The Fantastic Journey – The Bermuda Triangle’s best package holiday? (video)

Before Lost took us to a mysterious island and then lost the plot entirely, and long before Sliders decided that every alternate universe looked suspiciously like Vancouver, there was The Fantastic Journey—a 1977 slice of prime sci-fi cheese, lovingly grilled by NBC until it was lightly cancelled after just ten episodes.

The premise? A group of well-meaning Americans charter a boat into the Bermuda Triangle—presumably having never read a single newspaper article about how that tends to go. Cue a glowing green cloud (never a good sign), disembodied ship bells (even worse), and a one-way ticket to what appears to be the biggest cosmic recycling bin in the multiverse. Welcome to the Island of Time Zones™—where you can go from ancient Atlantis to a 1970s Los Angeles hotel to a volcanic death cult in under 45 minutes.

Our stranded crew is an oddball collection of sci-fi tropes with fabulous hair: there’s Varian, a 23rd-century healer who carries around a mystical tuning fork that can apparently do everything except get them home. He’s part Spock, part pan-flute album cover. Then there’s young Scott Jordan, token teen, who somehow knows everything about history and nothing about common sense. Dr. Fred Walters brings the hot-headed 1970s sass, while Liana—a psychic cat-whispering Atlantean-alien hybrid with suspiciously Californian blonde waves—brings the glam. Her tuxedo cat, Sil-El, is frankly the only one with consistent character development. Then we have Roddy McDowall’s Jonathan Willoway, a black-clad rogue scientist from the 1960s who is clearly just waiting to betray everyone but then doesn’t, because he’s Roddy McDowall and he’s having far too much fun.

Each episode tossed our gang into a new “Time Zone”, which basically means a different patch of Southern California with some backstory tacked on. One week they’re battling rogue androids in an art deco hotel, the next they’re trapped in a funhouse run by a Greek sorcerer with boundary issues. Joan Collins turns up in one episode and promptly leads a feminist uprising, as one does. There’s even an episode where Varian falls in love with a cultist and nearly sacrifices himself to a volcano god. Because romance.

The network, in its infinite wisdom, decided to shuffle the show around the schedule more times than Doctor Who in a regeneration crisis. Eventually, they just gave up entirely—leaving Evoland, the supposed utopian exit door, forever out of reach. Which is probably just as well. Given the series’ increasingly bonkers plotlines, Evoland would’ve turned out to be a Holiday Inn run by sentient plants or a mime colony in space.

In hindsight, The Fantastic Journey was the perfect encapsulation of 1970s genre telly: wildly ambitious, frequently incoherent, and held together with tinfoil, stock footage, and Roddy McDowall’s eyebrows. It wanted to be Star Trek meets The Twilight Zone with a dash of Chariots of the Gods. What it actually delivered was Gilligan’s Island with time portals and metaphysical angst.

Here at SFcrowsnest, we maintain that The Fantastic Journey deserves cult status—not for what it achieved, but for how gloriously, unapologetically weird it was. It didn’t just jump the shark. It quantum-leaped past it into another time zone and tried to reason with it using a Sonic Energizer.

Now that is television.