Gene Roddenberry never did think small.

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda is a syndicated program. Check your local listings for air dates and times. Review by E. Mark Mitchell A new syndicated program. It’s a gamble, no matter how you look at it. And when it comes from the well-intentioned yet deceased mind of Gene Roddenberry, it’s even less certain. At least with a new Raimi product, you know it’s going to have some kind of freaky slapstick action going on for you. Gene Roddenberry, though… I don’t know. See, Gene was always harder to predict. On the one hand, he was a great idea guy. A Wagon Train in space used as a platform to comment on events of the day. Or perhaps a spy in the ranks of the "benevolent" aliens. On the other hand, he had the elegance of a sledgehammer lobotomy. If you could describe something with a single blunt word, why bother using harmonious polysyllables? Well, for art, of course, but perhaps that wasn’t his strong suit. Now that ol’ Gene has gone to see what’s behind the stars, his old notebooks are being mined for series ideas. On the up side, some decently original SF TV has come from them. On the down side, even that has problems with direction (witness Earth: Final Conflict, which continues to change direction yet again as the new season opens). So when I heard that Andromeda was coming out, it was only natural to have a few misgivings. Now, Andromeda is set to be at least an attempt at a hard SF series, which has rarely been done successfully. Hard SF is where you try to get the science down right, like inertia in microgravity, and the measures that need to be taken to preserve life in the incredibly hostile environment of space. Babylon 5 is the only other hard SF series that springs to mind readily, and they had plenty of cheats of their own. Many people don’t know this, but I’m a big fan of hard SF. I love it when they get the science right, whether it’s quantum spin of an electron or the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole. Of course, the science we understand isn’t all that glamorous. The time delays of lightspeed-limited communication, not to mention the time dilation effect of travelling close to the speed of light, does not make interesting space opera. If you want to make it fun, you’ve got to speed things up, invent warp space or inter-dimensional teleportation. That’s a gimmick you can work with on TV. So, if you’re going to do hard SF, even with a few cheats, you have to find other ways to make it interesting, as well. Babylon 5 had an epic story on a galactic scale, and some seriously capable actors to bring it to life. Well, at least for the first four seasons; I never got to see more than an episode or two of the fifth. Regardless. From the looks of the previews, Andromeda had some good designers on staff. The technology was hard, as opposed to the fluid biological inventions on display in Earth: Final Conflict, but it had the streamlined, aesthetic look that they started introducing in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Never underestimate the assist that a good set design and good effects can give to a series. Besides the look, the talent is appreciable. Naturally, the first person everybody notices is Kevin Sorbo, he of Hercules and Kull fame. Did you realize Kull was supposed to be a Conan prequel? News to me. Anyway. Moving away from the sword and sorcery epics was a good choice for him; it’s still in the Speculative Fiction ghetto, but it’s a different kind of costume, and he gets to play with props of a higher level than the Bronze Age. Admittedly, moving away from the Raimi influence (or those movies that try to capitalize on said influence) means not quite as much comedy, but surely he can work in some humor elsewhere. Sadly, it isn’t until the actual series starts that we get a good look at anyone else that’s going to be on the show, so that doesn’t really help us access it up front. So if the look is good, and the acting chops are in shape, then the last element to carry the series has got to be the plotline. Sure, there are individual episodes that each deal with a separate event, and sure, not everybody is going to have an overarching goal like Babylon 5, but all the same, there’s got to be a premise, and a goal. Star Trek had one, Earth: Final Conflict has one, so what’s this one going to be? I gotta give this to ol’ Gene: he didn’t know how to aim low. The set-up is quite clearly based on the Fall of the Roman Empire. Each episode (so far) starts with an introductory quote from a book titled The Rise and Fall of the Systems Commonwealth, which is the primary civilization at the open of the premiere episode. The Commonwealth spans three galaxies, has millions of member worlds, and establishes peace and harmony throughout its