Thursday 5 January 1984

Warriors of the Deep

A Full Front-On Shot

The Second Coming, Episode 6
Sunday 1 June 2025

This week, the Earth’s original inhabitants wake up from hibernation after about a decade, put on their best fibreglass vests and samurai outfits, and invade an undersea base at 0.5× speed. The Silurians and Sea Devils are back — but why?

Notes and links

In the first season of Space: 1999, Moonbase Alpha’s operations were run from Main Mission, a spectacularly huge and beautiful set at Pinewood Studios. Seabase 4’s bridge is similar (but smaller and cheaper).

The actor who plays Bulic, Nigel Humphries, appeared in an episode of Blake’s 7 called Mission to Destiny, which we discuss in Maximum Power Episode 7: Jeopardy Space Meteorites.

The memory cheats. The book Doctor Who Special Effects by Mat Irvine (1986) features an extreme close up of a Silurian mask from 1970’s Doctor Who and the Silurians.

Room 101 (1994–2018) was a talk show in which a celebrity guest would discuss the things they hated most. In the episode broadcast on 15 April 2002, former Controller of BBC One Michael Grade appeared and nominated Doctor Who. You can see the relevent clip from the episode here. (He also nominated Shirley Bassey, so he’s clearly a monster.)

These days we think of the Cold War taking place in the 50s and 60s, but it was still going strong in 1984. We mention a few relevant films. We already talked about Threads (1984) in our discussion of The Dalek Invasion of Earth: it was a British TV movie depicting Sheffield in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The Day After (1983) was an American TV movie depicting a nuclear strike on the United States. And WarGames (1983) was a popular Hollywood movie about a teenage computer enthusiast whose hacking nearly kicks off World War III.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Warriors of the Deep in Episode 92: Is Ichtar Okdel?.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll enter your house uninvited and very very slowly and fill your bed with goannas.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The final episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire (perhaps) will be out on Monday: we’ll be supplying you with our urgent hot takes on the season finale The Reality War.

Today sees the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the final episode of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land, Wish You Were Here, in which Tara King finds herself in a parody of The Prisoner featuring a number of Doctor Who guest actors from the 60s and 70s.

And there’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we roared with laughter watching the astonishingly boring Season 6 Star Trek: Voyager episode Alice.