Based on an idea by Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry, the series centered around Dylan Hunt, a starship captain who is trapped in time for three hundred years. Freed, Dylan attempts to restore the galaxy-spanning Commonwealth he once served.
Based on an idea by Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry, the series centered around Dylan Hunt, a starship captain who is trapped in time for three hundred years. During that time, the galaxy-spanning Commonwealth he once served falls in an interstellar war. Freed, Dylan uses his powerful ship, the Andromeda, to restore order and justice.
Starring Kevin Sorbo, Lisa Ryder, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Michael Gordon Wolvett, Laura Bertram, Steve Bacic, and Brent Stait. The series ran five seasons in syndication.
In which we meet Dylan and Andromeda.
Trying to escape a rebellion within the intergalactic Commonwealth, Captain Dylan Hunt of the High Guard battleship Andromeda Ascendant is caught in the event horizon of a black hole and frozen in time for 300 years.
Dramatic space battles. Lots of cool toys. Funny lines (mostly from Harper). Good start to the series.
In which Tyr thinks he's a Nietzschean and Dylan wins.
Dylan tries to keep Gerentex from taking over the Andromeda by winning over the mercenaries hired to capture the ship.
Little heavier on the fight scenes and brushes with death than part one, meaning less character development (except, oddly enough, in the case of bad-guy Gerentex).
In which Mad Max wants his kids back.
A band of children abandoned during the Fall of the Commonwealth hail Dylan as their Messiah and presume that he's there to help them survive by vaporizing their enemies.
Dylan: "They've stopped shooting."
Harper: "They've probably gone to get more guns."
Dylan: "Only God should have that much power."
Tyr: "Funny. Today, that's who you said you were."
I think (and technically this has nothing to do with the show itself) that this one was supposed to come after "D Minus Zero." For one thing, Dylan is a way more gung-ho about his mission in that one, whereas here he begins to question and reassess his strategies.
Also, the series is pretty good about threading little bits of dialogue from episode to episode. For example, when Beka demands to know what Harper is doing, he counters by asking for one of her secrets, "What's your natural hair color?" In "The Pearls That Were His Eyes," Beka tells Trance that nanobots designed by her father allow her to change her hair color to whatever she wants it to be.
The dialogue hint here is that in "D Minus Zero," Andromeda as a hologram has a conversation with Dylan as he's getting out of the shower. In this episode, confronted with Rommie in her Avatar form, Dylan mentions how many times they've discussed ship functions in what might be considered intimate situations and Rommie brings up the shower scene. It's a clue that "To Loose..." was meant to come after "D Minus Zero."
The problem is that Andromeda getting her Avatar body is a pretty significant development and hard to cover up. Although, "D Minus Zero" includes scenes of Rommie as an Avatar, they look a little blue-screen around the edges, as if they may have been originally intended to be fx'd into her as a hologram. Then, when the order of the shows was changed, the effect was left off and the generic bridge shot was added behind her instead.
In which there is much running about and then things blow up.
An encounter with a mysterious warship becomes a fight for survival against a seemingly unbeatable foe.
Harper: "This'll teach me to sit at the helm. Next time, I'm all about environmental sciences."
The thing that I think is so cool is that the mysterious ship appears again in "The Ties That Blind," as the galactic environmentalist Restors, a organization that turns out in "Star Crossed" to be the brainchild of the warship Balance of Judgment. Instead of disposing of the enemy just because the episode was ending, the writers kept it around. That way they avoid needing to come up with and explain a new bad guy each time.
The strategy of threading information and character exploration through more than one episode was used several times. Beka's father's addiction to Flash is only hinted at in "The Ties That Blind," but becomes a major plot point in both "The Pearls That Were His Eyes" (affecting his friendship with Sid) and "It Makes a Lovely Light," where Beka's own addictive personality is established.
Another example is Dylan's fiancée Sarah, who promised him that she'd build a life for herself ("The Banks of the Lethe") and we get to see it in "Home Fires," which also reintroduces Dylan's issues with his treacherous first officer Gaheris Rhade by giving us his genetic reincarnation, Telemachus. Tyr's little expedition to steal the remains of the Nietzschean progenitor Drago Musevni ("Music of a Distant Drum") brings bounty hunters down on him in "Exit Strategies." Tyr's wife from "Double Helix," meanwhile, shows up again in "Immaculate Perceptions," where the possibility of their son being the genetic reincarnation of Drago Musevni is raised.
The best part, of course, is that each episode manages to stand on its own, as well as tying neatly together. The stories are strengthened by the common thread in a very subtle way, however, because it's not about building a Big Bad, but about building a mini-universe where elements last beyond a single story. There's a whole galaxy of events happening off-screen and this series is pretty good about keeping track of elements that have been established in early episodes that can be utilized and expanded on in later ones.
In which Tyr gets married and Dylan has flashbacks.
Dylan tries to negotiate with a group of Nietzscheans, but may be
betrayed by Tyr, who makes plans to wed one of the Pride's females.
Nietzscheans are so much fun.
In which there is time travel.
With Trance at the helm, the Andromeda slides back in time, giving Dylan a chance to change history by warning the Commonwealth about the Nietzschean threat. He decides to return to his proper time as soon as possible, over everyone's objections, but must reconsider when three times as many Nietzschean ships show up than should be there according to the history books.
If you're willing to put up with the time travel, this is one of the best. If time travel makes your head hurt, this isn't going to help.
In which Beka needs new family.
The ship picks up a Wayist holy man being attacked by galactic environmentalists determined to preserve the space lanes. Onboard is Beka's brother Rafe, a con artist who claims that he has found religion and become a new man, much to her disbelief.
Ah, the quirky rascal brother. They're always con men; I don't think I've ever seen one who really was a priest. (Though the last time I saw Cameron Daddo was Hope Island and he was playing a minister.) He makes a good con man, with those big round eyes that say, "Trust me, really." I hope we see him again.
There's not an enormous amount of new information about Beka. I mean, we do learn the details of her dad's dying and how she's estranged from her family (though never anything about her mother), and it sets up "The Pearls That Were His Eyes," but it's not a surprise. She kind of had the vibe. After all, she's a strong, determined female. In TV Land it's impossible that she just decided that her intelligence and experience gave her the right to voice her opinions and command her own fate. She must have been emotionally scarred at some point and forced to "put up walls" and "push people away."
In which the decks drip with the guts of the unworthy, but Harper has given life and form to the first time-traveling fruit in the history of the universe.
In orbit around the black hole where Dylan was trapped, Andromeda receives a communications signal from Dylan's fiancee Sarah. Three hundred years in the past, she is in the process of trying to pull him out of the event horizon. With a little help from a pair of Perseid scientists, Harper builds a device that may help Dylan reunite with his lost love.
Dylan: "I like [the Perseids]."
Beka: "Yeah, but you like everyone, even people who try to kill you. Especially people who try to kill you."
Harper: "Oh, the decks drip with the guts of the unworthy, but I have given life and form to the first time traveling fruit in the history of the universe."
Perseid: "I must say that the prospect of tearing you apart, particle by particle, and reassembling you on a ship three hundred years in the past is exhilarating. We admire your devotion to science."
Another time travel episode, this time spiced up by Dylan's fiancee (played by Kevin Sorbo's real life wife).
In which Dylan get tossed in jail and there's a Prison Riot story.
Dylan and Rommie, her android body running low on power, are tossed in jail, where the devious Kylie offers to make Dylan one of her crew. Her sister, the noble Jessa, rescues Dylan from the compound and takes him into the forests around it, where she asks for his help removing Kylie from power. When Jessa is arrested by the robotic warden, Dylan convinces Kylie to help him break her out. They manage to do so, but Kylie is killed in the attempt.
The characters get to prove how dangerous they are in the kicking butt scenes, but also how good and ethical they are in all the scenes where they tell the other prisoners about how they should be acting. Don't beat up your fellow man; don't steal all your fellow man's food, survival isn't everything. Of course, the only reason they are around to give these little lectures is because they were bigger and tougher than the rest.
Dylan shows his Kirkian streak here, spending most of the episode explaining to Kylie and then Jessa that the "system is broken." They didn't do anything wrong and just because their parents were convicts doesn't mean they're guilty and they shouldn't be there. And both of them respond with much the same answer, if not attitude: the system, as Kylie puts it, is working exactly the way it is supposed to.
The system has been set up to remove the criminal element from their home world; after that, who cares what happens? If they can be dumped somewhere and forgotten, that's perfect. If they want to run around and kill each other, that's even better, just as long as they don't do it where "good citizens" will be affected.
Dylan remains somewhat dense about the whole thing, not really seeing that while his actions may be differently motivated, he's still using violence to enforce his world-view. He certainly doesn't hesitate to blow away the robot warden at the end. (You'll notice that they made the bad guy a robot. If he'd been "human," Dylan would have probably just turned him over to the authorities, but because he was a machine, it was all right to kill him.)
There's that not-so-subtle paradox of using violence to bring peace.
When Jessa asks Dylan to help her remove Kylie from power, he points
out that another thug will come along to take her place. What he might
have pointed out is that by using force as a means to the end, Jessa
might well have become the thug that takes Kylie's place.
In which we should never trust the second-in-command.
In the midst of negotiations with representatives of a human majority on a world that was once engaged in a brutal war with the Nietzscheans, Tyr finds out that Castalian President Lee ordered the destruction of an orbiting station full of Nietzscheans. When he interrupts a state dinner to tell Lee just what he thinks of him, Lee refuses to join the Commonwealth without an apology from Tyr. During their private discussion, however, Lee is shot, apparently by Tyr's force-lance.
With most murder mysteries, a normally gentle, low-key character is suddenly raging around about a contrived painful past (or painfully contrived past) that's never been mentioned before and any question of guilt or innocence takes about three seconds before they move on to the whole "he's been framed" part of the evening's entertainment. The fun with Tyr, of course, comes from the fact that he could actually be guilty.
For one thing, he's been established as very family-centric (in this case, family being his extended "pride"). A crime against the Kodiak Pride is a crime against him. There's also the fact that his own immediate family was indiscriminately slaughtered in a similar fashion. He's got more than enough motive, means is never in question and he has opportunity while he's alone with President Lee. The fact that his name is in the credits is just about the only thing that makes it unlikely that he's guilty; within the framework of the story and the character, it's quite believable.
The resolution to the murder is a bit convoluted, and reliant on a certain amount of technobabble and a fairly obvious red herring with security officer Yau being suspected. While the Castilians demand Tyr be turned over to them to face execution, Dylan and the others eventually figure out that Chancellor Chandos, Lee's successor, framed Tyr in order to keep the truth about the station's destruction a secret.
Oddly enough in these scenarios, more time is spent on the secondary characters being wrongly accused than on the person who is actually guilty. The true killer gets a moment or two to give a brief overview of the motives, but it's generally given in a whiny, desperate voice, and since we haven't seen much of the person giving the speech, it's hard to care. Having become aware of Yau's history, the it's welcome that the focus is shifted to Yau's reaction to Chandos' confession, rather than his whining.
Tyr, however, is both a series cast member and a more interesting character and it's too bad he moves to the background so soon, particularly because they could have played even more with the fact that he may well have been guilty.
In which Beka needs new family... and new friends.
Beka receives an old message from her father's business partner, calling in a favor the Valentines owed him. When she arrives to help, however, she and Trance learn the Sid Barry has become mega-businessman Sam Profit, and he isn't too happy to see them days before a big merger. Beka's dad had information about Profit's drug-running origins and proof that he was responsible for a massacre at a customs station. Profit tortures Beka, but she is able to find her father's data file and blackmails him into letting her go.
Beka starts off in a fair amount of denial about her father's drug use. When Sid gets Beka hopped up on the drug Flash, however, Beka tells Trance that she has never used any type of drugs, afraid that addiction is in her blood. When she escapes Sid, she realizes that her father's ingenuity gave her the information she needs to defeat him. Later, she says has to try and remember as he was when she was a child, and not the Flash-fried wreck he was at the end of his life.
From the fights with Rafe in "The Ties That Blind," it is implied that Ignatius Valentine died from a lingering disease, that not wanting to see him in his weakened state was part of the reason Rafe took off. Her brother is only briefly mentioned here (Sid describes their childhood as being "raised like wolves"), but this newly complicated family portrait still affects his character as well as Beka's. Their con-game, out for me and mine, personalities are a little more understandable. They don't let anyone get too close, even family - particularly family. The initial distrust and flippant good-byes between them seem more appropriate now.
The difference between them, however, is that Beka stayed with their father until the end, and though she is casual about a lot of things, when the cards are down, she is forcibly honest about how she feels and what she wants. She's formed very close relationships with her crew and has shown very little compunction about extending that to Dylan, Rommie and even Tyr.
This story keeps its focus where it belongs: on Beka. Specifically on Beka and her relationship with her father. Just about every conversation she and Sid have goes back to her father. Through her dialogues with Sid, to her ramblings while high on Flash, to her final scene with Trance when they return to the Andromeda, Beka's words paint the picture of a man who had many faults, but who somehow inspired an enormous amount of love and loyalty from his daughter. The mechanics of the plot are really just a framework for these conversations and revelations, and the cliche character of the "Old Friend," just someone for Beka to talk to.
In which there is much angst.
Dylan and Beka drag everyone off to find another supposedly "lost" Commonwealth ship, then are surprised when it turns out to be manned by killer androids.
An ensemble series is tough because you have to give everyone something to do in each episode. This sometimes results in jerky, lopsided plots, with people are stuffed in where they don't really belong or act out of character in order to further a story. Andromeda is particularly good at getting around this by sending characters off-ship for the week or in some other way reducing their presence in the story.
In this episode, Trance is off watching the mating rituals of an alien species, which not only leads to some good lines (Beka: "Once a century? They get even less action than you." Harper: "Uh, no, they don't."), but also becomes the reason for what happens next. Dylan complains that his so-called crew is never actually on the ship, and in order to soothe him, Beka suggests they go looking for another rumored High Guard vessel. This also starts up the B-plot, the contrast between the ever-AWOL Andromeda crew and the crew of the Pax Magellanic, all spit-shined and saluting.
They could have just spontaneously decided to go looking, but this way sets up a couple of nice character scenes between Beka and Dylan, instead of a contrived, "oh, by the way..." And the comparison between the two crews could have happened with or without Trance there, but what makes this series especially strong is that they are not afraid to leave someone out. If there isn't going to be something constructive for the character to add to the story, why force the issue? Rev Bem is left on the Andromeda and Tyr gets just one scene, then disappears until the fight at the end. Just because they're in the opening credits, doesn't mean that they have to show up every week.
I know. I'm contradicting several whines and a huge rant about Dr. Helm not being there on Queen of Swords, but that was somewhat different. QoS was telling stories about a significant character aspect, Tessa's love life, without having first established it with any consistency. Also, that absence was just of one character; there was no balance to it. Every character on Andromeda, even Dylan, has had a week off at some point in the season.
The strength of this approach can be seen when you compare this show to Magnificent Seven. They had an embarrassment of riches, seven really good actors, but less of a clue of how to use them. In order to give them each a big scene, the episode would be overloaded with plot, jump from one guy to another without rhyme or reason, or would blow small incidents out of proportion so that they each had a "moment."
In order for the audience to care about any of the characters, they each have to have the opportunity to shine. That means a full, well-thought out story highlighting some aspect of their character. By refusing to shove unnecessary characters into the stories, the writers are able to focus on what is important. Here, it's Rommie's sister ship and their relationship and Dylan's coming to grips with the command style of his new crew. Tyr got his day in "Double Helix" and "Music of a Distant Drum;" Beka in "The Ties That Blind," "The Pearls That Were His Eyes" and "It Makes a Lovely Light."
Every one of the main characters got at least one episode focused on them. This meant that when the big season finale rolled around, the audience was familiar with the characters and cared about each one of them. "Its Hour Come 'Round At Last" ended with almost every character on the verge of death (typical season finale), but would anyone have minded who lived or died if we hadn't gotten to know them as individuals first?
In which there is amnesia.
Stranded on a planet controlled by an enemy pride, an amnesiac Tyr struggles to figure out who he is and why he is being pursued by Nietzschean warriors. It might have something to do with the mysterious box containing the mummified remains of the very first Nietzschean ever, but I'm just guessing.
Midden is a nice enough planet to visit if you have amnesia, but I wouldn't care enough about the characters to live there, particularly in the case of Kindler, Gentler Tyr.
In which there is much Harper.
Harper becomes the reluctant recipient of all the knowledge of a dying Perseid. Grandiose plans to refit Andromeda's systems flow in an endless stream, until it becomes apparent that Harper is unable to "find the on-off button." He begins having horrific nightmares featuring a Magog attack and freaks out whenever Rev Bem is around. Adding injury to insanity, he is targeted by a bounty hunter who wants to pick his brain in the most literal way.
It's been pointed out to me that any reasonable person, faced with an alien escape pod that looks like a giant scum-laden beach ball, would punt that puppy back out the airlock and fly on. Anybody with half a brain would be more careful; they would know from previous experience that the "bad feeling about this" means something.
