Andromeda - Season 2 2001 Horror Movie Review

Season Two the series continued to contain many of the problems that cripple it:  way too many bumpy-headed aliens, too many derivative characters and story lines, weak acting, and weak writing.  But the show improved in Season Two primarily because it started developing more continuity from episode to episode.  It didn’t develop much in the way of actual story arcs, but some minor stories, something completely lacking in Season One.

I am only now watching the series for the first time so I don’t know if the show will take advantage of it, but the one real hope on the show in Season Two was the development of Trance’s story.  There had been some minor hints in Season One that there was more to Trance than one might initially think, but this was taken to a whole new level.  Numerous hints have been provided.  That she either can’t die or isn’t strictly speaking alive.  That she has an undisclosed significance of enormous import.  That if her nature and destiny were known it would endanger the crew.  That she evolves and changes over time (and does in Season Two, dramatically changing her physical appearance).  And we know that there are others like her, at least one of which may have had some very bad effects on a planet.  As of the end of Season two, Trance is the only character on the series who really interests me.

I started watching the show because I am currently working my way through every series with robotic, cyborg, artificial, reprogrammed, or technologically enhanced characters.  Unfortunately, the show has done far less with Andromeda than I could have hoped.  The avatar of Andromeda could be a great character, but the writers after two seasons have barely done anything with her.  I keep hoping that they will.  There was one interesting episode where she helped a man (played by an actor who was one of the Lone Gunmen) where some aspects of her being an android were addressed, but it wasn’t the beginning of anything that was ongoing. 

One of the fun highlights of the season was seeing Kevin Sorbo’s sidekick from HERCULES, Michael Hurst, guest stars as an android.  It was just a tad strange seeing the two familiar actors in a completely alien context.

One of the crippling things about the show is the weakness of the cast.  Kevin Sorbo is a likable actor, but his character is fairly boring and impossibly traditional in the standard heroic mode.  Tyr has to be one of the worst characters ever on a Sci-fi series.  The problem is the way he is written.  As conceived, he is hopelessly one dimensional.  There is no nunace, no subtlety, and nothing of interest.  If there was one character whose removal from the show would improve it more than any other, it would be Tyr.  Beka is solid but not terribly exciting (though there are times when she physically looks like she could be Kara Thrace’s older sister).  Lexa Doig’s Andromeda is naturally likable, but they simply do too little with her.  Harper is unrelentlessly irritating.  Which leaves Trance.  In Season Two she becomes increasingly important and my major hope is that she will become even more important in Season Three. 

In closing, I only wish someone working on the show knew anything whatsoever about Nietzsche.  Hundreds of passages in Nietzsche contradict the crude version of his thought presented in this show.  Nietzscheans seem to have taken nothing from Nietzsche apart from some nutty distortion of the Ubermann.  You certainly don’t get the communal cave men you see on the series.  In fact, one of the main words that people used to describe the actual Nietzsche before his mental breakdown was “polite.”  He was a polite, nice, pleasant man.