Welcome to the Implausipod. A podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode we'll begin our deep dive into Appendix W with the origins of the Space Hulk, as we enter the Dragons Domain. 

People of the jury, I'd like to bring some evidence forth before the court, the court of public opinion. And that evidence is this: the forty or so titles that we currently have in the Appendix W exist on a continuum from reasonably well known to very obscure. And this episode definitely draws on the latter, both in terms of the origin as well as the lore within the Warhammer 40,000 universe. But when picking from the list, I decided to move this one forward from some of the more well-known titles that we'll get into to pique your interest a little bit, but also coincide with the release of the Kill Team Into The dark Box set this weekend, which is currently scheduled for release on September 10th, 2022, a few days after the recording of this podcast. The box set represents return to the environment of the Space Hulk, an iconic piece of Warhammer, 40,000 lore that's been with the game since its early beginnings. The Space Hulk is a collection of starships that have been brought together and connected and are now drifting aimlessly through vastness of interstellar space.

Within the lore of the game, they've been occupied by everything from chaos cultists to genestealer cults and commandeered by ork warbands or other unknown alien entities. And because they're a collection of ancient starships that may have been drifting for quite some time, they're, they can be a quite valuable resource. So they attract the attention of rogue traders and the Adeptus Mechanicus, or others who may look to loot the secrets of the Space Hulk. But mostly they represent danger, bringing death and destruction whenever they drop out of the warp and enter into a star system or the occupied planets nearby. So much danger that the Imperium will launch boarding actions of either Space Marines equipped in heavy Terminator armor or Imperial Navy to root out and uncover the secrets and dangers that lie therein.

But if I told you that all of these pieces of lore in 2022 are based off of an episode of a British sci-fi TV series from 1975, would you believe me? Well, I think the linkages are pretty clear, so let's lay out the evidence. I'll make my case and you can tell me what your verdict is at the end. And for our first piece of evidence, we need to look at television, specifically science fiction television in the seventies and eighties.  And what we find there is pretty dire. Now, when we were laying out the overview for Appendix W in episode four, we did include television. Now, it wasn't as influential as books or movies, but it was still there and it did play an important role. The problem was, is that the state of science fiction on television for the two decades prior to the release of WarHammer 40K was really not great.

There'd only been a handful of successful shows, and most of those didn't even last that long. Star Trek, the original series ran from 1966 to 1969, and at three seasons that was one of the most successful ones. Other shows like The StarLost, Battlestar Galactica, and Space: 1999 all had limited runs of only a season or two. Usually the spiraling budgets that were required with all the props and special effects for the science fiction shows were the things to doomed their cancellation. But the viewership was never that huge either. The shows could be high profile at launch, but they'd often fall in the ratings during the course of the series.

There were other sci-fi shows that managed to persist, of course, like the Six Million Dollar Man, or Dr. Who. But in the case of the former, they were more sci-fi adjacent, and in Dr. Who they had other ways to mitigate the budget, I guess is the way to put it. Um, I'm not gonna say it was low rent, but you know, the money is up there on the screen.

So while the situation was dire for televised sci-fi, the impact that it ended up having was enormous. The shows would continue to have merchandise produced based off the properties well after their air dates, including, you know, toys and models. There was continuing new shows that were able to light the spark of imagination in the investors and get a new project greenlit.

Now, of course, everything changed after the release of Star Wars in 1977. And we can see the number of TV shows that were produced in its wake, including Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica and Blake’s Seven, and those series were all able to last longer. But Space: 1999 was a special case because it came out in 1975.

This brings us to our next piece of evidence. Now, Space: 1999 was a bit of a special case. It was produced in the mid seventies by the British broadcaster, ITC, and it was the most expensive series ever produced for British television up to that point in time. You can see it in the sets that cost and the design. The money is up there on the screen, same as Dr. Who. But in the opposite direction. The high concept was that the moon itself had been blasted out of Earth's orbit by a nuclear explosion, was set adrift throughout the galaxy, which admittedly is a little bit over the top, but it did provide a plot hook that allowed for the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha to encounter new peoples and interesting things throughout the galaxy without having to actually be on a spaceship in the same way that Star Trek was. And so while they had similar plot hooks, the big difference between Space: 1999 and Star Trek was the former's kind of appeal to realism. Aside from the inciting incident Space: 1999 drew much more heavily in look and aesthetic on Stanley Kubrick's 2001 than it did on say the original Star Trek series.