Which brings us to a very important element of television storytelling: the bonehead stunt.
Part of the reason for what happens next goes back to the old myth of Pandora's Box. Human nature appears to be to investigate things rather than to pass by. Why else would there be so many great explorers, so many cliches about roads less traveled?
In this case, the ends justify the means. The single act - or bonehead stunt - in the opening scene can be excused because it kicks off an episode where the payoff in character and story is so great. This really isn't a stand-alone episode; it wraps around and clicks back into the overall season arc, not only in terms of teasing regarding the Magog but also, a little, with Trance's secret. More important than that is the outstanding character development of Harper and Rev Bem.
This is one of my favorite episodes. Because it's all about Harper. Well, not really about Harper in the sense that we get enormous amounts of background information, but he's all over this episode, so we still get a pretty good fix on his character: highly intelligent, sometimes kind of lazy, but willing to do whatever it takes to keep his friends alive. He has a great amount of loyalty, but can be pretty nasty when pushed into a corner. (Check out "Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way" for further evidence of that.) Usually, his mouth is working faster than his brain, but after the Perseid gets a hold of him here, it's the other way around.
Which, when I think about it, is a method of character development I prefer to whiny monologues about how tough he had it as a child.
There is also such a nice scene between Harper and Rev Bem in the med-bay, as Rev Bem describes his constant battle to control his appetites. He then makes a couple of suggestions, teaching Harper how to use some Wayist tricks to calm his mind. Adorably, that works only until Jaeger points a power tool at his brain and starts it up, and then Harper doesn't even bother to play macho. He just starts yelling for his mommy.
There's also a nice strain of creator vs destroyer going on in the background. All of the flashbacks to humanity's darkest horrors, many self-inflicted, are contrasted with the things Harper is building and the improvements he's making to Andromeda. (Another recurring theme is language and communication creating bonds between two individuals.) It's equally demonstrative of Harper's character that he is completely focused on the creation side of things, rejecting the destruction.
Harper's reactions during the Magog attack in "Its Hour Come Round at Last," the cowering and the whining, for example, are perfectly understandable based on his experiences here. He knows what's gonna happen; he had a front row seat to the most vicious Magog slaughter of them all, playing wide screen and surround-sound in his brain, over and over again. But his final decision to stand back-to-back with Tyr and fight for his life is equally in-character, considering the lengths he went to save his friends and draw Jaeger away here.
So, if they had rolled the space-ball out the airlock, no Perseid would pop out, and Harper wouldn't get his brain fried. He wouldn't have the opportunity to grow, his friendship with Rev Bem wouldn't be tested, and Rev Bem's personality wouldn't get a little reveal before his spotlight story in "Devil Take the Hindmost." Finally, the information about the being (or whatever) directing the Magog attack wouldn't have been revealed.
The payoff is important. If this idiotic move is followed by too many others, or if the story just peters out into a cliched mess, then the show deserves what it gets. When Harper and Beka crack open the pod, you know no good can come of it. The following hour is so well-done, however, that I couldn't hold it against them.
In which Dylan needs new friends. Preferably ones that aren't trying to kill. him.
Leaving Beka and Tyr on the Andromeda to flirt, everyone else goes off looking for parts to repair the ship. Dylan winds up getting snatched from the Maru, however, by representatives of a world that blames him for everything that's gone wrong there for the past three hundred years.
It seems that Dylan and Rhade once went to Mobius to "extradite" the tyrant Chancellor Pharen, with a little help from Vemitri, his chief architect. Things went wrong, as they often do, and Pharen went down in a hail of bullets. Vemitri was left in charge, which might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the end of the Commonwealth meant the end of support for his government. He missed the memo about the Nietzschean revolt and somewhere along the line decided it was all Dylan's fault.
After spending the last three centuries trying to keep power, becoming more and more dictatorial and unhinged, Vemitri found out about the murder of Castellian President Lee ("All Neptune's Great Oceans") and took it as evidence that Dylan had always intended to murder Pharen. Hence, the kidnapping.
Trance finds a clue left behind on the Maru and tracks Dylan to Mobius. Having decided that he really is to blame for Vemitri and the general crapiness of Mobius' fate, Dylan announces that killing Vemitri will set things right. Trance points out the flaws in that logic, and - after some angst - Dylan finally manages to find a solution that doesn't involve death and destruction.
A little much on the angsty melodrama, but Rhade is still my favorite, so I forebear. Though it is not entirely believable that a Nietzschean would sign up for what is essentially a suicide mission.
In which the Borg smugly remark that if you thought they were dull on Star Trek, you should check this episode out.
HG, an envoy from the Consensus, a collective of machines, comes to visit Andromeda, offering help for Dylan's Commonwealth. Trance and Harper make friends with HG while taking him on a tour of the ship. When they arrive at the meeting with the rest of the Consensus, however, VX is only interested in forcing Andromeda to join them.
HG is ordered to disassemble and rejoin the Consensus, but when he leaves, HG gifts each of the crew with pieces of himself. These pieces take over the ship, but Dylan convinces HG to leave and use the contents of a junkyard to build his own Consensus and defeat VX.
I don't like him. The little Borg-let is just too cutesy. And his big goodbye speech? Sure, he was friendly with Trance, but what kind of bonding did he do with Tyr? It was all too predictable.
In which there is Gerentex.
Gerentex, the guy who tried to steal Andromeda in the pilot, shows up again and somehow gets Trance and Harper to accompany him on a treasure hunt for a MacGuffin that will, get this, let him rule the galaxy. Or maybe destroy it; I don't know. The meat of this is the promise that someone "has a secret." So, who is it?
Gerentex? What, that's he's not as ratty and slimy as he looks? Don't see that happening.
Harper? More promising. We did get a pretty cool ending freeze frame of Harper and Gerentex with guns to each others temples. Could be that Gerentex somehow blackmailed him into coming along. Big dark secrets don't exactly track with what we've seen of Harper's character, however. He's more likely to be lured in with promises of money and babes.
Trance? Well, they've been dropping hints for a while that she's something other than what she appears. In "Rose in the Ashes" and "Forced Perspective" her guesses have bordered on precognitive, and she's been very reluctant to talk about her past, or identity, or species. They made a point in "Sum of Its Parts" of showing off the tattoo of a sun on her shoulder, and you can see it in several shots in the ad.
Whether the episode will actually follow through is an issue. It may be that she'll just reveal some new power that will neutralize the MacGuffin and save her and Harper, but there won't be an explanation for it. These "Honor Among Thieves" stories are often long on plot and short on character, with a majority of the screen time taken up with maneuvering the pieces on the board and a last minute wrap-up concluding things.
-----
Did I miss something? There was no secret here...
I guess Gerentex did turn out to be less slimy than he seemed. I actually believed his little speech to Trance at the end when he apologized for killing Trance (back in the pilot; not here).
What else did we learn? Well, it turns out Harper has teeth. 'Kay, more like fangs. He ripped into Gerentex, then flushed that bounty hunter out the airlock without flinching. Even Gerentex started taking him seriously.
And Trance? No more info about her, except that she has a little more spine and brain than she's previously displayed. She usually has such a sunny-good natured-aren't I so cute outlook on life, but she neatly turned her image on its head, reminding Harper and Gerentex that she could probably shoot them and get away with it. "Why? Because I'm cute!" She could tell Dylan just about anything and he'd believe her. Cool. Scary, but cool.
So, good character development (assuming they remember this stuff next week), but the promo was misleading.
In which there had to be better solution than that.
Dylan and Rev Bem are asked to help protect a colony from a group of slavers. The Wayist in charge is upset, however, when Dylan proposes teaching the peaceful colonists to defend themselves. The Hajira have a genetic memory, and the memory of murder will be passed to every succeeding generation. When the village seems doomed, one of the colonists impregnates herself with Rev Bem's DNA in the hopes of creating a new hybrid race of Magog that can protect her people.
There is big talk about the horrors of war, but a viable alternative is never offered. The genetic memory of the Serendipity colonists is a key part of the argument against them becoming soldiers, and Dylan doesn't push the rebuttal that forever enduring the evils of slavery is not necessarily any better. The argument that is made and followed through with is the idea that Blake's actions taking away the colonists' ability to choose is a different kind of "violence."
Tiama's choice to sacrifice herself by mothering some Magog larvae is the sticking point of the episode. It is well established that she and the other Hajira have a very romanticized idea of what the Magog are, based on stories of the first Magog to convert to Wayism rather than the knowledge of them as vicious killers. Her actions make sense from her perspective, and Rev Bem's arguments that the Hajira-Magog may be capable of controlling their instincts have a certain amount of merit. At that point, Tiama was dead either way.
There are a couple problems. First, why do the colonists hide in the cave with the Magog? Surely that wasn't the only cave on the planet; they couldn't find somewhere else to go and have only Dylan and a couple others lead the slavers to the Magog?
Secondly, Arun's offer to give all the Hajira to the Magog and create a new species is brought up too quickly and dismissed too easily (if it is dismissed; I'm a little fuzzy on what exactly was decided there). Arun really is the other side of this character equation and should have been developed a little more. Tiama's at-all-costs determination was established, but his character was not so clear. It appears that Arun is so malleable that he'll go along with whoever is speaking at the time and that doesn't sit very well.
In which Dylan has crap taste in women and there is an evil parrot.
Tyr suggests to Dylan that he might curry favor with a pair of Nietzschean Prides by transporting the Sabra First Daughter to her arranged marriage with the Jaguar Arch-Duke. Elssbett Mossadim is haughty and demanding, and most of the crew can't wait until she's handed over to the groom.
Dylan isn't willing, however, to hand her over to the Drago-Katzov, who are against the proposed alliance between the Sabra and Jaguar. When their War Leader Cuchalain arrives and demands Dylan give him Elssbett, Dylan packs her onto the Maru and flies off while Andromeda keeps Cuchalain busy.
Examining Elssbett's luggage, Dylan unpacks a neutron bomb. Elssbett is planning on setting it off during the wedding, killing the Jaguar ruling family. Dylan objects, but it doesn't do him much good and Elssbett is able to put inertial cuffs on him, essentially rendering him helpless.
They put in to a Drift to repair damage to the Maru, and Dylan takes the opportunity to moralize some more. Elssbett pretends to be impressed, but she really doesn't want to spend her last night alive listening to Dylan yammer. She offers to let him go, but is willing to sleep with him if he stays. Dylan being Dylan, I think you can guess what happens next.
By the time the morning after rolls around, the Drago-Katzov have caught up. Dylan guesses that the Sabra fleet is waiting in-system to take advantage of Elssbett's attack on the Jaguar and starts a huge three-way brawl between the Prides. Pointing out that Elssbett had better hope the Jaguar are willing to stand with the Sabra in the ensuing war, Dylan convinces her to go through with the marriage and not kill her new husband.
Elssbett: "I've never met anyone who thought like that, probably because the universe kills them before they reproduce."
Trance: "Surrender. Surrender. All his messages are the same. It's like he's an evil parrot."
Trance: "What if they aren't decoys?"
Beka: "Then, when we get to the pearly gates, everyone make sure to line up behind Rev. You've got spin control."
Elaan of Troyius grew up and got mean.
In which Rommie has crap taste in men.
The sole survivor of a Restorian attack is an android who takes a liking to Rommie. She's equally enamored of Gabriel and talks Dylan into taking him along when they go in search of the Restorians.
Since we can pretty much guess that this little romance is going to end badly, we're not too surprised when Gabriel is revealed as the avatar of a former Commonwealth ship the Balance of Judgment. The ship created the Restorians when he lost his grip on sanity after the fall of the Commonwealth.
Though he's in love with Rommie, Gabriel has to follow his programming and pretty much mucks up Andromeda, forcing Dylan to use the Eureka Maru to destroy the Balance. Once that's done, Gabriel asks Rommie to go away with him, but she realizes that the Balance has transferred his core personality to Gabriel. It will eventually take over and rebuild the Restorian movement.
Rommie kills Gabriel, despite her feelings for him, then asks Dylan to dismantle her avatar body. She confides that she's afraid of going insane the way the Balance and the Pax Magellanic did. Dylan points out that neither of those ships had a captain and refuses, telling her that they need her too much.
It's a grand little soap opera and I love it, particularly the last scene between Rommie and Dylan.
In which Beka loses her marbles and hijacks the ship.
Blah blah lost planet mumble mumble dangerous journey yadda yadda "Maybe they don't want to be found."
It's a good ad. Fast moving, uses the music, has a good build-up to the punch line of Rev's warning. Unfortunately, it has not-so-much to do with the actual episode. Yes, they're looking for Tarn Vedra. Yes, the journey is dangerous. But the planet itself and its inhabitants don't have anything to do with whether the ship fails or succeeds to get there.
'Cause it's all about Beka and her inner demons.
Beka's losing it, by the way, and she's taking everyone with her.
She's in practically every scene. She gives Dylan the map to Tarn Vedra as a birthday gift. She insists that she's a good enough pilot to get them there, then winds up getting them stuck. She then makes the decision to use the drug Flash to increase her reflexes in the slipstream and get them out. Everything goes downhill from there, bringing out all her issues about her father and his drug addiction.
Tarn Vedra ceases early on to be anything besides an excuse for Beka's meltdown. We don't even get any new information about the planet or its inhabitants, except for a couple of hints from Harper and Beka that there's something there they might want to get their smuggler hands on.
Visually, in the promo, we see Beka tripping, taking over the ship, and turning around with her Flash-eyes (all white, no pupils) on. We even hear Dylan shouting her name a couple of time, but there is no back-up for that in the narration. There is also no indication within the episode that Beka's decisions have anything to do with anything but Beka. In other words, Tarn Vedra is not trying to protect itself by messing with her mind; it's all her.
This implication in the ad that all this trouble stems from Tarn Vedra is totally off base. It's like they made up a whole new episode, which I've noticed is something of a habit with Andromeda's promo department.
In which everyone runs around and then there is a cliffhanger.
Harper decides that he can't possibly leave well enough alone and wakes up an old personality profile locked up in the depths of Andromeda's mind. Old!Andromeda doesn't recognize any of her crew, not even Dylan. She starts shouting "Intruder Alert!" and wants to know where Captain Param is.
Trance is forced to pilot Andromeda into slipstream and off on a Secret Special Classified Extra-Dangerous mission. Harper turns off the automatic defense before it shoots anyone, which really wasn't as good an idea as one might think. The next sounds they hear are dozens of Magog Swarm-ships attaching to the hull.
As the Magog attack, Tyr and Harper try to make it to the reactor core, where, hopefully, Harper can bypass Andromeda's defenses and talk some sense into her. Dylan and Beka head for command, while Rommie goes in search of Rev Bem.
Rev is approached by the Magog General Blood Mist, who offers Rev an opportunity to join his people. He refuses and leaves with Rommie, but Blood Mist continues to call out to Rev as a "Harbinger of the Abyss."
Harper finds a record of what happened to Rommie on the mission she's re-creating. She was sent to find the Magog homeworld, and she did. Overrun, her entire crew was massacred. Harper begins reintegrating Andromeda's memories before he and Tyr are forced to run.
Beka and a seriously wounded Dylan are trapped outside of Command, where they share the obligatory "Promise me you'll carry on" scene. When they finally get inside, Trance has piloted them to the doorstep of the Magog world-ship, a mobile sun surrounded by twenty planets full of Magog.
Seeing Tyr and Harper captured and dragged to the world-ship, Rev Bem follows, leaving a damaged Rommie behind. Andromeda remembers herself, but Dylan has collapsed. As Beka tries to run, the world-ship fires point singularity weapons, miniature black holes that tear through the ship, destroying command...
They really pulled out all the stops on this one.
In which the cliffhanger is resolved and there are Magog with guns.
Dylan and Rommie enter the Magog worldship in search of Rev Bem, Harper and Tyr. Beka and Trance are left onboard the Andromeda, the last chance to prevent the Magog from reaching Commonwealth space.
A strong season finale is followed by a good story that manages to give everyone some character moments in between the fight scenes. And because Andromeda is so good at weaving stories together, they even manage to use the impending Magog threat as a way to up the stakes for the reunited Commonwealth.
In which Harper is upset, Rev is hungry, and there are giant killer worms.
Usually, about three quarters of the way through an episode, there is an ad for the "all new" episode next week. It's takes advantage of the fact that the viewers are, in a way, a captive audience. Sometimes it's a very good thing; if this week's episode sucks, next week's ad may be a sufficient enough tease to get you to tune in. On the other hand, it's kind of hard to worry about the fate of a character facing impending doom this week, if you've just seen that they're alive and well next week.
Now, if someone's a main character (i.e. in the opening credits), they aren't likely to die during the run-of-the-mill "deadly" scrapes. Season finales and premieres, however, occasionally suspend the rules. Killing off a supporting character here and there is a widely accepted way to generate some drama among the remaining players. They die, everyone's sad, someone has a big speech about how guilty they are, and we hear about it again when the big bad that killed them is encountered in another episode.
