Andromeda fans, front and centre. by Cybersnark

OTHER SCIENCE FICTION SERIES

Andromeda fans, front and centre.

POSTED BY: CYBERSNARK
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 17:34
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VIEWED: 5531
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Friday, June 30, 2006 4:52 AM

I'm a little late on this, but:

After three years of effort, Jill ("writergroupie") Sherwin has released Sailing the Slipstream: An Unofficial and Unauthorized guide to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. I've been watching the development over on ExIsle ( http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?showtopic=25394), where many of Andromeda's (pre-Fall) writers hang out (including Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who approaches Joss-like levels of talent). The book includes multitudinous interviews, observations, episode-by-episode reviews, and various other pretties. It's also purple, which, as all true Andromeda fans know, is the perfect colour.

Also, and critically, Jill did this book on her own time, meaning that this represents three years of avoiding other paying gigs and living hand-to-mouth. It was done for no other reason than pure love of what the show was, and sadness over what happened to it (and desire to understand how it went wrong, so that these situations might be better avoided in the future). Both are sentiments that we Browncoats should be intimately familiar with.

I repeat again, that she was doing this on her own expense. Books are now up for ordering on http://www.writergroupie.com/slipstream.htm. Ordering process is a little involved, but hey, we're fans, and sometimes fans have to cut corners.

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Friday, June 30, 2006 5:11 AM

BLUEMOONSTUFF

I stopped watching after Tranz turned from Purple to Gold. And, of course, she lost her tail. I think it was the tail that did it for me. Gotta love a chick with a purple tail.

The local staions started moving it around the schedule alot also so it was hard to find some times. I bought the first few DVD's but they were a little too pricey to keep buyin'. It was a good show until that random gunfire took a perfectly good tail.

I'll check out the book. Thanks for the Link!

BMS

An Original Browncoat - Member since September 20, 2002

Wearables • Writeables • Stickables
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http://www.bluemoonstuff.com/Firefly_Serenity/fireflyserenity.html

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Friday, June 30, 2006 6:21 AM

CYBERSNARK

Actually:

Select to view spoiler:

Argument's been made that Trance staged the tail-ectomy. It was getting her recognized, and she wasn't ready to be identified yet.

http://www.rhwolfe.com/Insider%20Info.htm Last set of links on the page reveal Trance's secrets.

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Friday, June 30, 2006 7:06 AM

BLUEMOONSTUFF

From the eps I did see after that fiasco she did seem to have a World of responsibilties, literaly.

I'll have to see if it's in reruns anywhere. Be nice to see it in order though. So what did bcome of Harper? Did he end up blowing the Universe to bits by the end of the show? How about Trance, back to Purple maybe? Ohhh, the Purple.

Any good Andro boards for me to troll and catch up on stuff?

BMS

An Original Browncoat - Member since September 20, 2002

Wearables • Writeables • Stickables
Fancible shiny goods made by a Browncoat for Browncoats
http://www.bluemoonstuff.com/Firefly_Serenity/fireflyserenity.html

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Friday, June 30, 2006 7:45 AM

SAB39

This thread is interesting to me because I only discovered Andromeda at the beginning of the last season. Not that anyone ever bothered to mention that it was the last season or anything, or that the last episode was even the last episode. The story just ended, and the next week was a rerun. But hey, I'm not bitter.

Anyway, the point is that coming into the show at that point, I actually liked it. A lot of humor, some ambiguity to the morals of the characters... of course this was before I discovered Firefly but that wasn't something I was used to at the time.

So can someone give me the backstory here? What was it that was good about the show originally that got destroyed, and how did that happen? And am I completely crazy for liking the last season?

(and is the whole thing available on DVD so I can find out? ;) )

ETA:

Quote:
Originally posted by bluemoonstuff:
So what did bcome of Harper? Did he end up blowing the Universe to bits by the end of the show?

He built himself a lovebot. Or something.

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Friday, June 30, 2006 7:57 AM

CHOO1701

is it me or was Harpe a cheap Wash lookie likey?

-----------------------------
"Remember, always be yourself. Unless you suck."-Joss Whedon

ITES RULE!!!!

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Friday, June 30, 2006 10:50 AM

CYBERSNARK

Actually, Wash was a cheap Harper look-alike (technically, since Andromeda was around first).

