Andromeda’s Kevin Sorbo speaks candidly about his vision for the show.

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Between his duties as Andromeda’s lead actor, executive producer and spokesman for the ‘Crimson Hope’ Adult Chicken Pox foundation, Kevin Sorbo might be said to be shouldering a truly ‘Herculean’ burden, but he still took time out of his busy schedule to speak with us about Andromeda’s third season.

“There have been a lot of rumors floating around about the things that have been happening at the show but I just want to clear them up and say that our series is in good hands.” Kevin Sorbo chuckled. “For a while Andromeda was dark and confusing like the universe on the series but then I and one of the producers of SeaQuest came to restore the light of clarity and make it a happier and brighter place. After all if viewers trust me to command this huge starship on television, they should have no trouble with me commanding the TV series itself.”

Sorbo is also dedicated to bringing a lighter touch of comedy to the once dark and melodramatic SciFi series.

“For too much of my career people have taken me seriously with heavily dramatic roles like Hercules and now I want people to laugh at me.” The actor declaimed. “Andromeda is serious a lot of the time but there’s no reason that it can’t be a joke too. For instance in an upcoming episode instead of shooting at aliens, we’re going to throw pies at them because Harper discovers that the aliens are fatally allergic to cherry pie. In this way we can do comedy without undermining the credibility of the series itself.”

And Kevin Sorbo has increasingly ambitious plans for Andromeda to help the series expand its audience in its third season around the world.

“The thing that holds back a lot of North American shows in the international market is that they’re in English and people in other countries speak a whole bunch of foreign languages instead. So what we need to do to improve our worldwide share is reduce the amount of English talking on the show in favor of more non-verbal communication.” Sorbo explained. “Scientists say that up to 95 percent of communications are non-verbal like grunting, hand gestures and facial tics and I plan to make sure that at least half of Andromeda’s dialogue from now on will also be non-verbal so that Andromeda will translate better to the worldwide market without any dialogue getting in the way.”

The actor and Andromeda producer is also talking freely about the changes that will be made to his charachter and to the series premise in general.

“Last season we had this whole Commonwealth storyline and nobody except our old showrunner knew what that was about, so now we’re just going to have fun. We’re going to dump the uniforms. From now on everyone will just loosen up and walk around in their underwear, except for like ceremonial occasions when my charachter might decide to put on a shirt or maybe not because he’s a renegade now and doesn’t wear shirts anymore.” Sorbo said. “He’s given up on this whole Commonwhatever thing and now he just goes around to different planets helping people who are in trouble. Like Jesus. Also he discovers that he has magic powers because he’s actually the son of a God. But more like Jesus than Hercules. Some people might say that’s blasphemous but I say that it’s exactly what this show needs to appeal to a wider audience. The Bible after all is the best selling book of all time and we need to tune into that demographic.”

Sorbo nevertheless remains very concerned about what the fans think.

“We’ve had some critical feedback from the fans about some of the changes made to the show and we listened and we’re going to address the problem by giving the SciFi crowd lots more exploding ships and me gunning down the same three aliens over and over again in slow motion.” Kevin Sorbo said. “But people need to understand that Andromeda as it is today was not the show that was pitched to me when I agreed to come on board. That was a series premise about a half-man half-cyborg Santa Claus who travels through time on a starship crewed by transvestite mutants while battling evil flying monkeys from the future who want to eat up all the candy in the universe. Or maybe that wasn’t actually the series premise but a crazy dream I had when I got bored and fell asleep while they were pitching me the actual series premise. Either way I’m determined to make Andromeda live up to that standard and fire anyone who stands in my way.”

The noted thespian and former toilet paper pitchman is also quite mindfull of the Herculean task of living up to Gene Roddenberry’s legacy.

“Gene Roddenberry was a great man. He invented the atom bomb, the telephone and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. And though some cynics might disagree with me, I think Andromeda was the greatest of his inventions because the telephone and the atom bomb have killed millions, but Andromeda has to my knowledge only killed three people. ”

“Gene Roddenberry was a dreamer. He dreamed of a different kind of world. A world where telephones armed with atom bombs would force people to watch episodes of Andromeda thus ensuring global unity. And we want to keep that dream alive and when our latest episode with our crew communicating with each other through grunts, facial tics and emphatic gestures while throwing pies at invading aliens arrives in Malaysia or Senegal, in some small way we’ll be keeping that dream alive. And I’m happy to know I’ll be doing my part.”

Summary: Children of the Corn meets an Afterschool special.

After Andromeda’s pilot aired over two weeks, Lightning is Andromeda’s first-aired plot episode. Now that the pilot has introduced the characters and set up the basic premise, the first plot episode shows us what happens now that the show’s premise is in place and the stories can begin. The result, though, is a mixed bag more than anything else. While the special effects have clearly improved and the Andromeda chase scenes work pretty well, the writing still needs some fine tuning to put it mildly. While a definite improvement in comparison to the clunky writing of Andromeda’s pilot, Lightning is still weighed down by a predictable plot and two dimensional characters, and while the gratitious nudity may cater to the young adult demographic that Harper and Trance were put on the show to serve, it doesn’t exactly help serve Andromeda’s claim that it’s something more than Hercules in Space.

As in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, Hunt and Co. arrive on a Commonwealth space station populated by children none of whom survive to over the age of 20 and whose fragmented knowledge has turned into crude religious rituals and lethal violence. Hunt and Co. then spend the episodes doing plenty of foolish things and reciting high minded rhetoric set to stirring music until Andromeda — as in the pilot — in a Deux Ex moment saves their hides. The episode is meant to be a sketch of how uncertain and troubled Hunt is (though why we have yet another episode focusing on how troubled Hunt is, after we just got through with a two hour pilot dealing with how troubled Hunt is) but ultimately turns into a bumbling Keystone Kops routine dealing with how incompetent Hunt is and how incapable his crew is of dealing with any emergency; Trance brightly welcoming the invaders into Andromeda by opening the airlock door doesn’t even stand out that much.

It’s never a good sign when your crew is outsmarted by Ferengi or children. It’s a worse sign when your crew is outsmarted by children who are seconds away from killing you if not for the fact that out of nowhere your ship’s artificial inteligence saves the day by walking around the ship naked and performing a task that she should have been able to perform just as easily as an A.I. Though the children are supposedly backwards and ignorant and incapable of dealing with their medical problems, they have no problem outwitting Hunt (admittedly not a very tough task) and dealing with his neurological probes. Though they can’t open a single airlock bay door, they have no trouble taking over Andromeda itself. And how does Hunt convince them that he’s right? Well, it’s not quite clear but when he’s beaten them, they all seem to have come around to his point of view.

The key problem with Lightning is that its defined by an idiotic plot, namely a plot that, to work, requires the major characters to behave like fools. Though clearly forewarned, Hunt chooses to go with very little protection directly into an ambush. Once ambushed he encounters a colony of children who have made themselves into efficent killing machines and proceeds to patronize them, walk half-heartedly through the rituals that they take with deadly seriousness and leads them into an area of the station protected with a top level access security code. His best response to 300 years of savage life and death struggle and death in teenage years is to introduce them to Trance and rattle off cliches about getting along. Though the children are in a state of constant war, Hunt attempts to resolve the problem by repeating the word “peace” over and over again as if that in and of itself was a solution.

In fact, throughout the entire episode Hunt seems to be under the confused impression that the children’s main problem consists in getting along well with aliens, rather than in being hunted to the point that they’ve turned into savages and forced to be part of a horrifying life and death struggle. This means that his afterschool solution of having them learn to get along better with aliens won’t solve their problems of being attacked by Magog and Nietzscehan slavers, nor will getting ready to be part of a Commonwealth that doesn’t actually exist except in Hunt’s imagination. So by the point of Hunt’s departure, their key problem hasn’t changed except that Hunt has managed to rob them of the discpline and strength that had actually kept them alive up until this point.

In point of fact, the entire crisis that dominates the episode is silly and pointless. Using the Nova bombs may be extreme, but it’s certainly not genocide. Genocide would be the extermination of the entire Magog race. The extermination of the Magog who have captured one human star system and colonized it is roughly equivalent to dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Certainly it’s not a wonderful thing to do but it is an act of self-defense against genocidal invanders and clearly the Commonwealth saw the Nova bombs as valid tactical weapons otherwise they wouldn’t have equipped quite so many ships with them. Indeed if there was any ambiguity in Andromeda being equipped with Nova bombs, the tactical purpose of the nova bomb fighters is pretty clear: to be the equivalent of the first strike nuclear weapons of the Cold War… in other words, they were designed to be used exactly as the children intended to use them. And unlike Hunt or the Commonwealth, the children lack any mid-range defense options. It’s either be hunted on the station or fight back with the Nova bombs. There’s no other option in between.

In fact if Hunt had used the Nova bombs against the Nietzchean strike force when he had the chance, the Commonwealth that he so desperately dreams of restoring might still be here. Then paired with the pilot, this shoves Hunt in the Janewayish situation of not having taken the sane course in the pilot and then going on to pretend that her stupidity was actually an act of great moral sacrifice. Except of course that Janeway’s stupidity only cost her crew 7 years of their lives while Hunt’s stupidity wiped out the Commonwealth and several thousand times the number of insurgents who would have been killed by the Nova bombs to begin with. But then again having a Captain do the sane and sensible thing would have eliminated both the premises of Voyager and Andromeda, and we certainly can’t have that.

Worse, throughout the episode Hunt displays the same closemindedness and hysterical frenzy as Janeway when people don’t act the way she thinks they should and aren’t convinced by a display of her canned rhetoric. When the children who have been murdered and hunted by Magog for centuries now respond to the sight of a Magog with a completely understable response, Hunt washes his hands of them and goes back to his ship to brood about how tough his sacred mission is. Definite shades of Janeway browbeating anyone who crosses her path and then looking out at the stars and pondering how difficult the task of getting her crew home is while wearing that martyred expression which proclaims that no one could possibly understand how heavy her burden is. But worst of all, his conversation with Rev Bem brings up the suggestion that he really is a messiah or some sort of chosen one must come a shriek of horror to anyone who’s been watching Science Fiction movies and shows for the last decade. After the Matrix and two of the biggest dueling SF series of the late 90’s both featuring a Captain who’s “the chosen one”, you’d think that the writers could have gone a somewhat more original way than another Christ figure. Still at least of Brooks, Sheridan, and Reeves… Sorbo actually looks the part, all he needs is a goatee and a long flowing robe.

And all this episode needed was an actual villain, writing that would have shown the crew and Hunt as halfway competent and a moral dillema displaying some actual understanding of moral issues.

Summary: Andromeda battles a Big Red Dot.

As the obligatory crew shakedown episode, D Minus Zero gets the basic framework of a potentially good episode right, just not the content. Considering prior Andromeda episodes that featured the starship being taken over by kids and Dylan Does Die Hard, DMZ is a definite improvement in the sense that it actually has some idea of a how a TV drama episode should work.

As with last week’s episode, this week’s begins with Hunt looking for High Guard memorabilia and wandering into another obvious trap. He encounters an unknown vessel portrayed through 98 percent of the episode as a blinking red dot and spends the episode trying to fight it. With the show’s end we get a brief glimpse of the vessel before it blows itself up but no idea who its occupants are or what the battle that occupied the whole episode was about.

The Das Boot battle sequences though really serves as background material to the crew crisis shakedown in which Hunt gets to know his crew and they go through some stormy weather together. This is a good enough idea for an episode but if you’re going to neglect the battle sequences in exchange for character development, there should actually be some character development and the character moments should be pretty dark and riveting. DMZ though offers neither.

There are a few tense moments here; notably, when Beka and Hunt finally do come to a head but there’s not much in the way of character development here, so little in fact that last week’s Fateful Lightning episode had more in Harper’s revelation about his past and more spirited dialog from the regulars. DMZ mostly features the regulars saying exactly the things we expect them to say and we can see the dialog and even the basketball quips coming a mile away. It’s like a piece of TNG fanfic in which an enemy ship approaches and Worf declares that we should treat it as hostile, Troi says she senses nothing from the ship, etc… so that rather tha n offering character development or even interesting dialog, DMZ churns out characters predictably going about the routines established for them.

So Tyr is pissed at Hunt’s lack of agressiveness, Beka isn’t sure she trusts Hunt, Harper fixes things and Rev Bem and Trance say mysterious unknowable things. It’s not a good thing when your characters and their material is completely predictable 3 or 4 years into the show, it’s definetly not a good thing when the material is completely predictable 3 or 4 episodes into the show. In fact if anything, DMZ felt like a Season 1 Voyager episode. Janeway wants to deal with the crisis the Starfleet way around Federation ideals, Chakotay argues that Starfleet is nowhere around and they should take the practical route, meanwhile the crews are being integrated. And here Hunt wants to deal with the crisis the High Guard way around Commonwealth ideals, Tyr argues that the High Guard is long gone and they should take the practical route, and meanwhile the crews are being integrated. Really, if I wanted to watch Voyager reruns, my local UPN affiliate’s advertisements in the local paper declare that they offer five flights a week.

As a combat episode, DMZ certainly does work better than either the pilot or Fateful Lightning mainly because it features the innovation of featuring actual combat conducted by Hunt using strategy in a somewhat comprehensible way. Admittedly, it also features the Star Trek mode of combat, conveyed through consoles blowing up into sparks and people teetering around the bridge and plenty o’ technobabble but an improvement is an improvement. The sub warfare gimmick of showing neither the enemy ship nor the crew might have worked if there had been really gripping and suspenseful things happening on the ship, if the battle hadn’t been represented by a graphic display that made me feel as if I was watching Tron all over again and finally if there had been some actual purpose to the whole thing.

The last one is somewhat problematic as Hunt sets out to engage and battle the enemy ship for no particularly concievable reason. He’s not protecting any territory here, the medical ship’s log doesn’t seem that important as salvage or it might have been mentioned at the end of the episode and gathering intel on the enemy when the enemy has the advantage and you’re not defending or protecting anything except for your ship, is more than a little silly. Since the identity of the enemy is unknown and its capabilities are superior to Andromeda while Andromeda can’t resupply and has no backup, there is no rational purpose behind the battle except more incompetence from Hunt.

Finally on the plausibility front. People have complained about Voyager’s ability to repair battle damage alone and isolated in the Delta Quadrant. That’s problematic but Andromeda features one man repairing the damage on a much bigger starship singlehandedly. He may have some of the ship’s systems to help him but it’s still ridiculous. Andromeda had a staff of thousands and now one man using existing systems can do their job?

