Long and Detailed Second Season Andromeda Reviews

Originally posted in my LiveJournal, these reviews were written immediately after each episode and edited over the next few days as I spoke to people and watched the LJ Comments sections. I haven’t changed them much during the process of compiling them on one page here, so all of my original speculations remain. Some of them panned out and some didn’t -- and I have no certainty on whether Harper died in Future Trance’s past anymore -- but by retaining them I show what the episodes suggested at the time. I also include my thumbnail reviews of the previews.

Now I'm kinder and mellower that the season's over and I see where everything was heading. I'm more annoyed over all the potential that kept getting ignored....

With the ship severely damaged, Dylan leads the crew of the Andromeda Ascendant in a battle against the largest and deadliest enemy they have ever encountered.

It seems that a lot of people liked this episode. Me? I want to throw things, though I liked bits of the episode. Bits of it.

Plenty of smaller things bothered me, but the biggest has to be the plot point in which Harper is impregnated with Magog eggs but given some never-before-mentioned drug that will render them dormant. Though the drug won’t work forever, and Trance says they might find a way during their breathing room time to get the eggs out. Maybe. They don’t seem to hold out much hope. So the eggs were removed from Tyr, who we’re told barely survived, but Harper gets to live out a bizarre twist on his worst nightmare, even as his condition renders him some sort of combination of a pregnant rape victim and someone living with AIDS.

(The Magog present some interesting metaphors to present day concerns. Just as the Star Trek: Original Series Klingons can be read as standing in for the USSR during the Cold War, the Magog can be seen as standing in for the biological warfare fears prevalent today. They’re a lot like a virus. And terrorism leads to the fall of the Commonwealth.)

I’d like to leave aside the fact that the spoiler about Harper being impregnated with usually lethal Magog eggs was sent to TV Guide almost a month in advance, but I just can’t, because it adds to the feeling that this plot move was a cheap, cynical stunt designed to stir up the audience.

What is up with the mystery, almost-but-not-enough-of-a-miracle drug? We’ve never heard of it before. Not a hint. Where did the serum come from? Why hasn’t Harper heard of it before? Why haven’t the rest of them? If the writers had shown it before or shown it being developed, it would have made some difference. If it’s something Trance just put together, that only adds to how unbelievable this is, because how much time did she really have to develop it, anyway? Harper and Tyr had the Magoglings growing quickly inside them.

We’ve been told all last season that Magog eggs are lethal. This drug blows a big hole in the fabric of the continuity. It’s also a cheat, allowing the writers to do this horrible thing to Harper without having to actually kill him.

And the nanobots can heal Dylan’s broken leg and deep claw marks (and presumably kept Tyr alive and healed him after his surgery), but can’t be used against Harper’s Magog eggs? The writers would probably argue that the Magoglings start to take on the DNA of their hosts and be hard for nanobots to see as excisable material, but that doesn’t quite work for me because they have to remain Magog enough to 1] feed and 2] burst out of the host as Magog..

Then there’s the thing about the eggs being dormant. If they’re dormant, can’t you remove them without them ripping Harper’s insides apart in vengeance? Though someone on an Andromeda list, Nora, mentions that Zack Stentz said:

"Magog babies are designed to be pretty much impossible to remove without killing the host-- with a very few exceptions. They insinuate themselves into sensitive areas of the host’s anatomy, and when surgery’s performed, they go nuts with teeth and claws, and also secrete massive amounts of lethal toxins into the host. And their acquisition of host DNA allows them to foil immunological attacks as well."

But it gets worse, as the writing staff exacerbates one unforgivable plot bit with another one: that Tyr seems to be the only person in the whole crew who gives a damn about what happened to Harper. Are we to believe that Dylan and Beka wouldn’t have been right there when Harper woke up for the first time? Dylan, who cares deeply about his crew, who in "Harper 2.0" asked many times if Harper was all right and kept him under constant surveillance to make sure, and who here risked his life to go back to get Harper, Tyr, and Rev. Beka, who usually treats Harper as a younger brother and in "Harper 2.0" showed so much care for him. Instead, Dylan and Beka are trading inappropriate quips on the bridge without any mention of the damage done and then encapsulating in a tidy but unlikely package what this episode’s events mean to the series. It’s very sloppy and rushed writing in which you have characters doing things only because the script says they must. They would be in med deck. I understand the two commanding officers being on the deck while things are still a bit dangerous. But they better have gone down later off-screen.

But Rev’s in med deck? After the Magog rip the crap out of Harper, let’s let a Magog be one of the first things he sees. Trance could have explained the almost-miracle drug instead. And Rev seems only vaguely sad over Harper’s condition while Trance seems vaguely sad and rueful. Like they’re already writing him off as dead. What is up with that?

Making Tyr, who only started to care last episode, the only one who shows any concern over Harper’s mental state.

Did the writers think it would be too much effort for them to write more than one person worrying for Harper?

My greatest worry? That the next episodes will be the former status quo, like none of this had ever happened personally to the characters, and continue on that way until sweeps month in November or even February. I want this issue discussed, damn it. I want a Harper talk with Dylan and Beka. I want to see nightmares and lingering trauma about the Magog-related events in the crew.

The temptation of Rev Bem bored the crap out of me, though it did show me that the crew shouldn't trust him.

I also have smaller things I hated. Like the new trailer commercial for the show. I miss Sorbo’s low-key, earnest voiceover about "one ship, one crew." The game show host from hell guy doing it now is so over the top that he makes me wince as he smarms about Dylan Hunt, "a HERO...." And the rest of the crew is chopped liver? And Beka’s new outfit. She goes from armor to a breast-baring catsuit? Does she think flashing her chest will stop an oncoming Magog? And the Beka Valentine established last season would need many more reasons to nova bomb the cluster than what this episode gave us. Somehow the scenes of Dylan and Rev searching the world cluster for Harper and Tyr held no drama or tension whatsoever. The more airtime Rev gets, the less I trust him and the more I wonder why the crew does. And that thing where Dylan comms to Harper. Didn’t MilitantRommie say in "Its Hour Come ‘Round at Last" that Tyr and the Maru crew lacked the subdermal communication devices? She didn’t say specifically about the immune system boosting nanobots Dylan used as tracking devices, but to me it sounded like she distinctly said in "Its Hour..." that they didn’t have the High Guard comm units.

The quips and encapsulation of this episode’s lesson at the end killed me. Nobody was in character. It’s like Robert Hewitt Wolfe realized that he was running out of episode time and raced through the med deck scene and the closing scene on the bridge. Sure, they filmed faster than usual trying to avoid the threatened guild strike, but that’s no excuse.

- Tyr’s character development. He’s coming more and more to see these people as his Pride. The new bond between him and Harper may be very interesting in the long run, though I wonder how long Harper will be able to deal with Tyr seeing him kind of as his child. I can’t see the Tyr of old mimicking a Harper whine under any circumstances. Or doing that almost affectionate near-thwap. Yeah, he’s patronizing with some of his up-from-your-bootstraps talk, but that’s Tyr. And I liked his slavery story. Watching him as Trance and Rev break the news to Harper....

- Rommie kicks ass, whether she’s literally kicking ass or talking of herselves. ("Oh, Andromeda. I’ve never been so glad to see me.") The bit in which Rommie remembers her past mission for Beka was great. And she even looks prettier this year.

- Under different circumstances I would have liked Beka’s new outfit. Beka's reaction to finding out that Dylan can use the immune system nanobots installed in his crew to track them was perfect.

- Trance being brought back to life by having her tail pulled. Beka figuring that Trance could be brought back to life by having her tail pulled.

- Until the glib end, Dylan was great. Dylan breaking his leg during that jump since he’s not Superman. Livid with offense at the Magog using guns. Cheerfully saying, "It’s me, Captain Idiot," when Tyr says that only one man could be stupid enough to come rescue them.

- Harper in torn-up clothing. So I’m shallow. His snarky bitching as he’s trying to free himself is fun. And Gordon Michael Woolvett does an incredible job in the med deck scene. The terror, the initial relief, the realization, the growing horror, the attempt to be brave.... Watching him try so hard not to cry is heartbreaking. His worst nightmare, twisting around until it’s become his life. The show better follow up with this. Deb and I imagine him having some nights where he’ll put his hands over his stomach and freak out over the thought of what’s living inside him. Or-- ick --feel them moving, or imagine he does.

This should have been two episodes, with the first dealing with the search and rescue on the Worldship and the second showing the desperate search for cures for Tyr and Harper as the Magog start to hatch. That second episode could have been such a nailbiter: the panicked searching of avenues for stopgaps and cures, Tyr and Harper obviously in pain from these parasites that want to rip out of them, the crew feeling the consequences of this attack as deeply as possible. They try the surgery option, possibly a cure! But then Tyr almost dying from the surgery, though he's now cured, makes the crew realize to their horror that they don’t dare try it on the un-genetically modified, more sickly, thus more fragile Harper. Angst! Drama! I mean, instead we get to hear that Tyr almost died but we don’t even get to see him recovering. When we see him he looks fine while Trance tells instead of shows.

Oh yeah, if the writers devoted an episode to it, it would be obvious that Trance couldn’t come up with the almost-miracle drug out of nowhere just in time.

So I’m pissed about this episode, especially since I’ve been waiting for it since early May, but I’m sticking with the show. I have some faith. Besides, I want to see if they do right by Harper.

Dylan, Beka, Rev Bem and Tyr, pursued by a gang of Nietzscheans, are forced to make a crash landing on an icy planet.

First half of the episode: D (Saved from an F only for Dylan getting thrown around prettily, Dylan telling Tyr without words to protect Beka from Rev, and Tyr mentioning that Dylan’s been taking an awful lot of risks lately. Harper was great, but I wanted to kick Rommie in the scenes with him from the first half.)
Second half of the episode: B- (The writers woke up?)

