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?
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.
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?
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.