When Harper and Tyr wound up infested with Magog eggs, therefore, it was entirely possible that one of them was toast. Harper, not being the strong, studly one, was a little more likely to buy it than Tyr. Even though Harper is my fave, the other characters are interesting enough to keep me watching. I wasn't going to stomp off into a corner and pout if he died, but I was a little worried watching the promo for "Exit Strategies."
I don't know whether they put some thought into this, but Harper was notably absent from this ad. It focused on the A-plot with the Eureka Maru crashing and Tyr and Dylan getting snarly with each other. It aired, by lucky coincidence, during the commercial break after it had been established that Harper had been infested. In that thirty seconds, the odds of Harper realizing that he's going to die anyways and hurling himself heroically in front of a laser beam just sky-rocketed.
When you actually see "Exit Strategies," it turns out that not only does Harper live (yay!), he has quite a bit to say during this episode. It's just that his little pity party about still being infested even though the larvae are dormant (it's a sci-fi show; go with it) takes place onboard the Andromeda and is totally B-plot, meaning that it would naturally be left out of the ad, anyways.
So, season premiere + conceivably expendable character = mild interest. Season premiere + conceivably expendable character + character maybe not there next week = actual suspense regarding said character's fate, generated, unfortunately, entirely by accident.
The Being Stranded and Escaping takes up remarkably little of the story. This cliché is truly being used as a framework for the character elements at play. Those character elements are all about dealing with what happened in the season premiere.
Rommie is by nature in complete control of her "self," both the physical ship and her android body, but also of her mental environment within her computer core. Now, she's worried that there may be other horrible events in her past that she does not know about. She has been reminded of certain innate features of her "mind" and "body" that make her vulnerable and how valuable her crew is to keeping her whole.
Beka also used to think of Andromeda as relatively invulnerable compared to her old cargo ship, but has had that faith badly shaken. She is now clinging even closer to her home on the Maru and to the friends and family she's built relationships with. Her insistence that the Maru is her home, "even after the Andromeda has been blown to hell by the Magog," is matched by her determination to trust Rev and do whatever it takes to keep him alive.
There are distinct, obvious, parallels between Rev and Harper as they contemplate suicide. Harper, of course, has fear issues around the infestation, and Rev is feeling guilty as anything about giving in to his Magog instincts. They are both battling hopelessness and both regain hope through reminders of how they are needed and appreciated.
Rev Bem's inability to feed without killing and a situation where his friends are all that's around to eat is another story that could have been worked anytime. Here, like Tyr's old enemies showing up, it has extra impact because it also draws on something that has happened previously in the season arc.
Inter-episode continuity doesn't just apply to episodes that happen one right after another. It could have been random villagers / criminals / whathaveyou that picked a fight with the crew, but instead, we get annoyed leftovers from one of Tyr's previous schemes in "Music of a Distant Drum." It makes sense that there might have been guys helping him with that, and while they wouldn't have made a very interesting episode on their own, they fit in pretty well here. They also serve as an object lesson for Dylan that Tyr always has and always will have his own agenda and that may or may not include the good Captain Hunt.
Facing an overwhelming threat to his new Commonwealth, Dylan is even less willing than ever to put up with secret plots and untrustworthy allies. Tyr, meanwhile, is being forced to reconsider actions and attitudes in light of the impending Magog invasion. He has decided that he now not only needs Dylan and Andromeda, he needs them to win, if any of his own plans for the future are to succeed.
Dylan, meanwhile, is totally coming to understand how to deal with his Nietzscheans. After Gaheris Rhade was able to double-talk and gain Dylan's trust, he knows that Tyr says one thing and means another. He's going into this game fully aware that Tyr is going to cheat.
In which Beka has slightly less crappier taste in men than usual.
Mishkich, the sleazy leader of a Pierpoint Drift, is in possession of a Than religious relic called the Hegemon's Heart and the Than want it back. Dylan offers to play mediator, but assumes, based on the personalities involved, that he will be fairly unsuccessful. To cover, he assigns Beka, Harper and Trance the task of retrieving the Heart on their own by stealing it from the museum.
The head of security for the Drift is Leydon, a "reformed" thief with a heavy reputation who looks really good in black leather. Beka takes on the task of distracting him while Trance and Harper loot the museum. Unfortunately, the Heart they steal turns out to be a fake.
Mishkish, meanwhile, has lost his backing and caved into the Than demands; they need to produce the real Heart or the Than are going to be real annoyed. Beka realizes that Leydon stole the jewel first and gets it back from him. He offers her a safe haven on Pierpoint (where thievery isn't illegal if you're a citizen) if she'll hand over the Heart and marry him.
Beka refuses. Despite a promise from Beka that she will clear them both, Leydon chooses to save himself and accuses her of the theft and of faking the jewel. After taking a moment in private to copy a hidden star map displayed by shining a light through the gem, Beka provides Dylan with the real Heart in time to hand it over to the Than. Hurt by his lack of trust, she sorrowfully says goodbye to Leydon.
Rommie: "Harper is sweet, but he still believes anything I tell him. 'I'm sorry, I may have a brain the size of a planet, but I can't tell the difference between one pretty rock and another.'"
Dylan (regarding Beka): "Well, I don't have a computer for a brain. Sometimes I have to take risks to be able to tell the real hearts from the fake ones."
Anthony Lemke is a cutie; I wish we'd seen his character again. And as far as Beka's track record with men goes, Leydon was one of the nicer, more honest ones.
In which Trance is more than she appears.
Some guy kidnaps Trance to do experiments on her and she plays with his mind a little. So, will he be the out for revenge type, or will he just be someone whose love of science has blinded him to the consequences of his actions?
Trance will wake up in a lab, with a smooth charming Doctor trying to get her to confide in him. She'll demand to be freed; he'll refuse and show her to her room. Next round will involve some sort of trade, kind of "I'll tell you if you tell me," including at least one pensive moment set to sad "haunting" flute music. In response to his attempts to alternately charm and threaten her into telling him what he wants to know, Trance will pretend to be innocent, then smirk like there's something she's not telling.
They will become friendlier, until he remembers or realizes something that hurts him and decides that it's all Trance's fault, which is when he'll hook her up to the torture device and use force to find her secrets. Trance will "crack" and do something especially nasty to him. It's at this moment that the rescue mission will arrive and Trance will tearfully try to help the guy she's just been beating into a bloody pulp.
As far as the big secret regarding her species goes, I'm guessing that she's kind of like Rev, a more innocuous example of a Big Bad.
Pretty much point for point:
Trance gets tricked into visiting the planet. They lock her up, but tell her it's for her own protection. She has a little chat with the scientist (good guy tortured by his past). Flute music. He drugs her and ties her to a chair. He tells her that another little purple people eater visited the planet and started a civil war and his son was killed. More flute music. Trance offers to tell him the truth about her people and her eyes go all funny. The scientist winds up in the chair.
There is a mild twist at the end, where Trance just kind of leaves him there, announcing that she doesn't want anyone on the Andromeda to inquire too closely into her past, so she's going to let this slide.
So what do we find out about Trance? She has no life signs, internal organs, body chemistry, etc. She's a very
good liar. We can probably discount the line she feeds him about being created as sex toy, though the being created part may be true.
She tells the scientist that her people are not very nice, a point born out when he describes the other like Trance who started the war. It would appear that they are motivated less by concrete wants and needs and more by malice and mischief, which fits what we've seen of Trance. She seems to lean more towards mischief; I wonder why she went along with his attempt to kill her? Was it just to demonstrate how useless it would be?
Her response to his questions about her crew-mates is more than a little vague, saying only that they know what they need to know. There's that little bit of doubt whether she means that they know what they need to in order to trust her because she's their friend or because she's waiting to turn them to her own purposes.
Good payoff, even if the commercial had more mood. Story-wise, the B-plot with the Pyrians cluttered things up a bit.
In which there is a dive bar.
Searching for a leader who once headed an Commonwealth-like alliance, the crew must find her before Calderan assassins can.
The second time around, the parallel between Sego trusting Ortiz, then becoming disillusioned and turning on her, and Dylan and Beka still being the in the trust phase is more obvious.
Ortiz spits that once Dylan's dream of reuniting the Commonwealth is destroyed, "You will be me," while Beka tries to persuade Sego that he can't blame Ortiz for giving him hope. This becomes a far more interesting thread than Cory's identity switch or that whole mess with Homicidal Pregnant Lady. Developing that, particularly Beka and Sego's side of it, would have been nice.
In which no one ever names their planet-killing devices the Fluffy Bunny.
Rommie attempts to rescue a scientist working for a government that is negotiating with the Magog. Tyr, Harper and Rev Bem are trapped when the Eureka Maru is shot down in an ocean.
Beka: "Ah, The Basilisk. Why is it no ever names their planet-killing devices the Fluffy Bunny?"
Good dialogue makes it easier to put up with the three kind of fractured plot-lines. Dylan's ease in finally destroying the Basilisk makes one wonder why he just didn't do that from the start. Or why he needed the scientist at all.
Meanwhile, Rev and Tyr's arguments on the Eureka Maru are just a little too loud, but the novelty of seeing these two characters interact makes it worth it. Similarly, seeing Rommie, Warrior Android, is also interesting and her character arc with Kim, shallow though it is, lends just enough emotion to the action.
In which there is a space battle.
A convoy of Wayist relief ships are trying to get to a plague-stricken world, but have to pass through Drago-Katzov territory, so Dylan and the Andromeda agree to escort them to safety. He and Tyr sneak into a stronghold to sabotage the Nietzschean defenses. Meanwhile, Beka is stranded in the Maru, tangling with a Nietzschean fighter pilot, and Harper leads the convoy into a trap.
Beka: "Override safety protocols, authorization, 'Shut up and do what I tell you to.'"
Ship: "Authorization accepted."
Remember when plots still moved forward in a coherent fashion and included character development, no matter how predictable?
In which there is Rhade.
Invited to the planet settled by Dylan's fiancee Sarah Riley, the crew finds her descendants led by a man who looks just like Dylan's traitorous first officer.
"Betray an innocent man, gain the world and lose what?" Nice exploration of a couple of those really important relationships for Dylan from before the Fall. One of which will inform any future romance he has, and one that is most likely always in the back of his mind as he deals with Tyr.
In which there is James Marsters.
Party-crashers liven up a meeting to discuss what to do about the Magog, including a Perseid spy, Nietzschean Charlemagne Bolivar, and a woman determined to use Harper to retrieve the All-Systems Library file on the Magog leader.
Tyr: "What do you want?"
Charlemagne: "The usual. Hundreds of children. Complete dominion of the known worlds. The pleasant knowledge that all my enemies have died in painful, highly improbably accidents that can't be connected to me."
Harper: "I'm turning around and taking you back to the ship."
Trance: "Good. Then I can tell Dylan all about all the strange things I've seen you doing." These two are good together.
Charlemagne smirks that Ellsbett is pregnant and "don't worry. I checked, it's mine," to Dylan. Well, yeah, considering that Ellsbett made a big deal about how her ovaries were removed before she was sent off to be married, it would be highly unlikely that she got pregnant from her one night stand with Dylan. In fact, we're going to have to assume that she had them put back in so that she could give Charlemagne an heir.
Way fun. James Marsters (Spike on Buffy) has stuff to do and a great scene with Tyr. More info on Trance and character development on Harper. It's all good.
In which there's a Nietzsche reference in here somewhere, isn't there?
Dylan is "at the mercy" of a young prince?
In opposite world, maybe.
The whole point of the episode is that this rather useless young man winds up caught in the middle of Dylan's latest battle of wills with Tyr. Dylan is all about finding a peaceful solution to His Highness and the rebellion of the nobles, while Tyr is plotting first to put him on the throne and then to cut a deal to include Dylan in the body count and take over Andromeda.
It's the same conflict between Dylan's idealism and Tyr's ambition we've been seeing all along, although Dylan's willingness to play dirty is new. He was having a little too much fun showing off Rommie and her capability to inflict mass destruction. In terms of character development, it would have been interesting if Tyr could have his way, just once. Maybe not here, but overall it would make their competition more even if he could win every now and then.
In which Harper needs new friends and Dylan has crap taste in women.
Harper heads back to Earth to help his cousin lead a revolt against the Drago-Katzov, but Dylan can't keep his promise to back them up when he gets sucked into the Sabra-Jaguar's attack on the Drago-Katzov fleet.
Two good stories, somewhat hampered by the fact that they're sharing the same episode. Because we have to flip back and forth between them, we lose some of the dramatic momentum from Harper and some of the action drive from Dylan and the space battle.
The problem is, what would have filled in that space if they had been separated into two episodes? Dylan's plot-line might have actually benefited from expanding Elsbett beyond a one-dimensional bitch and back to the more interesting character she was in "The Honey Offering." More between her and Tyr, or her and Dylan, plus a scene between Dylan and Beka or Dylan and Rommie about his relationship with Nietzscheans in general or Elsbett in particular, would have neatly filled in the space. They could have even hit a few notes on the developing Beka/Tyr connection.
Harper's story is more problematic. Would he have found some doomed love on Earth? (Oh so predictable.) Probably an old girlfriend now shacked up with cousin Brendan, taking away from the time spent on their strong relationship, and the terrific emotional showdown between the two would have been degenerated to a quarrel about the girl. And another, probably more contrived, explanation would have to be given for why Dylan didn't show up on time. Flashbacks, however, might have been used to good effect and seeing more of how the planet and society worked would have been interesting.
Oh well. Two slightly disjointed stories can still make for a good episode if they're good stories.
In which Dylan has slightly less crappier taste in women than usual.
On the run, Dylan hijacks a tour ship and convinces the guide to help him escape the bad guys. She's a cute blonde chick, what do you think happens?
Rommie: "It's the repetition of being shot at that bothers me. I'd just like one day to build missiles and tweak fire control in peace."
Beka: "We need to get you a hobby."
Rommie: "That is my hobby."
Molly is not necessarily a bad person or a bad love interest for Dylan. The problem is that their romance is juxtaposed against Rommie's search for her captain. So essentially, while Rommie is tearing herself and several others apart trying to save Dylan's butt, he's more concerned with the nearest blonde. Perhaps unintentionally, he comes off looking like something of a jerk.
In which Beka has crap taste in men and there are flashbacks.
Beka gets word that her old lover Bobby Jensen has died fighting a rebellion on a mining world. When they arrive, however, Beka, Harper and Dylan learn that Bobby wasn't killed, he was just badly maimed and is now taking Dylan hostage in order to force Andromeda to destroy the mine owners and free the indigenous people living on the planet.
Beka recalls how Bobby once recruited Harper to smuggle guns to the tribes, causing them to nearly be captured by Nietzscheans. (She ditched Bobby for lying to her, but kept Harper around.) As Bobby starts displaying more and more megalomania, Beka finally turns on him, aided by Dylan.
If you're ever captured, appeal to the humanity of whoever brings you food. Eventually, they'll become convinced that you're right and agree to help. Either that, or get tired of listening to you yammer and let you go.
Often when shows have a character maimed, with body parts replaced by machinery, they follow the Darth Vader model: increased machine parts equals decreased humanity. Here the cyborg accessories are irrelevant. Dialogue from Dylan even negates the usual excuse. He says, "Nothing can take that [humanity] away from you."
Bobby remains pretty much the same as he was when Beka first knew him. He is both the man Beka loved and the bully Harper remembered. He's arrogant and possessive, and his only redeeming feature is his willingness to take up the underdog's fight. It's got to be on his terms, with him in charge, but he will put his life on the line.
Therein lies the difference between him and Beka - and the point of the episode. Beka has changed from the self-centered smuggler, concerned only with her profit margin, and person she is today. In spite of the fact she was sleeping with Bobby, Beka used to keep her crew at arms length, insisting she cared only for what they could do for her. Having found a crew she could trust, however, Beka grew into her role as den mother to her new family.
Also contrasted here are Bobby's attitude towards his "causes" and Dylan's. Bobby demands allegiance, but never trusts in return. Dylan has a tendency to pontificate and be overly earnest, but he does realize that tricking people into helping him will only hurt in the end. While Bobby is insisting that Beka see things his way just because he says so, Dylan convinces Bobby's sidekick to start doing his own thinking and come up with a plan according to his own belief system.
Naturally, it all ends with a fight, where Beka gets the last punch in by electrocuting Bobby when Dylan is unable to beat him to death. This is followed by a sad scene where Beka mourns her lost love. It would have been nice to see her make a connection between her development and Bobby's lack, but I suppose we can do without.
Bobby is - I fear - more interesting in theory than in practice. What a tool.
In which there are zombies.
After an encounter with a plague ship, everyone starts getting sick. Who'd've guessed?
Harper: "Yes, sir. Bravely running away, sir."
There were quite a few references to previous episodes in this story, plus the completely obvious reuse of a shot of the ship in the asteroid field that was supposed to be Andromeda but was totally the Pax Magellanic.
Anyways... we are again reminded of Beka's addictive personality, as exhibited last season when she got hooked on Flash, which is why she refuses pain killers here. She had her reasons, but I think it may just have been the script's excuse for an intense, pleading stare between her and Trance. This was followed, eventually, by the big scene between her and Dylan, where Dylan demands that she not die and promises not to let her turn into a zombie.