"Exit Strategies" consisted of the good, the bad, and the "you gotta be kidding me!" Since the bad and the "you gotta be kidding me!" grabbed my attention the hardest, they go first.

The "you gotta be kidding me!":
- This episode takes place three weeks after "The Widening Gyre." Because... there wouldn’t be anything dramatic happening in those three weeks? After what they’d been through? Are the writers on crack? Three weeks! Dylan and Rommie put Harper out there clearing Magog bodies for three weeks? Way to keep the suicidal guy stable. Nobody knows that for three weeks he’s been haunted by a stench of Magog throughout the ship?

- Rev fasts as penance for three weeks. Do you think the crew might want to know that they have a starving Magog in their midst? Maybe Rev didn’t tell them because he knew they’d rightfully freak, being the tasty treats they are. Way to try to kind of suicide in the most irresponsible and dangerous-to-others fashion possible, Rev.

- We get to see Beka’s onscreen concern for Rev over his self-inflicted agony but not even a second of what she must be thinking about Harper’s condition? Excuse me?

The bad:
- The new, bombastic voiceover for the show commercial is heinous. It seems to get worse every time I hear it. Kevin Sorbo, come back!

- I haven’t seen computer generated image and green screen work this bad in a long time. Welcome to the world’s most obviously computer-generated cave-ins. Watch the actors go transparent against static backgrounds. Between the bad special effects and the caves (especially with the funny looking giant worms living in them), I was getting nostalgic for late 70s/early 80s Doctor Who.

- The aforementioned Rev penance fast (with all that time the episode then spends on his self-inflicted suffering) and the decision to place a suicidal Harper on corpse detail with Rommie telling him to suck it up. The people on this ship are usually much smarter than that.

- And why is Rev getting so much attention anyway? The more I see him, the creepier and more untrustworthy and self-righteous he seems to get. If he was truly of the Divine, he couldn’t kill? Which makes everybody on the crew who does kill to protect innocents evil, I guess. And a truly Divine Rev wouldn’t have gone in to try to save Tyr and Harper, since that involved killing. Glad you’re willing to sacrifice crewmembers as acceptable losses on your quest for holiness, Rev. Good thing Dylan and Rommie came in as back-up in case he regained his faith.

- I couldn’t figure out what the hell Dylan was doing out there in the snow with his force lance until 15 minutes later. Bad storytelling.

- The fight and chase scenes in the snow were confusingly shot and hard to follow.

- One scene we see Harper with a gun to his stomach prepared to end it all. Next time we see him, he’s in an access tube arguing with Rommie. How did she convince him not to shoot himself before? Once again, Andromeda cuts away from a necessary conversation out of... laziness? What?

- Harper’s shirt. What the hell was that? It has the texture of wet paper toweling.

The good:
- Tyr’s becoming more interesting and thawing out. His scenes with the Nietzscheans he’d double-crossed -- off-screen before the events of "Music of a Distant Drum," as it turns out -- and his "inferior!" taunt with that manic grin, the way he worked to sell Dylan on his good qualities at the end.... Major character development.

- Dylan confronting him at the end. Dylan’s less innocent and has more to lose now. He understands Nietzscheans better. It sounds weird to say this of a 40-something-year-old man, but he seems to have grown-up more. Dylan’s such a good, fairly easygoing guy that it’s great to get these reminders that he’s not someone you should mess with. Starting a game of Go, with its echoes of games played with Rhade, is a nice touch.

- Tyr’s remark about how Dylan is taking a lot of personal risks lately. (It’s another thing for me to file in the "Dylan’s impending breakdown" folder. I see it coming. Survivor guilt, Rhade guilt, time displacement, and now this new Magog thing. There’s a lot of guilt, depression, and megalomania in our captain that’s bound to boil over sometime.)

- Rommie finally connecting with Harper over how that hidden personality backup and possible other hidden timebombs make up her own version of dormant Magog spawn in her guts. I hadn’t thought of that.

- A drunken, fatalistic Harper using the scanner to watch and say Hi to the Magoglings in his gut. He’s given them names. Hell, I’m sure he’s ascribed personalities to them too. Scary.

- The mention of Bobby and of Harper’s favorite beer suggest that the information on Seamus Harper Online will be incorporated into the show. Very cool.

- Beka’s comments about the Eureka Maru being her home going way overboard. Dylan’s response that he feels the same way about the Andromeda Ascendant definitely lacked her "and the rest of you can go to hell for all I care" undertones. It may have slipped out without her wanting it to, but she had that thought ready. There’s a nastiness close under her surface that we’ve seen before in "The Pearls That Were His Eyes" and "It Makes a Lovely Light."

(Her nastiness in this episode made me wonder if Beka has used the "dump you on the trash heap where I found you" threat with Harper before. It makes me wonder if she’s gotten nasty with the Maru crew before. Trance immediately acquiesces to her in "Pearls" when she got nasty with her, and in "Light" Beka backed Harper down on the bridge with a look. He seemed afraid of her. Given her experience of family through her untrustworthy junkie dad and untrustworthy con-job brother, maybe her acting as a kind of big sister to Harper isn’t always a nice thing. I wonder how indebted Harper feels to her. She got him off Earth, she gave him a home and a job doing what he likes. Maybe he worries about being sent back if he’s not useful anymore. Maybe he waited until Dylan and Beka were gone to have his breakdown.... Maybe there’s more Dark Beka coming.)

- Harper fixing the deadly ship problem by the time the counter hit 7. Waiting until 2 or 1 is such a tired cliche.

While Dylan tries to help bring a diplomatic agreement to pass, the rest of his crew steals a priceless relic, then finds out that they stole a fake and have to find the real one and get it to the Than without anyone realizing that it was stolen.

My reaction to a "A Heart for Falsehood Framed" is a bit... complicated. I enjoyed it as I watched it--it’s a fun episode with snappy dialogue--though it bothered me a bit that a lot of the episode ignored the events of this season. Then I finished the episode, and it really started to bother me that we had second season Dylan, Tyr, and Rommie interacting with what seemed like first season Beka, Harper, and Trance. (Rev was absent, out converting people. I know, Hunh?) But then I thought up an explanation for why that works for the episode that’s either valid or me rationalizing my ass off.

Dylan, Tyr, and Rommie are the second season version of themselves. Dylan is less knee-jerk idealistic, and he’s the one who masterminds the theft, thus showing a major loosening of his moral code. Tyr continues to be more sprightly; him sitting in on the card game helping Harper with his hands is something he never would have done before, since he rarely socialized with the crew except for that time when in his boredom he helped with Beka’s weightlifting, which is a survival-oriented behavior he approves of. Rommie snaps more and is more ruthless, as she seems to be absorbing some of the character traits of her earlier backup copy’s personality, which could be described as stone-cold militant bitch.

By contrast, Beka, Trance, and Harper seem very first season, and most of the events involving only them could have taken place first season. (I personally feel that Harper’s extreme chipperness had a slightly harder edge here, but half my friends say that they felt he was normal, pre-spawn chipper in their eyes. I found it creepy, but....) Watching the second season and first season characters interact made a kind of jarring friction for me.

It ticked me off, until I found a possible reason for why it might be deliberate and not just the writers doing a reset and ignoring all the torment of the last two episodes.

Beka, Trance, and Harper probably had the theft to come in mind even as Beka and Harper were walking the bazaar. The Maru crew spends the episode reliving the good old heist days pre-Andromeda. Which means that aspects of their behavior on display here may even be pre-first season. They have time-warped.

Which is either what the writers intended or me during their work for them; I can’t tell.

Since it took me three hours of talking out the episode with my friends to come to that conclusion, it makes it hard for me to decide what to rate the episode. But I sure had a good time watching it, even with the jarring moments that may be deliberately jarring.

I’ve wanted them to be shown on-station for the longest time, and here it is. Not bad. Nice polyglot mix of peoples too. Beka and Harper apparently have a procedure for dealing with pickpockets, because they shoot off in separate directions to catch him like a well-oiled machine. All of their talks in this episode studiously avoid mentioning any season two events, but it’s still great to hear them interacting. Ryder and Woolvett have a great chemistry, and it’s obvious that Harper loves Beka deeply and that she appreciates him. And that he’s stubbornly continuing an old argument and trying to convert her to the goodness of living on a planet. (Homesickness?) He apparently finds most stations to be too rickety and chintzy, while she doesn’t understand the appeal of unregulated temperatures and weather, dirt, and Magog raids.

Leydon has no fire or depth--he’s just hottie love interest of the week--but he gives Beka and Harper some great things to work off of, such as when Harper comes up behind him with a big pipe prepared to club him and Beka’s doing the "don’t!" hand motions. Harper has a public lewdness charge on his record. "It was only the one time!" he protests. Actually, his record is surprisingly clean, with only grand theft starship, interstellar flight from prosecution, and that one public lewdness charge on it. Somebody must have taken good care of security in most cases, because the Maru crew has pulled off some heists in its past and really enjoys the buzz from it. Just watch Beka and Harper casing the museum.

Leydon brings up criminal records for Beka, Harper, Tyr, and Trance. He doesn’t have anything on Dylan but says that he’s keeping an eye on him, certain that he’s the mastermind behind the crew. The audience scoffs... but then it turns out that Dylan was the person who told them to steal the relic. (Character development, ho! So... if peace couldn’t be decided through diplomacy, he’d give the crystal to the Than, thus giving them what they wanted and hopefully taking away their reason to blow the station to dust, and say that Doge could like it or lump it?) Harper tells Dylan that he missed his calling as a criminal mastermind.

The heist is great fun. Watch the Maru crew put its illicit expertise in action and have a kick doing it. Harper looks especially happy with it all, and he has a lion’s share of the research and technical work. Canon does have him throwing himself into his work when he’s troubled by anything. Trance saying, "Let’s bring it!" as she starts her progress toward the Heart in its security field is a nice moment.

