How bad is Andromeda?

[Christopher]

I do know that with E:FC they completely jettisoned the original alien race and most of the main cast; and, with Andromeda, the final season was almost completely planet bound, with almost no spaceships.

With both shows, the ratings plummeted with the quality, but Tribune gave them both fifth seasons for purely financial reasons, in hopes of surpassing the 100-episode "magic number" for rerun syndication, in hopes of making a profit in the long run. As such, in both cases, the fifth season was retooled to be as inexpensive as possible.

 

[thribs]

I gave up on it halfway through the first season. I'm told that was the show's best one.

You missed the season one finale. That’s a shame

 

[DarrenTR1970]

There is also the third entry in the PAX trilogy. "Strange New World" No Dylan Hunt, but its does have John Saxon.

If anything, Andromeda may be a less drastic reworking of Genesis II/Planet Earth than Strange New World was, since at least it kept the name Dylan Hunt and the idea of civilization falling in a war rather than a natural disaster. Also, I don't think the characters in SNW had the same mission to rebuild civilization; they were just trying to find and rescue their hibernating colleagues, though maybe with a longer-term goal of trying to rebuild.

I recently got a chance to watch Strange New World on television and, what struck me about it, was that it didn't feel like a pilot for a television series, but more like two episodes of a failed series edited together to make a feature length movie to fill a two hour time slot.

You had the first episode where the PAX team discover the city of clones led by James Olson, then, the second episode set in the abandoned zoo with Gerrit Graham as a decendant of the zookeepers.

The only thing connecting the two was the PAX team following a signal that they hoped would eventually lead them to other PAX survivors.​

 

[theenglish]

By the end of the first season, I thought it was one of the best written science fiction series I'd seen. The world building was rich and each character had a complex backstory. As others have said it fell apart by the end of the second season.

 

[Christopher]

I recently got a chance to watch Strange New World on television and, what struck me about it, was that it didn't feel like a pilot for a television series, but more like two episodes of a failed series edited together to make a feature length movie to fill a two hour time slot.

Yes, I called that out in my blog review. I wondered if they just slapped together a couple of leftover scripts developed for the Planet Earth version, but the differences in the characters seem too great for that. I figure that by that point, ABC and Warner Bros. just weren't willing to shell out the money for another full-fledged pilot and just went the cheap route, making a pilot "movie" that could easily be recut into standard episodes.

You had the first episode where the PAX team discover the city of clones led by James Olson, then, the second episode set in the abandoned zoo with Gerrit Graham as a decendant of the zookeepers.

Weirdly, the version I saw had those two segments in the opposite order. Apparently it was released both ways.

 

[Anwar]

I mean, it was a low budget show and had to contend with that. But they did in an effort in for the first 2 seasons or so and the "Coda" thing shows how epic it would've become.

Though I can see how some folks might have taken it badly with the reveals of the true nature of the Spirit of the Abyss and Trance's people.