domain. When encountering new species, even the Magog, who eat other sentient beings (and quite a lot of them, by reports), they prefer to broker peace, rather than wage war. In fact, the Commonwealth hasn’t fought a real, all-out war in centuries. It’s the pinnacle of peace and enlightenment. Of course, it has to fall. One of the major cultures in the Commonwealth is an engineered human variant species, philosophically devoted to the teachings of Nietzsche to the point of religious fanaticism. The Nietzscheans are as male-dominated warrior culture as they come, and they like it that way. Unfortunately, they see the Commonwealth as weak, by making peace with the Magog where they should have taken vengeance for all the people the Magog, um, ate. And, as we all know, the superman must destroy the regular man, merely by his presence. And, in this case, a whole buncha secretly stockpiled starships. The Andromeda Ascendant, captained by Dylan Hunt (Sorbo), is lured into a trap by Nietzscheans, utilizing a black hole to create both a reason for the Andromeda to rescue civilians and a means to keep them from using their Faster Than Light drive. The FTL sequences are half-cheesy, in the Classic Trek way, and half-cool, in the scientific theoretical and nifty CGI way. In any case, turns out Dylan’s first officer (and best man at his upcoming wedding) is Nietzschean, and in a coldly logical manner, informs his friend the captain that he shouldn’t be trusted as the other Nietzscheans attack. Which is accurate, as it turns out, considering he sabotages the ship when it dips close to the black hole to lose its attackers (most of the crew evacuated when things got hot, but Dylan, his cool bug pilot, Refractions-of-Dawn, and the Treacherous Nietzschean First Officer stayed aboard. Oh, and the ship’s hottie AI (Lexa Doig), naturally, but she couldn’t hardly evacuate, being the intelligence in the vessel, after all). TNFO shoots Dawn, who was probably the most instantly likeable bug I’ve ever met (more charisma in one mostly immobile costumed finger than some leads have in their whole heads), and then attacks Dylan with some fairly cool acrobatic kung fu, which also employs these forearm spines that Nietzscheans have, while the ship plunges too close to the black hole. Apparently, being genetically superior means having muscle-controlled spines in your forearms as moderately useful weapons (unless, of course, your opponent knows you have them, which, if he knows you’re a Nietzschean, is a foregone conclusion). Of course, being the lead, Dylan wins, and his friend is proud of him. Those nutty Nietzscheans! But wait, then it gets all sepia-toned and still-screened. Then there’s another ship, a kind of tramp freighter, the Eureka Maru, crewed by Beka Valentine (Lisa Ryder), the owner and hard-working captain, Trance Gemini (Laura Bertram), an endearing oddball of unknown species origin (which promises to play heavily in future episodes), Rev Bem (Brent Stait), a "reformed" Magog turned holy man, so I think his first name is actually his title (and BEM is short for Bug-Eyed Monster, so that’s the joke there), and engineer Seamus Harper (Gordon Michael Woolvett), who, by having the British Isles-area ethnic name is fated to be obsessed with technology (thank you, Mr. Scott). Introduced later is the remaining regular, Tyr Anasazi (Keith Hamilton Cobb), who, besides having the rockingest name for a dangerous guy, is a Nietzschean mercenary who is disgraced enough that he has to prove his genetic worthiness in order for his culture to allow him to breed. Fun folks, those Nietzscheans. The writers went all-out on coming up with names for these folks. I mean, really. Trance Gemini is my favorite, but I still think Rev Bem is the cleverest, and you already know my opinion of Tyr’s name. They’ve all been hired to find (and in Tyr’s case, capture) the long-lost legendary Andromeda Ascendant. Their employer is a rat (John Tench). No, really. When your employer is a giant rat with gold chains like a low-rent Mr. T, and none of the muscle to back up the freaky outfit, you know you’re in trouble. Heck, one of the rat’s henchmen, another rat, is all dressed up in biker leather, except instead of looking all tough, he looks like Al Gore in biker leather. He’s not even as tough-looking as one of the Village People. Or maybe it’s a she; hard to tell with aliens (and Village People). Okay, anyway. We find out it’s 300 years later, and the war with the Nietzscheans has killed the Commonwealth. No, really. That huge star-spanning empire got squashed. The barbarians overran the gates, and Nero fiddled. No, wait, it was a benevolent empire, not really a corrupt one. It fell through treachery, not internal decay. Though I’m sure someone fiddled, somewhere; people are like that. In any case, some