Next week: Third time out of four episodes, people board and try to take over Andromeda.

Summary: Andromeda does Event Horizon and produces a pretty decent episode. Dylan learns that a crew of incompetent buffoons is better than a crew of killer androids… who are trying to kill you.

The abandoned “haunted” starship is a SciFi staple that goes back to the romances of actual haunted ships and it’s a story idea that offers little room for innovation but then it’s not meant to be innovative. As such, Mathematics of Tears is probably Andromeda’s first good episode. Not good in the sense of being a classic or even looking all that impressive by the standards of other SF shows, but it’s the first demonstration that Andromeda can do an episode without tripping over its own feet every five minutes and actually produce something like quality SciFi.

Surprisingly, most of the strength of the episode comes not from the script which is somewhat unfocused but the strong direction and visuals of Mathematics of Tears. Considering how weak Andromeda has been in the visual and production areas, this is a real achievement and demonstrates that good direction can overcome some major flaws in script, acting and production design. Steadicam is a bit overused even by “scary” episode standards but the overall effect is a graceful and tense look that meshes well with the subject matter. And yet another surprise is that the self-proclaimed “number one action hour on television” finally managed to do a strong action sequence. Where before Andromeda’s fight scenes looked like outtakes from a Michael Dudikoff movie or just plain bizarre (an android that climbs up on ladder and jumps down on Hunt, Hunt getting into a shoving match with a guy in an ape suit), Mathematics actually manages a tense action packed sequence that involves over a dozen people and is still coherent and believable.

(Of course Tyr’s proclamation about enjoying Wagner is a bit unlikely since while Nietzsche was a disciple of Wagner as a younger man he, like anyone who isn’t completely tone deaf, rejected Wagner and the screeching cacophonies of his operas. Indeed Nietzsche’s final judgement on Wagner was that “Wagner is a disease. He has made music itself sick.” - The Case of Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche. But amusingly enough as a composer Wagner’s music is a nice enough way to score TV shows.)

Shot like a renegade DS9 episode suffused with golden light, Mathematics’ script makes great improvements by doing away with some of the constant problems that drag down the quality of Andromeda’s episodes. First of all for the second time in the post-rerun series of episodes, Trance is completely eliminated from the episode. Presumably the actress has other engagements but an explanation is provided and the explanation actually serves as the pivot of the episode by triggering Dylan’s dissatisfaction with his current crew. This is the kind of care and attention to detail that Andromeda has not really displayed until now and demonstrates that after horrific messes like Rose in the Ashes or Pears that were his Eyes, actual thought went into the writing of this episode.

Harper gets to stay but the amount of mugging he does for the camera is radically cut down to standard comic relief material, instead of a Neptune like state of affairs where Harper’s annoying comedy routines took away crucial time from the story and made it difficult to take the episode’s subject matter seriously. This is another sign of improvement suggesting that at least for this episode, Andromeda is committed to aiming for quality SciFi instead of trying to do their version of Cleopatra 2525.

Secondly Hunt’s self-righteous and condescending lectures are kept to a minimum and he’s actually personally involved in the story, instead of just walking around and lecturing the guest stars on how they can learn to be better people. By bringing in the issue of an A.I./Captain relationship and having the Pax’s AI see him as a substitute for her Captain, Mathematics involves Hunt in the story instead of having him prance around as an observer trying to tell other people how to live their lives. Hunt’s behavior in this episode is still foolish and his failure to delete the Pax’s AI which is trying to kill him dooms his mission to a failure but it’s a foolishness that reflects a human failing, rather than the noble act of a principled man which is how Andromeda usually tries to pass off Dylan’s stupidity.

Thirdly, RevBem is given a function of sorts and even takes command of the Andromeda while Dylan’s away. He actually exchanges some non-spiritual dialogue with Hunt and engages in mission related activity crucial to the plot. Considering that in the past few episodes he’s either been banished or relegated to silly spiritualist preaching, this is another improvement. Hopefully it’s one that leads to a greater function for RevBem on Andromeda and more screen time for the character.

The characters and plot do still have a long way to go. The Andromeda crew walk pretty foolishly into a trap, a trap into which Dylan incomprehensibly leads his second in command, his ship’s AI and his chief engineer leaving almost no one on Andromeda to defend it in case of attack. He completely disregard’s Harper’s warning about the Pax even though the rumor that many salvage teams had been lost while searching for the Pax should have rung some alarm bells. Pax’s entire crew go down to the planet which is a little bizarre. Even if the fighting required as many people as possible, there still should have been non-combat support personnel and some people out of a crew of thousands who wouldn’t have been much use in that kind of combat scenario. Certainly having the entire crew of a warship go down to fight on the planet while abandoning a starship capable of blasting the entire planet to bits is nothing short of bizarre. Apparently this is yet another demonstration that the Commonwealth ships were commanded by complete incompetents. Having Pax kill off the remaining on board crew would have made more sense.

Furthermore the Commonwealth apparently lacks the medical equipment that can distinguish between an android and a human being. This seems a bit odd. Apparently Andromeda can’t tell one from the other either. Neither can Harper despite the fact that he designs them himself. After the final link with Pax instead of now deleting the AI, Hunt decides to flee back to the Andromeda. It’s bad enough that even while the killer androids are on a rampage trying to break into his ship, Dylan decides to spend time interfacing with the AI to find out the details of her killing spree. Sentient software or no sentient software, an AI that blows up planets and is trying to kill you has to be stopped… fast. This is a decision, probably even Janeway could have made. Unsurprisingly though Dylan is as incompetent in this episode as ever and most of the time just stumbles from one revelation to the other, with the bulk of the discoveries coming from Andromeda herself. This obviously doesn’t put the Captain in a good light.

Furthermore, the actual premise of this episode attempts to justify Hunt’s incompetent crew of buffoons– whose idiotic behavior reminds Hunt of the fact that he should be shopping around for a good crew– by pointing out that the alternative crew he wanted turned out to be rampaging killer androids. Of course contrary to the ending of Andromeda, discovering that the ideal Andromeda crew consisted of rampaging killer androids doesn’t prove that Dylan’s crew is a good crew. Just that they’re preferable to killer androids who are trying to kill you. Indeed Dylan’s line about being happy with his current crew because “he can rely them” is nothing short of bizarre since the premise of the entire episode is that he can’t. Trance, Harper, Beka and Tyr go off and do whatever they like when they feel like it so that he indeed can’t rely on them. They’re just not a starship crew.

Beka defends them with a self-righteous speech about how tough life is in the future, but their exact transgressions prove life isn’t at all tough in the future. The crew aren’t fighting to stay alive, they’re entering surfing tournaments, going off sightseeing, looking for relatives and going to meditate at retreats. And they do these things on their own. That is not the way people behave in a dangerous universe in which they’re fighting to stay alive. This is the way people behave when they’re working at a job with a good natured boss who never enforces the rules. Hunt clearly needs a new crew and he needs more crew. He’s commanding a starship intended for a crew of thousands which has a handful of people running it. And it’s baffling as to why he hasn’t attempted to recruit crew from the worlds which have already joined the Commonwealth

Still, overall this is a good episode driven by strong visuals, an improved script and while many of Andromeda’s perennial faults remain, they also feature a certain amount of improvement. Let’s hope that improvement continues.

Summary: We learn the perils of Drivers Ed in the distant future. Andromeda does Caretaker, half the crew considers murdering Trance, Dylan broods for 300 years. William Blake and Robert Oppenheimer join the cast. Everything goes back exactly to the way it was before.

Dear Abby. Is it okay if I blow up evil enemy warships that are at war with us and coming to attack me? Signed: Captain Weenie.

Lightning’s Nova bomb kid squadron may have been a controversial moral issue, but in Angel Dark, Hunt manages to outdo himself by spending hours brooding over whether he should destroy enemy warships which are coming to kill and destroy Commonwealth High Guard starships, including potentially his own. Hunt didn’t seem to have any trouble firing on the 10,000 ships attacking him in the pilot. Now he spends hours in the dark with the thing from black lagoon pondering if blowing up 10,000 ships of an enemy force which started the war and which are coming to destroy the Commonwealth fleet and slaughter Commonwealth citizens is the right thing to do or not.

Now I’m not an expert at these things but if Hunt finds it morally repugnant and against his pacifist nature to defend the Commonwealth against enemy warships coming to kill them, boy has he gotten himself into the wrong line of work or what? And boy is he on the wrong mission now. If Hunt represents a fair sample of the High Guard officer, then it’s not real surprising that the Commonwealth fell. Maybe it’s just a case of only the rats surviving the sinking ship but then again his friend is very ready to desert the Commonwealth fleet with very little proof and when she’s attacked, her ship goes down without a fight. It seems the High Guard may have been plagued by a very definite lack of backbone and a sense of duty, much as Hunt is. This is common enough in collapsing civilizations, it just makes for poor characters and poor drama.

Trance, Unsafe at any Speed. “Turn right, no turn left. Oh no… it’s the Past!”

When an accident hurls Andromeda back 300 years in time to the point of a pivotal battle between the Commonwealth and the Nietzchians it seems as if Andromeda is trying to produce its own version of Trek’s beloved episode City on the Edge of Forever, but instead ends up with Voyager’s series pilot Caretaker in which Janeway neglects an obvious opportunity to return home on doubtful grounds in order to preserve the series premise. The one link Angel does maintain with City on the Edge of Forever is that it manages to produce an even more ridiculous gimmick for taking the crew back in time. Where City featured a rewrite that had McCoy accidentally injecting himself with a terrible drug and running into the Guardian of Forever, Angel has Andromeda thrown back in time because the crew put Trance at the controls of the Slipstream drive even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she ends up crashing the ship into the past.

This is after all the far distant post-apocalyptic future where life is so much harsher and nastier and so presumably, driver’s education on a Starship would be a lot harsher and nastier too. Still it would seem to any sane and drug free person that putting a neophyte who tends to forget to wear a helmet with her spacesuit at the controls of a massive starship and telling her to go through dangerous and risky procedures that normally only well trained pilots engage in, would be a bad idea in the insanely suicidal sense. Much as taking a nurse out of a hospital and putting her at the controls of an F-14 jet fighter in midair might possibly be predicted to have a negative outcome. Unfortunately, apparently with the fall of the Commonwealth not only have many lives and cultures been lost, so has the fabled 20th century art of simulations that might help teach people who do not know how to fly starships, to fly starships without actually putting them at the controls of a real starship in flight. Perhaps someday the Andromeda will go back in time to the golden age of the 20th century where they can learn of such wonders as seat belts, fuses, locks to prevent enemies from just walking onto your bridge and trying to kill you whenever they feel like it and simulation systems. Or if these are all unavailable, maybe some common sense, that tingling sensation in the back of your head that tells you it’s unsafe to put people who don’t know how to fly jet fighters or starships at the controls.

Time Travel for Dummies:

Still barring this piece of plot insanity that tops anything Voyager has been able to come up with in seven years of plot insanity (if Janeway ever puts Naomi in control of Voyager at warp speed, I’ll reconsider), Angel Dark gets off to a good start. By having Captain Hunt arrive too late to actually prevent the Nietzchian betrayal but at the moment of the final fall, Andromeda avoids a lot of plot problems and the complicated three way political situation between the Magog/Commonwealth/Nietzchians makes for a fairly interesting moral conflict for Dylan. Take on the Nietzchians and the Magog may gain even more power, take on the Commonwealth and you take part in the massacre of your own. Of course this is only a tough moral choice if you assume that these are the only two moral options available.

As Harper fairly accurately points out, the crew know the details of the next three hundred years of history and it’s a whole lot easier to rebuild the Commonwealth a year or two after it fell, rather than three hundred years after it fell. They don’t have to limit themselves to the either\or options of joining the battle, but could have left to go anywhere else and continue the work of rebuilding the Commonwealth from a much stronger foundation. Or explored ways of going further back into the past. The history database could provide information about enemy force dispositions, battles, tactical strengths, foundations, hidden motivations and the future plans of just about all the powers involved. Hunt’s argument that they’re from the future and don’t belong here is ridiculous.

Hunt isn’t from the future, he’s just been to the future, but exactly from this time and place and so is Andromeda itself. They got to the future by also traveling through time by a somewhat unusual method. The rest of the misfits aren’t from this time period but the obsession with safeguarding time is a little silly. It made sense for Kirk to protect his timeline in City because the alternative was ironically an Andromeda-like timeline. Meanwhile Dylan is fighting to protect a horrible post-apocalyptic world from being changed, because of some vague unproven theories and some mumbo jumbo about fate. It sure is lucky Wolfe didn’t write the script for Terminator 2 or it would have featured Ahrnuld working with T1000 to keep the nuclear apocalypse\robot genocide future on track and the end would have featured things remaining in the same nightmarish mess as they were in the beginning.

Tonight on Hunt’s Creek: Is the position of ship’s Janitor taken?

In Caretaker, Captain Janeway was given a choice between making sure the Caretaker’s array didn’t possibly fall into the wrong hands and possibly cause harm and stranding her crew 70,000 light years from home or taking any number of alternative possible options and chose to most irrational one, which would also serve as the basis for the series premise. In Angel Dark, Captain Hunt has to choose between trying to actually change history for the better in any of a large number of ways or stumble around the post-apocalyptic future and spending the next few years bumping into people who want to take over his ship week after week. Like Janeway he makes the most irrational choice and the one that would keep the series premise on track. The problem of course is that the series premise for both Voyager and Andromeda depended on a no way out clause and both shows made a mockery of that clause early on and tainted the validity of the entire situation. And while Janeway’s behavior was foolish, at least the act of sacrificing one ship to possibly protect several species has logical rationales, Hunt has no such protection.

