Science Fiction (and Fantasy) on Television

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This is originally a Showtime show. Showtime stupidly don't allow access to their website from outside the USA - just as they stupidly won't make more series of one of their most popular shows ever. It is quite extraordinary they came up with such a good show in the first place!

There are five people on the space shuttle Odyssey. It is a routine mission and even includes a TV journalist and her cameraman and a geneticist en route to the space station. All is normal. And then the Earth blows up.

The stricken crew look set to live out their last hours in empty space when a huge alien spaceship sucks them in. The Seeker is the one that meets them and explains that he is on a trail of exploding planets and needs help discovering the cause ... or the perpetrator. What can he do? Well he can send the five remaining people (Matt the cameraman has snuffed it) back five years. Not their bodies, but their minds complete with memories. And thus we have the beginning of a fairly interesting science fiction series.

Immediately we have character dilemmas with the fact that they are suddenly snapped back five years with the wonder if they were dreaming. More dramatic for the 22 year old Neil who is back in a 17 year old body. Even more dramatic for the journalist Sarah, whose little boy hasn't died of cancer yet. But most dramatic for astronaut Angela who was rendered unconscious when the Earth exploded and was sent back in time still unconscious - suddenly she is awake again - in the middle of a spacewalk.

The five are Chuck Taggart (Peter Weller - (remember Robocop)), who is a very experienced astronaut and leader of the shuttle mission. His son, Neil (Christopher Gorman) who is the youngest astronaut ever at 22 (but now snapped back to 17 when he was still drifting through life). The experienced shuttle pilot is Angela Perry (Tamara Craig Thomas) (with a father who is politically powerful, but not so nice). The TV journalist (first live broadcast from space) is Sarah Forbes (Leslie Silva) - suddenly whipped back to before her son dies and with consequent desperation to save him. And the brilliant playboy geneticist on his way to the space station, Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roché), who just happens to have had a past relationship with Angela.

The series is both wonderfully innovative in its incorporation of every cool science fact/fiction idea out there, and annoying in its occasional simplification and glossing over the essence of said ideas. Thankfully adult in its portrayal of realistic people (who swear), we wonder if this will last if the series changes to the SciFi Channel. But with good exploration of some of these ideas, we see immediately a sensible attitude (after accepting the "gimme" of the Alien who saves them), of such things as the obvious betting on the outcome of a football game and it being a different result to the original timeline. That is, the very fact that they are back in time with knowledge of the old future, changes that future. And the computer sentients and other strange enemies of course are affected and thus their aim of saving the Earth within 5 years rapidly becomes undermined by a changed reality.

Well, I can go on for ages about this, but suffice to say that at present "the future is in the balance" for Odyssey 5. Because Showtime, who sponsored it have decided, quite remarkably considering it is their most successful new show, not to make a second series. WHAT? ARE THEY MAD? Well yes, the powers that be at Showtime are Science Fiction ignoramuses. But all is not lost! With such large viewing figures, there is a very good chance the SciFi Channel will pick it up. Watch this space.

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Doctor SciFi is in.