Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda is one of those shows I've wanted to give a try forever but not had the opportunity. But the DVD set is cheap on Amazon, and so now (or rather, soon) is the time. I was wondering what people's thoughts about it were? And is it true it's based on an unmade fall-of-the-federation Star Trek sequel concept by Gene, or was it always intended to be an original universe?
It was supposedly based an idea by Robert Hewitt Wolfe (former DS9 writer) for a new Trek series: years after the fall of the Federation a lone starfleet vessel is left and tries to restore the glory days. He couldn't sell it as a Trek series and it was adapted for Andromeda, probably merged with some Gene Roddenberry story idea. As to the series, I could only get through the first season before giving up in the middle of second season. So didn't like it.
The first year is pretty good, the quality drops with each season and you have to make a decision to stop watching at some point. I'd suggest the end of season two. There are isolated good episodes after that, but the enjoyment you obtained from the first couple of season will be tarnished if you keep going.
He had a story done up after the show ended that explained how he'd have done it if he'd stayed on, but he left around S2 and Kevin Sorbo more or less took over which derailed everything.
Well.... Just lower your expectations way down, and you might find yourself charmed and/or having a good time. The cast is great, though.
It is on Amazon Prime here in the US. I tried to watch the first episode, but... it was pretty rough. I maybe got half-way through it.
It's based on Gene Roddenberry's mid 1970s unsold pilot "Genesis II" and its follow-up "Planet Earth", both featuring a character named Dylan Hunt. Robert Hewitt-Wolfe adapted those into the show he made in 2000 with Majel Roddenberry's co-operation. What others here have said is true. The first season and some of the second is good, but the rest.....I really can't say. I watched until the middle of season three and gave up.
That's a... complicated question. The first season and a half are very strong from a story standpoint, a far-future hard science fiction saga with some terrific writing from Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller, and others. It has a pretty good cast too, but the production values are disappointing due to Tribune Entertainment's inherent cheapness and the inexperience of the prosthetic makeup team. Halfway through season 2, Robert Wolfe is fired by Tribune -- that's actually an exceptionally long run for the creator/original showrunner of a Tribune show. (Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict's developer Richard C. Okie lasted a third as long.) This is just after "Ouroboros," a Wolfe-written episode that makes some major Tribune-imposed changes to the storyline and a lead character. The rest of season 2 is of uneven quality, with a mix of strong and mediocre episodes. In season 3, Tribune hires a new showrunner, Bob Engels, to work with the remaining original staff. He is terrible. He has no idea what he's doing, his scripts are incoherent, and his dialogue sounds like nothing any actual speaker of English would ever say. His idea of science fiction is ludicrous fantasy that could be generously called surreal, a complete and drastic break from the hard SF of the first season and a half. Basic ground rules of the universe (like the lack of FTL communication and force fields) are ignored. However, Stentz & Miller are still on staff throughout season 3, and their episodes continue to feel mostly like true Andromeda. Basically, season 3 feels like it's two or three different shows depending on who's writing a given episode, with the Stentz-Miller episodes being practically the only ones that still work. (This includes one of the best clip shows ever made, "The Unconquerable Man," which incorporates its flashback clips into an alternate-timeline retelling of the entire series saga to date and provides some meaningful insight and recontextualization of the whole thing up to that point.) Season 4 lost Stentz & Miller along with the rest of the remaining original staff. A whole new team took over under Engels. I was barely paying attention by this point; the show was unrecognizable and the ratings were plummeting. It didn't help that Kevin Sorbo was getting more powerful as a producer and freer to indulge his ego, giving less disciplined performances and rewriting the scripts to make himself more dominant. Season 5, much like season 5 of Earth: Final Conflict, was made solely to reach the 100-episode "magic number" for syndication so that Tribune could make back its investment, and was a semi-reboot designed to save money by setting pretty much the whole season in a single ongoing location, the Seefra system. Stentz & Miller actually returned for two episodes, but it's mostly forgettable. I was drawn into Andromeda before it premiered by the rich worldbuilding material that was posted online and the active Internet presence of most of the writing staff, both on the official show site and on The SlipstreamBBS, an Andromeda message board that was a sister site of The TrekBBS. I think I actually came to the TrekBBS through the Andromeda boards, so I owe my Trek prose writing career to them. It was great to connect with the show's writers and learn about their plans for what was initially the hardest hard-SF show that had ever been done on TV. Unfortunately, the actual show never had the budget to truly realize to the rich hard-SF worldbuilding developed by Wolfe, Stentz, and Miller and spelled out on the AllSystems University site (which survives in archived form here). So I was more a fan of what the show could have been than what it actually ended up being. I even came close to getting a chance to pitch for the show; apparently Wolfe remembered me from the time I pitched to him for DS9 back in the '90s. I was also hoping I'd get the chance to write novels in its universe. I did serve as a technical consultant on the first Andromeda novel, Keith DeCandido's Destruction of Illusions, and put Keith in touch with Miller so they could coordinate. That was the first time I ever got credited in a novel's acknowledgments. So I was really, really disappointed and betrayed when Robert Wolfe got fired and the show degenerated into the idiotic mess it became. I've never gone back to revisit it, even the good parts, since I was just too badly burned. Majel Roddenberry pitched it as a revival of Roddenberry's failed Genesis II/Planet Earth pilots from the '70s, which introduced the character of Dylan Hunt (originally Alex Cord, then John Saxon) as a 20th-century scientist frozen and reawakened in the 22nd century after a nuclear war. She pitched it both as a direct remake and as a version reworked as a space opera, and Kevin Sorbo (who this was going to be a starring vehicle for) picked the space opera version. So developer Robert Hewitt Wolfe merged it with elements of his conjectural musings for a fall-of-the-Federation Trek series. The idea of a sentient starship from another unsold Roddenberry premise, Starship (the source of the "ringship" concept art that was used as an early Enterprise in the ST:TMP rec room set), was also folded in, though Wolfe's concept had also included an intelligent Enterprise-K (addressed as "Kay"). By the way, Starship almost got a revival before Andromeda, as an animated project Majel Roddenberry was developing along with Stan Lee's company at the time and Leiji Matsumoto, the creator of Space Battleship Yamato and Captain Harlock. Which could've been amazing. But Lee's company went under and the concept never saw the light of day.