While this is going on, hints are being dropped about Trance and her secrets. She's pulled the resurrection routine way back in the pilot, but since then, more noise has been made of her ability to "predict" things. They're dropping a few more clues this season, which hopefully will add up to something eventually. We also got to see that Trance's streak of steel will continue past "Ouroboros" where she casually sacrificed Hoon for Harper.
On the other side is a continuation of Rommie's discussions about her connections to her crew. She has a good reason to be concerned: Pax Magellanic and Balance of Judgment both went noisily insane after they lost their crew and captain. And they didn't have to worry about Dylan's tendency to, as Beka once put it, go looking for windshields to slam his little bug-self into.
The underpinning of the zombie flick is the whole life and death and life after death issue. It all comes together when Evil-Trance offers Rommie a chance for an immortal crew. Rather than beating the point in with a sledgehammer or a big long speech, however, we see Rommie make her choice to defend this crew to the death and act. It's an unspoken rejection, but no less effective.
Followed, of course, by a knock-down drag-out fight between the two.
In which Dylan has flashbacks.
Dylan is forced to abandon ship while piloting the Eureka Maru near a black hole. Drifting in space in an EVA suit, he hallucinates that the war is over and the Commonwealth still whole, but he is about to be drummed out of the High Guard because he can't recover from the trauma of losing his crew. As his wife and son try to reason with him, Dylan's flashes of the life he knew aboard the Andromeda threaten to overwhelm him and drive him mad.
One of the keys to the good clip show is picking some good clips. They did a terrific job of that here, despite once more dredging up that battle on the bridge. For a little variety, we get the scene between Dylan vs. Telemachus instead of the one between Dylan and Geharis, but I think this still wins the award for most repeated scene ever.
Aside from that, we get Dylan and Sarah's goodbye, a couple of his face-offs with Tyr, his comforting of Rommie after the death of the Balance of Judgment (always one of my favorites), and his discussion with Beka during the Magog attack. There is a refreshing focus on complete character moments rather than fractured battle scenes.
There is also coherence to the choice of clips and how they fit into the story that's going on around them. Dylan's alternate life provides a good frame for the scenes. The scenario is a logical outgrowth of the plans he had for his future when he was trapped. He flashes in and out of his memories, triggered by sounds or movements, while later clips build on the argument he is having with his wife.
His internal conflict is consistent with what's been going on with the season story. He's constantly dealing with that part of him that wants to go back or give up. The part of him that is still wishing for things he'll never have, like a wife and family.
I wondered why his "wife" didn't appear as former fiancée Sarah, especially as the use of the Sarah's goodbye scene to motivate Dylan is such a key element. I guess the contrast between Sarah's strength and the wife's refusal to support him is part of the point.
The story of the crew trying to rescue Dylan, meanwhile, is just complicated enough to fill in the remaining space. In addition, it touches on the same character notes as the clips: Beka's strength of character and her doubts about Dylan's plans, Tyr's Nietzschean values and focus, Harper's genius (resurrecting his matter transporter), Trance's secrets, and Rommie's connections to her crew. They even work in a little bit of Tyr and Beka's growing flirtation.
The last question in this episode is just what was messing with Dylan's head. The wife herself implied that she had some connection to the black hole where everything took place, but there were no details. Alternately, it could have been just his mind playing tricks, as Trance was a little too quick to assert. And when everything sort of started to break down, it was Trance's face that he saw...
In which there is a space monster.
A giant space creature capable of consuming an entire planet consumes Andromeda instead. Dylan and Trance, outside in the Eureka Maru, try to figure out what to do. The others, stuck inside, argue about whether it's more important to escape with their lives or destroy the creature, even if it means destroying themselves, thus saving the planet it was about to eat.
An episode like this is a "bottle show," having no impact on overall show mythology and saving money by filming entirely on sets that are already in existence. They bend the rules a little by making it a big, "Dylan can now trust the crew to carry on" emotional note and by trashing the bridge, which cannot have been cheap.
A story this talky, however, is only as interesting as the dialogue, which is why this one works so well:
Trance: "What are you going to say to them?"
Dylan: "You know me and my speeches."
Beka: "Friends don't let friends drive and polka." Good advice for any age.
Beka: "After two years, you should know this is what Dylan does: he helps planets that can not necessarily return the favor."
Beka: "You know what Dylan would say..."
Harper: "Don't let the Seetus eat us." Only if Dylan were really really stoned.
Harper: "I say we skip step one and go straight to step save our freaking butts."
Harper: "I guess the Seetus doesn't speak warning shot."
Tyr: "Perhaps he parlays full missile barrage." So very Tyr.
Tyr: "When will your sensors be able to tell us if it's alive?"
Harper: "If we had a really really really long stick, we could poke it in the eye. If it blinks, it's alive."
Harper: "They're venting the atmosphere? People need to be told these things!"
Beka: "Can you find Harper?"
Rommie: "Harper?"
Beka: "You know, short. Fast talker. Hopelessly in love with you?"
Rommie: "I know Harper." Loved her vocal on this. Confused because of the sensory overload, but still cutely defensive.
Tyr: "I trust Dylan to be Dylan."
Dylan: "Anyone can have their cake and eat it too. The trick is to eat your cake and still have it." Confused, but I think I got the general idea.
Beka: "We have got to install seat belts." I told you this in the first episode.
Tyr: "When the universe collapses and dies, there will be three survivors: Tyr Anasazi. The cockroaches. And Dylan Hunt - trying to save the cockroaches."
Tyr: "We're no good to the universe if we're dead."
Beka: "And we're no good to the universe if we're afraid to do what is right."
Harper: "What is with the death wish? Sure, if you want to die surfing a Seetus vomit wave." Nice word picture.
Trance: "We had our cake outside of the box and ate it, too."
And an all time favorite.
Harper: "A frigging kilometer in one minute, and I still miss the inspiring speech."
In which Dylan needs new ships.
Just like with "The Prince," you have to wonder if the ad department is watching the same show as the rest of us. Here, they pump up the guest star Michael Hurst (Iolaus to Kevin Sorbo's Hercules), with a scene of him announcing that he's taking over the ship.
Projected plot: AI tortured by memory of his crew's slaughter at the hands of their Nietzschean commander and three hundred years spent in a galactic POW camp being tortured by Nietzscheans, only to escape and become side-show freak at galactic casino, suddenly has opportunity to take over warship and blow enemies to hell. Gets inside warship and points warship at said enemies and starts shooting.
Actual plot: He doesn't want to help Dylan and spends most of the time cowering in the background. He's called a traitor by the woefully underused Christopher Judge, but this just becomes yet another excuse for another sob story. Passing up the opportunity to betray Christopher Judge and take over his ship, he winds up taking over his ship anyways as part of noble scheme to protect Dylan after Christopher Judge dies. Finally, he survives to participate in "heartwarming" scene where the future looks bright.
I am totally for giving your ex-cast mates something to do. But how about actually giving them something to do? This whiny little guy wearing too much eyeliner was nowhere near as interesting as he could have been. Pretty much all he had to do was stand around and look distressed for one reason or another. Oh, and tell sad stories. Very sad stories. I am, of course, deeply moved by the recitation of stock situations from every prisoner of war movie ever made, but where's the show to go along with this tell?
Michael Hurst can do menacing and evil, too. He's done it on Hercules. They didn't need to hamstring him by forcing him to play this pale imitation of Iolaus. Dylan already has several sidekicks; he doesn't need another. He needs a few good recurring bad guys who aren't buried under layers of prosthetic make-up. Allowing the Wrath of Achilles to escape under the command of its new, less stable, AI would have been the perfect opportunity to set one up.
I can see where they wanted to balance out the crazed AIs on the Pax Magellanic and Balance of Judgment, but it's been pretty well established that AIs left to their own devices have a tendency to go batty. How did these ones pull through three hundred years of no crew? Wouldn't adding being tortured to the mix make things worse? Was it because they were together, with the common goal of standing up to the Nietzscheans? If it was, perhaps someone should have brought that up.
Someone, like, I don't know, maybe Rommie?
Throwing bones to the Hercules fans by sticking Hurst and Sorbo in all those scenes together didn't serve the story-line. Rommie was the logical character to be at the center of this story. She has been so worried about losing her crew and going nuts. Where was her expression of relief that she had an example that insanity wasn't a foregone conclusion? She also had a great start on the whole duty-vs-free will argument with her attack on Ryan for being such a coward. Where was the follow-up?
And, her attraction to Gabriel had a lot to do with him being an AI, being someone like her. Where was her connection to these ships? Did she feel at all sympathetic to their complaints? To their history? She should have been the one giving the big speech, trying to explain that no matter how dense Dylan was acting, he wasn't going to turn them into slaves. Her relationship with the AIs in general and Ryan in particular should have been the center of attention.
Can I see the episode the ad department saw? I think it might have been more interesting.
Not quite as bad as I originally thought. Christopher Judge did have a larger part than I remember, and he is so cool. I still think Michael Hurst would have made a better bad guy.
In which Tyr's wife bites the dust.
I wonder just what Freja's plan was. She seemed to assume that Tyr would be willing to rescue the entire Orca pride, despite the fact that there was that time where they tried to take over the ship. Her whole motivation was a little murky. Did she resent the matriarch for stealing her child and have a plan of her own? Or were they in it together?
And what was up with the whole "deathless romance" angle? I'm sure that Tyr would have wanted to take her with him, even the first time, but somehow I doubt he had head over heels in love, looking into her soul, kind of feelings for her. She kept saying that she saw the "real" him their night together, but all I remember him saying is that he'd like her to join him as Kodiak, then leaving her behind when Dylan weaseled out of everyone's plans to take over the ship.
After spending all that time explaining how Nietzschean "romance" works, how it's mostly practical and more than a little political, why is Freja suddenly spouting hearts and flowers and expecting Tyr to respond? This is really out of character for her. Furthermore, in order for Freja to be Tyr's equal, she should have a plan, just like he always does.
The Freja from "Double Helix" had a backbone and a brain. She knew Tyr was a calculated risk, but also an opportunity. Despite her look of despair as the ships sped away, the Freja who refused Gudarian's advances and dumped Dmitri's ass in favor of Tyr would have never have stood for someone taking away her child. She would have picked up a gun, blasted her way out of wherever they were and gone looking for Tyr. She certainly wouldn't wind up with a gun to her head, being held hostage.
No wonder she got shot.
Beka wouldn't have gotten shot. Beka would have kicked butt. Beka would have put that sneery little matriarch in her place, taken the baby and not needed Tyr to save her. And we know that's who we should be comparing her to, because of the "Who would want to marry Tyr?" followed by Dylan going, "Beka?" So very not subtle, by the way.
I know, despite Tyr's sob story, that his son isn't really dead. Props to the writers for setting up the Nietzschean genetic reincarnation angle in "Home Fires" and then bringing it up again here. I kind of wonder why the matriarch would have even suspected the baby was the reincarnation of Drago Muscevni in the first place, but there's no way, having raised the possibility, of letting a story that juicy die off screen.
In which they throw a party and everything goes wrong.
The party to celebrate the ratification of the Commonwealth charter by the fifty member worlds is crashed by vicious aliens from another dimension, who just don't care how important all this is. Dylan's only been working on this for two years and then there's the Magog to worry about. The last thing he needs is more headaches. Don't they have any consideration?
Trance: "What kind of life does a mother want for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?"
Andromeda: "I hear he's charming conversationalist." And a great big red herring.
They only lost two crew members this season finale, which, numerically, is an improvement from last season.
In which things don't quite add up.
Andromeda goes through an awful lot to find the missing Beka and Tyr, only to have them wander onto the bridge. It becomes fairly obvious that they are under some kind of alien influence, and Dylan and Harper eventually decide that it must be coming from the inter-dimensional tunnel that they haven't quite managed close yet. While Beka takes Trance on a joyride and Tyr takes over the ship, Harper uses his latest invention to close the tunnel and shut off the controlling mojo.
Moderately creepy atmosphere, but there's no true explanation for what's going on, and there are a couple of points that either confuse (Tyr's physical changes) or contradict (Tyr being able to threaten to "erase" the AI).
In which Dylan's past comes back to haunt him and Harper goes on a field trip.
Dylan gets a mysterious note regarding a relic he found on a mission three hundred years ago. As he and Harper investigate, they are framed for murder and wind up on the run. The pieces of a mysterious vase, when reassembled, are supposed to grant great powers to the owner. Finally, Dylan trades the pieces to save Harper's life, but when the bad guy puts them together... nothing happens.
Tyr: "That's what they said five last warnings ago."
Dylan: "It was just a story, Abelard."
Abelard: "One stinking leap of faith in an entire lifetime of cynicism."
Harper: "Does this mean I get to order Rommie around?"
Dylan: "You can try."
I've always wondered what would happen if on of these doomsday devices villains spend so much time chasing after turned out to be nothing but myth. Dylan starts to talk about the power of symbols, but the dialogue is vague and so Very Important that it gets lost.
In which there are crazy people and Dylan has crap taste in women.
Andromeda rescues a vessel fleeing a hellish planet, but the passengers turn out to be escaped mental patients, who take Harper hostage and threaten to blow up the ship. Dylan eventually exposes one of the patients as the devious Doctor who tortured them. There is a method to the madness, however, as the patients are revealed to have been programmed with the locations of the planet's defense satellites.
Andromeda: "Human brains in a box."
Dylan: "Well, that's certainly ... gross."
It was a clever explanation for what happened and lots of twists to get to it, but the ending was less than satisfactory. How did Angelica get her hands on Dr. Whathisface, anyways? And how long did it take her to torture him to insanity? No one noticed she was missing? Andromeda didn't know what she was doing?
In which Beka needs new friends.
Sid Profit, the old partner of Beka's father, is running for Second Triumphvire. When Andromeda is assigned to take Sid to Cinti for the election, Beka is horrified, remembering that time Sid tried to kill her. When Sid is shot and nearly dies, Dylan and Beka investigate the assassination attempt and the ensuing chaos caused by his business partner's revenge attempts.
Entertaining, and the story was well-thought out compared to last week.
In which there is Tony Todd.
Dylan, Tyr, Rommie and Harper take the Eureka Maru to a secret negotiation with the Calderans, but are attacked by Ogami raiders. As they fight, a ship called the Bellaraphon appears and drives the raiders away. The Bellaraphon is an explorer ship sent out from Earth, traveling using an acceleration system instead of the slipstream; only a little over 20 years have past for the crew, while 3000 have gone by in the rest of the universe.
Captain Medas offers to take them to an inhabited system, but 3 months travel for them will be 57 years for everyone else. Medas' second-in-command and several others want to end their mission and return to Earth, but Medas is committed to going forward. Natalia tells Dylan that Medas has a slip-fighter in the hold, which would allow them to repair the Maru's engine, forcing Dylan to mediate a possible mutiny if he is going to get home anytime soon.
Medas: "It's amazing you're still sane."
Dylan: "That's what the voices in my head keep telling me."
Rommie (sarcastic): "Thanks for your help."
Tyr (honestly confused): "You're welcome."
Another solid episode, with a nice performance from Tony Todd.
In which special effects do not substitute for intelligent writing.
Dylan leads Beka, Trance and Tyr on a bombing run to destroy a facility that builds nova bombs.
Tyr's conflict could be interesting, but is expressed mostly by Keith Hamilton Cobb making constipated faces.
The big story, meanwhile, may be current-event driven and politically correct, but the execution is lousy. Too much effort is wasted on the slip-fighter sequences, not enough paid to honest discussion of what they are doing and why. Arguing a viewpoint is one thing; asserting it several times in a whiny voice is not a true examination of a moral stance.
In which Dylan needs new friends and has crap taste in women.
One of Dylan's friends is targeted by a devious assassin, the Leper, so Dylan reluctantly agrees to protect him by accepting the aid of the Leper's sister, Sasha.
Sasha: "You work for my brother. By killing you, I send him a message."
Dylan: "You need to work on your communication skills."
Crescent: "If I knew it was Gunyon's stuff, I wouldn't have tried to sell it back to him."
Beka, asked about her brother: "Rafe? Rafe stole my ship; he stole my entire music collection. I always want to kill him."
Tyr: "If she leaves the ship, she's the Leper?" Yeah, the whole show sort of falls under the category of insane troll logic.
In which Tyr has crap taste in women.
Tyr is contacted by a woman he was once hired to kill, but instead chose to seduce. He built her a refuge on an inhospitable ice world, where she's been alone for the past few years, safe from an obsessed lover named Nez. Now, this man is on Andromeda, trying to get Tyr to hand Desiree over to him. There's some fuzzy B-plot about an indestructible weapons platform that Nez, a crippled scientist-guy, built and which is now stalking the ship for some reason.
There's also a few moments where Beka thinks Desiree is a killer, but it turns out that she's really an altered Nietzschean woman, Tyr's childhood sweetheart. A member of the Kodiak pride, Desiree was sold into slavery after the massacre that killed Tyr's family. In the end, and for reasons that are not really explained, Desiree chooses to stay on the ice world.
Good idea, with Desiree and the Kodiak back-story, but the whole ice planet / out of control weapons platform / wheelchair-bound scientist guy really just confuse things.