So of course in order to avoid any rational examination of events, Andromeda falls back on mumbo jumbo about fate and destiny. Rather than simply make a decision Hunt spends hours brooding about fate and destiny. Like Janeway, Hunt seems to have forgotten that he isn’t a messiah or a superhuman deity but a officer in the service of a fleet and a government whose orders he is supposed to follow. When in doubt of orders there are regulations to follow and superiors or fellow officers that can be contacted. If he has information about a threat, he is bounded by orders to convey that information to his fellow officers. His own personal angst on the issue is irrelevant because as long as he considers himself a Captain in the service and exercises the privilege of command the use of Commonwealth and High Guard titles, privileges and equipment such as the Andromeda itself; he is bound to take actions only within the context of the wishes of the Commonwealth and the High Guard. Angel Dark meanwhile displays no interest in actually following orders, looking up regulations or submitting to the authority of the service. Instead Dylan closets himself with RevBem while they discuss Dylan finding God. As nice as this is for religious believers (and once again demonstrating that the Roddenberry name on the show’s title is worth as much as a Miami ballot), it would be nicer if Hunt brooded less and did his job more. If he held strategy sessions with his crew in an open forum to determine options, followed regulations, made rational decisions instead of sitting in the dark and stroking his disturbingly sun bleached face while pondering joining RevBem’s cult of the 80’s vampire movie Halloween mask.

Right now Hunt has brooded his way through episode after episode, stumbling into preventable disaster after preventable disaster and getting out by the skin of his teeth or by a sudden case of enemy stupidity. He’s shown very little indication that he was indeed part of a disciplined elite military force, instead he’s acted like an adolescent stuck in a teenage drama. He doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t how to get it and he doesn’t seem much interested in anybody’s input or in actually looking to High Guard regulations. He thinks that his angst is more important than everything else in the universe and the show expects us to think so too. Where even the worst Trek Captains like Janeway have taken a stab at doing the job and being in command, Hunt has spent the show so far in desperate need of Prozac and whatever other combination of medications will let him play a Starship Captain on TV. Pervasive indecision and the kind of manic depressive states Hunt has displayed are symptomatic of mental disorders, not strong leading man characters. He’s incapable of command and needs to find a job more appropriate to his condition. Andromeda currently has several thousand positions open, he should pick one and go with it.

Hey Kids! Want to learn how to Sabotage Andromeda? Send $3.95 to Annoying Idiot Plot, Box 787, Jeri Taylor Drv, Rick Berman City:

Meanwhile the painfully overused and ridiculous plot theme of “Everybody Sabotage Andromeda Now!” continues. Star Trek security was bad but even Voyager wasn’t sabotaged 6 out of 7 episodes. You’d think that after this happening week after week and with just last week’s episode demonstrating to Hunt that he can’t trust Tyr, there would be some sort of security measures in place. Instead the crew’s only protection against Tyr and Harper’s sabotage is the watchful eye of Trance who wrecked everybody in the past in the first place. Of course to heighten plot plausibility, within this episode Trance and Harper separately pull off two technological miracles apparently beyond the conception of the Commonwealth’s best and brightest. Harper comes up with a way to destroy the entire Nietzchian fleet that the Commonwealth itself has never thought of, yet he has trouble knocking out or restraining Trance. Trance manages to achieve time travel, which again appears to be something also beyond the ability of the mankind. Wesley and Kes save the day again.

Back at the bridge, Andromeda proclaims that she’s in tip top fighting shape. You have to wonder exactly how this was achieved. Magic? Crazy glue? A team of superinteligent chimps? Sure Harper may be a genius who can do anything with enough technobabble, but can he really do the job of a thousand men maintaining and repairing Andromeda using nothing but thin air and wisecracks. Because unlike Voyager, Andromeda apparently doesn’t need to look and trade for supplies.

Now all we have to do is go hide in the Nebula…:

And in its fearsome drive for quality Andromeda picks up another plot resolution we haven’t seen enough times on Trek. Igniting stellar gases so that they burn and explode thereby wrecking enemy ships. The irony is that Trek did this years and years ago and the special effects still looked better. Along the way they’ve also borrowed Trek’s forehead makeup division circa 1993. Admittedly it’s an improvement over the Bug Suit or the Night Cream but like all of Andromeda’s production values, it works best over a compact video monitor with shaky reception.

Tonight on Andromeda, When Literary References Attack!

Tonight William Blake’s most obvious quotation makes an appearance and the most obvious Robert Oppenheimer quotation. Now if only as much work had been done on the plot.

Next week on Andromeda: A plot you can never get tried of. People board and try to sabotage Andromeda again…but this time, they’re family.

Summary: The Andromeda season finale features the ship coming under attack by Magog as an accidentally revived personality backup program leads them on a repeat of the mission that got the last ship’s crew killed.

…Its Hour Come Round At Last is certainly impressive. Not so much for the script or acting but for the carnage. This script written by DS9 veteran and Andromeda creator Robert Wolfe is better than average for the series, defining and patching up crew relationships. But the real action is the, well… action. The Andromeda crew kill what looks like a few hundred Magog over forty minutes during which the Magog chase them around the ship like a pack of rabid hyenas and the issue isn’t resolved by some meaningless ploy or technobabble or speech by Dylan. Indeed it isn’t resolved at all.

Since Andromeda has a two year commitment and a drooping audience, its finale has been written as a cliffhanger with the usual crew in jeopardy and Captain out of commission bit. Attempting to duplicate TNG and Voyager’s use of the Borg in cliffhangers like Best of Both Worlds, which generated audience interest and suspense, Andromeda has brought out the Magog as its unstoppable insatiable enemy. The series has reserved them for an entire season (barring a few cameo appearances) and now introduces them as the horrific unstoppable enemy.

And there are similarities. The Magog are powerful, dangerous and keep on coming no matter what. They’re also unarmed and their strategy involves lots of screaming, leaping and clawing. Which is why the crew can kill hundreds of them without great difficulty. Basically they’re B Movie monsters with their own spaceships. It’s hard to see why they would be a threat to anyone. From Roman times, battle has favored the prepared army fighting in a coordinated and disciplined manner, utilizing technology. British colonialism demonstrated quite comprehensively that screaming and leaping is no match for superior firepower and sound strategy. The Magog may be a problem when you only have a handful of crew and no control of your ship, but any well disciplined crew and sound defense system should hold them off easily. On a planet, killing an unarmed attack force, no matter how large, is a turkey shoot.

But the Magog are still intimidating and unpleasant and once they’ve landed a few thousand warriors on the ship whose internal defenses are non-functional, they actually can pose a threat. It would help though if the threat was not once again the product of the Andromeda crew’s incompetence and stupidity. Unfortunately it is. Harper tampers with systems he doesn’t understand, producing an old version of Andromeda on a mission. Like Voyager’s Warhead, this new version of Andromeda won’t recognize that times have changed and its mission no longer relevant. It treats the crew as intruders, even though Dylan is a valid Commonwealth officer with valid ID. It also behaves in a surprisingly brutal manner for the AI of a supposedly high-minded civilization.

You have to wonder if there wasn’t some way to kick off this plot without the cause being another screwup by the Andromeda crew and the peril coming simply from the Magog, instead of their own stupidity yet again. It might make it easier to take their plight seriously, instead of having to think once again, that if they had displayed a bit more intelligence, they wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.

The steps to resolving this mess involve the usual technobabble and ladder climbing we’ve seen in all the Star Trek “ship disabled episodes” with lots of Magog howling along after them. RevBem’s poorly developed spiritual crisis mainly takes a back seat to Tyr-Harper and Dylan-Beka bonding. It probably should have gotten more screen time, especially since it looks set to play a major role in the resolution of the cliffhanger; but I suppose we should be happy, he got any screen time at all, let alone a storyline of his own. It would have made more sense if a Magog centered story which triggers a spiritual crisis, had worked around RevBem to begin with.

But instead we have more disposable scenes in which Dylan rebuilds the Commonwealth, while we weren’t watching. For a show supposedly dedicated to featuring the rebuilding of the Commonwealth, we get to see very little to none of this activity. Instead we have characters walk on stage and talk about how well the commonwealth rebuilding is going. This is somewhat akin to having a cop show whose characters never actually prevent crimes but come on stage talking about how they prevented some great crimes. How is anyone supposed to take Andromeda’s premise seriously, if the show won’t take its own premise seriously and would rather dedicate episodes to the personality problems of its half-wit crew, than its own premise?

Well, to distract from that issue, Andromeda’s season finale features more scenes of the shadow alien who’s directing the Magog and a cliffhanger that features the crew and ship taking severe damage. In comparison to the average Andromeda episode, …Its Hour Come Round At Last is more polished and better written but it still suffers from the same fundamental flaws this series continues to suffer from. Lack of originality, lack of content and lack of focus on its own series premise. As Voyager has shown, all the big bad aliens in the world will not make your show work, if you don’t maintain your premise and the reality of your situation.

Without a genuine accomplishment or threat, the Magog are just howling guys in furry suits.

Next week: Reruns and lots of ‘em. Enjoy the summer.

Summary: Murder Investigations for Dummies, Commonwealth Creation for Dummies, Andromeda borrows Insurrections Formal Captain’s waiters uniforms and the plot of Star Trek VI. And the pride and joy of the High Guard fleet is sabotaged and boarded…yet again by rejects from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Remember those Star Trek episodes where the crew arrives for a seemingly peaceful conference, tour or meeting and then someone is killed and a crew member is framed for the murder and the Captain has to prove him innocent? All the Trek series had them, the Babylon 5 pilot was based around the same plot and now Andromeda duplicates these achievements in All Great Neptune’s Oceans. For those who were waiting for a solid plot dealing with the actual premise of the show, namely rebuilding the Commonwealth, they’ll have to wait because Neptune is just another of Andromeda’s “Look what happened to us on the way to our mission of rebuilding the Commonwealth.”

There’s still nothing in the show about what signing the charter means for those worlds or why anyone is signing on to a Commonwealth that has is composed of a starship and a few crew members or just what Hunt has to offer them besides the occasional services of the Andromeda which convinces them to sign on the bottom line. Instead we get Murder Investigations for Dummies. The President is ready and incredibly enthusiastic about signing the charter as a result of whatever happened offscreen but unfortunately he’s assassinated. 30 minutes later and confessions to the murder from half of Andromeda’s crew, we dramatically discover what the entire audience knew all along…namely that the murderer is one of the two guest stars in this episode, rather than a member of his crew.

This isn’t actually a surprise since anyone who’s watched SciFi TV shows on a regular basis knows its pretty darn unlikely that a show will have the guts to actually expose one of its regulars as the murderer. The time until this revelation is mostly wasted time that involves a focus on the crew investigating each other and discovering the technobabble method of the murder in an episode that is supposed to focus on the compromises and political tensions of the fish people. Once we do focus on the revelations about the fish people, the whole subject carries very little weight because the balance of the story hasn’t focused on them making most of the episode pretty much pointless.

The Technobabble locked room murder method like most technobabble isn’t particularly interesting. While Babylon 5’s pilot had a gadget that could change appearances, Andromeda’s technobabble involves an overly complicated plot dependent on sabotaging Andromeda. This now has the majority of Andromeda’s plots dependent on people sabotaging or boarding Andromeda…or both as in Neptune’s Oceans. Clearly this ship needs a security officer, desperately. And locks, big iron ones that no one can open without the right key. The complexity and messy nature of the method itself suggests the chancellor is an idiot because as Tyr points out, there were so many easier ways to carry out an assassination and many more sane ones than setting an assassination to presidential music. He proves that he’s an idiot by pretty much demonstrating his guilt on camera and instantly confessing to Hunt even though the evidence against him is as slim as the stuff Columbo might cook up.

Interestingly enough Trance who as recently as the last episode proved her ability to the crew to find the right answer (which might come in handy for a murder mystery) is completely absent from this episode to the extent that she’s not in one single scene and even appears to be missing from the background. Not that this is a bad thing since Trance is Andromeda’s worst and most annoying character next to Harper himself but it does seem a bit odd and a word of explanation might have been a good idea. And RevBem, Andromeda’s other weird alien, is increasingly being written out of episodes to the point that he seems to be mentioned more when he’s offscreen than the total amount of times he’s onscreen. It would be understandable that the executives would be unhappy with the character and prefer the show to focus on the male and female models, still after Tyr RevBem is Andromeda’s only interesting character played by a real actor. Considering how precarious a position Andromeda is in quality-wise, it would be a shame if the same purge that removed all of Earth Final Conflict’s actors and characters replacing them with models were also to happen to EFC’s sister show Andromeda.

Certainly there’s plenty of money being saved on the makeup which in Neptune’s Oceans reaches a new and truly godawfull low. The fish people are human beings with dabs of silver paint on their cheeks, a plastic tube sticking out of their necks and what looks like a Buck Rogers jetpack filled with water on their backs. If Andromeda is this badly off in the makeup department, why not make the fish people just straight humans instead of trying to pull off an effect they clearly can’t manage. Or maybe they could have skimped on Hunt’s formal waiter’s uniform borrowed from the TNG crew’s formal waiters uniforms of Star Trek Insurrection which barely sees any wear and spent it on an actual makeup department instead of a few items from the back of the Halloween clearance rack. Between the fish people and the security officer who looks like a reject from the Rocky Horror Picture Show complete with Valeris’s wig from ST6 it’s just plain impossible to look at the guest stars without laughing no matter what they’re saying.

And what they’re saying doesn’t much matter since the supposedly underlying moral issue of whether his and Lee’s actions were right or wrong never gets addressed. Instead in the time honored methodology of mediocre programming, the show beats you over the head with the assertion that he’s evil by having him carry out a clearly evil act later on, without ever allowing any debate or perspective on his actions. And this is the second time in the first half of the first season alone that Andromeda again abuses the word “Genocide” as a catchall term for condemning some sort of military action as immoral. Hopefully the Andromeda writers got a dictionary for Christmas because killing a few thousand people in a military base is certainly not genocide, nor is genocide just a general term for “killing lots of people”. Genocide refers to planned extermination of entire peoples.

Firing on a Nietzchian base which was utilized for military purposes regardless if there were civilians inside is standard practice for the United States Military. Firing on it after it had surrendered is a violation of the rules of war, but since the Nietzschians themselves don’t follow the rules of war, no one is obligated to uphold the laws of war when it comes to them. Double Helix made it pretty clear that Nietzchians view diplomatic conventions as meaningless, meaning that such conventions would in turn not apply to them. Indeed everything we know about the Nietzchians so far from Andromeda tells us that “surrender” would be Nietzchian for “pause to reload.” Furthermore since Tyr has shown very little qualms about means and ends, his behavior is out of character. The Republic just did to the Nietzchians exactly what the Nietzchians would have done to them if they’d gotten the chance. Tyr of all people would be expected to understand that.

