John Kenneth Muir and The Bad Astronomer are both noting that the actor Barry Morse has died at the age of 89.
Morse was not one of those actors most people are going to know by name, but at least one of his roles — Lt. Philip Gerard, the dogged pursuer of Dr. Richard Kimble on the original TV version of The Fugitive (the character played by Tommy Lee Jones in the 1993 feature film) — is iconic.

Sci-fi fans are more likely to recognize him from the series Space: 1999, in which he played the fatherly Professor Victor Bergman for one season before being unceremoniously dumped in the show’s second-season retool. (The character never even got an on-screen explanation for what happened to him; he simply wasn’t on the show any more when year two began.)

I’ve written before about Space: 1999 (and also about the first-season title sequence). The show is a curious footnote in my personal story. I remember watching it faithfully when I was very young — probably five or six, around the same time I became enamored of Star Trek — and being pretty fascinated by it. I had the cool, three-foot-long Eagle spaceship toy, and I had a board game and some comics and a set of reels for View-Master. (Who am I kidding? All my loyal readers know I still have those things down in my basement…) I envied my friend John Llewellyn’s lunchbox, and I used to routinely exasperate my uncles who wanted to watch football on Sunday afternoons at Grandma’s house by begging and pleading to let me look at my “goofy moon show,” as my dad so diplomatically called it. But something really strange happened when the show was canceled: I essentially forgot all about it.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I still remembered the show as an abstract concept — I knew there had been a show called Space: 1999, and what the premise had been, and that I had liked it — and I still had my assorted artifacts gathering dust in the Bennion Archives, but for the most part, it evaporated out of my memory and left only the faintest of residues. For many, many years, I could recall only three things from the show itself (as opposed to elements derived from my toys and comics):

• There was a shot in the opening title sequence of one of those Eagle ships falling out of the sky onto the Moon’s surface and exploding.
• There was an episode where some kind of tentacled monster pulled this poor guy underneath itself and then spat out a smoking, human-shaped pile of ash and charcoal. (That scene must’ve scared the hell out of me to remain so vivid in my imagination over the years; it’s right up there with the smoldering remains of Owen and Beru as one of the most traumatic images of my childhood. Hm, there must be something about death-by-immolation that really punches my buttons…)
• There was this older guy on the show who was gentle and smart and made me feel better when there were monsters about, because he had such a kindly face.

Guess which memory first came to mind when I heard about Barry Morse’s death?

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Incidentally, a few years ago I picked up some Space: 1999 DVDs and eagerly set about revisiting this old childhood favorite. The experience was… disillusioning. The show had brilliant visual effects for its time, especially for television, and most of them hold up quite nicely today, especially those Eagles. I’ve always liked that ship design. I still think the premise is interesting, if far-fetched — a nuclear explosion blows the Moon out of orbit and sends it flying off across the universe with the human inhabitants of a lunar base along for the ride; eventually, they start to believe they are being led and watched over by some kind of intelligence, for purposes the show never got around to exploring — but the average episode was, well, dull. And frequently incomprehensible. And the acting could charitably be described as wooden most of the time, with the exception of Mr. Morse, who is quite rightly remembered as the human heart of the show. His scenes with series star Martin Landau were almost always good, even when the dialogue was gibberish; Morse seemed to activate something in Landau that no one else in the cast could reach.

So, in the end, it seems that Space: 1999 was the source of fond memories and some neat toys, but there was a good reason why I didn’t remember it very well during all those pre-DVD years. And why my uncles always dreaded having to indulge Reg and Alice’s little boy instead of watching their game!