technology has regressed, and civilized behavior is definitely on the down-turn. A nearly extinct ailment is apparently rampant. Basically, they did it, they finally did it. They blew it up. It’s a madhouse, a madhouse. Yes, yes, all that. So they find the Andromeda, snag it with grappling hooks, and drag it out of the gravity well, if only barely. This allows Dylan and Andromeda to return to a normal time frame, and they find out time has really flown while they’ve been having fun. Or almost getting killed, take your pick. Well, it takes them a few minutes, but soon they realize they have intruders, and they go to repel them. Beka and her cohorts don’t take this well, but Boss Rat takes it even less well, as he then smarmily reveals his hired mercenaries, led woodenly by Tyr the Nietzschean. Tyr the Nietzschean has all the acting expression of a bag of rocks. Yeah, he’s cute and all, and I’m sure he has some magnetism when he gets going, but I get the impression that SF acting is not his game, and he’s going to have to take some time to get up to speed. It looks like he still can’t believe he didn’t get the call-back for Wild Wild West 2: Even Wilder (look for it in your video stores this Christmas). And for a member of a warrior species, he needs some remedial boot camp. The first combat we see him in, he’s shooting unarmed, female-shaped robots that don’t even seem to see him. Heck, he runs up after a fleeing one and beheads her. Now that’s my kind of warrior hero. Then later, when pursuing Dylan, he does this maneuver that might have sounded neat in description, but if his opponent had been armed, he would have lost all his pretty dredlocks and the skull that carried them. Bring back that TNFO; he at least did this neato acrobatic flip thing over the bridge railing, and it wasn’t even a Raimi-style over-the-top umlauting-cry flip, it was actually almost Jet Li-ish. Must have been quite a change for Mr. Sorbo. But I digress. We play the game of "who knows the ship better," as Dylan picks off his enemies. Naturally, at some point, some of them have to die in order to demonstrate the danger that the people we really care about are in. That’s only natural for an adventure plot, and it also gives us the chance to see what a Truly Good Guy this Captain Hunt is, as he agonizes over every death, even those caused by the evil or the stupidity of others. Andromeda herself gets the chance to do more than appear in a grainy hologram and tell Dylan things when Seamus reveals he’s got a bit of the Johnny Mnemonic in him, and it goes horribly, horribly wrong. Never try to hack an AI’s intelligence, puny meat-brains; it’ll feed your mind back to you upside down and backwards. Heck, I know that, and I’m in the infant 21st, not the year 3535, or wherever it is. Can’t be 2525, because nobody is wearing bare-midriff tops with magenta thongs… but that’s a different show, sorry, sorry… They show them all kind of back-to-back on WGN, so they bleed over a bit in the memory. Anyway. So, yeah, hijinks ensue, and the upshot of it is that Dylan gets his ship, and he recruits the crew of the Maru (and a dazed-looking Tyr) to join him in a mission to bring civilization to the unwashed heathen savages of the galaxy. No, wait. To return the ideals of the Commonwealth, which are justice, peace, and a higher calling, to the galaxy. An epic adventure, to be sure, if they can hold it up and not CHANGE FREAKING DIRECTION EVERY FREAKING SEASON! Okay, yes, Earth: Final Conflict has me bitter, so it’s probably not fair to accuse this show of changing after only two episodes. And I have to say, I really enjoy Andromeda so far. It’s true that Dylan is a goody-goody, in some ways, but he’s doing the right thing for the right reasons (i.e. because it’s right), and if we accept the premise of the show on its own merits, that the Commonwealth was a good thing and that it would be better to have it back than to have the current state of affairs, then we have to accept that this self-imposed mission is a high and noble calling. Which I generally enjoy seeing. I don’t think they’re trying to say that the Commonwealth was perfect, but it is clear that it had enormous advantages over what replaced it. I like the characters (my complaints about Mr. Cobb notwithstanding; if he loosens up, I’m sure he’ll do better), I’m intrigued by the design of the sets, props, and FX, they don’t screw up the science too badly (and actually use it correctly more often than many), and I can get behind the "mission statement." But, it’s from the Roddenberry estate, which means they probably won’t be able to keep from mucking around with their product. Sure, I’m going on the basis of only one other show, but it’s the only other evidence I have, and it’s not promising. Date: 11/27/00 Copyright © 2000 by E. Mark Mitchell