Yes, all seasons of Andromeda are out on DVD (as far as I know; I know 1-4 are out, and I'm assuming S5 should have been out by now). I haven't actually seen S5, because Global (the Canadian version of Fox) stopped airing it and, by then, I didn't care enough to track it down.

I think the best Andromeda-related board that survives is ExIsle ( http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?s=9bff5eccb48901d3aeaaebce4dc28ac6&
act=idx) It's not exactly an "Andromeda" board so much as a general SF board, but a goodly number of Drom alums hang out there.

As for what it was like originally, Dylan's in-character opening narration said it best:

The Long Night has come.
The Systems Commonwealth, the greatest civilization in history, has fallen.

But now, one ship --one crew-- has vowed to drive back the Night, and rekindle the light of civilization.
On the starship Andromeda, hope lives again.

What drew me to it, personally, was the intricately-built universe (the various fiefdoms resulting from the Commonwealth's collapse, the Seekers of the Way, the Nietzschean splinter factions, the drift colonies and slipstream corridors), the aliens who were actually alien (the communal, insectoid yet not-hive-minded Than, the parasitic Magog, the totally materialistic [in the sense of rejecting anything not rooted in physical truth] Nietzscheans, the pan-spiritual Wayists, the literally multi-facetted ship's AI), the scientific roots (quantum physics, string theory, most of the "aliens" being genengineered offshoots of humans, time dilation, time lags in sublight communications, the lack of forcefields, the use of fullerenes and common-place nanotechnology), the unconventionality (the Commonwealth wasn't created by humans, and functioned for several millennia without our presence, Earth is a bombed-out wasteland and no-one cares), and the ensemble cast of fascinating, multifacetted characters, most of them harbouring major secrets in their background that make Shepherd Book look forthright.

As the show went on, the producers tried to tinker with it, turning it from an intelligent drama to a mindless action/adventure hour (one Usenet poster described it as "action-porn"). The writing staff was fired one by one (starting with RHW, who'd pretty much created everything short of the lead character's name), the "ensemble cast" turned into "a star and a supporting cast," two of the actors left (one unavoidably, I'll grant, due to medical issues), and Trance was retconned from "a mystery wrapped in a riddle with a tail in the middle" to a gold-tinged Xena wannabe (then re-retconned into a wizard).

Jill's book explains it far better than I can (as was the point of her writing it).

It's an ongoing debate as to which show got off worse: Firefly, which was mangled and cancelled outright, or Andromeda, which was hijacked, flown into the ground, then drawn out into a five-year trainwreck.

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Friday, June 30, 2006 12:20 PM

CALHOUN

Andromeda started out with potential, the first couple of seasons had some decent episodes then it went downhill fast! It got so crappy that it became the only sci fi show I wont watch! The acting is horrible and the writing absolute garbage!

Quote:
Cybersnark wrote:
Friday, June 30, 2006 04:52
(including Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who approaches Joss-like levels of talent).

How dare you insult Joss like this!!!

PFFT!!

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Saturday, July 1, 2006 5:29 AM

CYBERSNARK

The badness stems from two sources:

* Producers/network suits not letting RHW do his job.
* RHW being fired mid-S2. We were left with various people trying to be RHW, who were themselves fired and replaced with talentless-yet-malleable peons to the suits' wishes.

Check out the pilot to see how Wolfe could make a fully-masked supporting character/token redshirt casualty demonstrate more personality than the leads of some shows, using nothing more than dialogue and the actress' delivery.

Aside from the whole "being an alien" thing (and the career-military thing), Refractions of Dawn would fit right in among our BDHs. Probably be a good replacement for Wash.

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Sunday, July 2, 2006 6:13 AM

RELFEXIVE

There were a lot of good things in Andromeda at the beginning. It had a few dodgy eps (what series doesn't?) but it had a strong background, interesting characters, good plots and a fairly solid arc (eventually).

Then they changed it when RHW left/resigned/was fired/ran away screaming in horror/whatever the truth is. You could feel the slipping at the end of season two, and after the first few eps of season three I was sat there gaping thinking "what the frell have they done?!"

