More Andromeda Reviews
01/12/2000 . Source: Travers Naran 

Our chums in the US have been reporting in on the state of the new Andromeda TV series starring the shiny oiled-up fellow from Hercules, Sorbo.

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1) Travers Naran from Canada takes in a couple of espiodes; first off is the second episode after the pilot ...

Nutshell Review: 6 out of 10.
It's living up to RHW's motto, it certainly sucked less.

Well, it certainly sucked less, but I predicted as much. The episode finally let the characters assert themselves. When RHW didn't contrive his dialog, his natural wit shone, albeit briefly.

We got to know the characters a little bit better. All in all, it did was a pilot episode was supposed to do. When RHW stopped trying to write the episode and just let the moment flow, the episode really worked.

He had some entertaining one-liners in there and the quick little moments between the characters, like Dylan surprising Beka in the armory, really made it watchable. So far, this seems to be the strength in the series, but unfortunately, this was not the majority of the episode.

Most of the dialog and action still had a contrived feeling. That feeling of, "Um, OK. What do I say now to explain the obvious to the audience or to telegraph the character's emotions because I don't trust the actors to do it for me."

It made for a couple laughable moments including, unfortunately, Trance's death. There were some annoying problems in this episode, but this one irked me the most. A character dies, Trance, and we are shown reactions from Dylan and her former crew.

In a well written episode, this would be a touching moment. In this episode, it made me giggle. This kind of scene requires dramatic investment before it can work. You can't just pull the trigger on these emotions and expect the audience to react. You need to spend some time to get the viewer to get emotionally involved with the characters before you can pull the trigger.

You Cannot Take Short-Cuts!

That was my biggest beef with DS9. Time and time again, the DS9 writers rushed to an emotional climax and pulled the trigger. I felt like a girl who married a premature ejaculator! I am hoping this is RHW warming up because it's _really_ annoying to constantly pull the emotional trigger without a build up.

It looks cheesy and it's really annoying.

NITS
It's nice to know that when Trance is shot, she falls into a perfect hands-by-sides pose. Although the fight choreography is adequate for television, it doesn't seem to fit the supposed training and quality of the character's fighting abilities.

When I see someone do the infamous "two-handed club", I wince. I've taken basic martial arts, and I know RHW has as well (and then some). The fight sequence did not look like trained hand-to-hand fighters. When Seamus goes into "cyberspace", why do they have to show him as his real self?

It's more accurate and visually interesting to show his cyberspace 'avatar': a computer graphic that represents the user (e.g., a geometric shape, an animal or an idealized version of the user like a Greek God). Scientific Nits: Pions are short-lived subatomic particles.

They don't last long enough to be useful as "breadcrumbs". A better choice would have been anti-protons. Easily dumped in the exhaust by an over-rich antimatter mixture. Even a "low density" of anti-protons sticks out like a sore thumb.

And before anyone says, "they would have detected it", then I say: "But wouldn't notice the abnormally high pion count either?" See http://www.triumf.ca/welcome/pions.html GOOD I'm beginning to like Rev Bem.

If they can resist the urge to turn him into a cheap copy of the X-Men's Beast, I think he could be a very interesting character. They just need to stop making him spout fortune cookie lines and cliche dialogue. If they focus more on his spirituality as spoken "from his heart", he'll be perfect. Trance works best when Laura plays it pixyish and naive.

She doesn't appear dumb, just operating under a different set of priorities and motivations. She makes a refreshing change of pace from the other more "serious" characters. I'm finding it's not working for me when she tries to be "sassy" or wisecracking.

Also, making Trance be part of a mysterious race could be interesting. Although I'm hoping we're not going to be seeing any painful "Orko Meets Dree-elle"[1] type episodes.

I've got a few ideas how to take her character and race, but I'll keep 'em back hoping RHW does something at least as good or better.

[1] See "He-man and the Masters of the Universe" episode "Dawn Of Dragoon"

[2] I was 12. I didn't know any better.

:-) Travers.

2) Now here's Traver's review of the ANDROMEDA episode: To Loose The Fateful Lightning

[REVIEW] Nutshell Review: 4 out of 10, but I'm being *exceptionally* generous.
"Mira meets The Omega Glory!"

