A Unified World

[chrisbishop]

Sorry for the misunderstanding - but by reading your post, I thought you mean that Mars was at this distance...

[Marion]

Well, of course, in the comics and in several other Anderson related media (my old 1989 calendar for one!) Mars is already colonized by Earthmen. They have a captial city - Kahra - and presumably have been there for some time. I feel sure Captain Scarlet goes there in a comic story to save Kahra from the Mysterons, who - you'd think - if they wanted to get a first strike in quickly , would have blown Kahra to smithereens immediately after they captured Black...

That explains the Zero X programme -albeit not that well in chronological terms - but poses the question: how could Black be commanding the FIRST exploration mission to Mars?
Incidently - I know Fireball XL5 is often thought to be incompatible with the CS universe - but don't Scarlet, Blue and Green go to the moon in a Fireball rocket and Black was a commander in the space service, wasn't he?
You don't think that the solution might be that we were never intended to take this seriously - or that each Anderson series/production was created in isolation?

[Clya Brown]

I wouldn't have thought that Black's expedition was actually the very first to Mars. It wouldn't have made sense for the World Government to assemble a Zero-X mission just to investigate some radio anomolies - much more likely that Black's mission was just one of the first, whereas the mission catalogued in "Thunderbirds Are Go!" would probably have been the very first. The hardware and crew were already assembled, and the discovery of the radio signals probably changed the mission's objectives at the last minute.

Fireball is a problem - both in terms of the original TV series and the subsequent adventures in TV21 - since in both they go gallivanting off to planets that we know don't exist within the Solar System, and therefore can't realistically be any closer than the nearest star to us (i.e. four light years away), as mentioned above. So either Fireball XL5 takes place in the future of Scarlet's era, or it exists in a parallel universe*. Having said that, TV21 recorded a multi-story crossover between Fireball, Stingray and Lady Penelope in its early days, and the first Captain Scarlet story in TV21 included components from Stingray and Fireball. I think these tales ought to be regarded as apocryphal**. Also, I can't see how a colonized Mars can be squared with the Scarlet canon. As you say, it would have almost certainly been the Mysterons' first target - and probably effectively cut off from Earth as soon as the War of Nerves started. No... that's also either in the future or part of a parallel universe - maybe the same one that includes Fireball.

You know, the more I think about it, the more realistic that scenario of mine about the true nature of Black's mission becomes. As you said yourself earlier, Spectrum is potentially a tool for oppression: it only retains its heroic status if the World President is a good guy. But suppose the World President is not a good guy. Suppose Spectrum was actually created to protect and conceal the darker sides of World Government policy, as hatched behind closed doors in Unity/Futura, from public scrutiny. Wouldn't that make one of its operatives the natural choice to be the fall guy for any skullduggery?

[* A theory about which I've a few ideas of my own, but you'll have to wait for that one...]

[** That's tabloid journalism for you. You can't believe a word you read these days.]

[Marion]

I'm with you on that, Doc. I am sure that - if they wanted to - the World Government, or even a World President and his ruling cabal, could organise and use a powerful quasi-military force to perform whatever skullduggery they had in mind.
There are viable colonies on the moon already in CS's universe, so the next logical step is to move out from there to the other solar planets - for colonisation or exploitation.
Spectrum - with its police powers on earth and in space is ideally suited to act as 'enforcers' for whatever conditions the WP wants to impose on the new colonies.
How they would get the co-operation of the present officers with such tactics is a problem. All the biographies state that the elite officers are pure as driven snow - except Magenta and he's reformed - and their backgrounds don't lend themselves to the theory that they'd want to be part of a repressive organisation.
Maybe - as I said elsewhere - the elite, colourful and highly visible as they are, were intended as a distraction - allowing less colourful and less scrupulous men to do the dirty work?
When the Mysterons didn't lie down and die as expected - the elite officers suddenly became far more important as real defenders of the earth and its people from an enemy the WP had vastly under estimated?