The stuff they were doing with Sandoval in season 4 is what got me genuinely hooked on the show again as opposed to just watching it out of inertia.
Then they seemed to turn him into a one-note villain in what I saw of season 5, so so much for that.
How bad is Andromeda?
- Thread starter Neb Lleb
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Then they seemed to turn him into a one-note villain in what I saw of season 5, so so much for that.
In rewatching the pilot episode, I noticed that for a show set 10,000+ years in the future, the technology isn't really all that more advanced than Star Trek or Babylon 5. I guess to my way of thinking, any society/technology 10,000+ years in the future should be almost unrecognizable.
It's only 3000 years in the future (to be precise, season 1 probably takes place around 5167 CE). The Vedrans' starfaring civilization (first the Vedran Empire and then the Commonwealth) was already 7055 years old when they made contact with Earth.
Granted, though, even technology 3000 years from now should be really advanced. But of course, the production was limited by its budget. Also, the more realistic hard-SF approach meant that the Commonwealth didn't have the more fanciful technologies of the Trek universe, like teleportation or wall-like force fields or even FTL communication. So some of what might have seemed "less advanced" was just being more plausible.
And yet, per Harper, they (he) still remembered Batman comics (iirc). I guess it’s possible that the Batman ur-story becomes a long-remembered traditional Earth legend, but I’d wait another century at least before I could seriously buy it lasting significantly longer in cultural memory.
We still remember the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, etc. And that's just the small fraction of ancient culture that managed to survive through oral tradition and a small number of hand-written texts, as opposed to today when stories propagate far more widely through mass media and thus have many more vectors to be transmitted into the future.
The thing I always found most implausible about Harper was that he needed a physical plug implanted in his neck to interface directly with a computer, instead of doing it wirelessly. It struck me as a serious infection risk, and totally unnecessary. I mean, yeah, maybe there are advantages to a hardwired connection in terms of bandwidth, clarity, security, etc., but given how much our present-day wifi has already overcome those issues, I'm not convinced it would be necessary. At most, a more direct connection could've been achieved just by placing something against the surface of the skin to interface by induction or skin conduction with an implant just beneath the skin, so you don't need to have a physical opening into the body. (How would the jack be affected by taking a shower?) I once had an idea, or read in a story somewhere, about maybe having a tattoo of conductive ink that would provide the connection to the subdermal circuitry.
I think Harper’s plug can be put down to the ubiquity of diluted cyberpunk tropes in 90s sf media (long after the actual 80s literary movement had pretty much ended).
EDIT: Kind of like the data gloves/VR goggles I seem to remember them using to fly Slipfighter drones in exactly one episode.
His connection kept cutting out whenever someone made popcorn.
Well, yes, that goes without saying. That's my point, that it felt like an outdated trope even then. Mass-media SFTV usually lags a couple of decades behind prose science fiction in its concepts. Although Andromeda was better at that than most. I remember that one episode in season 1 -- I think it was "The Banks of the Lethe" -- made use of a scientific hypothesis that was still cutting-edge at the time, and may well have been the first work of science fiction ever to use that concept.
I looked that story up on IMDB, and yeah. The concept of sending messages through a black hole is really unique and very much indicative of what Majel intended the show to be as opposed to what it became.
I mean, that was more chalked up to the actor wanting to leave wasn't it?
Well, yes and no. The physics in "The Banks of the Lethe" was very solid, and it delighted me to see a scientifically accurate portrayal of time travel instead of the usual nonsense, but the basic idea of black holes allowing time travel was codified by Frank Tipler in the 1970s, and was understood with less mathematical formalism even before that (see Star Trek: "Tomorrow is Yesterday"). Although the use of quantum entanglement with a black hole event horizon to enable quantum teleportation was pretty cutting-edge theory at the time.
Although I remember now that that wasn't the specific cutting-edge concept I was thinking of. That was actually the "Alice strings" in the season 2 episodes "Into the Labyrinth" and "Ouroboros." Although apparently they were first theorized in 1982, so they weren't entirely new, but it was still a very esoteric bit of physics that was new to me at the time and that I didn't entirely understand, even though I have a BS in physics. But it was a marginally plausible way to justify the creation of an altered timeline in "Ouroboros" even though episodes like "Banks" had established an immutable-timeline model.
Maybe so, but good lord, the way they did it… (I’m not talking about the character leaving initially, I mean the last episode with the character.)
I think I may have seen all or portions of that episode...my memories of it are very fragmentary...after not having watched the show for a long time, and I had no idea what I was seeing.
It was pretty “hallucinatory” (not literally), and not in a good way.
That sounds about right...
This thread is making me think about finally rewatching the first two seasons, and the Stentz/Miller season 3 episodes. I've never been able to bring myself to rewatch, since I have so many regrets about how the show went wrong. But the discussion earlier today has reminded me of some of the impressively smart writing in the first two seasons, and I'm tempted enough that I saved the show to my Roku Channel watchlist, though I haven't quite decided to start watching yet.
There are Andromeda episodes I'd rewatch if the opportunity presented itself, but in terms of a fuller rewatch, I think I'd ultimately be frustrated by the lack of any proper closure for the series if I limited myself to the "good" episodes, and the migraines I'd incur from watching the other episodes would make such an effort not worthwhile for me.
I dunno, I just watched The Expanse and the sheer number of unresolved plot threads in the final episode (I know there's follow-up options available) was deeply frustrating for me.
I dunno, I just watched The Expanse and the sheer number of unresolved plot threads in the final episode (I know there's follow-up options available) was deeply frustrating for me.
Not to get too far off topic, but that was how I felt about the end of Babylon 5 — it seemed to skip some quite major reels at the end (which were no doubt intended to be at least partially filled in with Crusade). To me, B5 is only a complete work if you also read the novels The Shadow Within and To Sleep in the City of Sorrows, the comics miniseries In Valen’s Name, and the Technomage, Centauri and Psi Corps trilogies. And ideally the short story “Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic”, if you can find it, which disquietingly problematizes a previously beloved character, I think intentionally. All of which would understandably be a bit much.
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