but i don't think they actually eat them. In any case, THEY WANTED TO EAT OUR HEROES.

"Once our race is established on the new planet, we will gladly die."

The food people say to head eating person "You are not a god," and throws him head first into the glass sheet that preserves his genetic code.

"Listen! The only chance you people have is to help each other! and to live together!"