Martin Landau

The tape still matters more than the stunt. An assignment arrives, a team is selected, the hour becomes a machine with human parts. Landau’s Rollin is the face-changer in that machine — latex, voice, and the weekly argument that a plan can be drama. The Landau/Bain stretch through season three is the disguise era the pack still recommends sampling first. Gossip will say money and marriage. The later seasons say the machine continued.

s01e01 is the briefing grammar in one night: tape, team, method. The franchise’s true pilot even after the movies rewrote the altitude. CBS, 1966–1973, seven seasons of team craft as drama. Cold War procedural as team sport needed a specialist who could vanish into a room. Landau vanished on purpose, then made you watch the vanishing. Spy-fi craft, not franchise cameo.

s02e15 treats disguise as acting theory — the camera treating a face like a forged document. s02e21 puts the machine in a closed community: procedural dread without a speech about dread. Watch the briefings that self-destruct and the hours where the mask is the plot. The films sold spectacle; the series sold method, still the rarer on-screen trick.

Space: 1999 (ITV / syndicated, 1975–1977) recasts him as Cmdr. John Koenig — Moonbase Alpha blown from Earth orbit, Landau and Bain in tailored space chic, Gerry Anderson’s live-action swing. s01e01 is Breakaway; s01e08 is the fandom hour that still circulates; s01e10 is physics-as-doom. TV Flash files the IMF years as the original machine, then the moon as gloomy metaphysics in uniform. Watch the tape first. Then the void.