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There are a lot of good and bad commentaries on Andromeda. That seems fitting, everyone likes different things.
For me, Andromeda is the type of show I wished had gotten better funding and had a chance to follow its arc with better precision. Some found season 4 the best, I found it the worst, in character development, plot and even writing. True, the CGI was better, but that never ever makes up for bad plots or writing in my book...without a good story, everything sucks. You can forgive a lot of bad makeup or silly sets, when you have great writing and characters. Those who are fans of Dr. Who or Blake's Seven or even Red Dwarf would understand. In fact, those who are fans of the original StarTrek, the one about ethical issues mixed with characters in an adventure setting, will understand.
I think Andromeda was truer to the old Star Trek than anything since ST's time. In fact, I'm one of those who was tremendously disappointed with Next Generation and all its spin offs, except for the 1st season of Enterprise and the last season (NOT including the stupid cliché season finale.) The first couple seasons of Farscape were good, then it got overly dark and cliché, same with Babylon 5, except there I put the blame squarely on JMS.
I even found that with Andromeda's faults, the characters grew on you (but not necessarily if you didn't see the series from the beginning... because the backstory was so important to each and every episode...building on the other to some extent.) Even story lines I've heard others say had no meaning, or too tangential, were often fun and I, personally, did see connections with the arc...whether the Abyss is attacking through the WorldShip or through influencing another universe to attack through a vortex, it is the same arc...just adding complexity. In fact, this show's arc was exceptionally complex and intertwined, in mini-arcs, character development, subplots, everything...it even was asking questions that are not PC, like mixing God and Demon, good and evil, multi-universes, Promethean like beings giving fire to mortals yet possibly being condemned as demons...god like entities that seek destruction as a way to harmony, hating life, because life is complex and chaotic and full of suffering...even the idea that an philosophy generated in our time (Nietzche) could end up causing a new kind of bigotry and genocide between human variants in the future. Nazism, Stalinism, human control, slavery...a great writer once said that basic human stories never changed, just the people and the variations in how the tale is told.
It's a lot to spin into a tale and I preferred those stories, whether it be as simple and fun as Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way to as complex as the idea of an entity developing that hates life, not in the cliché villain way, but because it wants an end to chaos and sees nothingness as harmony. You can do adventure and fun and still ask serious questions, more often you expect that from good science fiction writing, usually getting that from books...it's hard to do a TV/film show that can get those issues in because of the great complexity and the likelihood you will offend someone...and even more sadly it seems lately, it's harder getting viewers that appreciate it rather than those that seem to want just CGI, creepy costumes and boring, wooden scientific speaking characters.
I also simply like the series because the characters don't walk around like valium-drugged-into-calmness zombies (Next Generation, et al) nor do they all speak techno-babble or all act like scientists. Here, the way is pretty much the way you'd expect people in the future to be...they don't speak about technologists or scientists, they simply accept the tech as normal and concentrate on normal daily activities..and reacting to odd things the way we might with "OK, this is weird..." or "I'm not a science ship, I'm a warship. I'm good at blowing things up." The humor is often because they are acting the way you or I might act, not calmly, with normal speech and with normal human-alien reactions.
Things I miss: tying things together better, like the connections between the Vortex warriors as a different front of attack than the Magog, the tesselation/phaseshifting hunters that came after Harper twice and were suddenly never seen again, the idea that genius brains were being stolen and that they were also tied in with the Engine of Creation thread being dropped, the Angels bell thread, the other avators like Trance suddenly not showing up anymore with conflicting ways of dealing with the Abyss, and so on.
I know season 4 and 5 could have been a lot better...4 if they had done some better writing and more consistently even at the loss of some special effects and dropped the paradigm stupidity...and 5 if they had more money, so didn't spend every show in Sefra...the stories seemed a bit better and consistent, I think, but the scenery and situation just stayed depressing/boring...without the general fun and humor that had kept the characters from killing each other.
And yes, I think the science on Andromeda was better thought out than on other shows, and the timeline/history...with the exception of how to rescue a ship caught on the event horizon of a black hole of course... but hey, no show is perfect on tech. It would be too boring if it were.
Anyway, my two cents...
score /10
cganders 1 October 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1185496/ |
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18-2-2021 02:47:06