It looks like one of the Maru crew’s hobbies is trying to get Trance to volunteer information about her past. They don’t seem to be very successful. And when she gets too nosy about them, they mention that her question is as irrelevant as her place of origin, which often makes her back down fast. The scene with Beka, Harper, and Trance talking in the Maru is great, because it really does feel like these three have known each other and worked together for a long time.

Leydon’s a weasel. Of course. He’s not even a very cagey weasel, since he threw Beka to the wolves way before he had to. (And after him using the thief name of "Schroedinger’s Cat" gave me such a geek thrill.) Unfortunately, it looks like Beka falls for him instead of playing him all the way through to the end. Lousy taste in men. (Was it part of the plan to have Tyr break up their cozy tryst or the writers being lazy about showing her having to make a decision about Leydon’s offer?) Though, Harper, ever the romantic, thought it possible that the weasel might actually feel something for her. Because he does.

And how thuddingly obvious is it that the relic is known as the Heart of the Hegemon, is supposed to be the actual, crystallized heart of the first Than queen, and has numerous fakes floating around? Thanks for hitting that home to the audience with a mallet through Dylan, writers. We wouldn’t have understood the metaphor even with the title of the episode being "A Heart for Falsehood Framed" otherwise.

One friend asked snarkily if Beka just has the one dress. Knowing Beka? Probably. And the award for most obvious hair extension goes to Beka Valentine. Okay, the fact that it’s so obvious from the lump at the base of her skull that starts the braid makes it very Beka even if somebody seems to be trying for Lara Croft, but I still prefer the crimped hair.

Dylan dealing with the diplomats is funny, and the new dress uniforms he and Rommie sport are great. Thank you, thank you, for getting rid of that awful white one.

Rommie saying she would prefer to blow both the Than and Doge’s people away shows, I think, the continuing influence of the backup personality as it integrates. Maybe that’s why she was so insensitive to Harper’s spawn problem in "Exit Strategies"? I mean, the idea that it’s okay to have the rape victim with a time bomb in his stomach clear out the bodies of his attackers isn’t even logical. And that snippy comment to Dylan that "Harper is sweet but he believes pretty much everything I tell him," then saying that her "brain the size of a planet" could tell his fake from the real relic instantly makes me wonder if she’ll be lying to him more in the future. LaT points out that maybe Rommie lied to him so Beka, whom Rommie didn’t trust here, wouldn’t be aware that the AI knew the difference between Hearts at all time. And, Rommie, doll? You’re the ship’s AI. His life and the lives of the crew depend on you. Of course he takes what you say on faith. I think the integration is also why she’s suddenly showing a concern over whether they can trust Beka.

And we do doubt that Beka told Dylan about the mysterious treasure map you can get from the Heart. Thus, she’s not entirely trustworthy in ways that Dylan would call it.

It’s a nice touch that Dylan looks guilty about the heist and is obviously unhappy to tell his celebrating crew that the Heart they stole has to be put back.

Smirk at Dylan looking at Rommie’s cleavage and saying that maybe she should wear something more formal for the negotiations, then Rommie looking down at her cleavage... and ending up in a dress uniform that displays only a little less cleavage. Another nice moment is Dylan’s "what he said" hand gesture to Tyr after Tyr answers Doge’s whine about what he’s getting out of the deal with the observation that Doge doesn’t get blown to hell is what Doge is getting out of it.

Tyr continues to be more fun after his Magog rescue experience. Him helping Harper in that card game is pretty funny, and look at his joy in dealing with the thief and Leydon’s minions. Man enjoys his work. His eyes popping out of his head when opportunistic Beka switches the real Heart for the fake makes me grin. Ditto his playing with Dylan over whether to kill the delegates and then on whether to kill Dylan if he ever agreed to do this kind of thing again. I’m still not sure if his show of possessiveness over Beka in the garden was part of the heist plan or not. The scenes in which he introduces himself to the Drift’s criminal element, and gets a very in-depth ogling by his criminal contact, made me grin.

The whole crew wears dark colors, with Beka and Harper in black. I wonder if there’s some meaning to it all, but there might not be. Harper’s shiny black pants had one friend wondering at first if he were wearing leather, but no. Dang.

Rev is out converting people? ::shudder:: I guess his crisis of faith solved itself. Well, at least he’s not onscreen.

Leydon says, "Ah, well, your captain’s reputation is rapidly becoming legendary." The Legendary Journeys of Dylan Hunt? Is that like Dylan being "like a Greek god or something" in the pilot?

Kass and I felt that the tag could have done a lot of things. Instead, we get Beka staring moodily and silently at the orbital. Missed opportunity.

So it was a fun episode, but I don’t understand what the writers are doing this season. Because last year, it all came together, while this year it all feels so random. "Let’s throw this story here!" If there’s some bigger plan or arc, I don’t see it yet.

And, aside from a few characterization things and the sub-dermal comms, this could have been a season one episode. It’s like the writers reset to the original default. LaT very reasonably says that the characters aren’t going to discuss the Worldship or Harper’s unwanted passengers every five minutes and that we don’t know how much time has passed since "Exit Strategies" so maybe they’re dealing better by now, but that still doesn’t work for me. And I want to watch them work through post-traumatic stress disorder and their horror, okay? I don’t think it’s such a big thing to ask.

And I guess we’re supposed to know that Dylan and Beka have each spoken to Harper about his condition already, just off-screen. Because it wouldn’t make sense for the writers to actually show something so important and imbued with dramatic possibilities? What are these people on?

I give "A Heart for Falsehood Framed" a B-. It has some great scenes, but the way I had to spend so much time thinking about it to justify certain aspects of the episode translates into demerits.

Trance is held captive, while Dylan and the rest of the crew try to uncover the source behind mysterious attacks on cargo ships.

It was like Old Home week for me with Anne Marie Loder and William B. Davis guest-starring. The Trance interrogation plot didn’t do much for me because there was no tension. We knew she was lying to him most of the time. We knew he couldn’t kill her. We knew she wouldn’t tell us much about herself that we didn’t already know. The interrogation scenes in "Forced Perspective" were far more interesting. So it was just waiting for it to be over. Fortunately, the rest of the plot reeled me in.

Check out Dylan’s new attitude. "We have to temper idealism with pragmatism," indeed. Darker, more intense, and with a lot more edge, Dylan doesn’t want to help protect what seemed to be innocent people because he has bigger fish to fry who’d be more helpful to the Commonwealth he needs to build against the Magog. He also doesn’t trust the Inari from the first and decides to give them chances to hang themselves. This uses the threat of the coming Magog well and provides character development. Beka feeling that they have to step in and help the little guy is a bit of a reversal for her as well, yet her reversal is also backed up by her empathy with the freighter pilots, who are doing a job similar to what she used to do and are getting killed for it. Then there’s Harper watching this conversation with utter shock. (And making a Freaky Friday reference. And bouncing his hand on Dylan’s bed in a suggestive fashion as if he has every right to.) It’s great seeing these three in a room together talking for the first time in forever, because they really do have great chemistry.

Nice use of teamwork in this episode, as our crew runs circles around their guests and works together instinctively. (Though Rev isn’t here, since he’s on a retreat. I didn’t even miss him. LaT wonders if perhaps Dylan told him to take some time off and really think about what he’s doing, considering that his penance through starvation in "Exit Strategies" was dangerous to the crew around him. Plus, he didn’t bother to tell anybody he was doing it. You notice that Dylan didn’t look too broken up over Rev’s suffering in "Exit Strategies." He doesn’t have the patience for secrets and self-inflicted pain that endangers his people right now. I like it. There’s no canon support for it in this episode, but it makes good sense to me.)

I love the new bridge, which looks beautiful and practical, a big improvement on the original, which, as LaT has said, looked more like a high tech living room. I read something in a recent Starlog article that said that the beige tones on the former bridge matched skin on film. They had to light everybody in a certain way just for them to be noticeable against the background. So they took advantage of the Magog attack to redesign the bridge for better filming. But I miss the rock ‘em, sock ‘em pilot’s chair. The ship’s exterior also looks more textured and sharper-edged now. And I’m very glad that they took some time over a few episodes with this, when on Star Trek: Voyager the ship was destroyed every other episode and was good as new in the next one.

Great reaction shot from Dylan, as he looks at the new bridge with surprise, awe, and total pleasure. The repair work’s done, it was done fast, and it’s beautiful. Which, of course, pleases Harper. Nice touch that it’s based on new designs developed just before the Fall. Dylan’s "down, boy" to Harper comes out sounding fond and the deviousness he shows in giving his guests free range of the ship to see what they try to mess with pleases me as well as Tyr, who’s now calling Dylan "sir" far more often.

Dylan’s distrust of the Inari turns out to be on the money, as it turns out that they’re being targeted by the Pyrians for being drug dealers. Thankfully, the Pyrians aren’t too obviously a special effect. Considering the shoddy CGI work in "Exit Strategies," I’d wondered how they’d come out looking. As to whether they actually are "new scary supervillians we can add to the ‘people who suck’ party," I guess we’ll see.

And Dylan has Harper building nova bombs for the next time they come up against the Magog. And hasn’t let anyone else on the crew know, not even Beka. Interesting. It would suggest a lot of trust that Harper wouldn’t tell anybody. The fact that Harper was more than willing to kill a few thousand Nietzscheans in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright" might also be a factor in Dylan’s trust that Harper will do this right.

(Though the other Magog-related development of season two isn’t mentioned, and Harper is again written in first season style in this episode.)

Rommie’s warmer and more sensitive to people in this episode, making me wonder if it’s a matter of her personality flip-flopping as she integrates or just different writers at work.

Dylan’s "pep talk" is a fun moment, as is Beka asking why she and the Maru get sent out on suicide missions every time Andromeda gets in trouble with him reasonably responding that if they were suicide missions, she wouldn’t be alive to complain.

