original score was composed for this episode by Vic Elms and music editor Alan Willis. Against expectations, Elms (who was producer Sylvia Anderson's son-in-law) thought he could improvise a score with the musicians the day of recording, as he could neither read nor write music. To avoid a walkout, Willis stepped in, hurriedly set some of Elms's themes down on paper, and conducted the musicians himself. Barry Gray wanted the music to be in the style of Maurice Ravel; Elms and Willis's final product is more reminiscent of the rock idioms of the day of the bands Deep Purple, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes. A track from the Thunderbirds episode The Mighty Atom can also be heard in the episode. Production Notes The original concept for this episode, involving UFOs and alien abduction, was one of ten episodes outlines devised for the writers' guide prior to production of "Breakaway". Whether this original concept was conceived by script editor Edward di Lorenzo or whether he adapted the idea is unclear. The ideas presented in the production bear striking resemblances to di Lorenzo's script writing for Mel Welles' Lady Frankenstein, a 1972 attempt to update the Frankenstein myth by adding issues related to gender, ecology and power/knowledge. (Many themes from this movie were reworked into "Ring Around The Moon" and his subsequent stories for the series "Missing Link" and "Alpha Child".) In the original script, the planet name was Uralt (German for 'ancient'), not Triton. As the theme of the episode is the foundation of science and whether the human condition can be understood from the point of rationality alone, it seems somewhat unclear why they changed from Uralt to Triton. In early drafts, Chief Engineer Smith (or Smitty, as introduced in "Black Sun") is a minor character. He does not appear in the final shooting script, although there is a reference to a Chief Engineer Anderson, which may be an internal joke referring to Gerry Anderson's obsession with technical issues. In general, the story seems to be about the relationship between power and knowledge, and, to a large extent, appears to be a visualization of some of Michel Foucault's main writings. The story has a strong visual style with vivid colour and abstract light effects. Some have compared the visual style to the German Expressionist cinema, others have found parallels in the French and Eastern European Theatre of the Absurd.