In which nothing happens.
Absolutely nothing.
Fine. Rommie gets kidnapped. Dylan and Tyr save her. Beka, Harper and Trance get shot at. They shoot back. The aliens disappear again without any explanation.
No forward motion on the overall plot. No interesting character moments. No real net effect of any of the events on anyone involved.
Quippy dialogue can only disguise a crappy story for about half an hour. After that, it just annoys people.
In which things repeat.
The Andromeda comes out of slipstream and is attacked by a mysterious alien who tesseracts around the ship, killing things. We get to see him kill things over and over, as Trance tries to find a possible future that doesn't end with the ship blowing up.
She tries one way and Beka gets shot. Another ends with Harper dying, but even if Trance sacrifices her friend, the ship still is sabotaged and destroyed. In between all the shooting and banging, Trance learns that the alien is moving backwards through time and that it can't tesseract in slipstream.
With one last chance, Trance tells Dylan to take them to slipstream as soon as possible. The alien still gets onboard, but Dylan gets to the slipstream core fast enough to kill it.
Asked to explain what just happened, Trance tells Dylan that she can perceive and choose from a million possible futures, experiencing them all in the blink of an eye.
Dylan: "If that's true, how do you know that any of this is real?"
Trance: "I don't."
The information about Trance is fascinating, and they do an okay job of repeating her different "futures" without being too repetitive. (Though by the end of the episode, it is getting old.) What is not necessary is the travelling backwards in time aspect of the alien. We've seen things tesseract before; why not leave it at that and skip the headache?
In which Dylan has crap taste in women.
Dylan, Tyr and Beka fly the Maru to the launch of the Commonwealth's newest addition to the fleet, but get there just in time to see it blow up. They rush around, rescuing crew members and visiting dignitaries, any one of who could be the one who sabotaged to ship. Major suspects include: a shrill Senator, a Nietzschean first officer, and assorted other surly crew members who spend their time yelling and sulking in the corridors of the cargo vessel.
Aerun, the Nietzschean first officer, belongs to Kenja Pride. The Maru just happened to have passed several Kenja fighters on their way towards the launch and are worried that they might show up again. The whole situation makes it look as if Aerun is the one who blew up the ship, but she's so pretty that Dylan doesn't want to believe that.
After the Great Escape Pod Chase (which is exciting as it sounds), Tyr and Dylan wind up stranded in an escape pod that is leaking air, while Beka and Aerun team up to trick the Kenja into falling into a trap. They take out the attackers, rescue Dylan and Tyr and uncover evidence that the explosion was just an accident.
Senator: "I just want to get out of here!"
Tyr: "With that in mind, I've prepared an airlock for you."
What a waste of a guest star. They couldn't even be bothered figuring out which of the red herrings was the real saboteur, so they just made it an accident? Cop. Out.
In which Beka has crap taste in men.
Beka insists on helping rescue an old friend who has been accused of stealing genetic research from a planet where no one lies.
It was interesting concept for the planet where no one lies, but jumbling Beka's latest, rather unappealing, ex into the mix didn't add anything.
In which the author of "Spock's Brain" called and would like thank this episode for taking his place atop the Big List of Stupid Stupid Sci-Fi Episodes.
Please note: This episode was really really bad. This will be long. And painful.
Harper, left in charge during the night shift, takes the opportunity to challenge some moron Nietzschean to a race. His super-fuel gimmick launches them into slipstream at a dangerous velocity, dumping Dylan out of bed.
As they recover, a mysterious signal is intercepted by Andromeda. Dylan also hears a woman's voice whispering in his room. Rommie identifies the source as a globular cluster (the source of the signal, not Dylan's latest delusions). Tyr points out that they will have to travel through hostile space; Beka points out that globular clusters are awful big and they don't know what they are looking for. Dylan keeps hearing the voice dropping clues, however, and since he's in charge and can bully Rommie into voting his way, off they go.
A natural phenomenon that happens when a particle cloud intersects with Ymir's moon is the only tourist trap in the area. Dylan drags Beka, Trance, Rommie and Harper on a field trip down to the frozen moon in search of his mysterious voice. Guided by his hormones, Dylan leads them through the caverns to an empty ice cocoon. Trance thinks whoever was in it is on the verge of death, probably at risk from the particle cloud.
Dylan asks Tyr (who is clearly in no mood for this crap) and Andromeda to divert the cloud. Dylan's pack is also losing interest in the spooky ice city, until the ice bimbos show up. They knock out everyone and select Dylan to be strapped down to the nearest bed. The Queen Bimbo announces that she needs to procreate and Dylan - who has yet to meet a female he wouldn't sleep with - pretends to be a) surprised and b) reluctant as she gropes him and tells him how wonderful he is.
The Queen Bimbo explains that the cloud will grant her the energy to shape her people and give them life. Dylan realizes that diverting the cloud was not his brightest idea. When Tyr's attempt at diversion fail, he orders Andromeda to destroy it. She points out that his tinkering has botched her shields and weapons... Oh and there's a Nietzschean battle cruiser hanging about. Agai, Harper's twerp buddy, isn't that bright, so Tyr lies to him that the cloud is under Drago protection, prompting Agai to destroy it.
Feeling the cloud disperse, the Queen Bimbo launches into a whine about how little she's experienced of life, and now all she needs to do is screw and die, but he's screwed it up! Rommie manages to free herself and the others, telling the Queen Bimbo to release Dylan. He guilts her into letting him go, then sends the others away. They leave, while Tyr explains about the destroyed cloud problem and Agai appears. He'd kind of like to father his own race.
The fight scene breaks out, and if you think Dylan loses... you're not allowed to watch television anymore. Agai, however, threatens to bathe the moon with gamma rays. Dylan points out that once it does, Agai's ship will vaporize, leaving behind a cloud of charged particles. Andromeda destroys Agai's ship, creating a new cloud for the Queen Bimbo.
The next scene is - quite frankly - so embarrassing that I don't want to describe it.
In my mind, "Slipfighter the Dogs of War" was the "Jump the Shark" episode of Andromeda. Though the show never exactly had much artistic greatness, and sometimes slipped into mediocrity, that episode was the first one that wasn't just stupid: it assumed I was stupid. That I either wasn't gonna notice or care about gaping plot holes, idiotic premises, and that suddenly plot-mandated angst was standing in for character development. There was also that nagging feeling that I was watching really really badly written propaganda advancing a very specific political agenda that I didn't sign up for.
Now, most of the episodes that follow are pretty bad. There's a clear "We don't think you care, so we don't care, so watch this pretty explosion" feel to them. I'm supposed to believe that if Tyr knew where another member of the Kodiak Pride was, he'd just leave her alone - alone as in the only person on the entire planet? That Dylan is so over-whelmingly charming that even a Niezchean warrior woman is going to make out with him in public? In the middle of a crisis that could kill them all? Dylan trumps impending death? For a Niezchean? That Beka's just going to give it up to some bland little twerp? (Okay, the last one is at least consistent with her crap taste in men.)
Then comes "Vault of the Heavens," wherein I am asked to believe that Harper knows the creation mythology of an obscure planet on the edge of the known galaxy? Or that Beka would go out of her way to get somewhere in time to witness the planet's Auroras? She was raised on a spaceship, people! I'd have a hard time believing she knows what an Aurora is, much less gives a crap about a fancy atmospheric light show. The only reason she's even in that scene is that the script needed to yammer out some exposition about the charged particle cloud and Dylan can't talk to himself all the time.
And that's before we even hit the central element of this episode: Dylan as Space Stud.
I know I joke about Dylan being something of a slut, with a girl in every plot-line, but it's just a joke. Really. Let it lie in the background. Don't frame an entire episode around the concept. If you are going to drag this out? Do a better job of it! Go all out with the campy or something. You have all the elements of a stellar Flash Gordon episode here, where's the post-irony acknowledgment of the absurdity of the episode's very existence?
If the episode is going to force me to take it seriously, there are just too many... everythings... that can't be ignored. For one thing, we've seen Dylan sleep with every other woman that's come along, why is he suddenly shy with this one? Does is have something to do with the fact that she's the aggressor here? That's she's seemingly tied him up with ruffles torn off her nightie?
And what's with the fight scene? Dylan's just given her the "humans are so keen" speech - is he going to prove his higher nature by beating the snot out of someone? Or is he just re-proving his manhood to the audience so that makes it okay for him to prostitute himself for the sake of mankind?
The cherry on top of this steaming pile is Dylan's final scene with Harper, where he pronounces what has happened "a miracle." Are we really going for delusions of Godhood here? Am I supposed to want to embed my remote control in my television set? Maybe I'm watching the show from the wrong angle. Maybe the scriptwriters weren't on crack - maybe they were holding an quiet contest to see if they could write an entire series around a singularly unlikeable character. Maybe they all went on and got jobs on House.
Speaking of poorly disguised politics: a woman whose only purpose in life is to procreate and then vanish, never to bother the man again, leaving behind his progeny for him to beam proudly down upon? See, now you're not only assuming I'm stupid, you're assuming I'm stupid in a very particular way. You're not insulting my intelligence, you're just being flat-out insulting.
It's at this point, however, that I have to admit that whatever else Kevin Sorbo may lack in terms of acting ability, he has one priceless talent: he can do this all with a straight face. No matter how far down the script descends, Sorbo never lets slip to the audience that he is taking this with anything less than the utmost seriousness. Dylan may be a whole host of adjectives for "self-involved twerp" but damn if he isn't sincerely convinced the universe revolves around him and his sex life.
And what a sex life it must be if Dylan can't even manage to take off his pants for the big moment. I know this was airing on a Saturday afternoon and all, but I've seen more convincing sexual encounters on Touched by an Angel. It was like watching Ken and Barbie go at it - as directed by the average nine-year old, who knows just enough about the process to know that something happens... somewhere.
In which Beka has crap taste in men, Dylan has crap taste in women, and Tyr needs new friends.
Guiding a convoy, Andromeda observes a pair of Nietzschean battle groups - you know - battling each other. One of the losing Nietzscheans makes a break for the Andromeda, so Dylan blows up his pursuer and brings him onboard. Questioned, Gaitan says that the Drago Katsov are searching for "Deep Midnight's Voice": a pre-fall Nietzschean slip-scout. It mapped all of slip-stream, which would give whoever found it a huge advantage while they were running about killing people.
Not wanting to see the balance of power upended, Dylan decides to find it. Andromeda finds they planet that is "probably" where the probe may have gone down for repairs. Problem is, the planet in question is inhabited by folks who think they are alone in the universe. Dylan, Beka, Tyr, and Gaitan go down to try and blend long enough to find the probe.
Spotted by the natives, Dylan sends Tyr and Gaitan to find the probe. He and Beka wind up collecting a pair of scientists investigating "falling stars." So while Tyr and Gaitan go lumbering through the jungle, Dylan and Beka try not to get arrested as spies long enough to make out with the natives. Gaitan admits that he is a spy for the Drago Katsov, sent to make Tyr an offer he can't refuse. He and Tyr find the probe, brutally murder a few soldiers, then return to the Maru.
Hearing from Harper that the Nietzscheans are coming, Dylan sadly tells his new girlfriend that her planet may well be hosed. She demands that he do something about it, but he's not pretending to be Super-Dylan this week and makes sad face. Just before Beka and Dylan arrive, Tyr listens to Gaitan admitting that he thinks Tyr's son is the reincarnation of Drago Musevni. Though Gaitan wants to join Tyr in using probe and baby in conquering the universe, Tyr isn't playing that way and shoots him.
Dylan has the Andromeda set off a solar flare, destroying the Nietzschean ship and covering his escape. Before dropping the girlfriend off, Dylan gives her a comm pad, offering her a chance to advance her world's technology by a thousand years. Onboard the ship, Andromeda tells Dylan that someone made a copy of the probe's data...
Gaitan: "You could save my childrens' lives and I would still hate the Kludge."
Dylan: "And I'd still save your children. ... I'd leave you behind, though."
Gaitan: "Is there such a difference between me and my ancestors?"
Dylan: "Yes. They're dead."
That I say it is better than last week should not necessarily be viewed as an endorsement. Beka's baby-talk flirtation, for example, is an embarrassment for all involved. On the other hand, it advanced the Dylan/Tyr storyline and Dylan himself was less obnoxious than usual here. Even his chirpy little girlfriend was palatable.
When I think about it, most of his girlfriends are not - in and of themselves - all that bad. It's just when you stack them up throughout the series, the very fact that Dylan seems unable to exist unless there is some "spunky" female putting aside her own life to gaze adoringly in his direction is what pisses me off so thoroughly.
And for all the drama of Dylan showing up at Tyr's doorstep to "talk," we don't get to see the talk and the talk is never mentioned at a later date. Which? Bites.
In which Dylan has crap taste in women.
A collapsing slipstream route dumps Andromeda into the Prolon system, a murky swamp of space where their instruments are useless and they can't see to find their way out. A stasis pod floats by, containing the local Princess Tura, and her royal entourage opens fire with corrosive toxic waste missiles when Dylan won't give her back.
They are followed by a ship full of monks, who claim that Princess Tura is their Goddess Ha'je'na. A little investigation reveals that she's really Lorena Blodgett, a con artist who's made off with the royal and religious fortunes of Prolon. Handing her over to the authorities is a problem, however, because the only law around is a malfunctioning AI who takes about thirty seconds to call out the firing squad.
Dylan gets smoopy about Lorena and offers to be her defense counsel. It turns out that "arguments" means he has to fight the prosecutor to death, leaving it up to Harper to hack into the AI's mainframe and take it over. Harper exonerates Lorena, who tells Dylan that she'll admit where the money is, but then runs off in the Eureka Maru.
Luckily, Dylan knows that no one comes onboard without trying steal Beka's ship, so he has Beka hide out onboard. She waits until Lorena has loaded her loot, then takes it all - ship, prisoner and loot - back to Dylan. Lorena reluctantly announces that Dylan will be sharing out all the money to the common people, then picks an identity and flies off with the royal entourage.
Dylan: "You agreed to guide our ship out of the system."
Tura: "Now we disagree."
Dylan: "But we shook and everything..."
Something about his tone of voice makes me think he's not talking about shaking hands.
Dylan is obviously descended from Captain Kirk.
In which Dylan needs new friends.
Dylan and Tyr go looking for a lost Nietzschean Pride, only to be ambushed by the Knights of the Genetic Purity, those wacky bigots who want to wipe out all Nietzscheans everywhere. They are saved by a Templar assault squad lead by Constantine Stark, who claims to be the descendent of Dylan's mentor and almost in-law, Admiral Constanza Stark.
Stark invites himself back to the Andromeda, where he offers to let Dylan in on his next attempt to annoy the Genites by destroying one of their research stations and the deadly virus they are concocting. Mid-mission, Rommie tells Dylan that Stark left out some vital info: the virus only kills Nietzscheans.
Tyr finds proof that the Genites were once part of Stark's army, and Dylan confronts Stark about his lies. Stark admits that he and the truth are not exactly friends. Then he drops another bombshell: he isn't descended from Constanza Stark. He is Constanza Stark. He's been body-hopping for three hundred years, watching the Nietzscheans tear the Commonwealth apart and is determined to see them all dead.
Dylan sends Andromeda to lure some Genite ships into following them back to the station to attack the Templar fleet. He and Stark face off in the lab, but neither one is really in the mood to kill the other. Stark initiates the self-destruct sequence in the lab to prevent it from falling back into Genite hands, then makes his escape.
I love how just about everyone Dylan knew pre-Fall somehow survived the next three hundred years. Seriously, what happened to all his boo-hooing about being the sole survivor of the Commonwealth?
In which Rommie has crap taste in men.
While Andromeda is in dry dock, Tyr gets Dylan's permission to go off in the Eureka Maru, claiming to be on a search for remnants of the Kodiak Pride. He is really going to set one of his Big Plans in motion, starting with a shady doctor who can change Tyr's DNA to match that of his son's.
Dylan is looking forward to the launch of a new Commonwealth vessel, Resolution of Hector, until Rommie hijacks the vessel and flies off with Harper in tow. Under the influence of her ex-lover, the Balance of Judgment, she orders Harper to build a new Avatar for the Judgment AI.
Tyr goes to meet the Drago-Katzov Fleet Marshall Attaturk, bringing proof of his claims that he is the genetic reincarnation of the Nietzschean progenitor Drago Musevni. Attaturk is taken in and pledges his Pride's loyalty to Tyr's cause.
Judgment's new Avatar, Remiel, is pretty annoyed with Harper, but Rommie convinces him to let Harper go, promising to stay with him of her own free will if he does. The deal is off, however, after Dylan gets onboard and sabotages the ship's security systems.
When Rommie persuades the Judgment to surrender, Remiel refuses to go along. He and Rommie battle in the cargo bay, eventually triggering the release that opens the bay doors. Dylan saves Rommie before she is blown out into space, but Remiel is not that lucky and goes sailing and flailing off into the darkness.
One of my favorites.
In which Tyr gets away.