I mean, the jumpsuits were still there, but they looked like they were fashioned out of realistic fabrics, and there was a lot of attention paid to things like airlocks, spacesuits, and the time it took to actually travel from one place to the next. There was no transporters here. We can see this aesthetic being picked up in other shows and movies that followed like Alien in 1979 in no small part because the special effects director, Brian Johnson, was the same person in both.

He also worked on a little movie called The Empire Strikes Back, which will also be relevant to Appendix W later on. Now, according to the internet, other elements of the show's design were also drawn from previous work that was done by the showrunners, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. They were notable for shows like The Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5.

So if you ever saw Team America:  World Police by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, you have the Andersons to thank for their inspiration. Now, ITC was a British producer of TV programs and they're famed for a few certain shows that you might've heard of, including the Saint, the Prisoner, as well as being involved in the production of the Muppet Show, and some of those have achieved some cult status. And in the seventies, Lou grade, who was the TV mogul behind I T V, really wanted to see Space: 1999 made. And the showrunners were also dogged in their pursuit of getting funding and getting this up on the screen. Production for the pilot began in November of 1973 and early on it was treated a lot like you would for filming a movie.

There was some initial production difficulties and they ended up having to move the entire set and all the material to Pinewood Studios shortly after filming had began. Now as Space: 1999 was supposed to be set up on the moon, and that was the premise, aside from the interior sets, which were all had to be created from scratch, they also had a pretty extensive model that showed the outline of the base that was used in filming the shots, and it had a fairly believable aesthetic to it.  You could see it as a working, living, breathing base on the moon. The landing pads function much like those on an aircraft carrier bringing up the iconic Eagle spacecraft from the depths below to launch and then travel across the moon. That Eagle was famed for its modular design, being able to carry multiple different packages, much like a Sikorsky helicopter, including either cargo or a personnel module.  And it featured prominently in a lot of the stories that took place on the show. It wasn't the only spacecraft of on the show though, and those other models would show up from time to time in various episodes. 

Returning to the show itself, it was somewhat unique at the time in that the episodes were designed to be played in order, similar to the long form TV series we have now.  There was a few series like that back in the sixties and seventies with shows like The Prisoner, but again, it wasn't the norm of how things operated. Generally, things were serialized and meant to be episodic and could appear at any time. And if I had to use any one word to describe the science fiction tales that were being told on TV at the time, it would be one of horror.

There was a deep sense of unease and a lot of the science fiction at the time was very unsettling. Whether it was, again, Kubrick's 2001 or Star Trek, or really anything of the period. Looking back, I think a lot of that can be attributed to the general zeitgeist of the time, the ongoing dread caused by the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the energy shocks of the seventies and the general downturn in the economy. There was a lot of stuff going on at the time, and it was difficult to necessarily see a brighter tomorrow. Some shows tried, like Star Trek, but even then they had some elements that were much, much more horrific, and so a lot of the shows (episodes) within Space: 1999 ended up reflecting that general unease and terror. The limited number of inhabitants on Moonbase Alpha, starting with 311 members and slowly whittling down over time, increased that tension. They were dealing with limited resources after all, and the plots on the show often revolved around the inhabitants of the moon base, encountering other planets or cultures or mysteries in space, or sometimes threats that were closer to home, members of the moon base would contract horrific alien diseases, become possessed or suffer all other of manner of ailments, which gave medical officer Helena Russell, played by Barbara Bain and Science advisor Victor Bergman, played by Barry Morris, a lot of work, mostly in explaining whatever the sciencey aspects were to the viewing audience at large. And Dragon's domain needs a fair amount of explanation.

So I'm gonna take a quick break, grab a drink, and then come back and join me and we'll look at the episode in question. Are we seated comfortably? Then let's begin. 