But abuse of the term genocide is really stretched to ridiculous extents when the security chief claims that the deaths of 10,000 Nietzchian slaves was genocide. If the Bajoran plans to blow up or contaminate Terrokh Nor\DS9 while it was under Cardassian occupation had succeeded in killing the Bajoran slave laborers along with their Cardassian masters, no one would have been whining about genocide. It would have been accepted as a logical resistance action and indeed in Babel we saw something fairly similar being carried out with the only problem being poor timing. And if it’s genocide to kill a few thousand civilians as part of a larger military campaign, then every civilized nation on earth is genocidal because even the Gulf war featured at least that many civilian casualties to say nothing of Vietnam or World War II. Star Trek has been accused of being naive but not so delusional as to take Andromeda’s policy line of apparently believing that you can win wars and defend yourself without actually having to kill people. That’s not the position of a progressive but of a pacifist and while pacifists may be nice people, they don’t belong in command of warships for obvious reasons.

And this pacifism is all the more ironic considering that the producer’s and Alliance Atlantis desire to push the action aspect of Andromeda causes the insertion of a completely gratuitous and unnecessary action scene that has Hunt beating up a half dozen soldiers who boarded his ship. Of course rather than having Andromeda use nanobots or some other means of subduing them from a distance, Hunt jumps around beating them up. Apparently violence for entertainment is perfectly fine, violence as a means of defending yourself against a real threat is wrong. This moral position is somewhat confusing in the sense that it makes no sense except as a means of self-righteous posturing.

Perhaps next time when Hunt is reading “Commonwealth Building for Dummies” which will tell him that it’s more important to research the history and political situation of the people you’re trying to induct into the Commonwealth instead of their table settings and dining protocols; he’s also sneak a look at the chapter about self-righteous speeches. He has the poses and the tone of voice down, now he just needs to understand what the words in the speeches actually means. Or perhaps the writers will actually put Hunt into a situation where his self-righteous is actually tested instead of having him going around and delivering lectures to other people on how to resolve their problems. But then again in Rose in the Ashes the writers contrived to deliver Hunt to a prison planet while still keeping him uninvolved from the problems at hand as he lectured the prisoners on being better people, so it’s no wonder he’s uninvolved in their problems secure on his starship where there isn’t a single crisis that can’t be resolved by a self-righteous speech.

Summary: The Bug suit returns,Dylan broods his way through the episode and Andromeda borrows all the Worf storylines it can get its hands on for Tyr.

It would seem that the last episode had the Andromeda nearly destroyed when it entered a combat area would have taught Captain Hunt a lesson. Fortunately it hasn’t. Seeing a large battle going on, Captain Hunt instantly steps in between the combatants without a clue as to what the whole conflict is about and demands that they observe a cease-fire. Then, given the chance between rescuing the ship being blown up by the giant canon or dealing with the giant cannon that has the potential to cripple his ship, Hunt makes the logical choice and ignores the cannon in favor of the rescue mission. Just as he’s about to go three for three and commit suicide by going down to talk peace with the Nietzcheans behind the giant cannon, Tyr convinces him to let him go instead. And from then on in, it’s his show.

This saves Double Helix from being another “Dylan broods but turns out to be right” bad episode and, by Andromeda standards, probably a fairly decent one, at least as soon as it gets away from the incompetent Dylan and his crew of whiny malcontents and focuses its story on one of the few Andromeda characters that actually works even if his storyline is borrowed from elsewhere. Double Helix does ultimately have a B story that features Dylan brooding and turning out to be right in the end all the while playing three-dimensional go (you can tell this is Andromeda and not Star Trek, because they’re playing 3D Go and not 3D Chess) but it’s not nearly as annoying as the “Dylan broods but turns out to be right” A stories Andromeda has been cursed with this far.

The Nietzchean guest stars? acting isn’t up to Trek quality but they’re still an improvement over the awful teenager from Lightning or the giant pimp weasel from the pilot. The new and improved bug suit does return and still looks like a discarded TOS prop but fortunately it gets slightly less screen time than Trance who gets slightly less screen time than Harper. Andromeda continues being the focus of the show’s leering innuendo making Andromeda the series? Seven of Nine, but without clothes. On the continuity front, Andromeda itself took a terrible beating in a battle last week and was nearly destroyed, but this week is in perfect working order and ready to take another terrible beating. It may be a stretch when Voyager looks just as clean and shiny this week as the week before, but for Andromeda to do the same without Voyager’s three digit crew or any visible attempt to look for resources, relying only on Andromeda’s own Wesley Crusher who himself seems engaged in somewhat alternate pursuits. Fortunately the episode’s real focus isn’t on any of this but on Tyr, who in Double Helix emerges as the strongest actor in the Andromeda cast.

This early in the series the idea of Tyr turning on the crew is still very plausible and Andromeda’s darker spin on the TNG material adding paranoia and uncertainty works to add suspense and drama. With Tyr and the Ocra pride both being completely manipulative, amoral and brutal there’s plenty of room for mind games in a contest where both sides are determined to win. This is a refreshing change from Dylan’s parody of a starship Captain blathering on about peace and goodwill towards all mankind or the after school special styled Let Loose the Fateful Lightning. A story that seems as if it will not be resolved by technobabble or by Deus Ex Machina or by rhetoric but hinges on what is in the character?s minds is certainly welcome. And even if Double Helix doesn’t entirely pay off on that premise, there are still plenty of good things here.

Ahead of them all are Dylan’s flashbacks to his first officer overlaid on Tyr’s interactions with the Ocra; brilliant and very effective, this piece of work holds the episode together at least up until the point the Andromeda itself is boarded. This is yet another repetitive and tiresome storyline that suggests that despite having an Artificial Intelligence and being the product of the most advanced civilization in history, everyone and their cousin can still board and take over the top of the line Commonwealth starship. There has to be another way to introduce a dramatic final act than by showing ragged and technologically backwards people boarding the bridge and nearly seizing control of the ship in 3 out of 4 episodes. Can’t they at least brace the bridge doors with a chair or nail the damn thing shut?

Dylan’s “confession” to RevBem is teeth grating and another jarring piece of continuity garble as Dylan reveals that he really wants to kill all the Nietzcheans. It’s kind of odd that he never gave any hint of this before and was playing basketball with a Nietzchean only last week. This seems to harken back to Harper’s revelation that he hates all the Magog and would like to see them all dead, yet never giving any sign of it in his friendly banter with RevBem the week before. Hopefully this is not a new trend in which each week a new Andromeda cast member reveals a bloody and genocidal hatred for another species and then forgets about it next week.

Not that Double Helix boasts any shortage of bizarre Dylan moments, but his “Critical Care-ish Janeway\Tuvok” moment, in which he places his hand tenderly on Tyr’s shoulder and proclaims that their working relationship is a demonstration of the way everyone can live in peace in the rebuilt Commonwealth, easily takes First Prize. Various questions arise here: where exactly is this rebuilt Commonwealth and what drugs is Captain Hunt on right now, will the galaxy truly be inspired towards the ways of peace by his relationship with a man who insults him in every episode, disobeys his orders in every episode and intends to kill him in two episodes and will Dylan really be able to complete Tyr as a husband and father by bearing him 22 children?

Still despite the successful aspects of DH’s Tyr story it’s hard to ignore the fact that it’s fairly similar to early TNG’s Worf storyline. TNG’s early first season Worf episode was Heart of Glory, in which Klingon warriors who don’t accept the ways of peace and want to take control of the Enterprise in order to continue their own wars; this forces the outcast Worf to choose between his Klingon heritage and Starfleet. Double Helix forces Tyr to choose between his Nietzchean heritage by joining the Nietzchean warriors who don’t accept the ways of peace and who want to take control of the Andromeda in order to continue their own wars, or his new-found loyalties to Andromeda. Both episodes even feature a finale involving a threat to destroy the Enterprise\Andromeda. The second half of Tyr’s storyline lifts portions of the Worf\K’Ehleyr story right down to the child she conceives without his knowledge. Double Helix puts a darker spin on the whole thing but it does seem quite clearly as if Tyr’s storyline is Worf’s in the Andromeda setting.

Like Worf, Tyr’s house\pride was destroyed early on and he’s witnessed the death of his parents. Like Worf he’s an outcast from his society and unable to live as a normal Klingon\Nietzchean. Like Worf, his house\pride was brought down by treachery and there are those he blames for this treachery and on whom he seeks vengeance. Like Worf, Tyr’s captain suspects that given the chance he will choose Klingon\Nietzchean agendas over service to Starfleet\High Guard. The Nietzcheans themselves in this episode manage to come off as Klingons without the stature, makeup and a sense of humor. Unfortunately a species without a sense of humor is more tiresome than anything else. Trek’s best villains like Q, Gul Dukat, Seska, Kang, and Weyoun had a sardonic quality and a certain sense of place. But take away the Klingon sense of humor, passion and emphasis on honor and you’re left with obsessive logical perfectionists who like to kill people; or in other words borderline robots.

Worse yet, even this much is taken away from the Nietzcheans in order to redeem Dylan’s incompetence, they have him turn to Janeway’s first resort. Namely, doing nothing to defend yourself and then threatening to self-destruct your starship. If that’s the best means of self-defense that you have, it’s time to resign the Captain’s chair or deal with the fact that sooner or later someone will call your bluff and you’ll either have to give up or blow up yourself, your ship and your crew. Up until the point the Nietzcheans board Voyag…err Andromeda they behaved as ruthless and efficient killers. They actually opened fire on the armored pod Tyr came down in, without even bothering to try and take the man they thought was Captain Hunt alive. Yet once onboard Andromeda they spare everyone’s lives including that of a Magog who attacked them. In fact, all it takes to route them is some not particularly fancy graphics Andromeda displays on her screens.

The Nietzcheans for all their perfectionist bloodthirsty efficiency never bother to check. They, furthermore, just walk off the greatest prize they’ve ever seen that would have enabled them to preserve their pride without a fight, even though they have the entire crew of the Andromeda at gunpoint. In a bizarre plot turn the Alpha swears vengeance against Tyr whom he holds at gunpoint…and then leaves even though he could easily kill him here and now. In fact if all the episode’s moody posturing about Nietzcheans were true, the Alpha would have killed the four Andromeda crewmembers minus Dylan and including Tyr to get revenge for the betrayal, leaving Dylan alive to deactivate the self-destruct system. Having now reached a high water mark of incompetence on a near Janeway level, this is probably something Dylan never considered. Fortunately as with Janeway, Dylan’s enemies become phenomenally stupid once it’s time for him to show off his command abilities.

If these were standard High Guard tactics, it’s no great surprise that the Commonwealth fell.

Coming up next week: Captain Hunt and Co. get the chance to return to his home in the Alpha Quad…err? past and solve all their problems as well as the reason for the existence of the series. Will it all work out, or not?

With Affirming Flame, the second part of Andromeda’s two-part pilot, there are plenty of improvements to notice. For one thing, the dialog now occasionally contains dialog. Where in the first part of the pilot dialog had mostly been limited to exposition, AAF actually features characters talking to each other for reasons other than to convey backstory and vital plot developments to the audience. This is nice. So is the fact that with the lion’s share of the FX dollars expended on the part one battle and orange black hole cable towing scenes, part two’s story has limited FX and as a result much better pacing and structure. And while the alien makeup is still as bad, there’s less of it to look at and that’s definetly a good thing. The characters too have somewhat improved. There is a marked decrease in annoying banter and an increase in actual decision-making. Harper and Trance still stick out like sore thumbs meant to appeal to a WBesque teenage demographic but at least the story puts them to work.

With all these improvements it seems as if Flame should be a better episode than Night, but it isn’t because where Night had way too much backstory and events shoved into 40 minutes, Flame has way too little story and events dropped into 40 minutes. Shown together as a 2 hour premiere, this might have produced better results and portions of the opening backstory could have been inserted as flashbacks into the second part. Together, though Flame features a predictable story where most of the time is expended on watching Sorbo run through a cheap version of Die Hard with clumsy fight choreography. Die Hard’s villain went on to play a satirized version of the SciFi alien on Galaxy Quest and apparently he’s been replaced by a giant talking rat dressed as a 70’s pimp with his sidekick the giant talking S&M rat. Aside from drooling on everything and snarling more often than Pat Buchanan, he’s not much of a villain and even the director recognizes this, turning him into comic relief two thirds of the way through.

Mostly, however, Flame suffers from a lack of drama or anything remotely interesting to catch the viewer’s attention. We know that Trance isn’t dead because she’s a cast member; therefore her revival isn’t particularly shocking. (though by killing her off once and threatening to have her killed off, Andromeda seems to be starting its own Dead Janeways trend.) Hunt’s Die Hard scenes meanwhile are uninvolving because he is so casual about it. Sure he may be an ethical Starship Captain but subduing armed killers aboard your ship and then taking the time to drag them to stasis pods while refusing to kill them even when they shoot at you, seems a bit excessive even for the Star Trek department. Faced with a similar situation in which Picard did Die Hard, he wasn’t nearly that non-violent. The fight scenes themselves between the fat Hawaiian mercenaries, the Sarah Bernhardtesque cyborg and Tyr are poorly choreographed and are a much better fit for Hercules than for a SciFi drama. Considering how much weaponry everyone has and what kind of sophisticated technology they should be able to deploy, you’d think that the combatants would actually shoot each other instead of going into slow motion leaps, turning somersaults and hitting each other with sticks. You’d also think that a top of the line Starship from a civilization spanning three galaxies controlled by an artificial inteligence would be impossible for barbarians with inferior technology and a lack of knowledge of its systems to take over so easily. Even Voyager has better security and considering how often Voyager has been taken over, that’s really saying a lot.

Meanwhile the ethical transformation of Captain Valentine and crew is even harder to buy. Where only a few hours ago they were ready to murder Hunt and steal his ship, they suddenly decide to quit the job and switch sides. Is simply the fact that Hunt told her to duck before setting off the ammunition locker enough basis for something as drastic as that. Tyr’s even more sudden transitition from hired thug to righteous avenger is even harder to buy. So is his casual relationship with Captain Valentine’s crew, considering that he served as uncaring backup for the supposed murder of Trance. You’d think some of them would notice or remember or care. The final scene in which the crew teams up is filled with cliches and completely implausible for serious drama, but then the pilot so far has given no indication that Andromeda wants to be serious drama rather than Hercules in Space. The upcoming episode suggests the show will be tackling darker issues (again involving people wanting to take over Andromeda) and they will have to make a decision as to what the show’s nature is to be.