Then it was occasionally good albeit in a rough-hewn, simplistic way. Oh, and they abandoned/messed with/screwed up the arc by forgetting about the incoming Magog worldship 95% of the time. And by confusing the Trance's people choosing the Commonwealth to fight against the Magog thing, too, by having the Chosen Defenders blasted to bits by the freaky other-dimension aliens/Pyrians/Great Tyr Betrayal.

I've not seen past the end of season three yet, literally and psychologically; I'm not sure I want to. Are the following seasons actually worth seeing at all?

It's a great shame, really.

"My God - you're like a trained ape. Without the training."
"Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all..."
"SUMMER!!"
http://www.theshadowdepository.co.uk/index.htm

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Saturday, August 12, 2006 9:58 PM

DINALT

First 2 seasons, excellent - rest not so excellent.

As others have said, having RHW leave didn't do the show any favours. It left it with moments of greatness, but nothing as cohesive as the first 2 seasons.

Probably having Tyr leave was one of the worst decisions. Having him onboard at least helped create some tension between the characters.
I also didn't like the way the characters developed. When they got Tyr back for a few later episodes, he acted totally differently to his earlier appearances (shooting defenceless women, etc.).
It could be that power had corrupted him, but he was a pale imitation of his former self.

Other than that, Dillon Hunt descended into 'James Bond' style farce, bedding the female guest appearance regularly. Got nothing against sex in SF, but at least make it part of a characters development.

And by Season 5, the rot had really set in. In some ways, you could almost view it as a parody of FF - stranded with no real technology to speak of.
And the characters changed too radically. Obviously, we were expected to believe that time had passed differently for each of them, which is fair enough. But after building the characters up for 4 seasons, I found little to relate to in S5.
Most of the characters acted only when money was involved, which tended to go against the previous 4 seasons, and some of the episodes were clearly played for laughs.
There are some good moments in S5, but you've got to stick with it to find them.

A real shame for a series that had showed so much promise, although I guess there were enough fans to give it a 5 season run.

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Saturday, August 12, 2006 11:48 PM

RABBIT2

Never really got in to this series as it kind of kept moving around the schedules over here in the UK. From what I saw, it looked like it was a complete reworking of a short lived Gene Roddenberry show from the `70`s called `Genesis 2`.
It looked like it had a number of good ideas going for it but seemed to borrow heavily from other sources. Is it worth checking out on DVD?

--------------------------------------------------

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Me: Don`t crash?

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Sunday, August 13, 2006 2:52 AM

DINALT

Definitely worth checking out on DVD - if only for the first 2 seasons. See if you can rent it though, as that's a whole lot cheaper.

I think the Sci-fi channel own the rights to show it at the moment, so don't know when it'll next be aired.

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Sunday, August 13, 2006 5:09 AM

SIMONWHO

Quote:
Originally posted by Cybersnark:
Andromeda, which was hijacked, flown into the ground, then drawn out into a five-year trainwreck.

I have the mixed metaphor police on line 2, wanting to speak to you.

I watched the first couple of episodes of Andromeda but didn't see anything really caught my interest; the bits of other episodes I've seen certainly haven't turned that impression around. But it wouldn't be the first good series to be destroyed by behind-the-scenes power struggles and egomania.

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Saturday, August 19, 2006 6:24 PM

DREAMWALKER

Cybersnark, I love your description of Andromeda. The show was really shiny till about the middle of Season Two (ie until Robert Wolfe stopped writing the eps) then it was ruined and became a train wreck. I'm still asking myself why I watched Season 5. I think the answer is that I loved Seasons 1-3 (although I hate what they did to Tyr in Season 4) and Harper's my favorite character, but still they should have ended it with Season 4 and never made the disaster that was Season 5.

SimonWho, gotta agree about the egomania. Andromeda went from being a story about all the characters to the story of Dylan Hunt. The fact that Kevin Sorbo had to be the greatest thing on the show had a large part in putting me off the series.

"You're talking to Serenity. And Early...Serenity is very unhappy."

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Sunday, August 20, 2006 9:10 AM

DINALT

Quote:
Originally posted by Dreamwalker:
Cybersnark, I love your description of Andromeda. The show was really shiny till about the middle of Season Two (ie until Robert Wolfe stopped writing the eps) then it was ruined and became a train wreck. I'm still asking myself why I watched Season 5. I think the answer is that I loved Seasons 1-3 (although I hate what they did to Tyr in Season 4) and Harper's my favorite character, but still they should have ended it with Season 4 and never made the disaster that was Season 5.