SPOILERS
[P.S. I'm not going to recap the episode because a) I've always hated reviews that do that, and b) watch the episode if you want to know what happened]

Sometimes, you come across an episode where everything about it was pretty decent, but something, somewhere, isn't quite right.

That was bugging me throughout this entire episode. I really liked its fundamental concept, and I did want to see this story done well, but it ended up causing me great pain to watch. I've been thinking about this for the past couple days.

What went wrong? Kevin Sorbo's Captain Dylan Hunt is not the greatest performance we've ever seen in SFTV, but I can say it isn't bad.

Considering he's playing a ramrod of a character straight out of 40's and 50's pulp SF, I think he's hitting the tone just right. Rev Bem is developing nicely as well.

We got to see him express his faith directly from the heart, but still manage a "human" quality about it ("I think I feel my ribs hurting again" when his tormentors storm onto the bridge).

Trance is being played close to the right balance where she's not stupid, just a little unfamiliar with the concepts we take for granted. I also liked the trick with her untying her bounds with her tail. I also thought the actor playing the second in command of the children did a pretty good job of the material he was given.

So I don't think it was the acting, or even the characters, that bothered me. There were some nice scenes, like Dylan pursuing the fighters, that were well executed. I loved the CGI, even though it's still low-res, of Andromeda bursting away from the dock in pursuit. You get the sense of urgency the crew feels as they race to capture the fighters.

The clips of the tactical display really helped with this. Well shot and directed. Another good scene was Rev Bem confronting the leader, the girl, in her bedroom.

I was impressed with the line: "If you could resist killing me for one hour, maybe you could do manage that for a lifetime?" (Quote is approximate and from memory). Those were strong scenes.

Where I had problems were scenes like Dylan explaining the Commonwealth to the kids and the children's reactions. Listening to Dylan Hunt, not even *I* bought into his message. The children's reactions, especially the crowd scenes, made my skin crawl.

The kind of scene Joel and the Bots would mock on MST3K. Someone who's only exposure to children came from _The Lord of the Flies_ and _Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome_ could have written this scene. It was painfully insincere and almost insulting. Everyone has an inherent model of experience, a mirror of reality, that we compare anything we see or learn to.

A model based on a lifetime of repeated exposure to real people, real children and real situations. When you write falsely - writing a contrived emotional experience, the audience will notice.

They can't often describe in words what's wrong (just a vague feeling of unease or skin crawling), but intuitively, they know they've just been lied to, badly. That made the episode suck supremely. Emotionally and logically, this story felt contrived. What's sad is it shouldn't have been. The story should have been able to unfold without any help. They had all the right elements, but they still forced the situations.

The scene where Dylan and the girl explore the archives and Dylan discovers that the children have memorized the archive because they can't read should have been a _shiver_ moment; it's one of those scenes that even an amateur writer could pull off.

Instead, we got a bad revisit of TOS episode "The Omega Glory". Why? Because the writers contrived the moment based on "The Omega Glory". Where else could they have got such a painful exchange from? The poor plot set-up also crippled this episode.

I complained the first two episodes pulled emotional triggers without cocking the hammer. Here, we have it again. You know, I'm not sure what the big deal about Nova bombs are. I really don't get the feeling their use is a "crime".

In our world, if someone should detonate a nuclear weapon, whether it be in war or a terrorist incident, the world would stop. People would actually pause and be affected by the moment: it is such an unthinkable act.

Sure, we may say in our frontal lobes: "Yeah, someone will use nuclear weapons on people," but from an emotional perspective, it's still an unthinkable act. From what the characters have said, using a Nova bomb should be unthinkable to civilized people.

So far, we've detonated *how* many Nova bombs? It's been more like: (In a MAD TV Deadpan) "Oops. Someone's used a nova bomb. How unthinkable." Detonating nova bombs seems a little too commonplace. For an ultimate weapon, it has remarkably little affect on the characters or the audience. I really wanted to like this episode, but this story was badly put together and poorly written.

