A major catastrophe has occurred...' Having detected an alien distress signal, the Main Mission staff listens to the sombre appeal.
The voice of the alien commander tells how large areas of his ship are devastated, with thousands dead and hundreds sick and dying.
While John Koenig marvels that each deck measures one hundred square miles, the instruments register life signs.
The Commander opts to mount a humanitarian mission, selecting personnel to assess the medical, scientific and material needs of the aliens.
Hoping to encounter the ship's inhabitants, Koenig sets off with Victor Bergman down one corridor, sending Paul Morrow and Alan Carter into the other.
The nature of the mutes' fear becomes apparent when a brutish man springs from around the corner and viciously clubs Lowry unconscious.
Up ahead, a tribe of savages drag Helena, Lowry and the female mute to their camp, a settlement on the edge of a vast, overgrown arboretum.
These Darians resemble futuristic cave-people—filthy, with unkempt hair and rotten teeth, wearing garments of homespun mixed with synthetic fabrics and adorned with accessories fashioned from technological items.
In another area of the ship, Koenig awakens in a tastefully appointed rest chamber to find himself under the scrutiny of a strikingly beautiful woman.
A switch is ritualistically thrown and the chamber floods with blinding light; to the Alphans' horror, the mute's body evaporates.
Lowry is selected next and, during the examination, is declared a mutant when the priest discovers a joint of his left ring finger is missing.
Leading them along a mile-long gantry suspended above massive mechanical structures, Neman drolly demonstrates the vastness of this ship and the absurdity of Koenig's demand.
He informs them the Daria is a generation ship, preserving the life and skills of the Darian race after the destruction of their home planet—à la Earth's own Noah's Ark.
A study of their food production system shows no inventory of raw materials on the ship—yet the recycling plants are stocked with a steady supply of all the essential elements.
When their own resources were exhausted, they discovered that descendants of the original survivors existed in the radioactive 'wilderness'—savage, degenerate creatures wiped clean of all civilised behaviour.
Neman and Kara reveal their sacred cause: a gene bank containing genetic material preserved and protected before radiation damaged their people.
Frightened, she leads them to a room where they encounter the ultimate Darian horror—the gutted bodies of those Survivors recently offered to the god Neman.
In addition to the regular Barry Gray score (drawn primarily from "Another Time, Another Place"), the 'space horror music' composed by Vic Elms and Alan Willis for "Ring Around the Moon" is heard during scenes portraying the Survivors' acts of violence.
Robert Farnon's 'Experiment In Space—Vega' makes an appearance, as do excerpts from previous Joe 90 and Stingray scores, composed by Barry Gray.
[4] This story, Johnny Byrne's favourite of his contributions to the series, was based on real-life events surrounding the 1972 plane-crash of an Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes Mountains.
After ten weeks, sixteen survivors (out of forty-five passengers) were rescued; shortly after, the truth came out they had resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.
The fact that, after 'a million years of civilisation', the Darians could commit technological cannibalism formed the episode's primary theme.
This tale was combined with a spin on racial purity (for 'Darians' read 'Aryans') and placed in similar circumstances as author Brian Aldiss' novel Non-Stop, involving two disparate cultures existing on a generation ship.
A prolific actress, she had appeared in dozens of films and television programmes produced on both sides of the Atlantic before taking the role of the Darian aristocrat, Kara.
In 1981, she would assume the defining role of her career: the scheming, flamboyant man-eater Alexis Carrington in the American prime-time television drama Dynasty.
The Survivors' settlement area was revamped from the expansive Gwent interiors constructed for the previous episode, "The Infernal Machine".
Two actresses playing background Darians, Linda Hooks and Jenny Cresswell, would make subsequent appearances in the series: Hooks (Miss International of 1972)[6] would be cast in the remounted scenes of "The Last Enemy" as a member of Dione's glamorous crew; Cresswell (Miss Anglia of 1969)[7] would appear throughout the second series as a background extra.