SimonWho, gotta agree about the egomania. Andromeda went from being a story about all the characters to the story of Dylan Hunt. The fact that Kevin Sorbo had to be the greatest thing on the show had a large part in putting me off the series.

"You're talking to Serenity. And Early...Serenity is very unhappy."

Definitely right about Kevin Sorbo having to be the greatest thing on the show. Could only take so many 'Hercules' in show gags - okay, there probably weren't that many, but they did detract from the show, lol.

I think that's one of the reasons that Tyr's character was changed so much, so Kevin Sorbo could look like the real hero of the piece.

What bugged me most though, was that within the fledgling 'Commonwealth' in later series, we were led to believe that the ship was fully crewed.
But other than fleeting glances, we never actually saw much of the crew at all - certainly not on the bridge or anywhere critical.

Another thing that grated was the whole 'Paladin' issue - hope I've got that right, lol. Suddenly turning KS from an optimistic captain to a mythical 'saviour of the 'verse' type.

And S5 still remains to my mind, one of the worst finales ever for a Sci-Fi show.

Only highlight for me was the introduction of Brandy Ledford, but even that couldn't really compensate for the storyline.

It's just irritating to think that this could get 5 series, and FF didn't even get 1 whole series.

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Tuesday, January 9, 2007 4:51 AM

CLJOHNSTON108

Quote:
Originally posted by Choo1701:
is it me or was Harpe a cheap Wash lookie likey?

Quote:
Originally posted by Cybersnark:
Actually, Wash was a cheap Harper look-alike (technically, since Andromeda was around first).

I'd watched the first season on DVD about a year before I discovered Firefly, and was kinda impressed by it, especially the performances of Lexa Doig & Lisa Ryder.
Couldn't believe how bad the creature effects were (Farscape spoiled me), though, but I really liked that an attempt was made at providing "Good Science"!

I just picked up Vol. 1.1 for $4.99, just to re-visit...

Between bouts of cringing from the music (Greg Edmonson spoiled me), I noticed Harper's Hawaiian shirt, then his disheveled blonde hair... "Hey! That's Wash... doing Kaylee's job!"

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed!

EDIT: I really like the episode D Minus Zero!
I love space stories that feature submarine warfare, like Balance of Terror in Star Trek: TOS or Wrath of Khan!

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Wednesday, January 10, 2007 11:09 AM

THIEFJEHAT

This is a very interesting thread.

After I finished firefly in early 2004, a friend handed me some DVD's of Andromeda and told me this:

"This show was alike to firefly in storytelling prowess until the end of the 2nd season. Then suddenly it turns into a craptacular adventure"

And wow was he correct. I loved the idea of a fallen commonwealth. A galactic dark age. The greatness is gone but there are fragments everywhere, some waiting for a rebirth, others changed into different things. I remember enjoying the ship's AI for "Clairion's Call" who had become a casino. Like he himself WAS the casino and his avatar was the general manager.

So after season 1 I wasn't sure how this show could go sour until I watched the season 2 finale and OMG, it was a total 180 about face. NOTHING was worth watching after that. I struggled to finish the 4th season and when I did I threw the 5th season out.

I'll be very interested to know what went wrong. The link you provided will hopefully shed light on this failed gem.

When ppl ask me to compare the failures of Firefly to Andromeda I always say that Firefly was attacked by outside forces and killed and Andromeda self destructed.

Do not fear me. Ours is a peaceful race, and we must live in harmony.

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Wednesday, January 10, 2007 3:41 PM

CYBERSNARK

Quick update: Jill has since stopped producing the book due to the extreme cost (both for her and for the people ordering it --the downside of vanity-press, you have to sell a prodigious amount of product to break even), but she's still keeping a list of interested people, and is exploring other means of production. There's talk of a tamper-proof .PDF, or some such. I'll provide updates as I hear 'em.

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Wednesday, January 10, 2007 5:34 PM

CALHOUN

I like the picture of the "Liberator" Dinalt. I think it was my first favourite spaceship ever. :)

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