Summary: Captain Hunt and the Andromeda have to transport Elaan of Troy…err…Elssbett to make peace with the opposing pride by offering herself as a bride.

This Andromeda episode offers essentially the same exact setup as the famous TOS episode Elaan of Troyius. The original TOS episode featured Captain Kirk and the Enterprise having to transport Elaan to her marriage with the leader of the opposing side as part of their peace treaty. Elaan is initially arrogant and views them as inferior but confrontations with Kirk help bring her around to recognizing their worth, respecting him and he is even nearly pulled into a relationship with her. On the way the Enterprise plays cat and mouse with the Klingons and unravels deception and conspiracy and finally having gained some maturity and responsibility, Elaan overcomes her reluctance and goes ahead with the marriage.

This is essentially a pretty good rundown of the basic plot of Honey Offering. Elssbett even duplicates the famous Elaan scene and complains about her quarters. There are various differences produced by the need to accomodate the story to different universes and the cultural changes that have taken place since Elaan of Troyius originally aired, but the resemblance is indeed very striking. It is nice to see Andromeda broadening their range of “Trek appreciation” to beyond the borders of The Next Generation and its assorted spinoffs.

With that said Elaan of Troyius wasn’t a very good episode, just a memorable one more for reasons of camp than of quality. And there’s not much Andromeda can do to improve on it. The producers have decided for some reason to blow a good chunk of their special effects budget here with the usual mixed results. Some of the battle FX look pretty good if a touch repetitive and recycled, while the matte of the station is awful enough to have actually appeared on TOS. The choreography of the action sequences has improved, as long as you ignore obvious questions about why two heavily armed warriors keep fighting each other in hand to hand combat.

With the changes in society with regard to the roles of women, it’s virtually inevitable that Elssbett would be a stronger character than Elaan. Being allowed to get out more and do more while relying less on men and even temporarily defeating the Captain (somewhat more problematic in the TOS universe) certainly helps. It also helps that the actress playing Elssbett is far more capable than France Nuyen’s essentially one-note performance. Although in the context of the Nietzchians, her vulnerability isn’t particularly plausible. Her ruthlessness doesn’t really seem to equal that of the Nietzchians we’ve seen so far.

The retrofitted robot suits make an apperance and all the Andromeda crewmembers put in an apperance as well, however briefly. Considering the rash of MIA’s during recent episodes, especially RevBem, this is a welcome departure even if it means that they all have to be paid for brief apperances. The Andromeda has a small enough crew as it is and it helps the show’s plausibility if all crew members are present, accounted for and working together to deal with the crisis whatever that might be.

Next week: Andromeda falls in love with a bad AI.

Summary: A pleasant and inoffensive though not particularly original or interesting episode starring Andromeda’s only talented actor.

There’s not much that can be said about Music of a Distant Drum. Despite its claims to focus on Nietzchian-human slavery, it essentially repeats a pretty standard plot that you’ve probably seen about thirty times if you’ve ever watched a season of Bonanza. Strange man arrives to disturb the quiet backwoods lives of a single mother and her (adopted) son, thugs are hunting for him and menace the woman. The son initially distruts the man but overcomes those feelings to view him as a father figure. The woman displays some feelings for the man but ultimately their destinities take them to different places. Indeed except for the contrived action sequences it’s even a bit similar to TOS’s Paradise Syndrome.

Not that it’s a bad episode though by any means. Despite an often awfull script by Robert Wolfe full of “hammer over the head” characterization and characters repeating the obvious at the camera, it features quiet and skillfull direction and another good performance from Keith Hamilton Cobb. Allan Kroeker, who directed many great Star Trek episodes, directs this one and Cobb is essentially the only actor on Andromeda who can act so the pairing make for a watchable and occasionally charming episode. The guest starring actress also turns in some good work which is a nice contrast to some of the genuinely awfull guest star casting in previous Andromeda episodes. Best of all, Sorbo and the rest of the Idiot Brigade remain mostly out of sight except for a confused scene in which Beka rambles on about her dreams for several minutes. It’s a bit that should have been left on the cutting room floor.

Certainly an episode taking place on a planet where human beings are enslaved by Nietzchians featuring the Andromeda had the potential for dealing with some more complex material. Instead we have Tyr behaving completely out of characher, even once he regains his memory. He spends the entire episode completely disregarding his survival which is antitethical to the concept of a Nietzchian and to Tyr. His relationship with the mother and son is at first justified as ensuring his survival but he intervenes in a non-lethal situation and fails to kill the assailants pretty much guranteeing that they’ll report back on his whereabouts. Next he clashes with members of the Drago pride and not only tells them as much as he knows about himself but leaves his opponent alive, conscious and not even tied up. This moves him out of sentimentaility and into Hunt levels of irrationality. Finally he lets the mother and son be used as hostages against him even though any idiot at this point would understand that this gurantees their deaths, something the same group of Nietzchians had just demonstrated for him less than a few minutes ago. And the woman’s continued risk taking to help a Nietzchian is even more strange and irrational.

The entire notion of human slavery really isn’t addressed except in bits of dialouge where the humans describe how awfull the Drago pride is but we don’t see any of it and when we do meet Drago pride Nietzchians they just come off looking like regular thugs. There doesn’t remotely seem to be anything smart or superhuman about them. There’s no real interaction between the parties. But what little we do get makes Captain Hunt seem all the more foolish and cowardly for puttering about on his crew’s personal errands when there is real evil and oppression to be fought. There are a few million people enslaved on this planet, yet Hunt spends extraordinary efforts to rescue Tyr who got himself into this situation but doesn’t seem to show any concern at all for the actual slaves. Indeed it’s Tyr who suggests that the woman accompany them and not Hunt, who despite giving sanctimonious lectures to everyone in sight, doesn’t seem to care much one way or another. Providing refuge to anyone who wanted it would have been the moral way to go but the idea doesn’t even seem to occur to Hunt.

Even more irrational is Hunt’s flat refusal to carry cargo for pay or mine and sell an asteroid, especially since just two episodes ago he was reduced to selling off parts of the Andromeda in order to pay for repairs. He doesn’t even bother to defend his position but acts as if it’s the natural one to take. Voyager has mined and traded materials and they were actually on a mission while Andromeda spends long stretches of time sitting around and doing nothing or fumbling about on a crisis caused by a personal errand of a crew member. Seems like mining a platinum asteroid might give Andromeda something to trade instead of selling off part of itself or the personal effects of the crew. But then this is an episode high on good feelings and low on common sense. An unfortunately all too common aspect of Andromeda.

Next week: Harper gets a spot on Andromeda’s Most Wanted, probably not just because of his annoyance factor and obsessive mugging for the camera…but who knows?

Summary: Just say no to drugs. Really, just say no to drugs because they’re… well, bad for you. And only losers use drugs while winners stay clean. And if you can think of no better way to spend your time than an hour of these cliches, you’ll love It Makes A Lovely Light. Oh and Andromeda gets hijacked… again.

There are times when It Makes A Lovely Light actually seems like it might be a good episode or at least a decently watchable one. After all, Andromeda has come closest to success with episodes like Mathematics of Tears, which actually make use of the rich Andromeda backstory, instead of relying on cheap gags and cliches. And it was this same rich universe that seemed to have won Andromeda a large fandom before a single episode even aired. Unfortunately, under the direction of Ethlie Ann Warren (A Rose Among the Ashes, The Pearls that were his Eyes) it makes a baffling turn from being a story about Dylan locating his home and the capital of the Commonwealth to a series of dreary anti-drug cliches.

There’s very little about this story that makes any sense. Beka suddenly becomes obsessed with reaching the capital of the Commonwealth and starts manufacturing and using Flash. It’s not clear why she’s so obsessed that she would risk her life and become addicted to a deadly drug in the process for something that has no reason to actually matter to the character. Tyr decides to try and jump ship because he’s worried about the danger, though just about everything the Andromeda does is foolish and dangerous. Meanwhile Trance is having seizures. Her seizures don’t add much to the story beyond demonstrating that the actress is actually less annoying that way. Maybe she should go into seizures more often.

The one thing this episode does point up all over again is why Dylan needs a new crew pronto. From the opening of It Makes A Lovely Light, his crew throws him a birthday party by faking a core meltdown. Faking a real life threatening emergency onboard a starship is only something an idiot would do. Not just any idiot, but dangerously incompetent idiots of the kind that don’t belong on the bridge of a starship. This is then followed by Beka deciding to operate Andromeda while under the influence of a drug. Most of the crew knows about her actions but chooses not to tell anyone. And this is capped off by the revelation that Harper had secret overrides in place designed to take over the Andromeda at Beka’s command.

So, in essence, Dylan’s entire crew besides RevBem is completely untrustworthy. Four of them conspired to cover-up drug use by their commander, and at least two of them had a secret plan in place for hijacking the starship. This is without counting Tyr, who had his own plan for doing the same thing. The only positive aspect of this is that the writers finally came up with a plausible reason for why it was so easy to hijack the Andromeda.

Fortunately, the episode avoids addressing such complex and ambiguous issues and instead throws out one anti-drug cliche after another as if the Federal government were buying ad time. We have a checklist of all the drug cliches. Beka even claims she can quit any time, at which point Dylan of course asks her why she hasn’t stopped yet. Maybe it’s because the plot is so mind-blowingly boring she needs to escape from it through mind altering drugs.

Next weel: The Magog attack…finally

Summary: A competently handled and well acted, if unexceptional, episode that recycles standard Andromeda material.

MIA Index: RevBem is missing again. If this pattern continues, he may end up not appearing in more episodes than he appears in. Which would be a shame. Oh well more room for Trance’s mugging and Harper’s pathetic geek spewing twentieth century slang “Mata Hari, Phone Home?”. Glad the producers know quality when they see it. Sigh.

How many Commonwealth starships with insane AI’s who have their crews and must be destroyed are out there? Apparently at least two. It’s starting to look as if AI’s have become the holodeck of Andromeda. An unnecessary piece of technology that opens up a lot of storylines because of its malfunctions. The opening quote attempts to justify it with a sentimental defense about AI’s needing to be loyal but it’s not clear why anyone needs an AI with that much personality and intellectual capacity that it can choose to be loyal or not. There’s little use for such a thing and little ethics in creating such a being. At least Voyager’s EMH became sentient by accident, and what personality he had was purely artificial.

Andromeda claims that during the Commonwealth, AI’s were considered citizens with full rights but Pax’s treatment in Mathematics of Tears suggests otherwise. After all you can’t just casually blow up a full citizen and full citizens aren’t built and made to order and full citizens can resign their posts. Anyone capable of loyalty is also equally capable of disloyalty and worse, insanity, which seems to be an occupational hazard among ship AI’s. Even more bizarrely, apparently you can’t just switch off a rogue AI by remote control, much like the holodecks. Why would anyone want this kind of messy and dangerous technology, but that’s a lot like asking why Andromeda’s avatar features cleavage. There’s no logical explanation, it’s just meant to be entertaining.

Meanwhile, Dylan appears to have learned very little from either Mathematics of Tears or Sum of All Parts. Once again rogue cybernetics are allowed to roam the ship with no supervision, leading to bad results. Once again he fails to recognize a ship AI disguised as something else. Another continuity breach occurs when the rogue AI can apparently go where it likes even though Sum of all Parts stated that Slipstream requires biological pilots.

So too most of the script is full of some rather large holes but then this is not an episode that depends on the script (which is pretty fortunate considering that this one comes from the writer behind A Rose in the Ashes and The Pearls That Were His Eye) but on the acting since after all it’s driven by Andromeda’s emotional state. On that score the episode is quite fortunate since Lexa Doig is one of the three people on the show who can actually act. Michael Shanks turns in a good performance but rather than being ambiguous or in any way complex, his character is very one note and two-dimensional. We’re supposed to believe that Andromeda falls in love with him at first sight but there’s little in his performance to support such a response.

It might have been a better idea to focus on the actual avatar, instead of an android body which is essentially the PseudoBorg from Sum of All Parts reincarnated. Namely, he’s good and decent but being used by the evil AI core to do bad things to Andromeda, which inevitably ends in his death. Like the PseudoBorg, he infiltrates the ship’s systems and disables portions of the ship. And like the PseudoBorg he really can’t be blamed for anything he does, which makes him a simplistic and not particularly interesting character. The script attempts to set him up as a tragic hero through his classical literature fixation and his doomed romance with Andromeda but tragic heroes are complex and he is just a series of witty catch phrases delivered while constantly brooding in a corner. He has no willing part in the action and therefore no real contribution to make. Where the actual AI might have defended his actions and argued his case, he can only look around mournfully and keep apologizing over and over again. And this stops being interesting very quickly.

The plot such at it is hinges on the ecoterrorists who go around in starships blowing up starships. If this wasn’t enough of a contradiction in and of itself, they were apparently founded by a starship who thinks starships are the root of all evil. The easy solution would seem to involve blowing himself up for being evil. He claims to justify this using the principles of the Commonwealth; one wonders how he interprets Commonwealth principles to oppose interspecies contacts and space travel. It’s a question Dylan might have put to him, since here unlike in Mathematics of Tears, arguing the issue might have been somewhat constructive. The ecoterrorists as an enemy are a joke and he isn’t that much better since we barely see him. Instead as in Sum of Parts, we’re saddled with the cuddly mech who wants to turn his life around but can’t quite seem to manage it and messes up things royally along the way.

It wasn’t interesting then and it isn’t very interesting now.

Next week: Commonwealth Phone Home.

Summary: Prison planet chic, exploitative costumes and Dylan does nothing for an entire episode. Oh and how to power your very own android using piles of dirt.

Rose in the Ashes is a completely forgettable episode that looks like a misplaced Hercules episode and plays like a droning hum in your ear. In fact it’s so forgettable that only a few hours after it aired I’m having trouble remembering the details, let alone finding anything useful to say about it. The women have the expected revealing outfits, there are mean people in pale makeup running the facility and Dylan cultivates a human relationship, which proves that the human spirt can never be entirely suppressed, blah, blah, blah. Besides its striking similarity to a far superior Outer Limits episode about prisoners on a futuristic Earth trapped in a prison from generation to generation by an android who’s breaking down, there’s nothing remotely intriguing or interesting here.

