Episode 9: FORCE OF LIFE
FORCE OF LIFE is constructed as a story about an abstract entity from outer space that uses Alpha technician Anton Zoref as a body for evolution, causing disaster and destruction along the way, as it searches for energy in order to develop and finally leave the ruined body of the technician.
One aspect that makes FORCE OF LIFE significantly different from ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE is that the two worlds are completely different indeed, and we are not given very much information about what the alien entity is up to apart from absorbing energy, and there has been some discussion about what Byrne was attempting to get at. In particular the episode caused some controversy among American critics. Landau was also asked about the episode during a TV debate but could only reply that he had no idea what it was all about.
When being addressed with the question himself, Johnny Byrne seem to emphasise the general structure of evolution, which is a central theme indeed in SPACE:1999, explaining how the entity paraphrases evolutionary life. Victor Bergman also states something about a star being born at the end of the episode. The final word in the episode, however, is Helena giving comfort to Zoref's wife, Eva, by saying that there are many things we don't understand.
One interpretation of the alien entity that comes rather immediately to mind is to think of it as the spirit of science and technology. The postmodern concern about limits and dangers of modernity, science and technology in particular, is a theme that prevails through out the series, the BREAKAWAY incident seems to be very much a comment on how technological evolution has brought upon us new and more serious possibilities for disasters on a global scale.
Johnny Byrne in particular seems to have made quite a lot of statments of this kind with his writing for SPACE:1999, his adaption of Art Wallace's THE SIREN PLANET into MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH being an excellent example of his uniformly fine style and ecological concern, a theme he has contributed to by writing for ecological dramas like ALL THINGS GREAT AND SMALL after his days with SPACE:1999.
Prior to SPACE:1999, Byrne had published a novel GROUPIE (1969) investigating, apparently very similar to the basic story of FORCE OF LIFE, how a young girl got carried away in the world of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll during the second half of the 1960's.
Although the setting is somewhat different and there is definitely no rock'n'roll in FORCE OF LIFE, yet the electronic music by Teperino is some of the finest musical score for the complete series, the premise and the conclusion of the stories seem quite similar. In fact, Byrne seem to be making his contribution to the kind of thinking would later be more specifically lettered by Jean Baudrillard, whose investigations in semiotics made him put forward similar reflections in works like LE SYSTEME DES OBJETS (1968), CONSUMER SOCIETY (1970) and FOR A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SIGN (1972).
Although FORCE OF LIFE seems to be Byrne's major investigation of the forces of consumer society, the forces of technological thinking or the forces of the modern world, fellow Irish writer Thom Keyes made a similar type of contribution to the second series, THE TAYBOR, which went even further by using typical Baudrillardian imagery in describing consumer society as a sort of hyperspace.
Even though FORCE OF LIFE may ring even more true as an allegory in 1999 than it did in 1975, and it is a rather devastating story about people getting caught in life without any sense of purpose or meaning, the epilogue does not indicate that the type of life that Byrne illustrate in this tale is completely devoid of deeper meaning. In fact, even though we may be lost in space and run by external forces, we should perhaps (1) like Bergman, try to understand what the external forces are and what they want, and (2) like Helena explains to Eva, never give up on our search for knowledge and hence increase our power as the context grows increasingly complex.
What Byrne suggests seems to be quite similar to the emphasis in Jean-Francois Lyotard's focus on continued possibilities for growth, learning and understanding in a postmodern world, in spite of the disbelief in the metanarratives of earlier paradigmas as he explains in THE POSTMODERN CONDITION (1979).
The conclusion, which is always present but accented differently in SPACE:1999, is that even though we have no control of our future, the only thing we can do is to emphasise on quality control. We have no idea of how things are deveoping, but this does not prevent us from doing our best in order to promote a better world in every way we can. Like John and Victor slowly but surely track down Zoref, although without much of a consequence for the ellapse of things, it seems nevertheless like the only possibility to survive to systematically make priorities on the agenda and then work systematically and analytically in order to fully understand and solve the problem.