Andromeda: worth the time?
- Thread starter Ragitsu
- Start date
That was my least favorite part. Mostly, Andromeda was a hard-SF series, but this was totally fanciful, a misinterpretation of quantum theory. It was based on the idea that a superposed quantum state doesn't resolve until it's observed, which is often misinterpreted to mean that only a thinking being can make it happen; but in reality, any interaction with a macroscopic ensemble of particles will cause the state to resolve, and scientists only specify observation because observation is what scientists do. It doesn't matter whether the "observation" is done by a person or by an automated system recording a result.
And even if it did require a conscious mind, there's nothing in quantum theory that requires it to be an organic mind instead of a synthetic one. Andromeda was paradoxical in its approach to this, treating AIs as fully sentient persons with equal rights, yet assuming they somehow weren't "real minds" of the sort that could resolve a quantum measurement. It didn't make sense in terms of in-universe conceptual consistency, let alone real physics. The only reason it was done was to provide an excuse for having human/organic starship crews instead of letting AIs do it. But it wasn't a plausible excuse at all.
What was the name of that episode...it was like the only one I never saw...
When was Trance blue? I remember her being purple, and then turning gold, but I don't remember her ever being blue.
Shanks starred in "Star-Crossed" and Judge starred in "The Knight, Death and the Devil".
Different people have different eyes. Plus, memory can be a fuzzy beast.
One thing I never understood after Andromeda got a full crew again was the lack of uniforms. It made sense early on when it was just seven of them, and I could even see Dylan forgoing one after a while, but once that crew turned into a couple hundred or thousand, or ten depending on the episode, you'd think they'd issue new uniforms for the crew. You could even have Harper and Beka complaining about it here and there.
Remember in Season One Voyager when Neelix asked Tuvok when he was going to get one of those spiffy Uniforms everyone else was wearing?
Hunt found a planet that still had a common wealth naval acadamey, where he collected a crew of graduates who did 4 to 10 years of tertiary education to earn the right to wear those uniforms.
Harper is scum.
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I just realized that Star Trek Discovery just did their Andromeda story line last season. I wonder which one was closer to Gene Roddenberry's original idea. (Now I will go run and hide.)
You can see Roddenberry's original idea in the TV movies Genesis II and Planet Earth. They were about a scientist named Dylan Hunt who was put in cryogenic suspension in the 20th century and woke up in a post-apocalyptic 22nd century, where he worked with an organization called PAX to try to rebuild civilization. It would've been pretty close to the '70s Logan's Run TV series or Filmation's Ark 2 on Saturday mornings, traveling around and encountering the various weird enclave civilizations that had cropped up in isolation. (For some reason, TV execs really wanted to make a "wandering the post-apocalypse" series work in the late '70s, also trying it with Planet of the Apes and with the Strange New World pilot, a third stab at Roddenberry's concept without Roddenberry's participation.) The concept was heavily reworked for Andromeda because Kevin Sorbo wanted to do a space show, and Robert Hewitt Wolfe merged it with a lot of his own ideas from an unused post-apocalyptic Star Trek premise.
So the answer is that neither one was particularly close to the original, since the original wasn't a space show. In one way, Andromeda was a little closer, since in it, the fall of civilization was more complete. Yet DSC was closer in another way, in that Dylan working for PAX, an idealistic institution working for the good of everyone, was similar to Burnham working for the Federation.
(And before anyone suggests anything about DSC cribbing Wolfe's idea, I should point out that people have been proposing "Fall of the Federation" story premises since the days of the '80s fanzines. Anyone who's ever read Asimov's Foundation had probably had the idea.)
Buck Rogers.
Which was Rip Van Winkle.
Of course Buck isn't trying to bring back the USA.
Although if he'd submitted to Princess Ardala's numerous wedding proposals, he probably could have.
I was just kidding around, but thanks for this info. I only have a vague knowledge that either of these movies existed and never really knew what they were about.
That was where the Rodenberry's name in the credits came from? I had always assumed the premise and the characters and all of that came from him. It seems like kind of a stretch to call it Gene Rodenberry's Andromeda and to give him a creator credit, when so little of what was on screen came from him.
What about Earth: Final Conflict? How much of that came from Rodenberry?
Well, it was derived from his original concept. The basic idea -- a man named Dylan Hunt waking up in a post-apocalyptic future and trying to rebuild civilization -- is Roddenberry's. Just the fact that they used the name Dylan Hunt for the character meant that he would get creator credit.
Generally, the policy is that whoever came up with the initial idea is entitled to credit, even if it changes drastically from what they conceived, because the project wouldn't exist without the thing they came up with.
Plus, of course, Majel Roddenberry was the one behind getting these projects made, and GR getting a creator credit meant that the Roddenberry estate, including Majel, got paid commensurately. It's always important to remember that screen credit is less about giving credit in the literal sense than it is about determining who gets paid and how much.
The pilot script was credited solely to Roddenberry, so it was largely his work. I gather that the general premise was pretty close, although the aliens were more malevolent in his version, while they were made more ambiguous in E:FC to reduce the similarity to Kenneth Johnson's V. And certainly E:FC ended up going in very different directions from whatever Roddenberry originally intended, or indeed what its original showrunner Richard C. Okie had planned.
Okay, I've tracked down a decade-old thread about E:FC on this board:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/v-v-and-final-conflict.137543/
In this post, I quoted some behind-the-scenes information we were given years earlier on the old Ex Isle BBS (though the links to the original are dead now, so I'm glad I quoted them here). Andromeda producer Zack Stentz confirmed the following about E:FC's showrunner Richard C. Okie:
So yes, there was an actual pilot script, and probably a series bible or similar development notes of the sort we know Roddenberry came up with for his other series premises (e.g. broad episode concepts).
Another DROM producer participating in a 2005 Ex Isle thread actually contacted Rick Okie and asked him to chime in and answer some questions. His reply:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/v-v-and-final-conflict.137543/
In this post, I quoted some behind-the-scenes information we were given years earlier on the old Ex Isle BBS (though the links to the original are dead now, so I'm glad I quoted them here). Andromeda producer Zack Stentz confirmed the following about E:FC's showrunner Richard C. Okie:
So yes, there was an actual pilot script, and probably a series bible or similar development notes of the sort we know Roddenberry came up with for his other series premises (e.g. broad episode concepts).
Another DROM producer participating in a 2005 Ex Isle thread actually contacted Rick Okie and asked him to chime in and answer some questions. His reply:
Unfortunately, despite that last sentence, this was the only post Okie made on the BBS, so we didn't get any further answers. I've always wondered what the original plan was, but only a few details have ever emerged. It would've been profoundly different from the dumbed-down Jaridian stuff we finally got.
No it wasn't. It was no more hard SF than Star Trek or The Orville or the original BSG.