While science fiction can often feel like religion in drag, it runs into a major stumbling block when it attempts to depict the ineffable. Remember Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), in which the crew of the Enterprise confronted God? Maybe you’d prefer to have forgotten that. Or there was the cheesy manifestation of Satan in the original Battlestar Galactica with Patrick MacNee going by the devilish nom de voyage of Count Iblis. For anything in the cringe-worthy early Galactica to be especially rancid was quite an accomplishment—and not an enviable one.

One of the principal complaints lodged against Space: 1999 (other than it committed the unforgivable sin of not being Star Trek) was that it wasn’t a deal great of science amid the fiction. After all, this was a series that kicked off with a search for the planet Meta (“final destination” in Italian, “dead” in Hebrew). It was a show that was—at least in its initial and best season—far more concerned with metaphysics than astrophysics.

The Devil in Space: 1999’s ‘End of Eternity’

In the first of showrunner Johnny Byrne’s two takes on the supernatural (‘The Troubled Spirit’ being the other), ‘End of Eternity’ (S1, Ep12), Space: 1999 attempts to confront evil incarnate without being precisely on the nose about it. To summarize briefly, inside a black asteroid, the Alphans find a thousand-year-old prisoner, Balor (Peter Bowles). He is killed in their attempt to liberate him but miraculously revives back on Moonbase Alpha. He offers the Alphans the secret of eternal life but it is a Faustian bargain, as it comes with enslavement to his gospel of pain.

Though the base is seemingly at Balor’s mercy, Koenig (Martin Landau) lures him into an airlock, from whence he is flushed into oblivion. As the Alphans reflect upon their close brush with damnation another black asteroid hurtles toward the moon …

Our first glimpse of Balor is a bloodstained, gloved hand—red and black, the colors traditionally associated with Old Nick. Entombed with him are horrific paintings depicting pain, torture, and emotional agony. “It’s a one-room world,” muses scientist Victor Bergman (Barry Morse). After  Balor is pronounced dead, his anti-miracle of regeneration and escape is creepily accompanied by composer Barry Gray with bare, John Dankworth-style harp arpeggiations, unusual in the extensively underscored series.

Dr. Helena Russell: “His body is regenerating cells so fast they don’t have time to decay. His  body is being held in some sort of stasis.”
John Koenig: “Helena, that asteroid has been out in space for maybe a thousand years. Is it  conceivable that he’s been out there all that time?”
Dr. Helena Russell: “These figures are just indications but if they’re leading us where I think  they are, anything is possible.”

Meanwhile, Bergman has discovered that the asteroid itself is made of living tissue. Indeed, it uttered a piercing scream when first detonated. From this, he deduces a symbiotic relationship between Balor and his prison. Even as he is explaining this, Balor is awakening in the lab (more sinister harp strumming), traumatized and disoriented. As Koenig intuits that the asteroid functioned as a shell “to keep him from getting out,” Balor is already beginning to prowl Alpha with sinister intent.

For those who only know Peter Bowles from Britcoms like To the Manor Born, his performance as Balor will come as a dramatic revelation. Director Ray Austin, who made his name as stunt coordinator on the seminal British thriller series The Avengers, accentuates the black-clad Bowles’  dominating presence by placing him in platform boots that make him at least seven feet tall and further amplifying his stature by photographing him from low angles.

Bowles does not speak until 21 minutes into the 52-minute episode. And when he does, Balor is plaintive and distressed, lulling the Alphans into a false sense of security. Only the reliably skeptical Alan Carter (Nick Tate) is loath to go along. Favoring extended takes shot with long lenses, Austin lets Bowles roam free as Balor preaches his dark gospel:

“My powers are no accident of evolution. Once—a long time ago—we were mortal, as you are. Some of us began to experiment with the forces of life and death. They found first a  means to eliminate the aging process in living tissue. From there they went on until they achieved total mastery of cell regeneration until finally, they realized that death was defeated, that immortality itself was possible … Our people accepted the gift of eternal life offered to them by science. With nothing to strive for, our people became apathetic, corrupt. Our civilization decayed. Its purpose became negative. Some of us realized what was happening. We tried to reverse the process. We tried to instill in the minds of our people the thought that death gives a  purpose to life, that a full response to life can only be mentioned against a fear of death. How  can we value life if we do not fear death?”