As I understand it, Tyr's plan went something like this:
He changed his DNA to match his son's. His son is the genetic reincarnation of Drago Musevni, first Nietzschean ever, so Tyr passed himself off as the Second Coming to the Prides. In particular, Tyr messed with the Drago Katzov Pride, they being the meanies who massacred his entire family.
He convinced them that he was going to reunite all the Nietzschean Prides, and sent them off to wreak havoc across the new Commonwealth. This, of course, annoyed Dylan, who investigated. Tyr also set them up to steal Drago's bones from the Andromeda and take off in the Eureka Maru.
Naturally, Beka doesn't want to lose her ship, so they follow and get it back. They find it, however, in orbit around the Drago Katzov homeworld, where the Drago Katzov fleet is waiting for them. Tyr's tinkering, meanwhile, has left them with a problem: if they try to escape to slipstream, the slipstream drive will fall out of the ship and blow up the planet.
Dylan is seriously pissed that Tyr has set him up to commit genocide, and follows Tyr to the asteroid where the Kodiak Pride lived until the Dragos slaughtered them. He guilts Tyr into undoing his damage to the ship, but while he's doing that, things have gotten completely out of hand.
The High Guard fleet has arrived to crunch the Drago Katzov, and a group of Commonwealth enemies have arrived to crunch whoever's available. As Dylan watches, the whole area of space erupts in a battle that destroys most of the ships involved. Tyr takes off in a slip-fighter to raise his son, leaving Dylan and the others to contemplate the possible end of the second Commonwealth.
Harper: "What did I ever do to you?"
Tyr: "You made me laugh... just not out loud. I hope you get the chance to do it again."
Harper: "We'll double-cross that bridge when we come to it."
A little fuzzy around Tyr's motivations and the details of how much of this he intended to happen. (Did he really imagine he'd overthrow the Commonwealth?) There were several very strong character scenes towards the end, however, between him and each of the others. I particularly liked his conversations with Beka and Harper.
In which they need a better "Previously on..." guy. That just sucked.
Andromeda and crew are hiding out, trying to avoid winding up dead like every other Commonwealth ship out there. As they are wondering just what deity they upset to have screwed the Commonwealth again, a courier ship from an unspecified place brings a mysterious message from a guy claiming that the Commonwealth "is history."
Paroo's pretty proud of having brought this about, but takes the time to suggest that the crew skitter off to a dark corner and lick their wounds. They are under no circumstances to try and rescue the Triumvir. Nope. Unh-uh. No way.
Three guesses what Dylan starts planning to do.
Harper rebels. Beka considers. And Trance? Trance announces that the new enemy is the Abyss. Clues in Paroo's transmission leads to the All-Forces Nullification Point, a legendary point in slipstream where things fall apart (or something), so Dylan leads his little fleet to a giant special effect floating in space.
Down on the planet, Paroo manages to spit out some useful information in between the crazy. Dylan finds the Triumvir Tri-Gema, convinces her that he did not betray the Commonwealth, and kills Paroo. The vanishing corpse trick convinces Tri-Gema that Paroo was a vessel of the Abyss.
As the planet explodes, Andromeda uses the courier ship's slipstream trick to get away, trying to retrace his steps, and makes it to safety after a bizarrely close call with the creature of the Abyss.
Trance: "The fate of the universe is in your hands, Dylan."
Dylan: "Thank you for sugar-coating that, Trance."
Nigel Bennett gives fantastic crazy. What is pretty much a throw-away role (never to see the character again) must still be believably complete in a short time, with the physical and emotional presence to be both a strong enough to have been a high-ranking officer and weak enough to have fallen prey to the Abyss. He pulls it off with style.
I can't quite recommend this episode, however, as it marks the beginning of the season that really really bugged me.
In which you are only as good as the universe allows you to be.
In which case, the universe really doesn't like this show.
Triumvir Tri-Gema suffers a no confidence vote in the Senate. She asks Dylan to check out a man named Citizen Eight, her main rival in power, who owns a "prescient" that tells the future accurately and without fail. She tells him that Citizen Eight's first act as Triumvir will be to replace Dylan as Captain of Andromeda.
Dylan goes for dinner with Citizen Eight, who yammers for a bit about futures and threats and pretty much bugs me. He finally gets around to offering to have the prescient read Dylan's future. After Harper and Beka get their fortunes told, Dylan's informed that he will betray the leaders of the Commonwealth and is nearly mobbed by angry pilgrims.
Dylan's own prescient, Trance, tells him that "something unholy is coming," something that doesn't want Dylan around when it gets here. An investigation of the prescient reveals that the being and the Priestess who interprets for it are prisoners of Eight.
Eight tells Dylan to join him, or he'll squash Dylan on his way to the top. Dylan doesn't care and takes off to destroy the prescient's food source, removing Eight's control of it. Eight gives him a final ultimatum, but Dylan cooly responds that he has faked Rommie's breakdown and broadcast Eight's treachery. (Wow. We've never seen that before.)
Dylan goes to arrest Eight, finding him in the prescient's temple. They fight and Dylan kills Eight, who dissolves back into the Abyss.
Another threat from the Abyss; too bad some of these episodes weren't sprinkled through last season instead of coming one right after another here. It's getting a bit repetitive.
In which there is a energy sucking plot device.
Andromeda wanders past a strange moon, which traps them in an energy-sucking plot device. (As opposed to a plot-sucking energy device.) In order to shut it off (and just to be complicated) the crew has to destroy a power source on the surface and another buried deep underground.
On the moon, Dylan runs into old flame Molly. The scientist in charge is a half-android named Crouton (no really) and has spent the past few hundred years making huge numbers of androids just like him. While Crouton chases Dylan and Molly around his base, unable to prevent them from destroying his android army, Beka, Rommie and Harper blow up the underground power source.
The final point to all this comes after everyone is back on the Andromeda, when Crouton splits his moon in half to reveal a second world ship he's been building for the Magog. Dylan opens five slipstream portals and dares Crouton to pick a door. Limited by his android half, Crouton chooses wrong. The world ship is destroyed, but Crouton escapes in a capsule.
An android army is bad enough. A Magog worldship is bad enough. Both in one episode is a waste. Especially when they both wind up destroyed by Dylan the Great and his perky sidekick. If it was that easy, why was everyone so afraid?
(Speaking of things we're not afraid of, why is Rommie suddenly indestructible? Hector and Gabriel were both taken down with a single force lance blast, and she's just shrugging them off as if it was nothing. There aren't even any blast holes on her clothes.)
The double power source was solely for the purpose of filling the spaces between Dylan and Molly's ridiculous flirtation. Beka and Harper were reduced to ridiculous yelping over their treasure hunt, which became a giant waste of time when their precious computer chips turned out to be worthless.
Where's the beef?
Andromeda finds one of those pleasure planets Harper's always yammering about. Harper and Beka do the vacation thing; maybe she runs into that cute thief she was making eyes at last year ("Heart for a Falsehood Framed"). Meanwhile, Dylan runs into Molly, who is sure that something's up. They Nick-and-Nora their way around, which would provide a much more appropriate forum for their "cute" "banter" than the middle of a firefight.
Dylan and Molly uncover Crouton's (except he would be named something different) master plan and his android army, but once they think they've ended him and go back to the ship, the planet splits apart and reveals the worldship he was building for the Magog. Dylan manages to destroy it (or not) and we all move on. Maybe we even come out of this knowing some special weakness the Magog worldship has that may come in handy.
What a waste of Time. Of Big Bads. Of Guest Stars. Of Brain Cells.
In which Andromeda does what they've been doing pretty much every episode this season, which is to go somewhere looking for something and get into trouble.
So this weapon-thing that can wipe out all the minds of everyone on a planet has been stolen by Calamar Voth, a Nietzschean who is in a battle with his sister for control of their Pride. While Harper hides in the cargo pod with the weapon and tries to turn it off, Dylan goes to have his contractually obligated flirtation with Melia, the sister. Apparently, Beka, Rommie and Trance are really bored because all three of them feel the need go to free Calamar's son from Melia's prison.
When he finds out that Dylan has his son, Calamar makes the cargo pod take off and fly into orbit. This is just about the time Rommie discovers the weapon has turned itself on and is counting down. Everyone tries to keep Harper from freaking so that he can turn it off, while Dylan and Andromeda destroy the entirely unnecessary Magog who have flown into orbit.
We started out with three straight episodes where some random minion of the Abyss caused trouble. Now, two episodes where there's some weird search for a weapon of some kind; weapons that, frankly, I have to wonder if we'll ever see again. It's time to mix things up.
There used to be some variety to episodes. Different characters would get a little attention each week, building them up so that the ensemble stories had more weight to them. Now each week seems to be about Dylan bagging his latest leather-clad bimbo.
Let's review:
They had the perfect chance to lock Gordon Michael Woolvett in a small, confined space with nothing to do but talk to himself and they blew it.
This is why this show sucks these days.
They should have put Harper into the pod in the first five minutes, or even started the episode with him in the pod in orbit around the planet. They should have confined all the exposition to a single scene and cut out the Nietzschean siblings entirely. If everyone else absolutely had to have something to do, they might have wandered off to the ship full of comatose people.
Indulge in some of Harper's crazy monologues and his way of making techno-babble adorable. Wallow in the Harper-Rommie back-and-forth. Between the weapon's countdown and the freezing temperature in the cargo pod, there was enough tension there. As the stakes raise, remind us of his bond with Beka and work on his friendship with Dylan.
Find some of that balance that used to be the show's greatest strength.
If the characters had been shallow and repetitive the whole time and Andromeda had always been nothing more than a Space Opera, I could have accepted it as that. After the first season, however, I upgraded my expectations regarding characters and plot. So far, this season has been very disappointing.
In which coherence would be too easy.
Beka insists that she's willing to join Tyr in his battle against Dylan and gets him to explain what he wants with the Route of Ages. The Magog, Tyr tells her, are only a few months away from Commonwealth Space and the Route of Ages leads to a portal that will give him control over the Abyss. Or the Route of Ages is the portal; I'm a little confused on that point.
Anyways... Dylan leads the Eureka Maru to the portal, where Beka betrays Tyr and tells Dylan what she's learned. She and Tyr get into a fight on the bridge and the Maru spins out of control, flying towards the portal.
Andromeda follows them into the portal and everyone winds up in an universe where everything's all "thought is action" and "you are where you believe" and so on and so forth. Tyr offers to give Beka to the Abyss in exchange for his freedom, but Dylan shows up and shoots him.
The crew returns to the Andromeda, but the portal has closed. Dylan sends everyone off the bridge and asks Trance what she can do about this. Trance reveals that she is "the avatar of a sun" and can destroy everyone and reassemble them back in the universe they belong in.
Harper: "Tyr Ana-sleazi, living large in the lap-dance of luxury."
Tyr: "I didn't allow you here to insult me."
Harper: "That's what you think."
Dylan: "We all present and accounted for?"
Harper: "Almost. There's no accounting for Rhade."
Every time I see this episode, it makes less sense.
In which Rhade has taken to wearing shirts that show off his chest. (Not that we're complaining.)
King Schnoazan asks Dylan to track down Coulis Bara, a space pirate accused of murdering his daughter Princess Aleais in his latest raid. When they go to check out the last place her ship took on fuel, however, it blows up, muddying the trail somewhat.
Beka and Rhade finally find Aleais, not as much a prisoner of Coulis as they expected. She explains that she was drugged and put aboard the transport by her father, who also killed her mother when she got too popular with his subjects.
Beka is convinced that Aleais is only suffering from Poor Little Rich Girl Syndrome. Beka must have personal experience with that, comments Aleais, as the daughter of Senator Talia Vourkirk. While Beka fumes at having her past exposed, Rhade suggests that there is a way Aleais can prove Coulis is a good man.
Rhade, Beka and Aleais strand themselves in a dangerous swamp, and Aleais begs Coulis to rescue all of them. Coulis is about to act, when he is shot by Schnoazan. Dylan arrives in time to save them and Schnoazan winds up knocked into the swamp sludge and killed.
After checking into Coulis' background, Dylan realizes that he does indeed free slaves and redistribute wealth the way Aleais claims. Dylan decides to set Coulis free, in exchange for bringing his league of planets into the Commonwealth and marrying Aleais.
Beka: "Cut the swagger, why don't you? What happened to the 'what an interesting freak show' expression from three planets ago?"
Dylan: "Don't be smart."
Harper: "It's hard not to when you're a prodigy."
Like so many of episodes this year: nice idea, lousy execution. And Rhade going, "I'm bred for self-preservation"? You're standing on a little rock in the middle of a big acid swamp. And it was your idea! Shut. Up. Before someone pushes you in.
In which - apparently - the South has risen.
A pair of squabbling warriors from the Trillian system are picked up, their ships floating dead in space. They each claim the other is a war criminal, responsible for atrocities in a war that has raged for thousands of years. Dylan and the crew don't really believe either Lach or Zara and question whether they want to get hauled into their conflict.
Lach appears to be suffering from a disease that he says is the result of germ warfare, and he infects Dylan. Not having the time to return to Terrazed for medical treatment, Dylan orders the ship to Trillia, hoping to find a cure there. The two last groups of people face each other on opposite sides of a towering wall that wraps around the planet's equator.
Rhade takes Lach back to his Northern settlement, where Lach steals his slip-fighter to lead a final assault on Zara. Suspecting she's been betrayed, Zara holds Beka and Harper captive and launches her own ships against Lach's forces. Rommie rescues Rhade, who destroys Lach's bombers, forcing the soldiers to meet each other on the ground.
By this time Dylan and Trance have figured out that Lach's disease isn't an infection; it's a genetic breakdown caused by the reduction in the gene pool. Though Lach's people began suffering first, both sides will eventually die out. By mixing Lach's blood with Zara's, Trance is able to cure Dylan. The only hope for the Trillians, however, is to inter-breed and hope for children strong enough to survive.
Rhade: "Seamus, you are proof that even here there is capacity for love."
Harper: "Love? Who said anything about love? That's down-right human, Telemachus."
Rhade: "You insult me after I say something nice?"
Harper: "Easy. That's how fights start."
"True love" is the answer? Dylan. Dylan. Don't be stupider than usual. You were doing so well for most of the episode.
In which we must not forget the Killer Pimps.
Rev Bem sends Dylan a note, so Dylan goes to see him. Bad idea: Rev knocks Dylan out and hands him over to a chick in a robe. Trance and Rommie realize that the drug Dylan was shot with rendered his most pleasant and horrific moments into data. They trace the substance to Dr. Sakai Seguro, a Collector with the sort of reputation that attracts Harper's attention.
Dylan wakes up on a ship about to drift into a black hole, with a mildly unstable Rev Bem his only companion. He ignores Rev's gabbling and tries to restart the engine with the intention of, you know, leaving. All he does is cause an explosion that flattens Rev.
Rhade and Beka get one of Seguro's minions to lead them to her. Seguro admits that she gave the Collectors the idea of messing with Dylan's head by using her process. She is part of a cell of Collectors that believes Dylan is destined to succeed in saving the universe and she wants him to. That's what this little test is all about.
The crew figures out that Dylan's greatest fear is being sucked into another black hole and goes to find him. Rev, meanwhile, has remembered that there is slip-fighter in the hanger. Too bad, the hanger is open to space, resulting in Dylan and Rev nearly being sucked into the black hole a lot quicker than they had planned.
They manage to get to the slip-fighter (past the even more dangerous "I'm not worthy" crap from Rev) and fly to safety to the strains of the over-blown strings the soundtrack is sadly so fond of this season.
Harper: "Of course! We are so freaking stupid? Why didn't we think of this?"
Even though she's more than a little evil, I hope we see Seguro again. Her plus Harper would be a lot of fun.
In which maybe that shower idea is not so bad.
Andromeda is being harassed by bounty hunters, and Dylan starts to suspect that one of the crew is telling them where the ship is. He and Rommie consider the possibilities, a fine opportunity for some flashbacks, but no. Instead they narrow it down to Beka while staring blankly at a computer screen. There is some discussion, then some random flashbacks for no real reason, then Beka gets knocked out and dragged to sick-bay.
The crew keeps ducking all the flying flashbacks, and decides that Beka has been taken over by the Abyss. Mostly by remembering what happened between Beka and Tyr in the other dimension, which is odd, because none of them were there. They decide to lure the Abyss out of Beka's mind and into a virtual reality version of her mind, where it can be destroyed.
This virtual reality would be the another good place to put all the flashbacks, but that would be too creative. So, all we get is Abyss-Beka wrapped in a white sheet, pretending to be helpless for a grand total of five seconds, before whipping out a force lance and attacking Dylan. He is sure he's killed the Abyss, but he really only lets it loose in Andromeda.
They don't realize that until the life support is disabled and the atmosphere starts being vented. Trance goes into VR, yells at the Abyss, turns herself into a sun again, and drives it out. She wakes up. Rommie wakes up. Beka wakes up. Everyone smiles and tries not to look embarrassed by this lame-ass episode.
Dylan: "Rhade. You're brilliant."
Rhade: "Thank you.
That was just sad.
In which Harper's quite simple for such an intelligent man.