I made it through the first half of the first season before giving up. I really found it unbearable. People say the first is the good season, so it really makes my scrotum shiver wondering how bad it got afterwards. I don't know if there's any truth to the claim the show was based on an un-made Fall of the Federation Star Trek series, but the show sure felt like a Star Trek knock-off. The Commonwealth is basically the Federation made ridiculously larger (three galaxies or something like that) and the High Guard is a Starfleet that admits to being military. There's an honour-obsessed warrior race in the mix too.
I just answered that question. It was a mix of Roddenberry's Genesis II and Robert Hewitt Wolfe's conjectural ideas for a hypothetical fall-of-the-Federation show. Not so ridiculous when you consider that the show is set 3000 years in the future and that the Commonwealth is a 10,000-year-old civilization founded by the alien Vedrans. Also, the show's FTL system, slipstream drive, is independent of distance, a lot like Star Trek: Discovery's spore drive. So a destination in a different galaxy can be "closer" in terms of the number of slipstream jumps it requires than a destination mere light-years away through normal space. http://www.saveandromeda.com/allsystems/engineering/enginslipstr.htm If you mean the Nietzscheans, their philosophy had nothing to do with honor. Just the opposite -- it was about pragmatism, survival and victory by any means necessary. To them, it doesn't matter how you play the game, only that you win, no matter how treacherously you have to do it. http://www.saveandromeda.com/allsystems/lifeforms/nietzscheans.htm The genetically enhanced Nietzscheans (and their main character Tyr Anasazi) were partly based on the genetically enhanced Tyranians, the villains of Roddenberry's Genesis II pilot, and partly developed by Wolfe from his own original concepts.
I agree with Christopher. The background materials at All-Systems University were fascinating. It was too bad the show itself was unable to realize the ideas that had been presented on the website. It would be great to see this series rebooted/reimagined with a bigger budget and with Robert Hewitt Wolfe back onboard and given creative freedom. Even if it came back as a series of novels or graphic-novels, it's be fun to see what could really be done with the characters/concepts.
The only reason that I saw season one was to here Alex Lifeson's "March Of The High Guard" on the opening credits. On the second season onwards it disappeared and so did I.
If you have a Roku, you can watch Andromeda (as well as Mutant X) on the ad supported Roku Channel. It is also available for pay per view with no ads on Vudu. A season costs about $14.95, or choose single eps at $1.99.
I never understood the appeal of that theme. It was touted as some innovative thing that did some complicated electronic layering of an electric guitar to make it sound like a thousand guitars at once or something, and it ended up just sounding like a routine Scottish military marching band sort of thing. I liked the later theme music much better.
Ugh, sorry to hear that. Perhaps some other UK based outlet/service offers it. Use the Roku's search feature to see if it turns up on a platflorm you can access.
I've noticed Andromeda is currently showing on the (Freeview) Horror Channel in the UK, it's partway through Season 2 at the moment.
Season 1 and 2 aren't so bad but you'll pull your hair out when you get to season 5 and realize this show outlived 'Enterprise'.
When I watched it, I only got a little bit of the star trek vibe. It stands on its own, but at the end of season 1 I just lost interest, can't remember why. I do recall a weird episode where the Slipstream drive gets messed up when the alien girl takes the helm. I'm very surprised the show came out in 2000, I had this feeling it was quite a bit older. *shrug*
To answer the question in the thread title: no - there are much better SF series available on which one can spend one's money and be entertained.