Space: 1999 had already mulled that last question two episodes earlier, in the superb ‘Death’s Other Dominion’ (S1, Ep5), and answered it in the affirmative. But, for the present, we get an inkling of  Balor’s intent when his remark, “Our leaders lacked vision” is laid over a closeup of Koenig. The former insists he is offering “a way to transcend the limitations of the human spirit. But in the end, they turned on me.”

Although Balor says “I belong nowhere,” Koenig offers him Alpha’s hospitality, outwardly  signaling welcome while inwardly becoming suspicious or, as he asks, “Why would such a  civilized people punish a man in such a diabolic way?” Here, Austin and Byrne chillingly insert a  rapid-fire montage of the horrorstruck paintings found in Balor’s cell.

Terror and destruction, Koenig intuits, are what Balor was offering his people, a messiah of evil. However, he misdiagnoses the purpose and author of Balor’s gallery, a mistake that will haunt him later. Balor, meanwhile, is busy. He looks up Mike Baxter (James Smillie), a pilot who has been permanently grounded by an injured optic nerve, and offers him an unspecified Mephistophelean pact. When Koenig confronts Baxter he finds the flier seemingly possessed, half euphoric and half homicidal. Baxter beats Koenig unconscious and then succumbs to sudden brain fever, a sequence made all the more effective by Austin’s use of subjective point-of-view shots and jump cuts.

Revived inexplicably and uninjured, Koenig finds himself in over his head. When he confronts  Balor in his quarters, the alien descends the steps with a sinister, crablike motion, before laying out “a foretaste of what is to come”: an eternal cycle of violence, rebirth, then more agony. It is something like the satanic temptation of unending pain offered by Dr. Weir (Sam Neill) at the climax of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997), only presented with infinitely more taste and no gore.

“I have plans here. When you released me from my isolation, you left there something very precious to me—my paintings. Of course, you noticed them. Terror, torture, chaos,  destruction … a thousand years of reflection have convinced me I was right and now I have found a golden opportunity to prove it. Accept the challenge, Koenig. Surrender to the exquisite  forces of pain and suffering.”

Bowles is thoroughly in his element. When he reminds himself that he mustn’t kill Koenig outright, it’s as though he’s mulling what cocktail to have with dinner. And when Balor murders a nurse for sport, he makes a puppeteer’s gesture with his hand, like discarding a broken plaything. Byrne could have titled this episode “Sympathy for the Devil” for Balor gets all the best lines and Bowles relishes them—and the chance to play the essence of evil to the fullest.

Unfortunately, when Balor goes on the rampage, good taste dictates that he mostly tear up computers and throws Red Shirts about like chaff. The ramifications for humanity of his de Sade-like edict are left unexplored. As Koenig says, “We’ve got to find some way to fight him or we’re finished,” reducing the central conflict to simplistic terms. The closest we come to  plumbing Balor’s depravity is when he barges into sickbay and informs Dr. Russell (Barbara  Bain) that he is now the ultimate arbiter of life and death on Alpha, she is “obsolete,” and that  the functions of her equipment would (said with sexual relish) “amaze you.”

Dr. Bergman and Koenig devise a solution worthy of Balor himself. Koenig will parlay (which he does rather unconvincingly) with Balor in an area that is to depressurized once Balor is alone, then pull the stopper on the intruder. The latter’s menace is underlined by Gray’s scoring, which has abandoned the gentle harp for an aggressively jangling harpsichord. Balor is undone, in the  end, by his overconfidence and contempt for humans, toying with Koenig like a rag doll (“You forget I’ve already waited for a thousand years!”), before making a tactical mistake that seals his doom.