Interesting that Dylan’s not wearing his full uniform unless he has to now. Lately we’ve been seeing him in partial uniform or casual clothing when he’s not directly commanding or doing diplomatic work. He’s come out of his recent experiences changed.

And that inevitable breakdown I foresee for him? I think it’ll a beauty when it comes.

So that was the part of the plot I liked. The Trance interrogation sequences didn’t do much for me. She’s a character I like in small doses, so watching her play dumb and innocent for much of the episode as she screwed with her interrogator’s head just annoyed me. She might be telling the truth when she says that her people have seen so much that they get bored sometimes, but who knows? The other member of her kind who started the Inari civil war (or so the Inari claim) does provide an intriguing seed of doubt as to Trance’s intentions, though.

As to the ending, I think that Dylan wasn’t actually saying that he trusted her. As LaT pointed out, he says he makes a few exceptions but didn’t say that she was one of them. He lets her infer that. After all, he didn’t ask her about that other member of her race who supposedly started the civil war, perhaps because he figured she wouldn’t give him a straight answer anyway. I liked it that he let her hang in worry for a moment as he said that he didn’t ally with people who kept secrets from him and he couldn’t trust. Me, I think he’s keeping a careful eye on her.

And the new over the top voiceover for the show commercial annoys me more and more every week I hear it.

Dylan leads members of the crew to a desert wasteland in search of a former government leader.

Dull. So dull. The episode just slowly spins its wheels, going nowhere. No redeeming character bits. A plot you could drive a truck through. Enemies they didn’t bother showing until the last ten minutes. Every "we’re hemmed in a small space while a larger enemy shoots at us" cliche put in. Beka reduced to an "at least we had the adventure" sidekick who uncharacteristically ends up trying to keep the pregnant woman calm in between shooting things. No season arc advancement or nods to anything that’s happened so far this season. No Harper. And Trance loses her tail! It’s gets blown off, why? I liked the tail.

I don’t mind a good shoot ‘em up every once in a while. But this wasn’t a good one.

It starts out well on the Maru with good-natured sniping and a not too burdensome expository exchange. But how long have they been gone looking for Ortiz? Leaving Harper and Rommie alone on Andromeda, I guess, unless Rev’s back from retreat. Great. Leave him with a Magog and an AI who’s told him to buck up and stop whining because she needs him to keep fixing her. Tyr is great in that second season Tyr way, whether he’s asking why they brought Trance (as opposed to, say, Harper, who could snark back and wouldn’t try to fix engine rattling with a hammer, we say) or saying that Dylan might try dressing in something more inconspicuous. Tyr consistently gets the good lines this episode. When we see him at all this episode. It’s a good scene, but the moment we hit the planet, all the oxygen gets sucked out of the episode.

Why couldn’t our cast be the dream team of Dylan, Tyr, Beka and Harper? Because Trance has to be here to make portentous pronouncements and lose her tail. When is she working on a cure for Harper? She’s been on away mission after away mission lately. You’d think she had no deadline, pun intended. If she hadn’t come back from last episode’s spy mission what would have happened? Well, Harper would die. Unless she figures nothing could permanently hurt her or keep her, so it’s no biggie. But is she going to pull a cure out of her now tail-less ass at the last second? Because, you know, actually she had it all along or something?

Ortiz has to be the world’s dimmest person. If she’s hiding out, why have this person who looks like she used to stay right nearby? Have her be on another planet. And why have somebody who looks like you used to? If Ortiz were ruthless and had a cult of martyr-to-be followers willing to sow confusion, it might make sense, but the whole idea of Ortiz is that she isn’t like that. So things only work the way they because otherwise the plot (if you can call it that) wouldn’t work the way it does (if you can call it "working"). And why did it take Dylan so long to figure out? He’s a smart man.

Did anyone see Saphia giving a gun to the terrified pregnant lady and not think that badness was about to ensue? If this is Ortiz’s famed decision-making in practice, the universe shall tremble.

Kind of interesting that some of the people in the Commonwealth never wanted to be there, though. I like that.

Tyr’s out causing chaos off-screen most of the episode and Beka’s shoved to the corner playing sidekick with a gun, so the episode is mostly a dimmer version of Dylan and a too cute and Machiavellian Trance. Though Trance is funny drunk and asking Dylan if he’d like to look at her newly tail-less ass. In response, he waits a beat, then says, "No." I also liked her "either I’m crazy or I’m really dangerous" line.

The planetary sequences are dull and badly lit. The action scenes suck because we don’t see the enemy until the last few seconds. There’s no tension or give and take. There’s no real story because they wasted too much time on the pseudo action sequences. Dylan’s too stupid to be believed here. That about covers it.

We had a mini-"Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way" reunion as Rachel Hayward, Adulasia the metal-haired bar wench there, played Cory here, while John deSantis played Reaper there and Hsigo here. Hayward was very distracting, because I spent much of the episode thinking, "That’s the bar wench from ‘Fear and Loathing,’ isn’t it?" She's great here too, though. It’s the voice that caught at me. In other casting news, Gordon Michael Woolvett’s wife, Michele Morand, and unborn son (precocious kid) make their Andromeda debut. LaT: "Well, at least he married some acting talent." (How many Sam Sorbo digs can we make?)

The writing this season has made me feel bad about having pimped this show all summer. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t regret first season at all. There were some bad and/or annoying episodes, but they usually had good character moments and I felt like the writers were heading somewhere. This season? No. They’re making me dig for the good stuff. It feels like the stories are just being thrown out in whatever order. After giving us bombshells like the coming Magog invasion and Harper’s continuing infestation, they refuse to truly deal with either any further. Did they even think through the ramifications of these two events?

While the Andromeda Ascendant tries to protect a planet from a planet-killing starship, the rest of the crew tries to extract the informant who has information on fighting the planet-killer and get his data. Both missions turn much dirtier and more complicated than expected.

I really liked this one, which was a relief after "Last Call at the Broken Hammer" could have substituted as a sleeping aid. Everybody’s here, everybody’s in character, and events harken back to "The Widening Gyre." Plots A through C interconnect, share themes, and seem to have been thought out. I don’t forgive you for prior events, Ashley and Zack, since of all the writers who should be dealing with "The Widening Gyre," you two are it anyway, but I can say that this was one well-done episode and give you credit for that.

This episode’s funding comes from the School of Hard Choices. Most of the crew is forced to make the kind of life and death decisions that really makes them wish they could go with C, none of the above. Dylan has to weigh the lives of 4 billion strangers versus the lives of 3 people important to him, deciding in favor of the 4 billion. Later, he has to balance worldwide ecological devastation versus the planet and all its people not being there at all anymore, which is an easier choice though a distasteful position to be in. Left on her own after the Eureka Maru takes a hit, Rommie has to make a variety of strategic decisions that ends in her being forced to hold a whole population hostage to reach her objective, because the government of these people is collaborating with the Magog. While we don’t know if Harper understood how close he was to overdose before it happened, part of him has to figure that potentially overdosing himself has to be a easier death than if the Magog spawn become active at that very moment and tear him apart. Tyr is passive-aggressively browbeaten into risking his own life to save Harper’s.

"All Too Human" illustrates how small the crew really is. One might ask why anyone would send a person with a life-threatening condition that can be exacerbated by stress on a dangerous away mission, except that one then has to consider that Harper’s the only crewmember who has the hacking skills necessary for the informant extraction. Likewise, the single working EVA suit thing turned into a problem here, but on a larger crew one person would not be responsible for maintaining and repairing a giant warship, a large freighter, and everything in them. When does he find the time?

Rommie’s great here: kicking ass, snarking, sparking with Kim (guest star Bruce Harwood, who’s great as usual), strategizing on outwitting "the nice men with the guns," and salvaging a mission that had gone to hell. She can be such a bitch, as when she gleefully talks of the power grid going down, and it’s fun to watch. Likewise on her pretending to be Kim’s girlfriend. The moment when she asks Dylan how he could make these kinds of decision all the time every day is wonderful, as is Dylan’s answer that he can’t allow himself to think about all the things on the line because he wouldn’t be able to move if he did. Dylan has many great moments as leader.

At last, we get an episode picking up the pieces left dangling since "The Widening Gyre," with the Magog being off-screen but having a role in this episode’s events and Harper dealing with and suffering from his infestation for the first time since his deathwish in "Exit Strategies" three episodes ago. 13 baby Magog in his guts? Jeez. He’s supposed to take a hit of serum from his inhaler twice a day--and how strange is it that we finally find out the details of this now, so long into the infestation plotline--but the stress of the extraction mission going to hell makes the spawn churn inside him, so he this time keeps taking medicine hits until overdose stops him, putting him into a coma. (Once again, we don’t get to see Dylan or Beka finding out about the overdose or what their reaction was. The writers are still killing me....)

That coma also delineates the limits of Tyr’s recent softening of attitude toward Harper after they were fighting alongside each other and then impregnated together. Tyr will try to stop Harper from committing suicide and he’ll kibbitz Harper’s hand during a card game, but if it comes down to a situation in which one of them has to die, Harper’s on his own with his number up if Harper doesn’t have an advocate such as Rev arguing for him. As engineer, Harper is useful, but Tyr’s life still comes first. He wants to leave Rommie behind for the same reason. Very Nietzschean of Tyr, of course. He takes the EVA suit for himself with very little hesitation and would probably have left with it immediately, not giving it a second thought, if he hadn’t been forced to wait for Rev. In the end, Tyr does risk his life to keep Harper alive--and Keith Hamilton Cobb is wonderful showing Tyr’s horror at having to voluntarily drown to do it ::shiver::--but it’s only after Rev passive-aggressively works on him that he feels conflicted. I believe he means it when he tells Harper that this is the last time he’ll ever do that. In this case, Tyr has to know that Rev will survive, and if the Andromeda picks them up, Rev will be talking about how Tyr left Harper to die. He really is trying to convince Rev that this is a mercy killing, because Rev’s opinion will matter once Dylan brings them onto the Andromeda.