There’s the prison planet, set design courtesy of Star Trek 5 (a bunch of rusted crates, some tents and lots of people in ragged post-apocalyptic clothes) except where even ST5 had a sense of irony by placing those people on a “paradisical planet” that was the supposed result of bringing peace to the galaxy, Andromeda’s tone deaf script lacking even ST5’s sense of self-awareness places them on a mean Planet Hell prison planet. And the people behind this planet believe that crime is genetic, an idea that no one takes seriously even in the tough on crime 20th century, and so it’s stocked with the offspring of prisoners as well.

At this point any attempt in taking Rose seriously as a statement about penal conditions is laughable. Not only is the whole thing a direct to video cliche, not only does Planet Hell look a lot like Oregon and not only is the average American maximum security prison a much tougher place than “Planet Hell”, but shoving the offspring in there and never actually dealing with specific crimes makes the episode just another moralistic slam dunk. The warden is obviously evil, for one thing he’s practically caked in chalk white makeup and he keeps talking about the greater good which is an absolutely certain sign of evil. The prisoners are obviously victims since they’re earnest and the ones we focus on haven’t even committed any actual crimes. The system is obviously evil since it keeps innocent kids in prison, not much to discuss there. The question becomes not, “is this wrong”, “is this justified” or “does this reflect on our society”… but “let’s go blow up some androids.”

Where Voyager’s The Chute really pushed Harry Kim to the limits of survival and sanity, Dylan mainly tours the area, chats up the locals and gets thrown around a little in some clumsy action scenes. He’s never pushed to the limits, if anything he’s bored. There’s no real tension here, no fear, not even the sense of oppression which you’d think would be kind of important to a moralistic lecturer on the penal system. Remember the Paradise Planet from Star Trek V, well this looks a lot like it except with Hercules extras. Andromeda’s android body, like Tom Paris in The Chute, is somewhat threatened by running out of power, but in one of the most awful science blooper scenes in recent memory as she recharges herself using a bucket of high alkali dirt, and again saves the day.

Indeed, breaking down Dylan’s actions in this episode, he meets prisoners and condescendingly lectures them on being better people. He meets more prisoners and condescendingly lectures them on being better people too. For some reason they don’t kill him, probably because they recognize he’s a fool and as such under the special protection of God. Finally his cluelessness gets the “rose” of the title kidnapped by the mean androids who run the prison. He organizes a rescue party for her, and by ‘organize’ I mean he goes back and condescendingly lectures prisoners on being better people. As a result both of those prisoners get themselves killed. The android warden beats up Dylan, Andromeda who has managed to recharge herself no thanks to Dylan then destroys the warden. At this point with no more enemies to fight or rather be beaten up by, Dylan deactivates the planetary defense grid allowing his rescuers to land in the Maru.

Beka then glowingly gives him the credit for saving everyone despite the fact that his basic role in the episode consisted of annoying people with self-righteous speeches and getting beaten up (surprisingly the two were mostly unconnected). The only remaining question is why did anybody in this episode actually need Dylan for anything except condescending lectures and couldn’t Andromeda just have reached into her data banks and repeated the same lectures too?

This is an episode about a prison planet which comes equipped with a defense system protecting the planet and is nicknamed Hell but seems to only have a few dozen prisoners and a handful of guards and its control facility consists of one room which you can get into just by jamming open the door. Despite being nicknamed “Hell” the planet has plenty of trees, bushes and is actually pretty nice, aside from there being nothing to eat. Apparently Andromeda is doing its location shooting in Canada which lacks those all important deserts and as such its “Planet Hell” (an in-joke about the TNG set) looks a whole lot like Washington State. This is an episode about a prison planet where when Dylan & Co. break into the facility, absolutely no guards go to stop them. Finally this is an episode where despite being helpless and clueless, Dylan doesn’t become anybody’s girlfriend, mainly because the prison is dominated by women and big furry aliens.

So what have we learned from this episode? Don’t pick a fight with an android, because you’ll lose every time and if you have to end up on a prison planet, pick one where you can go camping.

Summary: Beka’s brother comes on board and he lies a lot, Andromeda trembles before the terror of the eco-terrorists and is boarded and sabotaged yet again… and that’s about it.

Ties that Blind is supposed to be Beka’s episode, a character who has mostly been overlooked and pushed to the background since the pilot, but really all we end up learning about her is that she comes from a shady but tragic background (which we already know) and that her brother is manipulative and lies a lot. Other than that, it’s mostly inoffensive. It won’t make you think but it won’t make you throw things at your television either. And that’s a definite improvement.

Mostly, Ties that Blind is reminiscent of Past Prologue, DS9’s 4th episode which did for Kira what Ties was supposed to do for Beka, namely expose her priorities and force her to choose between the Federation and her old life. In Past Prologue, an old friend of Kira’s who has remained a member of a terrorist organization finds his ship under attack and asks for refuge aboard DS9. He claims to have renounced terrorism and changed but really he’s just part of a conspiracy to blow up the wormhole in order to get all the major powers to leave Bajor alone. Kira has to choose between her allegiance to the old terrorist philosophies or to Sisko and the new Bajor and stops him by force. And in fact DS9 liked this episode so much they did a second awful variation of it titled Resurrection that featured Vedek Bareil’s alternate universe double with pretty much the same plot again.

Ties That Blind features Beka’s brother Rafe who’s still involved with illegal activities arriving in a ship that was attacked carrying the Andromeda version of a Bajoran Vedek monk in a crude version of the Bajoran Vedek monk costume. He spends 20 minutes beating the audience and the crew over the head with the stunningly obvious fact that he’s up to no good, but they still let him have free run of the ship. Turns out he’s associated with terrorists who blow up starships to prevent colonization. After some twists the tables are turned on the terrorists by brother and sister and everyone lives happily after.

At the moment that Beka blows up Rafe’s ship it does seem as if despite its flaws this episode may have actually achieved something and pushed through some character growth, but of course, as on Voyager when some major life-changing event seems about to happen, it turns out to have all been a trick. And it’s not surprising because ultimately Ties isn’t about Andromeda so much as it’s a recitation of patterns in which Rafe lies to and manipulates Beka and then does it some more, which gets boring very fast. There are no real loyalties in question and no actual choices to be made here and when the episode is done things haven’t actually changed or moved on in any way. The Beka\Rafe material could be taking place in any episode of any show of any genre and it would still be just as trite and repetitive as it is here. Where Past Prologue had a genuine life choice to be made at the heart of it, Ties is a smug package wrapped up in a bow at the end that tries to substitute a convulted plot for lack of any real drama.

Worse, it seems Wolfe has a talent for coming up with villains that make you giggle rather than cower in terror. His first post-DS9 TV project “Futuresport” featured a Hawaian Liberation terrorist organization, the villain of Andromeda’s pilot was a giant rat dressed as a 70’s pimp, in its second episode Andromeda was beset by small children and now Ties that Blind gives us the terrifyingly unstoppable terrors of a thousand sectors…the ecoterrorists. When they’re not freeing minks or living in trees, they menace top of the line High Guard starships.

Apparently these ecoterrorists called Restors go around blowing up starships on the shaky premise that if people stop travelling through space, they’ll stop wrecking the environments of planets. This apparently doesn’t stop them from traveling through space in starships themselves. Since the episode makes it clear that their focus is aimed at corporations and colonization projects, it seems more than a little confusing as to why they’d target Andromeda twice in the first place since Hunt isn’t a corporation and they’re not out to colonize any alien worlds. Sure they’re blowing up starships but there presumabely would be lots of easier targets more relevant to their immediate goals. Or perhaps the fame of Andromeda’s lousy security has spread throughout the galaxy attracting various miscreants like moths to a flame because they know that they can do pretty much anything they want here.

And once again Andromeda’s security is 9th rate. Even assuming that family ties that stupefied Beka to the point where she doesn’t much object when Rafe steals her ship, no one else seems to take any of the basic precautions. RevBem questions the nanomonk as to why he’d take on someone with such a shady past but no one actually bothers confining Rafe or monitoring him. Tyr stalks around abusing RevBem instead of suspecting the actual intruders onboard the ship. Basically Andromeda seems to need a security officer because yet again in virtually every episode Andromeda manages to be sabotaged and boarded and this is not a good record. Worse, Ties manages to pull another Voyager by having Rafe casually steal the Maru. Andromeda is an artificial intelligence and there are a handful of people onboard her and she can pop up on any monitor she pleases any time; would it have been that hard for her to ask Beka if Rafe actually had authorization to launch.

The writing features some of the worst banter and comic relief yet as Tyr tries to teach Trance how to fight. You have to wonder what kind of depths of insanity and boredom Tyr has been driven to in order to fall to this level. Then there’s an inexplicable scene where Beka tries to do a Bugs Bunny voice or a god knows what voice and the complete waste of Brian George as the Nanomonk. Brain George is a talented actor (some may remember him from his guest starring role on DS9 as Bashir’s father) and deserved a lot more than to spend his time lying on his back for a few minutes while Laura Bertram, Lisa Ryder and the actor playing Rafe demonstrate for the better part of an episode in painfully grating detail why the Emmys, with justification, ignore Syndicated shows. While Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine may have had their brillant acting, most syndication features junk that is poorly and cheaply made, badly written and composed of awful casts. And if Andromeda wants to stand out, recycling story concepts that were old when Night Court was new is definetly not the way to do it.

And with Andromeda going into reruns next week it seems a little odd that it would end on the note of Ties, rather than a stronger episode like Angel Dark which needed to be delayed anyway for full impact.

Next week: Reruns…if you haven’t seen it, it still won’t be new to you.

Summary: Andromeda takes another stab at duplicating TOS’s City on the Edge of Forever. Wesley Crus…err…Harper invents the transporter as Hunt’s wife tries to rescue him from the future. Everything stays the same at the end of the episode.

Banks of Lethe is indeed a stunning achievement. Not so much from the general Science Fiction perspective but from the Andromeda perspective as it is Andromeda’s first well-written episode. Namely the dialogue is bearable, the plot sane and not overly dependent on people doing stupid things, the issue actually compelling and best of all Trance is kept almost completely out of sight. This is notable because it shows that the Andromeda writers can produce above the level they’ve been demonstrating so far which gives us hope that the show may actually become watchable in the future, satisfying more than just its die hard fans.

Some key Andromeda problems do remain. The aliens of the week seem to get free run of the ship, despite a past history of almost weekly boardings and invasions. The Nietzchean attack on Andromeda is mostly un-necessary and seems to suggest that like TOS, Andromeda has a policy of endangering the ship every week to hold viewer interest. There is more than a small measure of technobabble in the plot resolution but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The acting isn’t compelling but it’s well above usual Andromeda standards with an odd twist that has Sorbo’s real life wife playing his TV show wife. The general look and feel of the show still says Trek Retread, but at least now it’s Potentially Good Trek Retread.

Unfortunately Lethe is hurt most of all not by anything it does but because it aired a mere two weeks after Angel Dark\Demon Bright which makes it look too much like a regurgitation of the same material. Indeed it would have seemed a lot more logical to air Angel Dark after Banks of Lethe since Angel Dark features Hunt cutting his ties to the past all together and focusing on the future while Banks of Lethe has Hunt deciding against returning to the past to be with his wife. But in this context a lot of the efforts of Hunt and Hunt’s wife to bridge the time gap seem wasted, since only two weeks ago Hunt and Andromeda were 300 years in the past. Before heading back Hunt could have stopped to pick up his wife, or if he’d really wanted to he could have stayed to protect her from making the tearjerking technological wonder tricks of Banks of Lethe seem pretty irrelevant by contrast. More importantly the idea of Hunt bridging the gap of time doesn’t seem as magical and powerful as it should, because after all didn’t Hunt and Co. manage to go back to the same time period just two weeks ago? After all the effort expended on trying to bring one man or woman through time, it seems as if everyone could have met and decided who stays and goes whereever, if the Andromeda had left the Battle of Witchhead Nebula and gone looking for Sarah.

The whole Commonwealth charter bit isn’t spelled out and shoved to the background which seems pretty odd since after all rebuilding the Commonwealth is the focus of this show and hence any diplomatic developments including the charter and meetings with alien races should have taken front and center, rather than stories about the past and Beka’s con artist brother. As it is there apparently have been major developments in Hunt’s quest to rebuild the Commonwealth and virtually all of them have happened off screen. In this case shouldn’t the show’s premise change over to a show about misfits on a starship dealing with personal traumas and trying to rebuild the Commonwealth in their spare time? How exactly has Hunt gotten races to surrender their sovergnity to an organization that doesn’t exist except for himself? Just by visting them and doing them minor favors with his starship? This seems a little iffy.

Ultimately though this is the symptom of a bigger problem. Andromeda’s premise has him cast away 300 years into the future and forced to make of it what he can. But two episodes that air nearly one after the other showing him phoning and visting the past regularly completely undermines that. Imagine Voyager if instead of waiting 5 years, Voyager had been interacting back and forth with the Federation in the first season. It would have hurt the credibility of an already shaky premise. Hunt’s decision to choose twice between the past and the future doesn’t carry much weight if we haven’t really seen the future. Contact with his wife or an oppurtunity to change the timeline should have been a major event that occured only once we really got to experience the future and once Hunt put down some real roots, otherwise all we’re seeing is an irrational Hunt martyrdom.

Andromeda’s premise of “you can’t change the timeline” makes the entire concept of time travel episodes irrelevant and predictable and worst of all completely pointless. Whatever originality Angel Dark’s finale explaining that everything Andromeda did had already happened in their past anyway is lost when Banks of Lethe repeats the same routine as a way of trying to compensate for the futility of the events that have taken place in the episode. How many episodes can you possibly have that feature the purpose of the time trip turning out to be irrelevant, except for one act which has already occured and shaped history but needs to be repeated by the time travelers. So in the end all that your efforts get you is that things stay the same as they were at the beginning of the episode. Not only is this a bleak and dreary view of human affairs but it’s not a very useful one for SF drama, which has traditionally stood for empowering characters, not tying them to some superstitious notion of fate and destiny as preached by a Bhuddist Werewolf. It’s certainly not what Gene Roddenberry stood for and that is his name before the title I believe.

Still, Banks of Lethe should get credit for being the first Andromeda episode that actually managed to achieve a certain sense of wonder. This is all the more amazing because the production design remains absolutely awful. Tyr wearing a set of clunky oversized “80’s idea of what VR glasses would look like” gear while jerking around the joysticks as enough sparks to weld a bridge go off in the background would have embarrased just about any SciFi production of any age, place or time. The bridge of the Starry and Sara’s lab are even more dated. Even TNG’s set designs looked more advanced than this and TOS could have given it a run for its money. Often with dated materials in a SF show you wonder whether the people involved have read any recent SF. Well, in this case you have to wonder whether they’ve ever used a cell phone or a palm IV because not only doesn’t technology look like that in the future, but it doesn’t even look like that in the present.