That leaves the concluding, bromidic exchange between Bergman, Koenig, and a suddenly perceptive Dr. Russell, who tells the men, “We meddled. We interfered with another people’s justice. We must learn to leave some things alone.” Bergman is still inclined to play Faust—“He could have given us immortality”— but Koenig quashes that thought. “No,” he says, “the price was too high.” True, but is evil something that can be conveniently expunged through an airlock?  It’s a question with which Space: 1999 will continue to grapple …

The Devil in Babylon 5: The Lost Tales

… as did Babylon 5. It would take an atheist (J. Michael Straczynski) to successfully call the Devil out by name, as he did as writer and director of straight-to-video Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007). He uses a premise quite similar to ‘End of Eternity’ but endeavors to answer the spiritual questions that Space: 1999 begged. (Unfortunately, there were not enough home-video buyers who wanted more lost B5 tales to be found, so the portmanteau DVD was a one-off.) Straczynski had dabbled with faceless evil during the series’ run, in the form of the Shadows, supernatural beings who manipulated humans with diabolical intent. However, in The Lost Tales, Straczynski upped his game considerably.

The first—and better—of the two “lost” tales (‘Voices in the Dark: Over Here’) begins with Col. Elizabeth Lochley (Tracy  Scoggins) summoning an exorcist, Father Cassidy (Alan Scarfe) to Babylon 5 to address the perturbing matter of Simon Burke (Bruce Ramsay), a crew member who has returned from Earth hearing voices and causing strange, paranormal phenomena in his vicinity. Lochley concludes— rightly—that she has a case of demonic possession on her hands, even if she is only a borderline  believer herself, referring to the unclean spirit as “that thing.”

Before meeting Burke, Father Cassidy has a few musings on the God-man relationship that should give the faithful pause. He describes himself as “something of a vanishing breed”:

A decline in faith and the influence of the Church was to be expected once humans penetrated Heaven and found there no angels, no choir eternal, not even a delinquent seraphim left behind by the general evacuation: just infinite space. For 200 years, mankind has walked among the stars on legs of fire and steel, daily encountering profounder wonders than the Burning Bush.

“Physicists have tried to soften the blow” of the death of God, Cassidy says, “with quantum mechanic consolation prizes, noting mysteries yet to be resolved in tiny, subatomic particles  whose absence hint at the presence of intelligence … Once we got into space the deck was  stacked and the clock was ticking.” But, he concludes, “the Church still has some surprises up  her sleeve.” Still, he’s not entirely prepared for what Lochley relates to him, that Burke had locked himself in the chapel, seemingly deranged, and was found saturated in blood that was not his own (or indeed anybody’s), although neither he nor anyone else was injured. “We’ve got a  little piece of the 14th century right here in the middle of all this technology,” Lochley summarizes.

In the first confrontation with Burke, the latter identifies himself as “just a humble servant” of the Devil, changing the noxious stench of his cell to an attar of roses to prove his bonafides. Cassidy, he says, is “Sadness, Useless, Loneliness” and he is “Asmodeus.” He commands  Cassidy to release him from Burke’s body, claiming to have been “bound here among the stars long ago,” seeded amongst the galaxies in order to achieve dominion over man once he crossed the planes of outer space. “Before Man can seek salvation, there must be the smell of  damnation.”

“There must be a reason to reawaken the love of God. But in the absence of humility that reason, or at least the fear of Hell, the terror of who fell and walks among you still,  Man sought his god in the stars and found only silence. But if the hand of darkness can be found,  does that not imply its opposite?”

In addition to the diabolical eloquence of the writing, Straczynski raises the feeling of mortal peril by filming the scene in Dutch angles, with a restlessly moving, handheld camera. “Proving the presence of Hell also proves the existence of Heaven, bringing people back to God, isn’t that it,” queries Lochley of Burke. So, by the Devil’s logic, God is to blame for Burke’s plight, a  proving point in a master plan. Cassidy calls it the most remarkable pathology he’s ever seen.  The session is punctuated by Babylon 5’s hull being wrapped in red, hellish flames. Lochley and Cassidy return to Burke’s cell to find it transformed into a long nave of fire, with Burke levitating, cruciform, at the far end.