Tyr’s understandably pissed off that Harper’s overdose and the single working EVA suit forced him to these ends, but those two things hardly deserve a death sentence. But that’s Tyr and very in-character, and I find it interesting behavior, though not something I want directed at my favorite character. :::grins:::

Rev’s a sanctimonious bastard with no regard for personal space, as usual. His method of calming down a person infested with Magog larvae is... to pursue that person and touch that person with his claws, even going so far as to grip Harper’s head with both hands, which Harper responds to with a panicked wince before he tells his instincts to calm down because it’s Rev. Rev’s method of dealing with a hypothermic Tyr is not to try to warm him up but rather to stroke Tyr’s bare, quivering chest with his claws. Tyr has a number of great lines lambasting Rev this episode, indicting him for his sanctimony. Rev is calm that the Divine will solve all. Of course, Rev, a Magog, will survive no matter what so he doesn’t have much to panic over. So I may have been happy that Rev passive-aggressively agitated for Harper’s life and horrified that Tyr intended to let Harper die, but I was right there with Tyr as he greeted Rev’s creepy preaching and his "since you’ll probably die, you might want to do this first" attitude with insults and shoves.

Rev’s depiction of The Way and the Divine is intensely creepy. His idea of faith is that you stop all your own forward momentum and trust that the Divine will come up with a solution for you. Here, Tyr provided, which Rev would no doubt see as the Divine working through him. Whatever. The only thing that creeped me out more was him telling Beka in "It Makes a Lovely Light" that "the Divine loves us more during the broken times." So the Divine likes us or tolerates us when our lives are going well, but really loves us when it’s all gone to hell and we’re miserable? Ick. But that’s Rev.

Carter’s secret revealed didn’t work quite as well as it should have, but that’s a small thing. Carter was a great character, well performed, otherwise. I wonder what’s up with Trance’s new gung-ho attitude toward weaponry and military protocol. And what’s up with the spiky hair and corset.

Next week: More Nietzscheans than you can shake a force lance at, and Tyr betrays the Andromeda crew. What, again? And it seems that the crew is split into groups. Again. Still. Whatever. (Is it really so hard to have seven people interacting in a room together? It hasn’t happened since "An Affirming Flame"!) Of course, all of this depends on whether the preview’s accurate, which it so seldom is.

The crew of the Andromeda battles with the Nietzschean Drago-Kazov Pride in an attempt to deliver medical supplies to an ailing colony.

The preview lied. Imagine that! No doublecross from Tyr this episode. Instead, the main thrust is that Dylan’s mental breakdown-to-be is accelerating. (I’m taking a moment to bask, since I saw it coming as far back as April. Basking, basking... okay, I’m done now.) Cheerfully nuts and ruthless Dylan is a dangerous force to be reckoned with, just charging ahead at things, and a lot of fun for the audience to watch. He keeps screwing up the Nietzscheans because he can think like a Nietzschean and he’s willing to die for his mission while they’re not. And they know it.

Dylan’s going gray. It’s a big shock to me, but I like it. If anybody has an excuse, it’s him.

Dylan and Tyr have a snapping, sparking chemistry throughout, the two of them snarking at each other endlessly, such as when Tyr says that they could always sprout wings and use pixie dust to make themselves invisible and fly to get in. Or when he laughs that he’d say something about letting God sort them out, but God is dead, to which Dylan shakes his head and wonders about Nietzsche being such a comedian. Dylan has some great lines throughout:

"I knew there was a reason I hadn’t fired you." (With Tyr cranking his big gun in response as an alternate answer to why Dylan doesn’t dare fire him.)

"Kinda curious what [missile strike number] five is going to feel like, how about you, huh?"

Dylan, after Cuchulain says that now he doesn’t just care about taking Tyr out, now he cares about nailing Dylan too: "That what the universe needs more of: people caring for each other."

Dylan finally gets the story of Tyr’s little field trip to get Drago’s bones, and he’s not happy that this has made the Andromeda a "big, blinking target" to Nietzscheans. Especially since the Drago-Kazov is trying to destroy the relief convoy, endangering the volunteers’ and the billions of disease victims’ lives, just to force Dylan to hand Tyr over. In fact, they released the plague just to bring the Andromeda Ascendant in. Shotboxer made the interesting point that the Nietzscheans’ idea about the Progenitor’s return to lead his people to conquer the universe has Christ parallels and that the concept is usually part of a slave’s religion. We don’t know much about how the Nietzscheans started.... Tyr nails Dylan on the reason why Dylan wants to restart the Commonwealth, and Dylan doesn’t look at all happy about that. Shotboxer and I were surprised that during Tyr’s "you’re trying to reshape the universe to fit you" speech he didn’t tell Dylan that the thing with the Progenitor is Tyr trying to do the same.

I figured that Dylan wouldn’t hand Tyr over to Cuchulain. However, I’m not so sure that Dylan wouldn’t shoot Tyr in the right situation.

Once back on board the Andromeda, Dylan makes it impossible for Tyr to get access to Drago’s remains in a very "how are you gonna defect now, Tyr, huh?" move. "Everything on this ship belongs to me," Dylan says. Wow, has he changed. "I don’t belong to you!" Tyr yells back. Dylan says he can leave at any time... but without the Progenitor’s remains. (For all the fact that he claims they can always leave, when Beka tried it in "D Minus Zero" he told her he’d prompt their enemy to use the Maru for target practice if she did. Which brings up an interesting point: If Dylan really went dangerously over the edge, what could his crew do? I don’t know if any of Harper’s overrides remain after "It Makes a Lovely Light," Rommie would probably support Dylan no matter what, and what might Dylan do to the Eureka Maru if they tried to leave....)

Tyr is near tears as he realizes that he and Drago’s remains are in the hands of a man willing to kill himself and everyone around him in his self-appointed mission. Tyr says that being willing to destroy the base and himself to accomplish the mission lets the Nietzscheans know how far Dylan is willing to go, and that makes Dylan vulnerable. I have to differ with him in that, since the way I see it is that the Nietzscheans now know that "how far" Dylan is willing to go is "all the way," and that has to scare the hell out of them.

Wonder how the rest of the crew will react when they realize how increasingly dangerous Dylan is becoming to himself and others.

Seeing Keith Hamilton Cobb this season and especially in this episode, I have to wonder why the hell he went sleepwalking through season one as Tyr. Maybe he was trying to make Tyr inscrutable, but it just came off as not being able to act.

But, hey, there’s still more to the episode than plot A! In plot B, Beka goes to save a relief ship that was culled from the convoy. After her ship is damaged, Beka is involved in a race against time to repair the Maru before the Nietzschean pilot repairs her ship and blows the Maru away. It turns out that Nietzscheans, or at least the ones in the Drago-Kazov Pride, let their barren women fight. Defective children, such as barren ones, are allowed to live, but they have to spend their lives trying not to bring any more shame on their families than they already have just by being born. But the pilot says that she doesn’t see herself as a homebody mother anyway. I wonder if Nietzschean women ever think of trying to amend the social structure so that they have more power than in just being allowed to choose their mate. I can’t imagine that everybody is thrilled to be a co-wife and just breed for the rest of their lives.

Beka gets to show how smart and tough she is again, as well as proving that she’s a good mechanic in her own right. And her authorization code for the Maru is "Shut up and do what I tell you."

In plot C, Harper is left in charge on the Andromeda in the absence of the two first officers and has to weigh his personal feelings against Nietzscheans and for the missing Beka--whom it’s obvious as usual that he loves dearly--against the good of the mission and the disease victims. Harper sucks as a captain and combat pilot, understandable since he lacks the training, experience, and temperament for those positions, but he asks Rommie for her expertise, a wise move. Though he didn’t do too badly for someone who’d never tried this before, especially since he’s facing impossible odds. It’s a nice touch that before Beka leaves he grills her on whether she’s certain she wants to leave him in charge as she goes to rescue the relief ship.

Rommie’s far snottier with him than she has any reason to be. He’s asking for her experience and judgment, and half the time she’s angry at him for not being Dylan. Which he calls her on, at least. She was also unreasonably snotty with Beka when Dylan left Beka in charge in "The Devil Take the Hindmost." Rommie’s very condescending in general to the guy who keeps her in working order. She should be glad he’s not as vengeful as I am, because as her engineer being treated that way, I’d feel compelled to teach her a lesson in mechanic appreciation.

Harper has no problems with blowing people away, especially Nietzscheans, as has been documented before in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright." His hatred of them leads him to engage the fleet, something Rommie rolls her eyes over, but the fleet would have engaged them whether the Andromeda attacked first or not. After all, the Nietzscheans were there to destroy the convoy and picked off that one ship to draw Beka away, splitting the crew up. It’s blatantly an ambush, after all.

Weirdly enough, when Harper’s considering whether to go at the Nietzscheans in a kamikaze blaze of glory to save the relief convoy, not once does the script have him mention that he’s already under a death sentence from the spawn in his guts, something you’d think would influence his decision. Just last episode, the same writers, Zack and Ashley, remembered that he had that. This episode? Nope. *sigh*

Given the choice of surviving but losing members of the relief convoy or dying and saving every ship in the convoy, Harper goes for certain death and the survival of all the relief ships, though Trance helps him put a spin on the decision to die defending the ships that he likes even better. Go, Harper.

At the beginning of the episode Harper mentions that they could just blow off the 31 billion dying since they’d have to fly the convoy through the dangerous Acheron system, just as he mentions that they could just sell the Heart in "A Heart for Falsehood Framed." I wonder why he keeps playing devil’s advocate when he knows these things are not going to happen. Does he think he’s doing a reality check? Then again, he’s pretty cranky at the beginning of this episode, especially when he’s sent off to repair more stuff. When he’s always repairing stuff.

