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The Expeditions
Episode 1, 27 January 1980
The first episode starts at the scene of Viking 1 uncrewed probe landing on the surface of the planet Mars in July 1976. A narrator explains that the purpose of the probe is to determine whether Mars is inhabited. As the narrator is speaking, the viewer becomes aware that there are two viewpoints at NASA amongst the scientists who launched the probe: One group obviously believes Mars is uninhabited, the other is open to the possibility of indigenous life on the planet. Each has its convincing arguments, but ultimately the probe indicates that Mars does not harbor life. At the close of the scene the camera pans back to show a larger view of the probe's landing area, with what appears to be indigenous Martian settlements in the surrounding terrain, with the narrator noting that, "If the probe had landed just a few miles further on, things might have been different." Afterwards the opening credits roll.
The next scene places the viewer at the Kennedy Space Center in January 1999 when the first "Zeus I" crewed spacecraft to Mars is carried into orbit by a Saturn V rocket. The Zeus project represents the beginning of a major effort by NASA and NATO to explore and eventually colonize the outer planets.
On Mars, Ylla (a Martian woman trapped in a loveless marriage) dreams of the coming astronauts through telepathy. Her husband, though he pretends to deny the reality of the dreams, becomes bitterly jealous, sensing his wife's confused romantic feelings for one of the astronauts. He kills the two-man expedition, astronauts Nathaniel York and Bert Conover, as soon as they arrive. Mission control on Earth does not know the fate of the crew, and one of the senior astronauts Jeff Spender urges the project director Col. John Wilder to abandon the Zeus project because of concerns that Mars may already harbor life. Wilder (who has shepherded the project for ten years) refuses, among other things because he believes mankind might escape environmental pollution and war on Earth by colonizing Mars instead.
A second mission is launched and the "Zeus II" crew lands on Mars in April 2000. To their amazement the crew (astronauts Arthur Black, Sam Hinkston, and David Lustig) discover that they have landed in a town that looks exactly like Green Bluff, Illinois, circa 1979. They are warmly greeted by close relatives and loved ones who all died years ago. In fact, the Martians use the memories of the astronauts to lure them into their old homes, where they are killed in the middle of the night.
A third mission, "Zeus III", lands on Mars in June 2001. It is commanded by Col. Wilder himself with five other astronauts (Spender, Parkhill, Briggs, Cook, McClure) as subordinates. The crew discovers five ancient cities in the vicinity of the spacecraft, one of which apparently was inhabited only a few weeks ago. The scientists find that all of the Martians have died of chicken pox accidentally brought from Earth by the first two Zeus crews. The men, except for the archaeologist Spender and Colonel Wilder, break out the alcohol rations and begin to celebrate their successful landing, becoming more boisterous. When Briggs starts dropping empty wine bottles into a clear blue canal, Spender loses his temper and punches him into the canal. He leaves the rest of the landing party to explore Martian ruins; when he returns, he is in possession of a Martian weapon and acting strangely. He kills the other astronauts except for Parkhill and Wilder, who shoots Spender in the chest before he has the opportunity to kill them as well...