A shaken Cassidy admits, back in Lochley’s quarters, that absent dramatic miracle, faith tends to fade. “As a member of the clergy you talk about miracles every day,” he relates. “Of course, that’s the problem. Everybody talks about miracles. But nobody does anything about them. Without the proof offered by such signs and wonders as the parting of a Red Sea or the dead raised up, after a while any number of the clergy will have doubts.”

Asmodeus has cleverly tapped into Cassidy’s own doubts, tempting him with the prospect of proving something miraculous—or the presence of the divine (and the demonic) at any rate. “But you keep going,” the priest concludes, “because that’s what faith is for—to believe in everything reason tells you is impossible. The terrible thing is he’s—it’s right. Two minutes of what we saw  in there would be the best recruiting tool the Church ever had.”

He returns alone to Burke’s cell for a second joust. “You say this was all part of God’s strategy to keep us by His side,” Cassidy challenges him. “Would you not sacrifice a single life if it meant bringing billions back to the Church?” Burke boasts that by doing that Cassidy is in a no-win situation. Leave Asmodeus in Burke’s body and admit defeat or perform the exorcism and defeat  God’s purported plan. He tempts Cassidy with evocations of pews filled to bursting with the newly faithful. “You will know [God’s existence] because we will be here to defy you,” taunts  Burke, as Straczynski scarily solarizes the image of his face.

Even Cassidy is having doubts, wondering if Burke is right. “What if these creatures really were  seeded here among the stars for some divine reason we cannot determine?” Lochley, like so many of us, struggles with the very fact of the existence of evil. Cassidy cites the prophet Amos (Amos 3:6), as to why God allows plagues and natural disasters (to say nothing of Nazism and God-denying Communism):

“Shall a trumpet be blown in the city and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city and the LORD has not done it?”

The priest is puzzled by “a missing piece” in the Devil’s argument. It comes to a sleepless  Lochley, prompting the third and final confrontation. Since Burke’s dementia began to manifest itself after his return from Earth (on the starliner Asimov), Lochley concludes that he must have been possessed back home, not on Babylon 5. “That son of a bitch,” she says of Satan.

Father Cassidy wants to perform the exorcism straightaway but Lochley overrules him, telling  Simon he will be sent back to Earth for the casting out of the demon. How, after all, could  Asmodeus seize Burke if “when you fell, you got cast down to Earth … trapped on Earth.”

The Devil and his apostate angels, Lochley contends, were bound to Earth, “denied the heavens,  denied the sky, denied the stars … Yours was no divine mission, It was an ecclesiastical  jailbreak.” (Scoggins sells the commander’s peroration with authority.) The Devil took possession of Burke in order for him to be exorcised aboard Babylon 5, to escape Earth’s bounds and avoid that day when the Sun flames out and consumes Earth amid boiling seas and “a flash of brilliant light. Any of this sound familiar to you?” That will be the end of Satan and his minions, but humanity will survive, having fled to the stars and made a new start, free of the Evil  One. Burke’s eyes blaze, he groans out a warning, then subsides into unconsciousness.

Straczynski’s postulation that Earth is Hell itself will not be comforting to true believers, although it does offer an explanation (or rationalization, for skeptics) for a world in which Hitler’s Final Solution, Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Great Leap Forward have taken place. It’s a bold assertion that should be the jump gate to further debate.

“He may have been the first to try to slip out but he won’t be the last,” Lochley warns Cassidy of Asmodeus, who tells her, “We could use someone like you.” “You think I’m religious enough,” Lochley asks. The priest glances at Burke’s slumped form and replies, “You’ll do.”

Indeed she will.