Welcome to Dragon's Domain. This is the eighth episode of the series originally airing in October of 1975, though production took place earlier on in the year. The episode begins during the simulated nighttime that takes place on the moon base in order to help regulate the bio rhythms of the inhabitants. Where one of the astronaut crew members wakes up from a nightmare and begins swinging around a tomahawk that they grab from a weapons display trying to fend off and attack a monster that's only an illusion in their mind. After they accidentally cut some equipment and trigger an alarm, they end up getting subdued, and a lot of the story is told through a flashback. It turns out that the astronaut was on a mission some five years prior, and in it they encountered something implausible several years prior to the moon becoming unmoored.

The astronaut Captain Tony Cellini. Was the leader of a deep space mission on the Long Range Ultra Probe, so named because it was traveling to the newly discovered planet Ultra. During the mission, the crew of four came upon a collection of spacecraft - not all of them human - that were kind of collected together, and no forms of life can be seen or discovered.

This is our first encounter with the Spaceship Graveyard, or in Warhammer 40,000 terms, we might call it a spacehulk. Now, of course, there's been other star craft graveyards that have appeared in science fiction since, but this is one of the first appearances we've ever had on TV or in film. Captain Cellini and the crew members decide to investigate, recognizing that they should be able to connect through the airlock of one of the spacecraft that are're there, and when they open that airlock, all Hell breaks loose.

A tentacled alien right outta the Cthulhu mythos materializes in front of them, emitting a horrific psychic scream. With wind blowing around them, its tentacles strike forward and it drags them into the vision of its single fiery eye. One by one, they're captured and drawn forward, drained of all life, leaving only their charred corpses lying on the decks of the Starship below.

Captain Cellini was trapped in the command pod, unable to open the door, and when he finally does manage to get it open, he sees the last person being dragged away. He fires his laser blaster at it, but the blast just reflect off the alien entity. He's barely able to get back to the command pod and use it as an escape craft to slingshot his way back to Earth (in a plot point that we'd see again years later in the movies Alien and Aliens, as Ripley does the same thing to make her way home, and that connection to aliens isn't to stretch). Once Captain Cellini makes his way back home, no one really believes him, and the flight recorders don't really corroborate his story. There's no evidence of the alien entity and much like Ripley years later, he ends up taking a lower grade job just to continue to work at this time, at the behest of his friend and Moon Base Alpha Commander Walter Koenig, played by Martin Landau, as a crew member on Moon Base Alpha. 

He's an able pilot and when the Moon base drifts back towards Planet Ultra, once again, he starts having these nightmares. The chief officers of the moon base decide to take an Eagle up in order to investigate the spaceship graveyard or space hulk. During that, Captain Cellini commandeers the Eagle and jettisons the passenger module, taking up the spacecraft up on his own in order to confront the dragon. Connecting with the airlock, Cellini anchors himself to a bulkhead with a rope, and then dives forward with an axe chopping at the beast. Once it materializes again, Commander Koenig and some of the other crew arrive in time to witness the battle and see Cellini ultimately be defeated by the dragon as he's being devoured.

Koenig grabs his ax, jumps forward and hacks away at the Beast's eye, eventually slaying it and with the beast gone, the crew retreats back to the moon base and Captain Cellini enters into mythological status. All in all, it was a pretty epic episode and was burned into my little six-year-old mind, and I remember it; it gave me nightmares for weeks. The beast itself had horrific visuals. The burned corpses were traumatizing, and the sound design was equally horrific. The beast emitted this massive scream that sounded like an air raid going off, and it was quite unlike anything you'd ever hear on tv. So much so that 47 years later, it's still burned in my mind.

Admittedly, I had the hardest time rewatching this episode because of the way it scarred me when I was young, but I can watch it now a little bit removed from the situation. So what is the enduring legacy of the show? Well, before we summarize all of our evidence, let's show you how it connects with the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Now, Warhammer, 40,000 as a whole has drawn from a lot of different sources, and some of those have been influenced by this show as well: witness Alien and Aliens, but the direct linkages are a little bit more clear and obvious. The first obviously is the Space Hulk, that collection of floating craft and the depths of space, unoccupied and lifeless, but in need of exploration.

