"3001: The Final Odyssey"... a SyFy Original Miniseries

I've said before - if the scripts for Blakes 7 had been given to Gerry Anderson to make we'd have had something very special. A serious drama, a great plot with high production values - Andersons live action shows and effects STILL look good.

 

Heh, that totally went over my head as a kid, but when I watched the DVDs a few years ago, I was "Whoa, this is trippy."

I never picked up the second season, did they lose the weirdness go standard space opera?

 

Oh that's easy: it fell though a wormhole.

Either one just happened to pass through thr system by sheer random chance, or some mysterious outside force intervened....or the more mundane boring option: some high-tech do-dad (massive scale LHC type installation build around the moon's circumference?) malfunctions and opens an artificial wormhole, dropping them who knows where in deep space.

The *real* trick is "how is the moon moving through space at any kind of speed conducive to episodic TV storytelling." More wormholes?

 

They lost the deliberate weirdness with a philosophical point to it, definitely. It was still weird, but more due to a lack of concern for making sense than anything else. It was from Fred Freiberger, so it was similar to the third season of Star Trek in that aliens just happened to have whatever arbitrary, magical technologies or abilities happened to be convenient for the plot (with a particular fixation on teleportation, for some reason).

 

From what I remember about the book, I found it rather disappointing. It felt like it reduced the Monoliths and took away a lot of their mystery.

 

^^ Another thing I didn't like was the way he retconned away the Stargate.

I'm right there with you when it comes to the current fetish for faux realism, but even when I was fourteen I cringed at the Moon being flung out of orbit-- apparently at superluminal speed.

I vaguely remember that there was a novelization that tried to explain it by saying that only a piece of the Moon was flung away-- which raises its own set of problems.

 

Meh..3001 was a disappointing novel for me. 2061, while not as good as 2001 or 2010, was a good book and seemed to be setting up a lot of things for another book. 3001 dropped the ball on most of these and totally changed the way the Monolith and its builders were portrayed. I read it once and have never had the urge to reread it, unlike the first three books in the series. I have no interest in watching an adaptation of what is the weakest ACC book I've ever read.

 

I didn't like 2061 or 3001. 2061 seemed utterly pointless and I only started giving the least bit of a crap at the "Trinity" chapter. ( I do remain curious about whatever was going on inside the comet, though. ) 3001 was... 3001. I don't remember how the portrayal of the monolith and its builders changed, I don't remember the stargate being retconned, but I do remember that Bowman was portrayed as nothing more than a procedure or "subroutine" of the monolith, and I didn't like that. I also didn't buy Frank coming back to life and stealing the ending from Independence Day was inexcusable.

 

About the only real problem I had with 3001 was all that stuff about the BrainCap. A more chilling violation of personal liberties and privacy I would have a hard time conceiving.

(as for the Moon vs. Space: 1999: I have also heard it suggested that the magnetic radiation produced by the explosion of the nuclear waste caused something called a 'Wilding Field' to form, reducing the Moon's effective mass to zero and enabling it to travel at near-lightspeed. But I buy the wormhole thing too.)

 

I liked 3001 much better than 2061 so this could be very good indeed.

 

I'm looking forward to the miniseries because it's grand scale space opera from Ridley Scott (I still have hope even after Prometheus) and I love the Odyssey-verse, but yeah, the book never really did much for me. All these years later my biggest takeaways from it are:

Raptor gardeners
Poole's circumcised penis freaking people out
Killer monoliths
Space elevators

 

I never read the book, now I'm kind of interested. :-D

 

It wasn't a big part of the story (sorry Poole). I just remembered it sticking out (there's no way not to sound like you're making puns here) to me as funny when the nurse or doctor gasped at seeing his circumcised dick.

 

Space elevators actually make a fair bit of sense, don't they?

 

Never said they didn't. I was just listing the things I remembered from the book.

 

They make more sense than space escalators, that's for sure!

 

That's quite a detail to remember. I read it recently and I don't even remember it.

 

Well, clearly you've become much more desensitized to penises than I have.

No, it just stuck in my mind since when I read the book in 1997/98? I wasn't as wise in the ways of the internets as I am now, and hadn't seen a hundred angry circumcision debates on TrekBBS yet, so the shocked reaction struck me funny.

 

It's a lot like the first half of 2001, with the apes. Except the 31st century was actually interesting.

 

Frank was having trouble getting a date to go all the way (even though he was like the major celebrity being the guy that lived from the 20th century), because all the women though he'd been mutilated, when in fact it was fairly normal when he was born. I don't recall if he was Jewish or not, which would have made it even more standard practise. It did get on his nerves a bit, but I think it was dropped once the crisis with the Monoliths started.

Europa over Earth. The old ones have spoken.

The Diamonds of Jupiter (or Lucifer to those born after 2010) being used to craft human society into the 31st century. No warp drives. No FTL drives. Just space elevators and commerce thorughout the Solar System....save Europa. Attempt No Landing There (no one has landed there since 2061).