Finally, having Harper inventing the transporter even with assistance just looks pretty bad. Wesley may have saved the ship a few times too many but Harper is several times as annoying as Wesley (and considering that Wesley Crusher is one of the most annoying characters in the history of SF TV this is clearly a notable if questionable achievement) and he invents the transporter. If Andromeda’s producers wanted the show to eventually get a transporter there were better and more credible ways to do it. But having Harper achieve this is just ridiculous. In Angel Dark we apparently discovered that Harper is smarter than the entire Commonwealth and Nietzchian fleets combined. Now we have him inventing a transporter in a few days. The only question remains is, when does he follow Wesley on a journey to a higher plane? Because it can never be too soon. This is after all a journey both Wesley and Kes made. It only seems fair that Harper and Trance, the characters based on Wes and Kes should join them in Annoying Character Nirvana too.

Next week: Hunt goes to prison, sparks rain on Andromeda’s bridge and the reaction shots look worried. Fortunately post-apocalyptic ragged refugees\prison set design is easy to do.

“Harper 2.0″

Summary: Simply awful. Harper gets a huge library database downloaded into his brain which makes him run around like a chicken without a head for most of the episode. Also there’s a smirking Schwartzenegger wannabe in aluminum foil hunting after him.

Basing an episode around Andromeda’s most annoying character was probably not a very smart idea to begin with but it always helps to have some grain of an original idea or plot twist in the episode. Fortunately, Andromeda compensates by making the annoying character twice as annoying and by having him speak twice as fast and in different languages. Now having him speak in different languages is helpful since it prevents us from understanding much of his dialogue and therefore leaves a certain amount of doubt as to just how awful said dialogue is. Still, even filming this entire episode with all the dialogue dubbed in French wouldn’t have helped, it would have just made the experience less nauseating–like wearing a blindfold to a showing of Battlefield Earth.

The plot here has a fugitive researcher stowing a whole lot of data in Harper’s brain effectively upgrading him to Harper 2.0. The result is a Harper on caffeine who yammers on twice as fast, does nothing useful and occasionally curls up and moans in a fetal position. The episode is mostly reminiscent of The Next Generation’s “Nth Degree” in which Barclay is turned into the smartest man who ever lived by an energy surge from an alien probe. Except that as annoying and mediocre as that episode was, at least Barclay accomplished something useful there while Harper mainly rambles on about modifying nanobots and screeches in different languages as if he were possessed by the demonic spirit of Linda Blair. But then this is a character who combines the worst qualities of Wesley Crusher and Tom Paris in one WB reject body and an actor whose idea of acting involves mugging for the camera like a demented chimp.

And since Harper is an idiot, it’s only appropriate enough that an episode dedicated to him should revolve around an idiot plot. It takes the crew about ten times as long as needed to figure out the obvious about what happened to Barclay. Despite continuing bizarre behavior by Harper no one bothers to confine him to sickbay and despite a bounty hunter who can melt through walls being on his tail, no one bothers to keep an eye on him. This of course allows for a predictable “steal the ship and try to draw the bad guy away” finale which could be seen coming from a mile away. Unfortunately it appears to be as easy to steal the Maru as it is to steal one of Voyager’s shuttlecraft. Though considering that the Andromeda’s crew could be crammed into a phone booth with room to spare, you would think that some way could be found to prevent crew members from stealing and launching the Maru into space, especially since the last time a crew member stole the Maru… was last week.

Of course there’s the bounty hunter who’s here to cut open Harper’s head; he’s big and speaks with a Teutonic accent and seems really mean. According to Andromeda’s Joe Reinkemeyer, “Jeger is a very interesting character, He’s about 6′7 and speaks with a German accent.” I’m not really sure which part of this is the interesting part, but it certainly is a good description of the character since you need know nothing else about him and you never will anyway. He’s an all purpose baddie who makes Voyager’s most trite alien of the week look startlingly innovative and original. He’s working for an entity which looks a bit like Earth: Final Conflict’s Taelons and was responsible for directing the Magog attack on a human planet. But we don’t learn anything about the entity– that’s Andromeda clearly setting up some revelations for the future. Too bad since this episode could have used some revelations or dancing clowns or lots of static.

There is one nice scene with RevBem only partially marred by spiritualistic babble and having Harper convert to RevBem’s BhuddismLite religion. And it is confusing as to why Harper would suddenly turn against RevBem because of some third part video footage and not his own personal experiences related in Let Loose the Fateful Lightning. Still, it’s ironic that in an episode dedicated to Harper, RevBem gets more character development in a few lonely Harper-centric scenes than Harper does in the entire episode. But then there are characters who are interesting, characters who are bland and characters who are just plain annoying. Unfortunately Andromeda has mostly sidelined RevBem in favor of Harper; this is as if Star Trek had sidelined Spock in favor of Wesley Crusher. Not a smart decision except as an attempt to appeal to some transient young adult demographic, the same demographic which loathed Wesley and Jonathan Brandis’s character on SeaQuest and all the other prototypes all of whom come off as positively benign in relation to Harper.

In that Harper 2.0 is reminiscent of Windows 95, it doesn’t fix the problem; it just expands it on a grand scale.

Next week: Captain Hunt is put on trial and torture… shirtless of course.

Review Summary

Like that other Tribune\Roddenberry show Earth Final Conflict, Andromeda has a promising concept and plenty of good background materials but is hampered by a weak cast and poor production values as well as uneven writing. As with EFC, things may improve or get much worse as time goes on.

Show Summary

The purpose of a pilot is to set up the show’s basic premise, introduce the characters and let us know what they’re going to be doing for the next few years or so and why we should watch and by that measure Under the Night sails through nicely. The situation, the crisis, most of the main characters and even a few of the gadgets are laid out nicely in the first hour. By the end of the episode, halted on a cliffhanger of sorts, even the average Hercules viewer will know what’s happening and why. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. A pilot should be compact and coherent without too much story clutter. It should set out characters that we’d like to get to know and suggest that we’ll get to know them more as time goes on. There’s the conflict, the crisis and everything wrapped up in a neat bow.

Andromeda’s pilot kicks off with a battlestations alert (ah but it turns out to be just a drill) introducing Captain Dylan Hunt and his genetically enhanced second in command. His genetic enhancement is demonstrated by his complete lack of a sense of humor and strong similarity to The Terminator. After exchanging some banter about Hunt’s upcoming marriage (this show’s equivalent of “he’s only got six weeks to retirement”) it’s time for the crisis. Andromeda answers a distress call and winds up in the trap set by the genetically engineered Nietzscheans. In show developer’s Robert H Wolfe’s DS9 episode “Let he who is without sin…” he suggests that the Federation is soft and corrupt and introduces the Essentialist movement which sees the Federation as being too weak in dealing with the Borg and the Dominion and thinks it needs to be shocked or torn down. Like the Essentialists of DS9, The Nietzscheans also think the Commonwealth has gone soft in facing the evil Magog and try and solve that problem by attacking the Commonwealth (rather than the Magog).

Since most of the battle sequence consists of Captain Hunt standing around in shock, watching as sparks fly from consoles, refusing to use heavy weaponry and muttering technobabble; it’s not particularly surprising that the Nietzscheans win easily. But just as Andromeda is about to be destroyed he executes a plan, somewhat disrupted by the sabotage of his first officer, which saves Andromeda but traps it in the event horizon of a black hole until a salvage vessel containing most of the show’s major characters comes along to tow it out and try to salvage it. Captain Hunt after getting over the shock of time lost decides to resist. This sets up the problematic arc of the episode in which we go from something very important happening at the beginning, crucial and meaningful conflicts to a petty state of affairs that basically degenerate into a shoving match between groups of people, most of whom we know will eventually team up to become the show’s cast. What this means is that the show is at its most gripping early on when the battle matters and at its least interesting towards its cliffhanger when the conflict really doesn’t matter very much. Still things may very well improve in the second half, though the preview doesn’t bode well.

Andromeda Concept and Execution - B-

The early portion of Under the Night is effective in its evocation of professionalism and the capabilities of a vast civilization but still most of this is told to us and very little is shown making the loss of the Commonwealth far less meaningful since we never actually saw it. And this is a problem that Under the Night’s writing suffers from over and over again. Rather than showing what’s going on visually, through behavior, through characterization; UTN tends to have characters recite flat statements at each other. Using the salvage vessel’s crew discussion as to what they’ll do with the money as characterization is about as subtle as a sledgehammer but it’s still the cleverest piece of characterization in the episode. The epic battle that ends up standing Andromeda centuries from home is shown as a confusing mixture of FX of varying quality that give no sense of space or direction. The actual bridge side of the battle consists mainly of technobabble and indeed the ratio of technobabble to plot ends up being pretty high. Since unlike the uniform effort of a production crew, each writer tends puts him own stamp on the show, it’s still too early to make any broad statements about Andromeda’s writing quality without further data.

One senses that there is a good concept here. On paper the Commonwealth, the High Guard, the Magog and the Long Night have a certain poetry and epic dignity. On the screen though the result feels small, silly and a look that is less epic SciFi and more Cleopatra 2525. Without a Star Trek sized budget and with a very weak production and special effects department that lacks the scale and ability of key Trek players such as Foundation Imaging or Michael Westmore, the Andromeda universe just isn’t being realized. Now SF shows including TOS itself have been known to stretch a dollar and find creative ways of making use of their resources to produce quality work but that requires talent and creativity which just doesn’t seem to be there at this time.

The key difference between a TV show and a novel is that the writer of a novel enjoys complete freedom to create whatever worlds he wants on the page and how well it’s realized is entirely up to him. There is no FX budget, no set decorators, no costume department, no casting or anything but the story. It costs just as much to write a battle with 50,000 spaceships as it is to write a love scene. A TV show though is a cooperative effort and the script, the writing is only the first part of the task and so writing alone does not make a successful TV show. indeed Star Trek’s success is not based merely on the quality of its writing, which often was and often is abominable, but on the characters and how the actors who played them came to define them, the look of the show and the atmosphere that combine to give it that certain feel that we associate with Star Trek. Any new show has to create that same vision and feel for itself just as Babylon 5 did which clearly established a vision and a sense of place and purpose that distinguishes one show from another just on a casual glance and the show’s pilot is the place and time to make that happen…or not. Right now Andromeda just looks like low budget SciFi TV and feels like low budget SciFi TV which makes it a good fit between Xena and Cleopatra 2525 and Earth Final Conflict which is exactly what Tribune wants. But as has been demonstrated with EFC, what’s good for Tribune is not what’s good for good science fiction.

Cast & Character - D

Surprisingly enough Sorbo is not the weak link in the Andromeda cast. In fact by contrast to his castmates, he’s actually pretty good at delivering heroic lines and going from light heroic banter to strong heroic tragedy. But then that’s exactly what he’s been doing for years now so we’ve yet to see if Andromeda will actually push any of his limits. As of now Dylan Hunt isn’t much of a character but more of a stereotypical Captain, this might just be a lack of exposure and backstory but Sorbo does demonstrate that he at the bare minimum has the persona to hold on to the role. This is no small feat when compared to the inability of Babylon 5 to find a Captain that could do the same.

Captain Ballantine his second in command makes no strong impression. Her backstory is an SF novel cliche. Her persona seems to be that of a younger Janeway. How she’ll mesh with Sorbo is a question of time.

Among the salvage crew though with Trance and Harper, Wolfe has managed to produce the two most annoying characters in a long time. Annoying to an extent that Wesley and Neelix never managed to be even after years of practice. As two refugees from teen dramas who somehow ended up on Andromeda, every moment of their screen time is purposeless, leeches away the show’s credibility and grates on the viewer. Harper is a character from a 90210 show by way of a beach party movie. He would be unnecessary and annoying as 30 second comic relief, as 42 minute comic relief plus supposedly being the chief engineer of a starship is a stunningly terrible idea. Paired with Trance whose alien makeup looks suspiciously like night cream and sounds like she’s supposed to be in Clueless, instead of a Science Fiction show its producers want to be taken seriously.

Andromeda herself is probably the strongest character concept yet though at the moment she’s more concept than character, and it doesn’t seem particularly necessary for a starship to show cleavage.

The Special Effects - B-

The quality of the special effects is mixed and ranges from upper Babylon 5 quality to shows that would have embarrassed the TOS production crew. Some of the high end animated scenes including the blasters emerging from Andromeda’s hull and the salvage vessel detaching from its crew pod to a TOS quality shot of a piece of the Andromeda shaking from unseen blasts and several mattes that don’t match the foreground or look extremely fake. Probably one of the worst offenders is the greenhouse room that Trance discovers which uses a matte whose look dates back to early TNG nearly a decade ago. And indeed even in early TNG, in episodes such as When the Bough Breaks, the results tended to be more creative and mesh better. A large portion of the special effects budget has been clearly expended on the battle scenes with the Magog which is thoroughly wasted since the battle without any structure or coherence. Far-off shots of the incoming Nietzschean ships use a matte background and aren’t placed in the same shot as Andromeda itself. The close up battle scenes are meant to show off Andromeda’s capabilities but don’t do anything of the sort. While the FX quality here is much stronger with a few exceptions, it would have been a lot smarter to exchange some of the shots of tiny ships flying past Andromeda and being blown up for narrative shots, improved time dilation effects and a shot of a Commonwealth space station or two.

The Aliens - C-

The aliens which often end up being the pivot of any SciFi show are created against the Roddenberry directive which emphasized the mobility of the actor’s face in portraying the alien instead goes for oversized monster masks that look as if they were borrowed from an 80’s horror movie, an impression that the actors only reinforce by constantly writhing around the humans like oversized vampire bats. The concept of the Magog may be that of terrifying superhuman aliens but in practice they look like rejects from a Tales from the Crypt episode. Each time one of them speaks you half expect to hear Jon Kassir narrating in the background. The Nightsider is annoying and chews the scenery so desperately it’s almost funny. But it isn’t. He does everything but stand on his head and carry around a giant neon sign reading “I’m slimy and up to something, I’m evil and can’t be trusted.” This puts him in the category of the Star Wars aliens who are basically just talking fantasy critters. The good Magog is a much stronger character but he still ends up going through the same shambling, snuffling and snorting routines that make it hard to take him seriously as a character and not a wind up toy. The good aliens consist of metallic suits that are predate even the original Star Wars movie and seem to have been borrowed directly from 50’s Invasion from Outer Space thrillers.