Harper’s been with Beka for "nearly five years," it turns out. Add that to the about 20 years (probably rounded off) he claimed he lived on Earth in "Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way," consider that Seamus Harper Online says that Beka’s the one who took him off Earth, and you end up at the conclusion that he’s about 24-26 years old. We know from "Exit Strategies" that Rev was with Beka for seven years, so perhaps Harper’s fine with Rev because the Magog Wayist was part of the Maru package.

(We get a voice transmission from Rev but no Rev himself this episode. I’ve heard rumors that Brent Strait has become allergic to his makeup. I hope for his sake that’s not so.)

And I’d like to thank the writers for giving us the Beka/Harper hug. When she gets back, she’s obviously depressed, and he’s trying to be so helpful. Talk? Don’t talk? Go away? What do you need? And she doesn’t want to talk about it but needs him and doesn’t want him to leave, so she grabs him around the neck in an affectionate, manly hug and asks him to stay.

Two great episodes in a row. Can I stand it? Do I dare hope that they’ve hit their groove this season? Well, Rhade, or a descendant of Rhade’s, is showing up next week, so maybe hoping isn’t unreasonable. Then we get James Marsters the week after that.

A message from Dylan’s 300-years-gone fiancée leads the Andromeda to a world populated by the descendants of the Andromeda Ascendant’s and the Starry Wisdom’s evacuees and his fiancée’s, who have established a Commonwealth-like government. It looks like a done deal that the planet will join his Commonwealth and help him fight the Magog, but we know better, don’t we? Especially after we find out that one of Gaheris Rhade’s descendants is in charge of the Home Guard....

It’s ironic that this episode was aired right after I got the news that Kevin Sorbo and Tribune intend to make the show more Dylan-centric and less ensemble-driven, because all of the ensemble scenes sparkle, while some of the Sorbo with anyone other than Steve Bacic as the Rhades scenes feel totally off. For example, the scene of Dylan meeting Sara’s descendants doesn’t work at all, when it should be this major moment. Maybe Sorbo’s going for shock, but here his shock feels like Keith Hamilton Cobb’s first season inscrutability: like he’s sleepwalking. Yes, the woman playing the Triumvere is awful, but he doesn’t try to work despite her. Though he plays Dylan’s rage over the voting results well. I love his comments that he has no time to waste here and they’ll change their minds once things turn serious, namely, once the Magog come for them.

The failure of what should have been the climactic scene of him fighting Telemachus Rhade isn’t really his fault, though. Maybe the fight would have attained some momentum and drama if sepia-toned scenes of the fight with Gaheris Rhade from "Under the Night" didn’t keep getting spliced in to interrupt it. That original fight had tension, momentum, the feeling of the universe hanging in the balance. This one, you’re waiting for it to be over. I was yawning and sing-songing, "They fight. And fight. And fight and fight and fight." Really dumb moment: Dylan putting down his weapon and Rhade deciding not to shoot. Since when? Rhade’s a Nietzschean. Though the really, really dumb moment is when Dylan banishes everyone, even Rommie, from the bridge so he can meet with Telemachus alone. Of course Beka’s rolling her eyes.

The other flashbacks have their good moments, but they don’t really work either, especially since Kevin Sorbo has blatantly aged onscreen in the last year, making it hard for the audience to accept that it’s seeing Dylan years ago. Besides, I’m not sure how Dylan could have figured out that Gaheris intended to betray him just based on the wrangling over whether he’d be Dylan’s Best Man or not. It’s a bit like Lassie barking and whomever having to figure out from the barks that Timmy’s trapped under a beam in the old, abandoned mine five miles away.

The vote and Dylan’s decision whether to let Rhade hang so he can get the planet’s military support or have the real criminal arrested and not get the military support lack any real tension. Because we all knew that he wasn’t going to get a bigger fleet and a full crew for Andromeda. It would utterly change the show.

Still, ignoring all that, from a story standpoint it’s interesting that Dylan returned to his former idealism here. I mean, as Rommie says, he weighed one man’s innocence against getting a fleet that could help save thousands of worlds from destruction... and he chose to save the one man. Maybe Dylan feels like he has to be more scrupulous since this is a descendant of a man who betrayed him, and Telemachus is innocent. Rommie might not agree with him, but she’d hardly be as vehement about it as Dylan’s crew, whose viewpoints we don’t get to hear. I can see Harper on the topic now: "Okay, so we tossed aside a whole fleet for one guy. I’m sure the fact that this one guy looks exactly like your old best friend has nothing to do with you blowing off the thousands of worlds we could have saved with the fire- and manpower the Triumvere was willing to give us. ‘Cause I know you’re impartial, Dylan."

Harper continues his devil’s advocate role. It’s amazing how he manages to impart unwanted possibilities into the conversation without getting in trouble for it just by being ludicrous and funny about it. He goes ridiculous by saying that the Commonwealth remnant might be peopled by cannibals or killer robots to get a laugh, then says, "C’mon, every single High Guard remnant we’ve encountered has been psychotic, evil, or both." At Dylan’s smirk, he amends, "Present company excluded, of course." And Beka agrees that he has a point. Harper concludes it with "We shouldn’t get all kissy-huggy, smoochy-woochy just because we like the cut of their uniforms." Later, when the Triumvere wants to get Dylan alone, Harper jumps in again, looking completely manic, with a ridiculous scenario of her getting Dylan away so her guards can use mind probes on them. He’s just told the leader of the government hosting them straight out that he doesn’t trust her and figures she wants to get Dylan away for nefarious purposes, yet she thinks he’s "sweet" as well as paranoid. Beka, seeing a perfect opening and unhappy about being split up, follows up with "It’s, uh, been a tough year," and Dylan even sees sense in this and says, "My crew is used to having the other shoe drop, and, frankly, so am I."

Even aside from this, the ensemble made me very happy this episode. Let’s see why:

Harper, on watching the Castalian ("fish" people) ships bite the dust: "One fish down. Two fish. Red fish, blue fish... it’s a freaking fish fry."

Beka, on hearing that the Castalians had 5 million casualties in the simulation: "That’s a lot of sushi." Harper almost explodes into his laugh. While Dylan chides her for making fun of their allies, she can’t keep a straight face. Neither can Harper or Tyr.

Harper: "Look, Dylan, if you think Aqua-Man and the Silver Surfer here will help you against the Magog, you might as well start basting yourself with steak sauce now and avoid the rush."
Total incomprehension from everyone on the bridge. Dylan looks to Beka for illumination, but she keeps smiling and says, "I don’t know."
Harper: "Aqua-Man? The Silver Surfer? Didn’t you people go to school? No classical education."

Beka: "I really liked all those Home Guard lancers lined up for my personal inspection."

When the Triumvere, whom Harper thinks is a babe, says she’d like to visit the furthest world of Dylan’s Commonwealth and asks Dylan if he’d take her, Dylan briefly looks at Harper, who gives an "oh yeah" nod and look.

Tyr: "You should never trust any Nietzschean."
Dylan raises his eyebrows.
Tyr: "Except me."

After listening to the complicated masses of elected officials the planet’s Commonwealth has, Harper says, "Give me a nice simple dictatorship any day. Then at least when things go wrong, you know who to hang." Trance ripostes that he’s only saying that because he never lived in a democracy. She thinks that "free elections sound like fun." Harper responds that there’s no such thing as a "free" election. Maybe an inexpensive one, occasionally.... Trance says he’s "cute" when he’s paranoid, so he immediately figures that she’s complimenting him because she knows something. He’s ready to use his hacking skills to stuff the ballot boxes in favor of the planet joining up with them. As insurance. "Hey, it is a time-honored system. It’s an integral part of the democracies I ever read about." Oh yeah, he’s from Massachusetts. ::ducking:: When Trance and Rev sigh at him, he says, "Fine, fine. But I would have made a great king."

In the one flashback I liked, Rhade suggesting that Refractions of Dawn be Dylan’s Best Man instead. Dylan feels that "Best Insectoid Hermaphrodite" doesn’t have the same ring as "Best Man." Playing basketball, Dylan tosses Rhade the ball and asks, "Think you can take me?" Rhade shouts "Magog!" and sinks a perfect basket while Dylan’s head is turned. "Yes," Rhade says as he walks out. Dylan mutters, "‘Best Insectoid Hermaphrodite’ sounds a lot better."

Rommie: "Do you know what it is that I really want?"
Tyr: "An avatar unencumbered by cleavage?" (I laughed out loud at this one.)
Rommie: "A real crew. I used to have 800 lancers stationed on me."
Dylan: "Yes, I can imagine the eavesdropping potential."
Rommie: "I never eavesdrop. I monitor, for security purposes."

On a shallow note, I loved the Triumvere’s boots and found it interesting that the weird, crinkly, wet paper towel shirt Harper wore in "Exit Strategies" looks decent when it’s under a closed vest, as it is here.

In other news, Sam Sorbo still can’t act. And Jamal was sweet, but so stupid that it didn’t hurt as badly as it should have when his foolhardiness and refusal to follow orders get him blown to pieces. Then again, he’s one of Sara’s descendants, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he turned out to be an idiot. ::ducking:: And Nietzscheans, as genetically modified humans, are "homo sapiens invictus."

I give "Home Fires" a B, with most of my good will coming from how good Harper, Beka, the Rhade(s), and Tyr were. Too much of the Dylan-without-them stuff felt weirdly hollow.

But how much cooler would it have been if Tarazed had been a Commonwealth splinter that had nothing to do with Sara or Dylan and they had harsh things to say about Dylan’s new crew and operating procedures? Oh well.

Next week: Here comes James Marsters, looking lean and dangerous and knife-like. And being bare-chested, it seems. A follow-up to the events of "Harper 2.0." No braid on Beka. Harper in a tank top in one scene. Promise of good stuff here, people.

The Andromeda hosts a conference of allies to the Commonwealth, while Harper is lured by unknown evil forces.

