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Space: 1999 ran from 1975-1977. This show is some serious hippy weirdness. The moon has become a nuclear trash dump, which makes the leading man, John Koenig (Martin Landau) essentially a garbage man in charge of the moon.
The show Quark (which ran for a rousing 8 episodes in 1977) will riff on this when the lead character Adam Quark (Richard Benjamin) is literally a garbageman in space. I'll be getting to Quark at a later date . . . hopefully much much later.
Now, back to the Moon which is about to go on a little trip. The short version is that a nuclear waste storage facility on the dark side of the moon goes critical, explodes, and acts like an engine shooting the moon out of orbit taking the research station Moonbase Alpha with it.
So, the moon is now a giant starship travelling at incalculable speeds, but apparently faster than the speed of light . . . or not, depending on the screenwriters. Space: 1999 had the whole 2001: A Space Odyssey futuristic look going on with the overall look as well as the first season's references to some sort of "mystical force" that might be a guiding alien intelligence. There is a definite possible tie to the use of "The Force" in Star Wars (1977) there.
The moon, of course, is a feminine symbol as it is associated with the sea (tides) and the menstrual cycle. There are innumerable moon goddesses. Here it becomes a giant space-womb for the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha. So, as I am watching this show I will be looking for actual production elements that emphasize the feminine with the hypothesis that Space: 1999, as in 2001, space is the ultimate feminine, the great and horrifying vaginal unknown. I wonder if there are other shows (or etc.) that used the "fling a rock into space" motif? Maria Dora Russell's book The Sparrow does: they use a hollowed-out meteorite as a starship.
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