I'm doing a rewatch of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.

Yes that Andromeda the show done by Majel Barret with Gene's name in the titles.

I watched it once all the way through and then the second time I just picked the episodes I liked which made the run really short, but this time around I am doing every episode including the ones I do not like and paying attention to things that happen.

I read the Coda which Robert Hewitt Wolfe wrote for the show and that seemed to fill a lot of gaps in the show that were never explained or shown in the episodes, oh how I wish they had used that as the blueprint for the whole series instead of what we got. It was pretty cool.

There's bits there that are still in the actual show which I feel were taken from that and this time around I am paying more attention to side characters like Trance, and I got the distinct impression she was far more dangerous then they actually let on through the full series, you get little hints of that every now and then, things she says and does. She's like Kes from Voyager in that respect. I always got the impression Kes was a lot more to her than what was shown in the episodes, and that's the impression I got from Trance Gemini. Also in the coda she and Harper seem to have some kind of special relationship and again you get hints of it in the show, her affection for him and being so protective of him. But they never really followed any of that up in any great detail.

So far enjoying my rewatch and my favourite episode so far is "The long and level sand" with the Bellerophon

 

Is there a way to watch it without finding Kevin Sorbo so annoying that the reflex to turn it off becomes overpowering? I couldn't get beyond the first episode. I can't stand seeing the guy act in anything. I know it's irrational but there you go...

 

I lost a lot of interest in the series after Tyr left, and I was never the biggest Hunt fan, and so when they went overboard with making him the end all be all, I was already out. At the time I thought Sorbo was okay, but a little went a long way, and I think my souring thoughts on him today are coloring my memories of the series.

I did like some of the other characters though. And the world building, or rather, the potential of the world building-and not the execution. The Magog were a great enemy, like a mix of the Borg and xenomorphs. Also loved the Nietzscheans (except for the bones in the arms).

 

Unfortunately no there's no way to avoid that, and even I find him a bit overbearing. He'd give James T Krk a run for his money in the bedding women department. I find Dylan a bit annoying about half of the time.

 

This is a line from Ally McBeal the hard boiled Legal Drama.

"I'm not a slut-slut, I'm just a kissing slut."

I may be wrong, but I think that there sentiment decries Dylan Hunt too.

 

It's accurate

 

I don't recall seeing him act in anything.

 

A thing about retroactive continuity...

Tier and Becka were boffing like furious muddy hippopotamuses the whole time.

So any time we don't see the two of them on screen at the same time, they are probably inside each other.

 

I should have inserted inverted commas around "act". His entire repertoire consists of playing Kevin Sorbo.

 

I always liked the first season theme song. Very unique. Not generic like the other seasons.

 

Written by the one and only legendary Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson! One of the only reasons I watched the show in the first place. The first season was enjoyable, but I lost interest into the second season and never picked it up.

 

Not really. When he was directed well and had his ego kept in check, Sorbo could do good work. He was often impressive in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and had his moments in early Andromeda. It was only later, when he became more prominent as a producer and was basically indulging his ego full-time, that his acting suffered.

I'll put it this way: In H:TLJ, Sorbo was convincing as a Hercules who was kind, compassionate, humble, respectful of others, and socially progressive in his values. Given what we now know about Sorbo as a person, that was pretty damn good acting.

The first season and a half were terrific in concept and writing, though they suffered from severe budgetary restrictions. The first half of season 2 was good, but then showrunner Robert Hewitt Wolfe was fired and the quality deteriorated. In season 3, the show was taken over by a staggeringly incompetent showrunner, Bob Engels, whose scripts contained dialogue unlike anything an actual human being would ever say. Basically season 3 was two (or more) entirely different shows depending on who was writing it. Zack Stentz & Ashley Miller, two of the holdovers from the original staff, kept writing excellent hard science fiction episodes in the spirit of what had come before, while the episodes by other writers were in a much dumber space fantasy universe that didn't even follow the same physics.

 

I seem to recall the show's starting off strong and going completely off the rails by the third season. Maybe I'll revisit it again myself someday.

 

The problem is that Tribune Entertainment cared more about the bottom line than quality, so they kept firing showrunners and replacing them with cheaper ones. Robert Wolfe's year and a half was actually an unusually long run for a Tribune series developer. Steve Feke of Beastmaster: The Series was canned after the first season, and Richard C. Okie, the developer and original showrunner of Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict, was fired halfway through season 1, with the quality beginning to deteriorate after that.

I often wonder, what might we have gotten if Majel Roddenberry had managed to sell these concepts to an actually good studio that cared about the quality of the work and was willing to invest the necessary budget?

 

Props to you if you can get past the first season. I can't remember another show I enjoyed watching go to crap so quickly.

 

I semi-remember an episode starring Tony Todd.Interesting only for the Trek like uniforms on display.

 

They had a Relativistic star drive.

Dylan's slip stream was broken, so Tony said "It will only take 500 years to get back to earth, no big, just come along with us."

 

That was "the lone and level sands" That was actually a pretty good episode and it's a shame we never saw that ship again, I absolutely loved the whole concept of the Bellerophon.

"Vault of the heavens" is a rape episode, I never thought of it that way till I watched it last night. Alien woman wants to breed a new crop of her species so Dylan is tied to a table to wait for the forced mating. It reads like a rape episode if you look at it from the POV of her forcing herself on him. But it turns out other, kind of. They do mate however, but it wasn't like regular sex ....

 

I watched this show for Robert Hewitt Wolfe. I studied all the mythology on the website, and it was the first internet board I posted on. When Wolfe left the show, so did I.

 

First season was definitely the best. Best theme, too. Great concept, worldbuilding was excellent, and very interesting and engaging lead characters.

It went downhill after Wolfe was fired.

I watched the whole run, first time. Same with EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT... but that truly was a slog to get through.

First run of ANDROMEDA is a mess after Wolfe was gone. On a rewatch, I will say that for season 5, the overall story holds up surprisingly well and was together and cohesive. When it first aired, I thought it was a dumpster fire and the worst season. On a rewatch, I actually put season 4 as the worst. Season 5 would have benefitted from a bigger budget... you can REALLY see how the budget slashing affected it. I'm frankly amazed ANY bit of it worked at all.

By the way, I always did love the look of the Andromeda Ascendant.