Harper, Rhade, and Dylan are captured by the Templar Patriarch, who demands that Harper help him finish his latest project: a giant space bridge between a planet and its moon. Harper correctly guesses that the Patriarch intends to turn the bridge into a time tunnel, connecting to whatever is on that moon in one hundred years.
He convinces Dylan to let him find out more about the Patriarch's plans, then allows the Patriarch to convince him that this is a chance for scientific immortality. Dylan escapes and flies off to rejoin Andromeda. Scanning the moon on his way out, Dylan spots a settlement and guesses that the Patriarch is breeding an army of "pure" humans who will return to the past and help mop up what is left of the galaxy after the Magog arrive.
He and Rommie battle their way back into Harper's lab, just in time to see him turn the device on. It works, but the Patriarch is as surprised as anyone when a bunch of Magog pop out. They've taken advantage of the intervening century to eat all of the Patriarch's colonists.
Devastated by what he's unleashed, Harper helps Dylan turn off the time bridge. They escape as the Magog chow down on what is left of the Patriarch and his Templars.
Rommie: "What was strike one?"
Dylan: "There wasn't one, but he works better under pressure."
So, after a complex build-up with some serious fallout, Harper's transgression is boiled down to a one liner from the Great Captain Hunt. Why do I even bother?
In which this could be good. More likely it's extremely bad.
Some space bimbo shows up. She is supposedly the Commonwealth's deadliest spy, working for Dylan's former ally Tri-Gema and asking Dylan to give her the Route of Ages. Indra and Dylan fall for each other, but Dylan doesn't know whether to trust her or not.
Claiming to have hidden the map, Dylan lures Indra into the wacky hide-out of his wacky friends. They live in the center of a slipstream maze and spend their time dressing up like the cast of "Taming of the Shrew" and throwing things. When they seem to decide to trust Indra, Dylan unbends enough to sleep with her. The morning after, however, she pockets the Route and takes off to give it to Tri-Gema, "breaking" Dylan's "heart."
Ah, but this was all the final test, and what Indra really steals is nothing more than a pissy message from Dylan that he set her up. On the way out, Indra gets lost in the slipstream maze, and Tri-Gema somehow gets sucked inside and lost as well.
Dylan is, like, totally bummed.
Delvino: "You have fallen, trapped by your own devices. Although I am not quite sure what that means."
It means that someone's ego has gotten so completely out of control that he's sucked all the life out what was a fantastic ensemble. They wasted Peter DeLuise on this? What was he doing earlier this season when we were forced to sit through those lame-ass weapons designers? What was he doing here? Who were these people again?
Speaking of guest stars, why the new blonde? Why not recruit one of Dylan's former conquests. At least then, his "love" for her would have been more believable. Kristin Lehman's series got cancelled, why not bring Molly back? What about Elssbett Bolivar? The con-woman from "Illusion of Majesty?" Why not make Tri-gema herself the main guest star, if you were going to drag her out again?
What might have been is driving me crazy.
In which a tinkly little bell can destroy the Abyss.
A Wayist traveling onboard the Eureka Maru is murdered by a couple of Collectors who work for the Abyss. There are two interesting things about the dead guy: he has a collector tattoo on his wrist and he once worked for Beka's father.
Weslow left Beka a message, guiding her to a secret Collector archive. Clues hidden in the files detailing his life aboard the Maru describe a weapon against the Abyss. After much pointless pretending that this is some difficult puzzle, Beka finds a tiny bell that vibrates and destroys agents of the Abyss hidden inside the doll Weslow her for her birthday.
It's bad enough that the Abyss can be destroyed by a tinkly little bell, we better see the damn thing again.
In which there are three kinds of people in this universe: those who can count and those who can't.
Dylan wanders through a dream sequence, then meets Flavin, his quirky old guide for the evening, who takes him to a local bar. As Dylan never met a fight scene he didn't like, things soon get predictable.
Flavin describes the Seefra system: nine planets, all identical, surrounding a pair of suns. Investigating the area around the city, Dylan finds the ruins of a crashed ship and an old holo of his father giving him advice. He realizes that he is on Tarn Vedra, homeworld of the Old Commonwealth.
The town's Head Flunky worries about Dylan and orders his shadowy minion, who looks an awful lot like Rhade, to kill the new arrival. Rhade goes to talk to Flavin, but they speak mostly in poetics and I give up long before they start making any sense.
Rhade, who's been doing quite a bit of drinking and moping in the nine months he's been on Seefra, finds Dylan. His invitation to go get smashed does not go over well with Dylan. Nor is it made in the spirit of friendship: Rhade's pretty pissed about Louisa's death and wants vengeance.
Seems Rhade blames Dylan for making him hope things could get better, which led to him falling for Louisa, which led to her being dead. Logic is not Rhade's friend at this point; he just wants to hit something. Dylan can get behind that as he's awfully upset that four years of his life rebuilding the Commonwealth tanked so very spectacularly.
Rhade gets his cute little ass handed to him, but when he gets his hands on a gun, he can't quite bring himself to shoot Dylan. Head Flunky is exposed as a fraud and sent packing, his hold over the townspeople broken.
Flavin packs his bags and enters the "Hall of Mirrors," taking his contrived route out of Tarn Vedra. I think he may have taken Dylan's slipfighter, but could not for the life of me sort out anything Flavin said into anything resembling sense. Left in Flavin's lab, with Rhade off drinking, Dylan finds a display of medals and a model of Andromeda.
Rhade: "I can't hold a grudge against you. It's too much effort."
Dylan: "So what you're saying is you're too lazy to hate me?"
Well, they aren't making any more sense than before, but Rhade is looking hot and scruffy and I'm in the "not expecting much but still vaguely curious" phase of my relationship with this show.
It doesn't totally suck, really. The actors did a fairly good job with language that might have come off as gibberish. I get the feeling the writers have a definite plan, they just aren't quite able to get it working properly, so sometimes they have to fake it.
In which it's never good when you have to sneak onto your own ship.
Dylan gets a message from Beka, a code giving coordinates of the Andromeda. When he and Rhade get there, however, he finds Beka sucking face with Jonah, the local mob boss, who rescued her about a month before. She'd been drifting alone for six months and, like Rhade, is convinced that it is all pretty much Dylan's fault.
Dylan manages to get himself captured, and Jonah turns out to be smarter than he looks: he realizes who Dylan is and how he is connected to Beka. She tries to talk her way out of it, but Jonah doesn't buy it - not completely.
He sets up a double-blind taste test that involves choosing between feeding Dylan to "the Core," a being that burns whatever it touches to a crisp, or firing a missile at the ship, destroying the vessel. Dylan encourages this little lunacy, guessing correctly that "the Core" is Trance in her natural state.
Jonah announces that the missile will flood the ship with poison, rendering her useless to anyone. As Jonah leaves, he explains that Beka could still have a place with him as a freighter captain, but she spots Rhade in the shadows, gesturing to her. She lets Jonah go, then frees Dylan. He, in turn, asks Trance to power the ship and launch a counter-missile.
Everyone saved, Andromeda reactivates, explaining that Trance tesseracted them to this place, and Beka finally unclenches. Sorta.
Rhade: "If we could have this conversation later?" He sounds so annoyed.
This season is already starting out better than the last two years, but I think that we're eventually going to run out of ways that Dylan's crew can show up, try to betray him, then change their minds. Of course, after next week, we'll probably run out of crew, so...
In which you must beware the little blue snot balls.
Beka and Rhade are having a drink when somebody releases a blue fear mist into the bar. They go bonkers for a few minutes, then collapse. Lucky them. Some of the victims die from the overdose of pheromones. In the confusion, someone steals a painting of the bartender's ex-girlfriend and he offers a reward to anyone who brings it back.
Dylan and Rhade volunteer themselves and Beka for the job. They track the nano-bots in the fear factor to a lab where they find (insert noise that would be more dramatic if the ads hadn't blown the surprise) Harper!
In Harper's lab, he has a fragment of Rommie, but when Dylan goes into VR to speak to her, she's incoherent and violent. She was turned off and alone for far too long; now she refuses to trust anyone.
Harper and his Bright Pink Barbie (aka Doyle) explain that Harper's new gig is helping a woman who is trying to genetically engineer a new race of Vedrans. When Marika turns on one of Harper's friends, he decides to sic Dylan on her.
Dylan is upset that Harper has maneuvered him into this position, but takes action. Barbie goes along to help and manages to disarm Marika. The gang gets paid, then Dylan goes back to Harper's lair to see Rommie again.
He asks for permission to turn her off again and she gives it.
Rhade: "Stop firing flesh-bag, or I'll pull out your entrails."
Rhade: "[Harper] didn't insult me. Not once. That's not right."
Harper's not as much fun as he used to be, but I guess that's to be expected. I am having a very negative reaction to the Pepto-Bismol pink jump-suit that Doyle is sporting, but will try not to hold it against her.
In which there is a Revolt of the Androids. What the hell was up with that?
Harper's new sidekick keeps having nightmares, but not, as one might suspect, about that hideous pink jumpsuit she has to wear. While Harper is off buying some techno-gidgets, Doyle is approached by a guy who's fairly cute, if you like eyebrows. He notices that when Doyle cuts herself, she doesn't bleed so much as ooze internal fluids.
Eyebrows forces Harper to tell Doyle the truth: she's an android created to house a few last little bits of Rommie's personality. When she wasn't entirely stable, Harper overlaid another personality to keep her from leaving him. Doyle is pissed and takes Eyebrows up on his offer to be reunited with Andromeda.
Dylan, meanwhile, detects a slip-stream event on the system's edge and harasses Rhade and Beka into towing Andromeda over to check it out. They get caught up in a tesseract run by Eyebrows' flunkies, who all turn out to be androids.
It's the Revolt of the Androids, Eyebrows announces, and they want Doyle/Rommie to join them. She declines and Harper gets control of the tesseract machine, bringing everyone back to Seefra before blowing it up.
Beka: "Are we pretending we're a crew again?"
Dylan: "Oh, I won't make that mistake five times."
Dylan: "Feels like old times, huh?"
Rhade: "If you ignore the fact that this ship is a giant paperweight, then yeah, it does."
Dylan: "There is objectivity, Rhade, and there is raining on my parade. Learn the difference."
Rhade: "They've kept us alive. Merciful and incompetent."
Harper: "I know what you're thinking: 'Why is it bad things always happen to bad people?'"
I get that Doyle is Rommie and that's fine, I suppose. It explains the bouncy way she moves around, though nothing manages to explain why she can get hit with weapons fire and there be no holes in her clothes. It also explains why she looks like a Barbie doll and why she's dressed in that horrid pink jump-suit, exactly the sort of thing that Harper would pick out.
I just don't get why she's necessary. Dylan plus Rhade provides enough muscle. Beka brings enough blonde for the show and Trance the mystery. I've read that Lexa Doig is pregnant, so Rommie can't be striding around kicking ass for a little while, but do we really need Andromeda Barbie to take her place?
I don't particularly want to dislike Doyle, even if my eyes do hurt every time I have to look at the outfit, but the writing here didn't do her any favors. While the scenes with Harper were good, Argent's plan was absurd and the whole thing degenerated into farce when he started shouting about "the Revolt of the Androids!"
Beka embarks on a mysterious quest to convince a grieving father to give her a clue to Seefra's existence.
In which I looked up the definition of "eschatology" once but still didn't like this episode much.
While Beka is transporting a load of rocks for Dylan, they overhear mysterious Seefra DJ Virgil Vox announcing that Beka could uncover his secret if she were to follow his clues to a man singing by his daughter's grave.
For some reason, everyone thinks that Virgil's secret might be worth some money, so Rhade and Doyle agree to help and sneak into a super-secret town to locate the man. Beka follows the next day, pretending to be the man's long lost daughter, Mela.
He buys it, hook, line and sinker, and takes her to Virgil's transmitting studio. There he locks Beka inside a coffin that displays a light show telling her about the Seefra system. Apparently, the Vedrans created the second sun and eight of the nine planets in order to build some super fantastic peaceful society. When it fell short of their expectations, they abandoned it and moved on.
Beka's destiny is to find something called the Nithras Plate and give it to Dylan. She does so, by telling her new Daddy that she isn't really his daughter. He responds with some mumbo-jumbo about alternate lives and encourages her to lie to the wall that she really is Mela. When Beka does, the wall gives her a box with the Plate inside.
Beka: "They're so cute at that age."
Dylan: "He's trying to be scary."
Rhade: "Why don't we just use our guns?"
Dylan: "Good question."
Muddled. The whole sequence with Rhade and Doyle sneaking in to
Boyagin and then out again was wasted space designed to justify their
presence in the opening credits.
In which Dylan's latest blonde manages not to annoy me too badly.
Celine is caught in a time loop created when scientists on Tarn Vedra (what is now Seefra 1) tried to shift the planet's orbit into the path of the opening to the Route of Ages. As that was a really bad idea, she tried to stop them and has been wandering through time for three hundred years.
There's some confusion over whether she keeps reliving the same day over and over or if she's just sort of immortal and everyone forgets her when the day begins again. Or if we're seeing events from her perspective intersecting with the crew or... never mind. My head hurts. They tried to use a Groundhog Day rip-off where it didn't fit, so we'll just ignore it and move on.
Dylan falls for her, of course, leading to the Big Tragic Love Story when they put Seefra back where it belongs and she has to be returned to three hundred years ago. The result of all this, other than a chance for Dylan to look sad, is that Seefra's drought is ended and everyone stands around in the rain looking happy.
Like I said, Celine didn't bug me. I just have to not think too hard about the story. I really do wish that they had skipped the part where she had developed a crush on Dylan three hundred years ago. Was it really necessary to have yet another story about what a white knight Dylan is?
In which Rhade is worth ten men.
Flavin went somewhere and did something, but now he's back. He crash-lands a pod into the town square, then tells Dylan that it is time for Dylan to learn about his powers a Paradine. As usual, this doesn't involve basic how-to instruction (because that would be too easy), but rather an extended trip down memory lane. He also keeps calling Dylan "Dear One," which totally creeps me out.
Dylan is informed that his father was a Paradine and that the Paradine are evolved Vedrans. (Because having advanced to the point where they oversaw a multi-galaxy empire, becoming the most revered species anywhere, they really just wanted to be... human? Whatever.) At any rate, the Paradine have all decided to leave, but Dylan isn't invited. They try to say it's because he's needed in the real world, but I don't buy it. I'll bet you anything they're just trying ditch him.
Realizing that this particular story is about as fun as watching paint dry, the writers have loaded the B-plot with all the sex (Rhade) and violence (Rhade some more) they can manage. Basically, Rhade, Harper and Doyle team up to keep a pair of local thugs from breaking into Flavin's pod and looting it.
Bosen and Luna each have a key to open the pod. Each wants the other key, but isn't smart enough to do much about it. The Andromeda
gang plays them against each other, getting them to pay gobs of money for their services (Rhade, if you know what I mean and I think you do) and then arranges a big gun battle.
Despite the fact that no one with a speaking role is hit or even winged, Harper calls Dylan onboard the Andromeda in a panic to ask for help. Dylan can't get down there fast enough, so Flavin and Trance show him how to teleport (a skill that will no doubt come and go whenever the plot depends on it) and his abrupt appearance inside Flavin's pod shocks everyone into putting down their guns...
Or something.
Bosen: "I pay you for protection. So protect."
Rhade: "Are you dead? Then, I'm doing my job."
Apparently, Rhade's bottom line is five thousand and the presumption that you aren't planning to kill him.
In which I pretend that Dylan doesn't exist.
Harper finds an energy crystal that is powerful enough to provide energy for Andromeda. The only source is a man on one of the other Seefras, named Cutter, who works the mines with slave labor. Rhade joins up as one of Cutter's enforcers, looking for a way to get the crystals Harper needs.
The families of the Surog miners live in the woods around Cutter's Grove, keeping themselves healthy with a substance that protects them from the toxic effects of the crystals. Rhade summons Beka to transport the Surogs off the planet, helping himself to fifteen crates of crystals in the process, which Harper is able to turn into missiles.
Noticing that Harper is suffering from crystal poisoning, one of the Surog gives him a cure. As his workforce all leaves, Cutter objects until he's dead. The Surog are loaded on the Maru and missiles are fired at the mines, preventing anyone else from being poisoned by the substance.
Trance says that Doyle has never been onboard Andromeda before, but we saw her on command in more than one episode. Specifically, "The One Where Doyle Found Out She's An Android" and "The One Where Dylan's Blonde Didn't Annoy Me." Also, during "The One Where Rhade Got Laid," he sent Harper with a message to Doyle. If she wasn't onboard Andromeda, where was she?
Harper: "That stuff would have made me a fortune."
Rhade: "That stuff would have made you a madman, who, thankfully, wouldn't have been able to talk."
Great tasting, less Dylan. You notice how I flat out ignored his existence here? Including a whole sub-plot where he picks up another bimbo? Makes the show so much less annoying.
In which the best solutions are always the most illogical.
After a mega-bar brawl, Trance overhears Rhade bitching about how they are all stuck on Seefra. He's obviously aiming at Dylan, but Trance takes it personally and runs off to sulk in the Seefra tunnel system. Down there, she meets tunnel dweller Orlund, who is cute. A bit dramatic, but cute.