Since in Science Fiction aliens are meant to represent the other and to nail down the sense of really being out there, not being able to get the aliens right is bad news for an SF show. Earth Final Conflict has managed to go a very long way on Da’an alone. TOS went a long way based on Spock. But Andromeda lacks even the ability to put its equivalent on the screen.

Hopes for the Future

Andromeda needs to seriously rethink its production values, iron out its cast problems and come back stronger and more focused not just on its concept but on implementing that concept as it deserves to.

“Sum of Its Parts”

Summary: Andromeda’s Borg Redux turns on the tearjerking machines in the absence of an original story with a revoltingly saccharine reworking of TNG’s I.Borg . Meet the first Borg Teletubbie. He’s cute, cuddly and he wants to hug you. Get yours today.

MIA Update: RevBem is once again missing from the entire episode, his character is one of the few interesting characters on Andromeda and it appears he’s being written out of entire episodes more so than any other character. It may be the makeup expenses or the fact that he’s simply not liked very much by the suits.

Gene Roddenberry may have had a hand in creating many of the classic Star Trek aliens, but the Borg certainly weren’t one of them. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped “Gene Roddenberry’s” Andromeda from borrowing them for Sum of Its Parts. Of course the Borg here have been retitled as “The Consensus of Parts” which is what the Borg are. Their costumes look quite a bit like the early designs for the Borg costume featured in Communicator magazine. They call their humanoid versions drones. They harvest and integrate human brains into their systems and they’re out to assimilate Andromeda and her crew. So of course when they ask him to come to a meeting, Hunt enthusiastically accepts. He doesn’t know much of these things but he doesn’t ask either, as in Mathematics of Tears he offhandedly dismisses the rumors about “The Consensus” and allows their drones to have free rein of his ship. Unsurprisingly bad things happen.

Most of this episode is basically TNG’s I, Borg and Voyager’s Drone redone. We have a sympathetic childlike drone who develops friendships with the crew after some initial hesitation. He has to return to the Borg or risk endangering the crew. We have a situation where his sacrifice might be required and the value of his life is debated. And ultimately when the ship is threatened by the Borg, he sacrifices himself for the crew but the emotional bonds he has formed remains. The idea of a new kind of Anti-Borg consensus being born because of the crew’s actions and grateful to the crew appears in Voyager’s Unity. The idea of the ship being infiltrated with weird wiring and circuitry by a new lifeform taking control of the ship and trying to bring itself into being and endangering the ship as a result can be found in TNG’s Emergence.

Of course I, Borg did much of the same material with intensity and a sense of genuine danger. Picard and Guinan’s reactions to Hugh were borderline and disturbing in the sense of altering what we thought we knew about these people and what they were capable of. The friendly drone here though is just one of the missing Teletubbies, he’s cute, he’s friendly and kind of stupid. And most of all he’s loveable. And we meet him before we meet the Directing Intelligence, pretty much guaranteeing that the DI and its parts o’ junk ship won’t be particularly threatening or impressive. Where the beginning scene focusing on Andromeda’s personality suggest that this will develop her character, no such luck. Instead the better part of the episode is spent on the Borg Teletubbie acting cute and desperately trying to worm his way into the viewer’s affection like a Hallmark Gold Crown store on “cute steroids.” And his departure in not one, but two death scenes to milk the maximum amount of pathos for a character whose sole reason for existence is emotional manipulation.

Where I, Borg focused on developing Hugh as a viable sentient being separate from the collective which happens only by stages, the Borg Teletubbie arrives eager for your love and affection. I, Borg worked because of Hugh’s contrast between his Borg exterior and his essentially innocent mind. But this only worked because we knew the Borg and because Hugh wasn’t waddling around hugging everyone and as desperate for affection as a Tribble. Instead of developing the Consensus first and introducing Borg Teletubbie later to make a contrast and humanize the Consensus, Sum of its Parts goes for cheap emotional manipulation and pushes the tearjerking lever as far back as it can. Of course no intelligent adult would care about the robotic equivalent of a teddy bear with no contrasts or complexities, but then that doesn’t exactly seem to be Andromeda’s demographic. As such the Borg Teletubbie basically comes off as the Simpson’s Funzo or the creature of David Gerrold rejected Pre-Tribbles TOS script who looks cuddly and cute but is actually practicing mind control on the crew with evil intentions. Like it, the Borg Teletubbie invades Andromeda and nearly gets everyone killed when he tries to take over the ship but since he had good intentions, it’s all written off as okay in the end.

And just in case the average viewer hadn’t just consumed so much sugar, he was headed for diabetic shock; the episode ends with Trance burying the Teletubbie’s heart in her garden proclaiming that “even though you only lived for one day, you already became a hero.” There’s a certain appropriateness to Andromeda’s most nauseatingly saccharine character who doesn’t just mug for the camera but practically beats its senseless delivering a saccharine eulogy for a character almost as nauseatingly saccharine as herself. If this scene could somehow be harnessed and transferred into actual form, it could produce enough melted sugar to feed several starving third world nations.

Now this episode could have been hilariously awful if Sum of its Parts had featured dozens of similar Borg Teletubbies invading Andromeda and trying to take over the ship all the while talking in a childlike voice and attempting to assimilate their victims by hugging them. Unfortunately that idea never comes into practice and so this episode is simply awful. Voyager and TNG Season 7 have done some awful things to the Borg, but Andromeda has topped them all. This makes Unimatrix Zero look practically delightful, Descent begins to look like Must See TV. Unless Voyager’s season finale features the ship being invaded by huggable Borg signing “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy collective family”, Andromeda has officially taken the Borg to the lowest nadir possible. I can’t imagine what could possibly be worse than this, but no doubt Andromeda’s writers will discover it in the second season.

Next week: Borg Barney Attacks!

“Forced Perspective”

Summary: Amateur night continues as Andromeda puts on a production of Apocalypse Now set in an industrial basement, Captain Hunt is tortured by “The Great Protractor” and another Andromeda couple pairs up. And for want of a stun gun Dylan spends a half hour having horrific flashbacks. Welcome to another evening of contrived moral dilemmas and clueless character theater.

MIA Update: RevBem, Harper and Andromeda all go AWOL in this episode confirming Andromeda’s recent trend of completely writing characters out of entire episodes possibly as a budget saving measure.

Forced Perspective is a dreary and confused muddle whose most exciting part involves a B-story that has Tyr and Beka bored out of their minds. Viewers can probably sympathize since FP’s A-story involves ideals and consequences that plays out like Dan Quayle trying to make a speech about quantum physics. In other words long, clueless and very incoherent but at times so bad it’s actually amusing. Beyond finally providing some backstory on Trance Gemini, Forced makes the horrifying revelation that Dylan got his command through a mission that involved the self-defense killings of a brutal dictator who was preparing to massacre billions of innocent people and two of his guards.

Doesn’t seem very horrifying to you? Well Andromeda and Hunt seem to think it’s very horrifying and spend a half hour exploring the moral considerations of whether killing brutal dictators in self-defense is a bad thing or not. As complex an issue as this might be for an episode of Sesame Street, Forced Perspective manages to completely bypass the obvious point in favor of assuming that it is a bad thing and then having Dylan mope about it for a while. While Andromeda has always been morally tone deaf, indeed so morally tone deaf that their basic moral premises could be logically taken apart by small children, Forced Perspective is still a real gem deserving of some sort of special award. Perhaps the ‘Distinguished Janeway Pip for Courageous Moral Incomprehension in the Face of Obvious Facts Staring you Right in the Face’ plaque.

In Let Loose the Fateful Lightning, Captain Hunt enlightened some frightened and terrorized children fighting for their survival on the idea that if they stop hating and wanting to kill the Magog and Nietzchians out to exterminate, rape and enslave them, everything will be alright, thereby essentially blaming the children for defending themselves and providing them with no solution whatsoever. In Angel Dark, Demon Bright Captain Hunt was brooding about the moral implications of fighting back against Nietzchian warships who are here to fight a battle with his own fleet. In Forced Perspective we are led through flashbacks on Hunt’s first pre-Andromeda mission which involved kidnapping a ruthless and brutal dictator who would have massacred billions and bringing him to trial. Since the dictator has heavy security and comes out shooting at Dylan and Rahde, the dictator and two of his guards end up dead. Oh the Horror! Oh the Humanity!

Captain Hunt feels bad about this. Not so bad that he feels the need to return and check up on the place but bad enough that he broods about it. But then, Hunt seems to brood about everything. He probably spends hours brooding before deciding which breakfast to order. Brooding is his way of demonstrating that he has a moral dilemma he can’t resolve without first brooding about it to show how much it tears him up inside. Of course his ideas of moral dilemmas involve ludacrous moral standards, which not even Janeway would subscribe to. And what those standards come down to is that Hunt is completely unfit for command or any job which would require making decisions or putting people’s lives at risk. He’s naive, pompously self-righteous and basically just plain stupid. One gets the feeling that the Commonwealth assembled him out of stock hero body parts but forgot to include a brain.

Indeed, essentially Forced Perspective’s contrived moral dilemmas could have been entirely bypassed if on their mission to kidnap a dictator, Hunt and Rahde had bothered to pack a stun gun. Certainly stun gun technology is probably well within reach of the advanced and mighty Commonwealth. The followers of the Great Protractor seem to have them. Admittedly they don’t work very well on Hunt, but then one has to allow for the conductivity problems involved in penetrating his 3 foot thick skull covered in internal layers of cement. Since they were there to take the dictator as an unwilling prisoner, they would have had to knock him unconscious anyway or deal with him kicking and screaming all the way back. A stun gun would have prevented both the dead guards and the dead dictator. So in a sense if Hunt has to blame himself for those deaths, he can blame his defective brain. Though if you actually asked Hunt about the subject, his reply would probably be that of Captain Harriman in Star Trek Generations, “The stun guns don’t come in ’til Wednesday.” Of course this makes you wonder who would win a starship battle between Captain Harriman and Captain Hunt or would they both just manage to crash their starships into a planet?

At this point we could again mention the complete lack of security that allows anyone who wants to board Andromeda or steal the Maru or board the Maru to just do it with no problems. We could bring up the complete lack of crew despite there being two Commonwealth member worlds or ask why the Captain has to go look for parts himself instead of sending Beka and why he takes Trance instead of Harper with him. We could ask why Trance doesn’t send a distress signal to the Andromeda for help or advice when she discovers Dylan missing, why the Admiral sends a potential Starship Captain on an inteligence raid instead of using their inteligence division or why this episode not only became a script but was actually filmed and broadcast. But these would mostly be complaining about the perennial plot stupidities in Andromeda episodes, instead of the more unique and wonderful stupidities of this particular episode.

And of course no review of Forced Perspective would be complete without a mention of The Great Compass, or as the planetary insignia would suggest The Great Protractor. The Great Protractor is the sniveling British guy who decides to help the duo kidnap the dictator by leading them on a Heart of Darkness-like journey through an industrial basement. As in Apocalypse Now, they’re going after Captain Kurtz but instead of going up the river, they’re going down the hallway of an industrial basement. Why the palace of an interstellar dictator in the year 4000 AD (or whatever year the Andromeda future is set in) has a 20th century basement is best left to the lack of imagination and funding of the set designer. But The Great Protractor (though he has yet to assume this noble title) wants to turn the evil dictator in because he rejected one of his designs for a “Cathedral of Light.” The Cathedral of Light appears to be different from ordinary medieval cathedrals in that it’s really small and made out of plastic. The Great Protractor however does not want the dictator killed and when bloodshed ensues, he turns even more rabbity and babbles on about something or other. These things of course make him an ideal candidate to be left in charge of the planet which Dylan proceeds to do, and fails to check up on him or send someone from the Commonwealth to check up on him.

Now, shockingly enough, leaving the first guy you meet in charge of a planet turned out to be a bad idea. The Great Protractor clones himself for body parts and rules the planet for 300 years and after 300 years of being an absolute ruler doesn’t snivel as much as he did before. So of course Dylan decides he must die. Now Dylan has opposed killing Magog who rape and eat human beings, he’s opposed killing Nietzchians who enslave and murder human beings. He’s opposed killing Harper and Trance who screech and annoy human beings. But he decides to murder The Great Protractor mainly for cloning himself for body parts and torturing Dylan. (Wonder who he would have left in charge of the planet this time, the Pizza delivery guy?) Now, obviously, making Dylan scream like a little girl is a terrible crime but Dylan barely has any idea where he is or what kind of state The Great Protractor has been running or how his people are treated. Dylan opposed killing the dictator who was about to butcher billions, yet The Great Protractor’s government appears to feature a Senate which suggests that some form of democracy is already in place. Clearly Dylan has a shorted circuit somewhere in his decision making process and this is a shame since without the ability to make sane decisions, Captain Hunt is pretty much a mannequin with sun damaged skin.

And to cap off an evening of insanity, Captain Hunt leaves The Great Protractor in control of the planet… yet again taking his word for it that The Great Protractor will leave and turn over power to the Senate. So if The Great Protractor is evil enough to deserve to die, then taking his word for it is probably a bad idea. Furthermore, since Hunt doesn’t have a clue who the Senators are and what they’re likely to do when in power, telling The Great Protractor to turn over power to the Senate is a bit irresponsible and idiotic. Fortunately, Captain Hunt is not one of those captains who lets lack of information, lack of responsibility or lack of intelligence stand in the way of command decisions; and so Hunt once again leaves power in the hands of a man who has shown he will abuse it, makes no arrangements for an interim government and takes no role in guiding the planet towards democracy. As in Fateful Lightning and Rose in the Ashes, he walks away from the entire mess glibly assuming that everything will be all right, even though there’s no possible reason for believing so.

Instead of actually taking responsibility for a mess he had no small role in creating, Hunt leaves to return to the Andromeda for another crucial week of exchanging witty repartee with Beka, learning about BhuddismLite from RevBem and having Tyr as his personal trainer. So once again with his mission botched and absolutely nothing accomplished, but his self-righteousness intact, Captain Stupidity rides off into the sunset…or the sunrise…or just in some random direction.

Unfortunately he just can’t tell the difference.

Next week: Andromeda is boarded and attacked by someone or something. Lots of yelling and screaming ensues.