Space 1999 - The Psychomorph

The Psychomorph by Michael Butterworth. Novelisation of "The Lambda Factor" and "The Bringers of Wonder, Part One" and "The Bringers of Wonder, Part Two". Butterworth's fourth outing presents a behind-the-scenes manipulator: a million-mile wide sentient space amoeba. The amoeba has existed for billions of years and sustains itself on the radiation of the stars it absorbs. Now senile and powerless, its once massive body shrunken and dying, it must receive a massive influx of radiation to survive. The arrival of the travelling Moon gives it its last chance and it attempts by any means to deceive the Alphans into causing a thermonuclear explosion to regenerate itself. The Tiranium crisis narrative from the end of The Space-Jackers is picked up with Alpha poised on the brink of oblivion. With only hours to go, mild-mannered mining engineer Carl Renton, under the influence of the amoeba's lambda waves, has his inner desire for success realised as he is given the courage to enter an unsafe tunnel and discovers a major Tiranium deposit. Only minor changes are made to the teleplays: (1) Sally Martin is another unfortunate teen trapped on the runaway Moon when visiting her favourite uncle at the age of fifteen. (2) Carl Renton and his bully (named Harry Garth) shoot craps rather than play their complicated electronic gambling device. (3) Carolyn Powell is influenced by the amoeba to order the meltdown of the Alpha nuclear reactors when she takes over Command Centre. (4) "Sahn" switches sex and is now portrayed as female due to appearance of fiancé, Peter Rockwell. (5) The jellyfish aliens are no longer the primary antagonists, but psychically synthesised pawns of the non-corporeal space amoeba. (6) Carter actually succeeds in inserting the nuclear fuel canister into the waste-dome core, but it becomes conveniently jammed part-way down the chute and will be have to be removed at a later date.

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