Stars: John Mills, Simon MacCorkindale, Barbara Kellerman
Get it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LR7Tbw
Synopsis
This is a four-part BBC miniseries.
Part One
In the last portion of the 20th century, all humanity seemed to sicken. Quatermass walks down the street, and there are gunshots and sirens all the way. A gang jumps on him and beats him up, but they’re run off by Joe Capp, who arrives just in time. The two continue on to the BBC where they clean him up and gets prepared for his interview.
They reference some of his old adventures, so those things actually happened. Quatermass is shocked that there are now dead bodies on suburban streets; society is in mid-collapse. Quatermass is looking for his granddaughter, who went missing, and the police can’t be bothered to look for her.
There’s a space station in orbit, run by the Americans and Russians; the British can only watch. Quatermass says he’s ashamed of the part he played in getting mankind into space. The Americans cut him off; censorship lives in the USA.
Suddenly, there’s a malfunction on the space station, and it breaks up right there on camera. The American seems to blame Quatermass for knowing about a terrorist plot; Quatermass only wanted to show his granddaughter’s picture on-air, and now he may be accused of being a terrorist. They drive through a land of poverty, crime, and violence. They pass a large group of Planet People, a magical cult of mostly young people.
Cobb takes him home to the observatory, where he meets a group of astronomers with two large dish telescopes. They were watching when the space station fell apart and something strange that they can’t explain. Cobb’s wife shows him some standing stones where she dug up some neolithic artifacts. She just keeps the stuff because all the museums are gone. The Planet People come by on their way to Ringstone Round.
The Planet People arrive at the stones, and the police are already there. It looks like the Planet People are going to get violent, but Quatermass grabs a bullhorn and explains that he agrees with them. The leader grabs the bullhorn and starts talking, but the police shoot him, starting a real riot. Quatermass, Cobb, and Mrs. Cobb escape just a bright light descends from the sky over the standing stones.
Part Two
The instruments in the observatory are going wild. Whatever it was that Quatermass witnessed made the instrumentation go crazy. The standing stones are covered in ash. There are dead bodies all over the place, both Planet People and Police. The remaining Planet People say that the other have gone to the Planet, leaving them behind. Quatermass isn’t sure if that’s what happened or if they all died. Quatermass finds an injured girl, who seems to have been changed by the incident, and he wants to learn what happened. One of the crowd yells, “Stop trying to know things!”
They grab the little girl and drive off, leaving the crazy Planet People behind. We see Quatermass’s granddaughter among them. Alison, Cobb’s daughter’s babysitter, runs off and joins the PP. They return to the observatory, where Cobb’s assistant suggests that the space station and what happened this morning may be related, and other standing stone circles may be affected as well.
The District Commissioner comes by, and they need Cobb and Quatermass to help them. They connect to a satellite and contact the Americans again. They show him video of a bunch of young people wiped out. This seems to have happened at multiple places at almost the same time. Even in a high speed orbit, one attacker couldn’t hit all those spots at once.
Quatermass wants to take Isobel, the little girl, to London for serious examination. One of Cobb’s daughters points out that “The old man– he stopped looking so old.” Quatermass has a problem to solve! He suggests that the madness that has overtaken the Earth may have been arriving for decades, affecting the young people born since this all started.
Quatermass and the District Commissioner are ambushed on the streets of London. Meanwhile, at the observatory, thousands of young people are converging on the standing stones. The strange light returns, bigger than before, killing all of them and destroying the observatory. Cobb returns home to find his house destroyed in the blast.
Part Three
Quatermass hides in the rubble of London, trying to escape the gang battle that pulled him from the Commissioner’s car. He runs into a gang of old people, who help him. They take him to their secret lair under the junkyard. He explains what’s been going on, and the old people are shocked. He makes a deal that will let him get through.
Meanwhile, Annie the DC gets Isobel to the hospital, and she starts levitating out of her bed. When she gets about six feet of the ground, she explodes in a cloud of dust. He talks to a scientist that used to work for a soap company. He explains how deer used to be killed and trapped by hunters and Only a small portion of the deer was used to get musk. Quatermass gets that look in his eye– could this be the same situation with the young people?
The army storms the old people’s camp looking for Quatermass. The DC has come to the rescue. They take over a TV studio and talk to NASA again, and they say that the stone circle attacks are continuing.
Quatermass thinks men put up the standing stones to commemorate some bad disaster that happened there in the past. There may be something, some kind of marker, buried beneath them that allows the aliens to home in on those places, maybe even attract them. He thinks there isn’t a normal spaceship out there, he thinks it’s an energy sphere that surrounds the entire Earth.
The Russians and the Americans want to try to launch a rocket to communicate with the alien. Quatermass blows them away with, “The crop can’t appeal to the reaper. The human race is being harvested!” The space shuttle sees a huge light beam aiming at the Earth, but it only lasts twenty seconds. Then the light shoots again, and the shuttle is in the beam, destroying it.
Meanwhile, even the younger soldiers are deserting to join the Planet People. The warring gangs are joining them as well. There are tens of thousands gathering in the Wembley Stadium colosseum, and Quatermass thinks that’ll be a target. The younger people start shooting at Quatermass and Annie. Annie is killed. The beam goes off as Quatermass hides alone in the parking garage.
Part Four
Quatermass stumbles out of the garage, covered in ash. He’s the only survivor out of around seventy thousand. The sun comes up and it’s a strange green color. They start to believe that it’s not an alien, but a machine that they cannot understand. This thing senses human protein and to take large numbers of samples.
They need old people. Quatermass goes back to the junkyard and gathers his friends. They need to find a way to destroy the machine. How can they lure the beam to attack a known target. They have a breakthrough.
They all return to Cobb’s observatory. They find Joe, who’s gone crazy at the loss of his family. Cobb insists that no one has died; they’re all alive somewhere.
The Planet People return to the observatory and the standing stones there. They wreck everything, including whatever it was the Cobb was working on. Cobb realizes now that they’re all dead. The Russians launch all their nukes into orbit. They’re all deactivated.
They set a trap for the alien device. They’re going to bait the machine into firing on the stones using pheromones to fool it. When the machine “beams up” the “humans” they’ll be poisoned instead. It feeds on the pheromones of the young, so they’ll be literally sending up the synthesized stink of old people to distract the thing. Then they’ll send up a targeted blast along the beam.
They set the antennas to build up over a period of an hour, to simulate the young people arriving. They sit and have some tea, waiting. Finally, they have a simulated million kids on the site. The actual Planet People start arriving, and Quatermass tries to warn them away, but they come anyway. The leader shoots Cobb. Quatermass finally sees his granddaughter in the crowd, and he grabs his chest with a heart attack. Just then, the light strikes, coming down just as planned. He crawls over to the detonator but dies before he gets there. The granddaughter helps him press the button.
The next day, the sky is blue again. Things start to recover, and everything is good again, now that the alien influence is gone.
Commentary
Quatermass starts out episode one largely ignorant about the world around him. He’s been hiding away from the world. He’s confused and a little bewildered at what he sees. He livens up a lot in part two, when it becomes clear what kind of mystery he’s involved in.
It’s slow and has a lot of build-up, but the world building is interesting, then concept is good, and the acting is pretty decent. The special effects are typical 1970’s BBC level, but the story makes up for it.
The fourth part drags quite a bit, with a little too much speechifying. The solution to the problem is unique and interesting. Presumably, Quatermass dies at the end, which is a bummer, but overall it was very entertaining.