Review STAR COPS: DEATH ON THE MOON - Episode Cancelled!

[Doctor Omega]

Your thoughts on this episode that was never completed, due to industrial action and then the cancellation of the show.......


This episode would have been a country house murder mystery – of the sort popularised by the fiction of Agatha Christie and the board game Cluedo – set on the Moon. It would have centred around a plan by a Chinese corporation – Chinex – to launch raw materials from the Moon to the Lagrangian point between the Moon and the Earth where they would be used to construct a space city. The Star Cops are called in to investigate when one of the engineers is found dead during the opening of the project. Spring assigns one Star Cop to each of the five possible suspects. As each suspect is killed off, Spring realises that the project is a con and exposes the killer – a flamboyant Swiss industrialist – via a satellite link during a shareholder's meeting.

Notes: Cancelled due to industrial action at the BBC, this episode was intended as the penultimate Star Cops story set between Other People's Secrets and Little Green Men and Other Martians. Although it had reached rehearsal stage by the time it was cancelled, the cast list for this episode remains unknown. Andy Secombe has said that he was to have reprised his character from the first episode An Instinct for Murder in this episode.

On to the final episode.....

LITTLE GREEN MEN AND OTHER MARTIANS

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/little-green-men-and-other-martians-episode-9.3546/


Back to the previous episode....

OTHER PEOPLE'S SECRETS

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/other-peoples-secrets-episode-8.3534/

 

[Doctor Omega]

It occurred to me that we would be missing a trick if we did not, at least briefly "look" at this episode that would have been the original ninth show.

An Agatha Christie murder mystery in space seems an obvious story to do and had been recently done by DOCTOR WHO with the TERROR OF THE VERVOIDS.

With Phillip Martin writing it, it should have been well scripted at least. The choice of director would have been a crucial factor too in it's quality.

In an interview on the dvd set he discusses this story.

Such a shame that STAR COPS was not allowed to at least finish it's run properly.

 

[michaellevenson]

The story outline doesn't look very appealing to be honest.
If one had to go then we're probably lucky it was this one.
One for Big Finish perhaps.