I'm hoping this isn't a trend, but just a reflection of the first few episodes. NITS [Science] Considering the two writers of this episode used to work on S:A&B, I can understand how this happened. Radiation leak. 300 years. Children are still being born and even look human. Uh-huh. Sure.

Maybe, I'll check out that bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

Travers Naran: Computer Programmer & P/T Meddler In Time & Space New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, North America, Earth, yada, yada "Stand back! I'm a Programmer!"

3) Now here's Jaime's take on "Double Helix". He says that Andromeda Hits Stride.

This was finally an unqualified and satisfying goodie, for the most part. Some minor nits involving verisimilitude I do have, possibly rather subjective. I'll warm my throat with them first, so I can sing about the rest with a purer voice. Opening battle sequence.

Maybe it is just me, but I *cringed* at Dylan's decision to place his ship in a vulnerable position before he'd neutralize the main enemy cannon. It seems to me he should have done that first, and then have rescued the Than ship far more safely. It all comes down to basic common sense regarding battle priorities.

When you are charging ahead and your buddy gets hit FI, you don't stop to treat him under heavy machine gun fire or you too are likely to become a casualty (every good soldier is trained to know that self-treatment is their best hope until the battle is over).

You neutralize the enemy fire first (usually by keeping the momentum of the assault and capturing the immediate objective), and then you can administer first aid at leisure. This may sound like a specialized nit but it is fairly basic.

I realize that dramatic momentum was at stake, but sometimes writers seem to a little prone to overlook that any viewer with a peedly clue (not *just* the few nitpicking folks with military experience) is likely to be annoyingly *jarred* out of the narrative flow by mistakes of very basic level.

It is generally not a *good thing* to do it during an opening sequence for which the aim is to hook the audience by the gonads.

One of TNG's all-time favourites, "Yesterday's Enterprise", was partially ruined in this fashion when they had Picard spread his far superior firepower over all three of the attacking Klingon vessels, thereby managing to destroy just one ship before the Enterprise was neutralized.

Had he brought all he had to bear on one ship at a time, and there was no reason for him not to, since he had already positioned his Enterprise to draw fire from all three, he would have still lost that battle but he would have taken out at least two of the ships and would have heavily damaged the third before it got him.

Tighter scripting is not incompatible wit dramatic momentum, and it will pay a higher compliment to the viewer's intelligence, particularly when it involves an sf-friendly audience. The other nit is that the lives of the Andromeda crew were spared a little too neatly by the boarding Nietzschean force, particularly in light of the zeal and bloodthirst they'd bestowed earlier on an empty pod.

OK, I'm willing to reluctantly buy the Nietzschean leader's decision that they might prove valuable later (although by the time he had issued it, Rev, given his fierce resistance aggravated by the fact that he is a Magog, should have already been sprouting a dozen smoldering new assholes).

But after the day was clearly lost to the frustrated Nietzscheans, we were given not a reason why they wouldn't blast the whole Andromeda crew, and particularly Tyr, on the way out. The Andromeda was lost to them anyway. It would have taken no additional time, and though they wouldn't have saved face, at least the winners would not have savoured the victory.

We can rationalize until Tyr grows a Magog about possible reasons, but why do the scriptwriters' job for them, without really doing them any favours?. One way or other, that should have been shown onscreen. So much for my nits. Now onto other reasons why this episode did rock.

First, for one of the best straight lines in any sci-fi show this weekend: Nietzschean Honcho (while playing with a Commonwealth kinky love wand: "I like *all* of your equipment, Captain Hunt... Hand it over to me."

Please bear with me. I was surrounded by females when we watched the episode and they were the ones who guffawed, not I. But I wonder if any nice bloopers were to be had after that take. Overall, it seemed scripted far more tightly than all the preceding efforts and, from the opening grabber with Andromeda and Seamus, to the closing with Tyr weighing the costs of the day, there were few if any throwaways.

Considering that one frequent complaint about the show has been about sucky dialogue, this made me want to grab a couple of cantaloupes and dress like a cheerleader for once (luckily, I do not own a handy cam). Dylan... It seems to have become a weekly ritual.

I get around to posting some criticism each Saturday morning about the prior weekend's episode, and then the new episode comes Saturday evening and makes me look like a very silly little man indeed. Pretty much all my criticisms about how they'd used Dylan in previous episodes went out the window with this one.

