Andromeda: Does It Get Better?

[WayneLigon]

I'd seen Andromeda (AKA Gene Roddenbery's Andromeda) around but I'd never watched even one episode. So I rented the first disc. The pilot episodes were pretty good, with only one real science hiccup I couldn't quite swallow but I let it go: it's a fun ride and I can give almost anything a pass if I'm having fun. Not too bad at all. I didn't think I'd really enjoy seeing Sorbo in anything, but he was pretty good as the captain. The other cerw members are nice as well. They seem to mesh well.

Then... then we get to Episode Three (each disc has just three episodes, also something that irks me). For those of you who don't know. the premise of Andromeda is that there was this big - really tremendously big - organization called the Confederation that met it's end while the Andromeda was caught in the time dilation effect of a black hole. Fished out, the captain discovers they were in the effect for 300 years while only a second passed for them. The Confederation is dead and gone for 300 years. He decides to recreate it, all by himself, with the aid of the Andromeda which, thanks to the general backsliding of civilization, is like 200 years ahead of everything else in the sky. Got that?


So we get to episode three. They go to this space station that the captain knows was around in his time, and hey, it's still there. I can buy that; things have been messed up for a long time. Space is big and records get lost.

Hoping to find some mothballed supplies and such, they dock. They are met by a station full of kids who don't get older than about 20 before they die from genetic damage caused by a reactor leak they can't fix. They have an entire civilization based on corrupted passages of High Guard procedure manuals that they've turned into a religion and cute misinterpretations of said texts ('frequency swiitching' becomes 'freak witches' or something like that). Didn't we see this before? Oh, yeah, it was called 'Miri' way back in ST: TOS, as well as being a standard cliche of every single 70's after-the-crash episode of any genre show. Jesus Christ, Majel, didn't you have anything better to do than approve revisions of 40-year-old scripts?

I mean, I don't even mind seeing some cliches, but.. man. This is an ancient one and just possibly one of the stupidest ones.

Before I go any further, does Andromeda get any better or does it stay stuck rehashing the same things as every show before it?

 

[jtone]

Actually, it gets worse. In the next season, they abandon the plot so that the Dylan can do his own imitation of Kirk. Continuity within the series is dropped. Don't waste your time.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Nope, it is down hill.

 

[WayneLigon]

I looked at an episode guide. Episode Six: time travel back to just before the beginning of the war that destroyed the Commonwealth. OK, I'm done.

 

[takyris]

Well, it depends on what you're looking for. I don't think that hard science fiction was ever one of the advertised benefits of the show. And any cliche can still be good if done correctly. (Farscape turned several cliches on their heads simply by having Chrichton well aware of the cliche and pissed off about it.)

That said, Andromeda never grew on me. It always struck me as pretentious but not actually good enough to handle its level of pretention. It's okay to be stuck-up and high-falootin' with your premise and way into taking yourself seriously, provided you can execute. While it seemed to get even worse once Sorbo was put in charge (or once he got the writers who defined the original vision of the show kicked out), it wasn't great to begin with.

I think it gets points for campy, so if you're into campy, go for it. But it never got points for much else on my end.

 

[Aeson]

Its just like any of Firework's productions. Not Good. I don't blame Sorbo for everything wrong but I do blame the production company for most of it.

If you like Xena and Hercules you might like it.

 

[mojo1701]

First Two and a half seasons were good.

After that, it DID go downhill after RHW left and exhausted all his ideas.

 

[WayneLigon]

Well, it depends on what you're looking for. I don't think that hard science fiction was ever one of the advertised benefits of the show. And any cliche can still be good if done correctly. (Farscape turned several cliches on their heads simply by having Chrichton well aware of the cliche and pissed off about it.)

Oh, I agree on both points. I certainly don't go into any SF show expecting a huge load of pure science. I was talking about the 'bomb the black hole with enough firepower to destroy 40 suns and it'll temporarily become a white hole' trick they used; that took some skin with it when it went down but I swallowed it. It certainly wasn't a deal breaker by any means.

 

[Mad Hatter]

It goes downhill rapidly. The sacrificed good character in Rev Bem, Tyr, and Beka just so that Dylan gets more airtime because he happens to be an executive producer. I think around season 3 the most productive members of the writing staff left the show because Sorbo was exerting undue pressure for them to write how he wanted them to write. The storylines just got painfully bad.

 

[Staffan]

It goes downhill rapidly. The sacrificed good character in Rev Bem, Tyr, and Beka just so that Dylan gets more airtime because he happens to be an executive producer. I think around season 3 the most productive members of the writing staff left the show because Sorbo was exerting undue pressure for them to write how he wanted them to write. The storylines just got painfully bad.

AFAIK, the actor playing Rev Bem quit because he got allergic to the makeup, before Sorbo became the Evil Overlord of Andromeda.

But personally, I'd say that the first two seasons are OK - not B5-level or SG-1-level quality, but OK. From what I hear, it's downhill after that.