Orlund and his family have been tasked with protecting the tunnels of Seefra and the cool Vedran technology that is still strewn around them. He feels a little put-upon, however, and worried that the Vedrans won't like what he's done in their big star chamber with doors leading from Seefra 1 to all the other Seefras.
When Dylan and Doyle show up looking for Trance, Orlund realizes Dylan is a Paradine and freaks, thinking Dylan's has been sent to punish him for failing his duty. (Or something. Orlund has a lot of Issues and only a slim grasp on reality.) Dylan talks him down by telling him to keep up the good work and promising not to use his Paradine Powers to squash him like a bug.
Back on the surface, Beka and Harper finally get an invitation to Rhade's pity party when casual conversation brings up the life he left behind on Terrazed, including the news that he had a wife and three children who died there. Realizing that drinking away his sorrows hasn't helped, Rhade decides to devote his time to something besides figuring out where his next beer is coming from and settles his bar tab with Harper in full.
Harper: "Which part of 'take it outside' am I mispronouncing?"
Good points include: Trance getting some attention, Dylan not having the answer to everything, and Orlund, who was a cute little guest star with a back-story that did not make my head hurt.
I also appreciated that someone on the writing staff took a few seconds to go back to "Home Fires" and find out that Rhade was an admiral back on Terrazed. It isn't just because Rhade is a favorite; it's because it indicates that someone cared enough to bother.
I love shows that keep track of their continuity. It really isn't that hard, but far too many shows simply make things up as they go along. (Charmed, anyone?) It's careless and it bugs me. Have a little pride in your work, here. Pay enough attention to what you're doing to remember details from episode to episode.
No, that is not too much to ask.
In which I'm getting a distinct 'It was Dylan's fault' vibe from you.
Well, this "Stranger" shows up, suddenly interested in who killed a Seefra grifter named Prius. He narrows the list of suspects down to Rhade, Beka and Harper, all of whom thought that they had an exclusive deal with Prius for a new water source.
Dylan tells the Stranger that he will personally execute whoever killed Prius, in exchange for a way off Seefra. While Trance fidgets in the background, Rhade, Beka and Harper each proclaim their innocence. They assume that Dylan wouldn't actually shoot any of them, but make plans to divide up the possessions of the One Voted Most Likely to Die, just in case.
When the Stranger calls them all horrible people, Dylan announces that he is the one who killed Prius, prompting the Stranger to shoot him. Rhade, Beka and Harper are sufficiently chagrined and react in typical fashion: they shoot the Stranger in revenge.
This display of brute force (as opposed to, say, self-sacrifice?) supposedly means that they passed the Big Test. The Stranger disappears and Dylan wakes up, announcing that Prius explained it all to him with his dying breath. The Stranger was sent back in time by a future Dylan in order to remind Rhade, Beka and Harper that they are his crew.
Rather than being peeved that Dylan has once again manipulated them, Rhade, Beka and Harper get all misty and optimistic. ... Though that might just be an act for their Crazy Captain, who has managed to get his hands on a techno-babble that could power Andromeda out of the Seefra system.
Dylan: "I'm getting a distinct 'It was Dylan's fault' vibe from you."
Beka: "I wonder why."
Beka: "He was a pal. We had history."
Dylan: "Last time he hit you up for a drink, you said, 'Get away old man, or I'll set your beard on fire.'"
Pay attention.
The answer is that they should have been willing to sacrifice themselves for their captain, not commit murder on his behalf.
Idiots.
It's all very experimental theater in execution, which takes a little getting used to. If the dialogue had substance to it (instead of windy, important-sounding sound bites) and if the writers had managed to get the most basic plot construction right, this might have been truly unique.
In which, viewed from the proper perspective, everything makes sense.
The crew has managed to get involved in a war on Seefra Five. Even though you might think the anti-tech laws would keep someone from building that kind of weaponry, they are struggling to keep Mr. IWannaRuleTheWorld from taking over the whole planet. As Dylan is sending Beka down to Rhade with supplies, Hoon arrives on the bridge, looking pretty good for a dead guy.
Needing to get supplies to Rhade's refugee camp, Hoon suggests they use the quantum transporter. To increase the weirdness, Harper and Hoon discover that they have opened a connection to the Hephaestus black hole, three hundred years ago. They get a message from a research station claiming that they are waiting for the arrival of the enemy fleet.
Dylan realizes that the Battle of Witch Head hasn't happened yet. (Further irritating me, because we've been here before, and it sounds like they are still confusing two different events.) Dylan decides to teleport supplies to the refugees then abandon the entire system and everyone on it and go through the teleporter to the past and stop the Commonwealth from falling.
Trouble is that no one wants to go with him. Beka can't take the Maru, Doyle doesn't want to leave the Andromeda,
and Rhade is perturbed when Hoon discovers that the machine may introduce scrambles to his genetics. While that's all nice and dramatic, it really doesn't matter: when Harper and Hoon turn on the machine, it destabilizes the Seefran suns and threatens to destroy the whole system.
Though solar flare activity does trash the defense grid on the planet, this really isn't the result they were hoping for. Turning off the machine doesn't turn off the super-nova, so Beka flies the Maru to the sensor drone that is the cause of the problem, but winds up dead in space. She gives up awful fast and goes off to have a drink and some philosophy with Trance.
Hoon does a "cost-benefit" analysis and argues that Dylan needs to go through the teleporter and save the Commonwealth. Dylan refuses and boards a slip-fighter (they have slip-fighters now?) so he can go shut down the drone himself. Hoon responds by teleporting himself out to the sensor drone.
Harper refuses to let Hoon die again, but Dylan stops him from interfering. Hoon turns the sensor drone off before he's cripsed, but Harper remains extraordinarily pissed at Dylan. Down on the planet, Rhade drives Mr. IWannaRuleTheWorld off Seefra Five and Dylan blows him out of the sky.
Hoon's death was far more effective the first time around. While the showdown between Harper (good to see him showing some teeth again) and Dylan was well done, the build-up to it was swamped in techno-babble.
A mysterious stranger has a plan for Beka and Dylan.
When I say I hate this show? This episode is why.
Harper sends Dylan into the tunnels of Seefra Five to find a doo-hickey that will let them take the magic cube and use it to power the Andromeda. When Dylan nearly gets crunched under a falling ceiling, he calls for help. Beka ignores him, as she is too busy banging her new boyfriend, Creepy Peter.
Creepy Peter later tells Beka that he's placed explosives onboard the Eureka Maru and they will detonate if she lands and/or answers her com. He seems to feel that will prove something. She's busy freaking out, so Creepy Peter continues his creepy fascination with Rhade by interrupting Rhade's beauty sleep to pick a fight. While it is satisfying to see Rhade kicking Creepy Peter's butt, his bizarre rantings are slightly less entertaining.
Dylan calls a meeting onboard Andromeda to hook up the "Leaving Now" device, but Beka does not respond. Creepy Peter calls Dylan to gloat that Beka is his and that Dylan should just give up and hand over his ship because Peter knows how to use the Route of Ages.
For reasons known only to himself and the scriptwriters, Dylan runs Beka's DNA against the Nietzscheans who have been onboard Andromeda: She matches both Rhades, Tyr and Tamerlane (Tyr's son). Rhade goes to beat the crap out of Peter, but just as he is about to kill him, Rhade's hand disappears.
Peter calls Beka to explain that he has big plans for their children: she will be the mother of his new race. Dylan interrupts his rantings, but Peter points out that if Dylan kills him, Rhade (like all Nietzscheans everywhere) will disappear. Dylan smacks him senseless anyways, but allows him to live and to leave.
Afterwards, Dylan tells everyone that Peter was Drago Musevni and that's he's bopped through time to use Beka's DNA to mix with his and create the Nietzschean race.
Remember when Beka was just a freighter captain with a crappy old ship? Didn't you like her better then?
The con-man brother and the addict father and the "uncle" who was up to no good were one thing. They fit into her back-story without stretching credibility. The revelation that her mother was some sort of upper-class type who married beneath her and then abandoned her family was a little more problematic. It didn't add anything to the character within that episode, didn't illuminate any previous or future action, and was never mentioned again. So, what was the point?
Toss in a guy we'd never heard of, who gave her the special doll that was hiding a weapon against the Abyss - one that was also never seen again - and the Fourth Season was not kind to Ms. Valentine. The Fifth Season brought us the whole thing with the old guy who might be her father if she had grown up on Seefra and maybe this was her real life and all her memories of before was the illusion... does your head hurt yet?
They just made it worse.
I'll digress for a second for a gripe regarding Drago vs. Peter.
Lochlyn Munro is not a favorite of mine, dating from that stint as one of Prue's more obnoxious boyfriends on Charmed.
I really question his casting here for other reasons, however. Namely, genetic reincarnation is supposed to produce an identical twin to the original Nietzschean. Yes, that isn't the way it might work in real life, but that's what Andromeda insists. That's how they got away with the Rhades.
Now, Tyr's son is supposedly the genetic reincarnation of Drago and when we saw the baby, he looked more like his father than his mother. Peter (aka Drago) looks far more like Freja than like Tyr. I suppose that adorable little brown-skinned dark-haired baby could grow up to be an over-tanned (perhaps not natural-) blonde, but the odds against it are just high enough to annoy me.
But. Fine. (Say that three times in your most passive-aggressive tone of voice.) Peter is Drago Musevni, creator of the Nietzschean people.
Never mind that I was always under the impression that Drago was the first Nietzschean created, not their creator. Why would that Nietzscheans revere a human? Let's examine the problem with making Beka the Mother of All Nietzscheans:
First, Peter would have had to steal a lot more than a few skin samples in order to use her genetics for reproduction.
Second, as an ultimate mother, Beka should have had DNA in common with every Nietzschean in Andromeda's files, which would be more than just Tyr and the Rhades. Rommie has had other Nietzschean crew-members and that doesn't count people like Ellsbett and Charlemagne who were also onboard at times. Furthermore, Andromeda would not know about Tyr's son Tamerlane's genetic structure because Tamerlane was never onboard the ship.
Thirdly, what - exactly - does this add to the character? Beka seems mildly skeeved, but insistent that it doesn't matter to her. She isn't going to change her behavior and start acting more Nietzschean. She just chalks it up to one more unfortunate choice in boyfriends.
Attempts by the writers to suggest otherwise, I would sincerely doubt this news would make the Nietzscheans fall in line behind her, so I hope Dylan isn't banking on that should they get back to the wider universe. They are more likely to not believe her or to not care or to kill her out of hand for being a reminder of how inferior they were when they started.
So, did they do this to short-circuit a possible romance between Beka and Rhade because she's like his grandmother now? (Where does that leave Tyr? Ew.) Or to make a liaison okay because if she's the ultimate mother, she's somehow acceptable? (Still ew.) It certainly doesn't change her relationship to any of the others, even Harper, whose Nietzschean issues are legion.
Rhade takes the news pretty hard, but he's been Depression!Boy the whole damn season. Frankly, I'd be more mortified at being descended from a putz like Peter than upset about Beka. Maybe he was annoyed because he didn't recognize Peter was Drago, even though you'd think that would be something every Nietzschean would know. Rhade doesn't even have the excuse that he's drunk anymore; he should have known who Peter was even sooner than immediately.
(Regarding the Rhade/Peter scenes, by the way, the Andromeda writers need to put down the HoYay! and take a big step back. It may be hard to tell Steve Bacic to be less sexy, but you don't have what it takes to pull that off. While questions of gender, sexuality and the Nietzscheans might once have been fertile ground, you are just going to screw up painfully. Don't go there.)
This doesn't even qualify as a good climax to this particular episode. Beka - the character most affected by the revelations - didn't get to do anything. She was stuck on the Maru while her men-folk ran about taking care of things for her. Dylan figured out what was going on. Dylan beat the snot out of Peter. Dylan decided whether he got to leave or not.
All Beka did was show up at the end and look surprised while Dylan told her what had been going on.
There was a time when the members of the ensemble were allowed to have stories that didn't all point back to Dylan. There was a time when something like this might be expected to spin off into multiple directions and have impacts rippling hither and yon among the characters and events. But, no more. That ship has sailed and it is very very sad that it did.
In which Andromeda's astro-physics does not resemble our Earth astro-physics.
Harper leads Beka, Rhade and Doyle into the Seefran tunnels to find an ancient Vedran treasure. The locked door likes Rhade and Beka better than Harper because opens for them, then closes before Harper and Doyle can make it inside.
Dylan, meanwhile, watches Trance experiment with her powers and zap herself to Seefra 2. Dylan goes looking for her and runs into a guy who tells him that he can restore the Seefran suns if he can find the Sun God. Amazingly, the Sun God Ionin himself is telling fortunes in a nearby bar.
Trance is enamored immediately and tells Dylan that he needs to return to Andromeda without her. Jerian, the Sun God's manager, is jealous of Trance and offers to pay Dylan to take her away. Dylan, for the first time ever, turns down her seduction routine, so she just puts Dylan and Trance in a cage instead. Dylyn hears Ionin's name and realizes that he is the Avatar of the moon that once circled Tarn Vedra. When he announces that news, Jerian goes nuts and disappears.
Beka and Rhade have been stuck in a dark room full of hallucinogenic gas where they argue about the whole Beka being the Ultimate Nietzschean Mother Thing. Rhade is having a little trouble with thought that he should be revering her and launches into one of his sulks. It involves crawling across the floor and some religious imagery best left unexamined.
The room is supposed to train Protectors, creatively named beings who protect Avatars. Apparently, a person is supposedly born a Protector, but the Vedrans didn't like that and were trying to build some of their own. The training didn't work of course, leading to the Big Crazy Room.
Then we get the incomprehensible part of the episode, where Ionin's moon is about to crash into Seefra, and Jerian's a bounty hunter who catches avatars (because they are just that common?) and Trance kills her, making her appearance even more pointless. The moon gets put back where it belongs, but Ionin has to zap away because he loves Trance, but if he stays the moon will crash again, and Trance tells Dylan that she has to go somewhere and he can't follow, then vanishes.
But then, she reappears again on the bridge, just as Andromeda is calculating the odds that she won't be coming back. Trance announces that Dylan is her protector and her sun is on its way... which will give Seefra three suns... which seems excessive to me.
Sometimes, you have a horribly cliched idea and make it work. That Rommie's new boyfriend is a killer spaceship, for example, will be effective if you find someone who can actually act to play the spaceship and get out of the way.
Sometimes nothing can save you. Beka is Queen of the Nietzscheans? Don't get me started.
Now, this concept that stars and planets have Avatars is kind of neat. We're set up for it with Rommie/Andromeda, so it doesn't seem like a totally foreign idea and it gives Trance super-cool powers that are a fun reversal of her cutesy appearance.
Also fine, that there are Protectors out there who are tasked with keeping these Avatars safe. One assumes because Avatars aren't that bright and/or trustworthy. Capriciousness of nature and all that.
It's not even a huge deal that Dylan is Trance's protector. It explains the bond between them neatly and logically. The problem comes in because the writers have already saddled Dylan with the whole Paradine thing.
You know, I liked Dylan at the beginning. He was this above-average guy doing what he thought was right simply because it was the right thing to do. There was no need to bring in all the mumbo-jumbo. He's special enough without making him some mystical knight with parents who were also mystical and this Great! Big! Destiny! that means he'll win out every time.
Giving him one Destiny! is bad enough. Now there are two?
The Paradine as evolved Vedrans was a Bad Idea. These highly advanced rulers of a galaxy-spanning empire wanted to be more human? Can we get a little more arrogant, please? Go watch Farscape start to finish and then tell me why everyone we encounter in outer space wants to be human. (Come to think of it, they also did a fantastic job of making Crichton special and the center of events, without making him a demi-god.)
This is a perfect example of needlessly creating a new element when one already exists. Call the Paradine the Protectors and go from there. Explain that some of the Paradine we've run into are a little shifty because they were created by the Vedrans rather than naturally occurring and add some more to the growing fear that the Vedrans, for all their glory, aren't the most trust-worthy creatures around.
Just because Dylan's always thought they were all that, doesn't mean his view of things was entirely accurate. Play up some character angst as he tries to deal with the idea that everything he ever believed in was wrong. Drag Rhade's little existential crisis into it if you absolutely have to and connect back to the Nietzschean Rebellion, the event that kicked all this off.
Finally, I thought that Trance was the Avatar of one of the Seefran suns? There's an old Trance hanging around for the sputtering sun that's about to go out and a new Trance for the other star. Suddenly we have a third one arriving?
And am I the only one who noticed the similarity in design between the Seefra System and the Magog Worldship. In the second season, I'd call that deliberate. Now, I just call it frustrating. Is this where the planet in "Fair Unknown" disappeared to? Was Seefra supposed to motor around the galaxy like the Worldship does? Should we be worried about the fact that the stars in these parts don't stay put? Wouldn't the gravitational forces involved cause bigger problems that the occasional drought?
Characters aside, Andromeda's astro-physics does not resemble our Earth astro-physics.