It's been an enduring part of Warhammer 40,000 since nearly the beginning with the first Space Hulk board game being launched in 1989, just two years after the launch of Warhammer 40K itself. Of course the game itself drew influence from Alien and Aliens and had a different aesthetic, drawing more heavily on the developing Warhammer 40,000 look and feel. But the basic idea of entering a spaceship, which might be a graveyard was there. 

The second linkage is in some of the aesthetics that near future hard sci-fi look has found its way into the Warhammer 40,000 universe, most recently with the forthcoming Leagues of Votann where we can see some of the design cues from the Eagle and the moon landers showing up in the, say Hekaton land fortress and (Sagitaur) moon buggies, as well as the exosuits and spacesuits that the members of the League wear. Again, a lot of this can all be linked back to the visual effects director, Brian Johnson, who also worked on Alien and Empire Strikes Back, which also had a bit of influence on, well, everything that followed, and our third and final linkage is in the Beast itself.

The titular Dragon of the episode, did you know that it shows up in the Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader Rule book? Yes. It's been there in the rules since 1987. Remember, despite being a miniatures game, Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader was more in line with. Dungeons and Dragons having a gamemaster and RPG elements, and as such, it had a pretty substantial monster section, if not having a monster manual on its own, and in there as one of the “creatures of the warp”, on page 204 are the Enslavers: floating psychic creatures that can materialize on a planet. They have a large single eye and are surrounded by tentacles and can drain the life of those around them.

Now the Enslavers have never really appeared much in the Warhammer 40,000 universe since. There's been a few mentions here and there in the odd Codex and a couple articles. Some of the R P G books have made passing mention to them, but by and large, they haven't been touched on in several additions of the game and haven't really appeared on the tabletop ever, so it's not surprising that the connection isn't really seen. It's mostly hidden from the modern audience, much like the enslavers themselves, but there's no denying when looking at a. Picture of the Enslavers in the Rogue Trader Rule book and seeing the image that appears on screen in the episode that the influence was there.

So as the Warhammer 40,000 Universe returns to the space Hulks with Kill Team Into the Dark, perhaps dip your toes into Appendix W and take a look for this episode. You might be able to find a copy and let me know what you think. As we wrap up. Let me just leave you with a few final thoughts now. I like the show.

I really do. I have fond memories of watching it in the seventies when I was really young. I don't think I saw any original airings. I think they're all on syndication on like Saturday mornings, and I really wanted an Eagle toy when I was young, even though we couldn't afford it back in the day. The biggest criticism looking back might be that some of the pacing is a little bit, uh, Slow as was the custom for a lot of media that was produced back in the seventies, I think just keep that in mind if you're giving it a rewatch.

As for Space Hulk, I bought the first version when it came out back in the day and really enjoyed playing it, and I'm happy to see them return to it with the Kill Team series this year. The fact that they're gonna be spending a full year in it with multiple releases every quarter focusing on it really gives me some, uh, “hope”.

But I don't think somehow that we're gonna see Enslavers within the context of the Kill Team box sets. It would mean that Games Workshop would have to produce a completely new force for something that they've never had on the tabletop before, and somehow, I don't think that that's the path that they're down with this one, but I'd be stunned and amazed if it did come to pass.

So that's all for now. I think we've got close to our 20 minute limit here. But join us next time on the ImplausiPod. I think we're gonna explore a little bit more of Appendix W before heading back into the Cyberpunk era to wrap things up there. But if you have any comments or questions on any of the shows, feel free to contact me at Dr.implausible@impla.blog or Dr. Implausible on any of the socials. Coming up on the horizon and some of the most interesting news of the last week or so was the reveal of the upcoming Peripheral TV series, which should be launching on Amazon in October. I'd like to do a bit of coverage on that prior to its launch. So we will devote an episode to that between now and October 21st, and we hope you come back for the episodes in between. Take care.