There was more Harper in this episode than you can shake a stick at, in some scenes two Harpers at once, though he only had about 30 seconds of screentime with any member of the crew aside from Trance. Yes, Gordon Michael Woolvett fans, you can see his tattoo, a yin/yang symbol on his left upper arm, due to a lot of time spent in the tank top. Which is nice, since they had James Marsters covered up in something awful except for that one bare-chested scene when he was talking to Beka. Now I shall redeem my lapse into shallowness with an in-depth look at "Into the Labyrinth" itself.

Theme of our episode: temptation. What are you willing to sell to get what you want? Our tempters are Satrina Leander and Charlemagne Bolivar. Our targets are Harper, Dylan, and Tyr. Let the games begin.

The actress playing Satrina was bad. How bad? I couldn’t believe her for a second. Maybe her character was supposed to be blatantly dishonest and uninterested in the men she was supposed to seduce, but I find it hard to believe that she was supposed to be that blatant. And she pronounces "archivist," which she claims to be, two different ways, with the last one sounding so goofy and uncertain that I wanted to throw something. I almost died laughing at the way she said "carrot." Was it supposed to be sexy? Combine the terrible acting with the tiny costume and the character climbing all over every man in sight, and I am afraid to see what upcoming female characters in this increasingly Tribune-esque show are going to be like.

Still, it’s funny to see Harper turn deer in the headlights when someone comes on to him. Of course, Satrina makes Adulasia (from "Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way") look demure by comparison. Though at least Adulasia was played by a good actress. But we’re talking about the trashy and blatant Satrina. The open-mouthed kissing, the straddling... the sticking her hand right through Harper’s gut to remove seven of the Magog larvae via phase-shifting, something the bounty hunter Jeger could do. She has a deal for Harper. If he gives her the data archive from "Harper 2.0," she’ll remove them all. Of course she double-crosses him, though he expects that and double-crosses her too with a Trojan horse virus file named "Sea Biscuit." Then her offer involves him giving her the archive and joining her in her employment by the Spirit of the Abyss, the Entity, leader of the Magog, also known as "Ol’ Red Eyes" and "Mr. Tall, Dark, and Scary, the Living Lava Lamp." I’m sure you can guess by whom the Entity’s known as the last two. She promises Harper everything he wants--"health, power, even love"--if he enters the Entity’s service. Interesting that "love" is in there....

Harper’s tempted by the power, corrupted by it, once he gets to try phase-shifting for himself. But the thought of being used and betraying everyone he cares for sets his head back straight, and he sabotages Satrina’s phase-shifted Magog swarm ship, cutting the phase-shifting power from her and her four colorful assassins, whom she’d set to killing the diplomats on board. Though it turns out that she didn’t need the phase-shifting implant in her data port after all, since she can do it herself and gets away. In the end, Harper says that he was hoping someone else could make his problems go away for him-- Rommie, Rev (!?!), Satrina, Trance --but now he’s going to work on getting rid of his remaining six larvae himself, probably with the phase-shifting/tesseract stuff he learned as a path to start on.

Trance lets him say that he was slacking off by not dealing with the spawn thing himself. But, you know, if I had a disease and knew nothing about medicine, I’d feel perfectly justified in leaving the search for a cure to my doctor. Especially if, you know, my doctor said she was going to work on a cure. That’s not slacking off and whining, that’s leaving my medical condition in the hands of an expert, which I am not.

But it’s a good thing that he’s decided to take looking for his cure into his own hands if my suspicions about Trance are correct. I’ll get back to that later.

Harper gets a major workout in this episode: looking for the archive he hid from himself, mouthing off, fending off Trance’s anger that he’s looking for it, trying to duck away from Trance, scheming, mouthing off, making out with Satrina to get a better computer analysis fix on how she does her tricks (poor boy), working out phase-shifting and ways to stab Satrina in the back, saving the day. His ruthlessness when getting the upper hand on Satrina and enjoyment of her pain is fun to watch. At one point he’s talking to an interactive program whose icon looks and acts like him, only to the infinite power. I’m still wondering what was up, pun intended, with the explosively manic HarperConstruct’s hair. Harper’s reaction to meeting himself like this is "Now I know why people hate me." Of course, having two Harpers gives RealHarper the opportunity to make comments like "Bite me, me," "Now I tell me," and "I told myself to watch out for you. I wish I listened."

We find out that the All Systems Librarians are a secret society, waiting for the return of the Commonwealth. Though how secret they can be when they have their huge insignia on their wrists or a finger is a mystery. Anyway, they’re secret agent librarians. Harper’s reaction is pretty much the same as ours.

After "Harper 2.0" Harper hid the archive in a sun, which explains "H2.0"‘s shot of Trance’s vaguely sun-like tattoo as a show of the "safe place" UpgradedHarper figured out to stash it.

I wonder if the phase-shifter implants disappeared along with Satrina and her Crayola crayon team of killers. Even shorted out, they’d be useful to Harper. Maybe someday he’d even be able to figure out a way to shift different parts of himself at the same time so he could take the larvae out himself instead of having his whole body being shifted at the same rate and having his hand not be able to enter his stomach. Though how he deals with the voices of the Entity and the damned that putting the implant in provides as a side effect, I don’t know.

Both Harper and Dylan refuse to succumb to Satrina’s blatant charms. Or maybe her voice and inability to speak got on their nerves. It did on mine. Is English this woman’s first language?

Dylan tells us that Rev thinks that Dylan should sign on more crew. Interesting. Rev wasn’t onscreen during this episode at all.

James Marsters as Charlemagne Bolivar is pretty much a more debonair version of Spike sans accent. I wanted to see more of him purring his way through some tasty lines as he sparks off of Dylan and especially Tyr. Charlemagne and Tyr have some priceless exchanges, especially their first one, which I would quote wholesale except that it would take too much transcription on my part. Bolivar’s Pride had different priorities than the Kodiak did in their breeding. "Instead of breeding for such obvious attributes, your people should have concentrated on more important things: treachery, cunning, proper table manners." He offers Tyr entry into Sabra-Jaguar via marriage to one of his sisters right before mentioning that he heard that somebody had taken Drago’s remains from the Drago-Kazov Pride. That scene could have been longer, especially since it amused me to watch the two of them check one another out and enjoy each other’s company.

When Charlemagne’s talking to Dylan and lays out his combined Pride’s pros and cons for becoming a member of Dylan’s Commonwealth, the cons are that they’re treacherous, they’re enemies with Drago-Kazov, and they’ll spend all their time reminding Dylan that he’s genetically inferior, but the pros are that they’re treacherous, they’re enemies with Drago-Kazov, and they have the largest fleet in the known worlds.

My friends and I wondered how Elsbett could be pregnant now if she told Dylan she was sterile. My next thought was that becoming fertile again was one of the first orders of business for her after she decided to marry instead of kill Charlemagne Bolivar. Or she lied to Dylan about being sterile, with her people only harvesting some of her ova so her line could continue while leaving her still fertile. Even if she had been sterile when she slept with Dylan, Charlemagne made that remark about needing to verify if the kid was his to let Dylan know that he knows about their one-night stand in "The Honey Offering." And to let Rommie know too.

I would have loved a long discussion between Charlemagne and Dylan as to why Dylan should allow the Sabra-Jaguar Pride to join the Commonwealth, but we don’t get that. We also don’t get much of Dylan’s decision-making process into deciding to let them join, a decision he likens to the Allies allying with Joseph Stalin. At the end, Sabra-Jaguar becomes a part of the Commonwealth.

Charlemagne also has a lovely scene with Beka, who lounges on his bed, eats his food, and threatens him. I want James Marsters back again. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.

The episode raises some interesting questions about Trance, as she becomes openly threatening to Harper when she thinks he’s going to retrieve the data archive and get a look at her secrets. "You know, since we’ve got a little time here we might as well find a good way to spend it. I know, I’ve got this really great game. It’s called ‘Harper tells Trance everything so she can save his miserable life.’ Would you like to play?" Later: "Harper you are my best friend, and because you are my friend I really need you to listen to me. Do not look at the archive." The look on her face and her intensity inspire Harper to say, "You know, Trance, I liked it better when I thought you were harmless." Her answer? "Me too." Yeah, I imagine she was much happier with him having no idea that she could be threatening.

The "thought you were harmless" discussion comes up after Harper tells her, at her prompting for what he remembers of his time with the archive loaded in his brain, that he remembers a long-lost civilization worshipping a purple goddess that looks a lot like her. When she’s still trying to deflect, saying that maybe they just liked purple or that his memory isn’t as good as he thought, he attempts to recreate the hymn of worship he sang to her in "Harper 2.0" that bothered her so much. She knows that he saw something then, and she now knows that he still remembers it.

Why is this important, class? Because I’m starting to wonder if it’s not so much that she can’t remove those larvae as that she won’t. When Harper says at the end that he’s going to work on getting rid of them himself, she answers, "That sounds complicated. When do we start?" When do we start? She was supposed to have started on that way back at the end of "The Widening Gyre." At least that’s what she said she was going to be doing. At one point in "Into the Labyrinth" when he takes a hit of his serum and is obviously suffering from the feel and taste of it, she has this "whatever; you’re annoying me" look on her face. My conclusion? She could save him but she won’t. Best friends? She seems to see him more as a cute puppy that she hopes she won’t have to put to sleep but wouldn’t be too sad about if she had to. When he says at the beginning of the episode that "God hates me," her answer is "Don’t take it personally." Hmmm. I also wonder if Wardrobe put her in the black jumpsuit that she wore in "Pitiless as the Sun" while she was tormenting her interrogator as a cue to the audience.