They used him right. He was on the ball, most of the sluggishness gone, still a little too trusting for his own good at the beginning, but increasingly aware of it, alert and active as a Commander, and correcting himself as he went. Happy-go-lucky casualness was replaced by tight focus and resourcefulness.

This is much closer to Dylan as I'd like to increasingly see him. He was also darker, more resigned and open to the requirements of dealing with the realities of a harsher universe. He seems to be finally finding his stride. Well, he is learning how to walk, at any rate. His inner conflict with Nietzscheans was very nicely scripted, for my taste.

Circumstances demanded that he grip still far too painful to face demons by the horns. He raised himself to the occasion and in the process saved his ship, furthered Tyr's respect for him (and possibly the faith of the crew), and came to grips with his own complacent failure to have understood Gaheris while the latter was still alive.

Thereby Dylan is forced to face that part of his own responsibility for the disaster which swept away everything that he believed in, the kind of mistake he cannot ever afford again. And the way it was done, superimposing his memories onto the present with a rematch made possible only by Dylan coming to grips with the hard past, was fairly nice teevee writing and directing.

It was also a nice touch to see the, ahem... calmer? (I was going to say "relaxed") side of Gaheris, as well as the unique and doomed friendship he must have felt towards Dylan, in order to allow the latter to finally catch him cheating. One aside.

Some folks are going to hate this comparison, but Dylan in episodes 1 thru 4 comes across as the sort of insipid ship's Captain we might get out of a later-Roddenberry utopic universe, largely sterile in terms of experiential conflict (i.e. the Captain Picard of TNG's first season).

Episode 5 gives us a Captain Hunt who is more of a natural for a harsher universe filled with conflict (closer to the grimmer, darker Picard of the latter seasons).

Case in point, demolish the Commonwealth (take away the happy and somewhat crippling in dramatic terms Federation and Starfleet of later Trek incarnations), meaningful conflict comes back and boredom is more prone to go the way of the dodo. Tyr... well the episode played very differently from what I had predicted, which was also very satisfying.

He too had to grip with demons from the past, but it was the wager of the present which mattered most, and the new demons to face, springing from his clearly reluctant choice. Also, while I don't think Tyr ever quite relaxes, we got to see a bit more of his, arg, "likeable", fun-loving side.

It is tempting to suspect that, though he might still kill them in a second if it were the only path in his best interest, he is developing feelings for his crewmates, for some more than others (love-hate relationship with Dylan). Perhaps this will spur his personal quest to become more than the urging of his genes.

As another aside, it was nice that they were able to do dispose of Tyr's wife without killing her. I'm beginning to suspect there are very few loose threads in this show. We'll see. Everything seems to have consequences, so we'll probably see both her and that particular Nietzschean pride, again.

Incidentally, it may just be my foot fetish acting up but I really dug the camera work they used to portray the passion of her encounter with Tyr, specifically her foot wrapping itself about him; that simple visual synecdoche is such a far more aesthetic, enjoyable, and - - dare I say it? - subtle handling than countless other unimaginative or over-the-top choices we might have got from a lesser director or scripter... thank you, oh kind auteurs, from the very heady core of my foot and leg fetish!

Like Rev before them, both Dylan and Tyr have to fight to overcome the easier, ingrained ways of their natures, in order to grow to a stature equal to the fate the universe has now dealt them and which they chose to accept.

It is not unlikely that each of the rest of a crew will face a similar personal quest, by virtue of having made that choice. Even Rev. No matter which level you attain, the test never ends. Not much during this episode on the others.

A bit more of the same of monk/warrior Rev, some nice bits with Seamus and Andromeda, Trance hanging around, and Beka. Beka! I expected her to be a more than decent fighter, but I didn't expect her to be this good. She keeps herself in such training that enables her single-handedly take down at least one, maybe two Nietzschean warriors.

Wow! The lass kicks ass. What is there not to like about her character?! (well, I suspect we'll find out). Overall, an episode to perhaps make followers out of the more open cynics. Next week, the time travel episode, and even higher expectations from the audience.

But no pressure, folks.

Jaime