Even more wondering comes in when you see Satrina pull out seven of the 13 larvae, and they look like albino tangerine slices and don’t lash out at him on the way out at all. Maybe she surprised them, I thought. I expected something with tentacles and suckers and things that would be woven into Harper’s organs and react violently to removal and spew out toxins as they ripped him apart. At least that what Trance (and Ashley and Zack in the SlipstreamWeb BBS) told us. Bone-headed mistake, or more support for the idea that Trance just isn’t bothering to cure Harper? Maybe the larvae and their toxins are phased at the same level as Satrina, and they tried to poison Harper but couldn’t because they were not in the same phase. But they were in the same phase as her and didn’t attack her. I doubt things that young and small have the brainpower to listen to the Entity’s commands and so not attack. Outlook hazy, try again.

And why did he give Trance the data archive after everything she’s said to him lately? Does he still trust her? Or... is it really the only copy of the archive at all?

And when is he going to tell everybody what happened? Given the killing spree by the phase-shifting assassins, I don’t think he’ll be able to keep it secret for long. Is the interactive HarperConstruct still bopping around the matrix or did Harper take him down? How self-aware is it, anyway?

Once again, the action scenes sucked. Really sucked. I also wondered if Dylan and Rommie got a mild lobotomy recently. Dylan might as well not have been here this episode. Though I loved him immediately knowing once he sees Harper in the duct that something is up. But why couldn’t Rommie, who’s everywhere at all times, tell what Harper was up to for much of the episode? Why couldn’t she tell that Satrina was phase-shifting? If Harper had privacy mode, or overrides engaged, that kind of thing needed to be made explicit in the text. If the quarters usually have privacy mode engaged, it’d be nice to know. Because, otherwise, Harper suddenly asking for privacy would be suspicious all by itself. (Is that his quarters or a machine shop he spent so much of the episode in? I’m not sure because the show never says, though I’m leaning toward that being his room due to the bed in there. Though it could be a cot for when he overworks. Arrrgh.) Rommie says that Satrina keeps disappearing off her sensors and doesn’t seem very worried about that. She remembers Harper asking her about phase-shifting but doesn’t connect that up to Satrina in any way. If I were her, and Harper suddenly blinked off scans, as he must have at the end of the episode, I’d worry. There weren’t enough diplomats to distract her that thoroughly. And Dylan didn’t worry about any of this, nor did he worry when Harper and Trance took off in the Maru.

Was that the mess hall or Dylan’s room Dylan left Satrina, whom he didn’t trust, sitting alone in?

Dylan: "And you explained it to them politely."
Beka: "I even used one-syllable words."
Dylan: "Ah. Condescension."
Beka: "That’s four syllables."

Beka, on the Castalians: "Yeah, yeah. Let one little president get assassinated, and you never hear the end of it."

Rommie, when the party-crashing Charlemagne calls her captain "Dylan": "Captain. Hunt." With a sharp emphasis on the "Hunt" in case he’s too stupid to get it.

Charlemagne: "My aide-de-camp’s fault, no doubt. I’ll make sure he’s properly shot."

Harper, when Trance refuses to help him find the archive: "I’m still a little murky on the ‘can’t’ versus ‘won’t’ dichotomy."

Harper, saying that he wants the archive so he can get rid of his larvae: "It’s a going away present for someone I’d really like to go away."

Dylan: "...and in case of an emergency, the ship can be piloted from the gunnery nose."
Charlemagne: "Emergency? You mean in the event that the command deck crew is reduced to a fine red mist and splattered across the walls in a bloody mural."
Dylan: "That would qualify, yes."

Rommie’s very cute as she warms up to her topic of what a tesseract is and how it can be used to Harper, who may be one of the few people who will get what she’s talking about.

Harper’s message as he leaves to get the archive: "Anyway, I’ll be back before you miss me. Because who knows how long that would be. I’ve gotta rustle up a load of parts, and with me gone there’s a much lower risk for a major diplomatic incident."

Beka, on the Castalians again: "I could say the fish people were floundering," interrupted by stern look from Dylan, "but that would be wrong."

Harper: "Well, you know, not only am I the president of the Liar’s Club for Men, I’m also a member. But you should know that, because you’re the chair of the lady’s auxiliary, and I use the term ‘lady’ loosely."

Harper: "Forget it. I’m done listening to you. Did you really think I’d play your stupid little games, huh? Tempt me, scare me, kiss me, snare me, give me a few convenient targets to try a little bit of god-like power on and boom! all of a sudden I’m Seamus Harper, foot soldier of the Apocalypse. Well, not me, honey. I’m nobody’s pawn."

Harper: "It figures. I finally meet a girl who says she wants me and she’s a dimension-shifting hellspawn from the outer darkness."

I give "Into the Labyrinth" a B-, and I’m only being that nice for all the Harperage. This episode should have been better.

When Dylan and Tyr rescue the last survivor of a royal family destroyed in a civil war, they’re named co-regents and obligated to get him on his throne alive. Of course, they have different ideas on how to accomplish that.

It was an interesting episode but somehow lacking much spark. If you need a quick primer on the differences between Dylan’s philosophy and Tyr’s philosophy, this episode spells them out. As expressed here, Tyr sees ruthlessness and treachery as the first recourse, whereas Dylan will try to compromise and negotiate first, then bring in the heavy artillery and start the slaughter if that doesn’t work. The discussion they have at the end has that usual fun snap and crackle, but most of the episode has them expressing their way of thinking to Prince Eric instead of one another. Prince Eric, played by a younger Matt Damon clone, is one of the thankless roles of all time, since he’s a sullen brat who whines most of the episode.

As seen here, Tyr and Dylan are just about the only crew on the ship. Rommie shows up as a guest star, while Trance has two, short "move the plot along" scenes. Beka zips by with a gun at the beginning of the episode. Harper and Rev are nowhere to be seen, though for Rev that’s the usual this season. It’s enough to make you think that the bridge is uninhabited. Why is it that the show’s writers can’t have most or all of the ensemble interacting together in one room more than twice a season?

Rommie has some of the best scenes. When Dylan threatens back the cutter that’s making demands of him by detailing the awesome might of the Andromeda Ascendant, Rommie has this cocky, elaborately casual pose that screams, "I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I could blow you to hell in three seconds." Later, when Dylan calls in the giant battle ‘bots Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee to decimate the snipers and Eric says, "You’re just like Tyr!" Rommie, who’s controlling the Dee and Dum, answers, "No, I’m better."

Ruthless Dylan and Rommie are one of the few kicks in this episode. They take total advantage of their greater firepower. We see season two Dylan again, who backs up his idealism with heavy artillery and iron-fisted pragmatism. As a greater bonus, the episode makes it very clear that he slaughtered Eric’s enemies, since we get to see the bodies lined up on the grass.

Of course, that greater firepower lets a lot of the tension out of the episode. We know that nobody involved has the power to harm the Andromeda Ascendant or its crew. The biggest thing at risk for Dylan is that he can’t get Eric on the throne as an ally against the Magog. That keeps the stakes very low, especially since we don’t care much about Eric in his own right. We know that if Tyr pulled his double-cross off he wouldn’t dare let the nobles he was dealing with pick Dylan off because he has to know that if he survived a sniper attack that killed Dylan, Rommie would figure he’s involved and slaughter him herself. No way Dylan’s death would get him control of the Andromeda Ascendant.

Hey, is there anyone who didn’t immediately realize that the one surviving retainer was the guy who sabotaged the royal ship’s slipstream drive? Anyone aside from Dylan, Tyr, Eric, and Trance, I mean.

I give "The Prince" a C. I might have given it a slightly better grade if I hadn’t waited a month and a half for a new episode, then gotten this. It’s better and more interesting than "Last Call at the Broken Hammer." Then again, a root canal is better and more interesting than "Last Call at the Broken Hammer."

Next week: Revolution! Guns! Angst! Harper! Angsty Harper with a gun! It looks like we’re going to Earth, folks. Yee-haw!

The Andromeda is drawn into a Drago-Kazov/Sabra-Jaguar war because Sabra-Jaguar, through Charlemagne Bolivar in "Into the Labyrinth," is part of Dylan’s mutual defense pact. Meanwhile, Harper gets a message from his cousin on Earth saying that they heard about the strike against the Dragans and would be willing to provide ground support if the Andromeda helps free Earth from the Dragans. Dylan sends Harper and Rommie to mobilize the resistance on Earth, promising to send help in the form of an air strike if the rebels can get the Dragans out into the streets.

Of course, only Harper actually cares for Earth, which is considered just another slave world of no strategic importance to the rest of the crew. Dylan seems weirdly smug and superior when he tells Harper that he and Rommie are it as an advance group to Earth. Harper is not enthused. He’s supposed to rally people to stick their abused necks out to the Dragan Nietzschean oppressors on a promise that Andromeda will nail the Dragans after the ship finishes its space battle with the fleet? But Dylan promises, and Harper and Rommie go.

While the rest of the Andromeda crew fights and gets led into a Dragan trap by a stupid Elsbett Mossadim, who took matters with the Sabra-Jaguar fleet into her own hands, -- she was much smarter than this in her first Andromeda appearance in "The Honey Offering" -- Harper and Rommie rally the resistance, give them a few weapons, set some mines, give some tactical advice... and sit things out, watching people die. Rommie just gives advice and watches surveillance. She lends no help. Makes me wonder if she didn’t want anyone to know she’s an android specifically so they wouldn’t ask her to contribute more. She also looks annoyed when Harper goes out once to save his cousin’s life.

Due to Elsbett sticking their necks in the trap, Dylan can’t get to Earth as he promised. Did he think that he could finish off the Drago-Kazov fleet on a timetable? What happened to "No plan of battle survives the first engagement"? Anyway, there will be no surgical strike from the air. The resistance is on its own, and shall be crushed. The episode emphasizes that Dylan values his word, but apparently his promises to his crewmates don’t rate as high. He does send Tyr in a small slipfighter to tell Harper to call it off. Tyr, a Nietzschean, which has to be insulting to a group of people fighting Nietzscheans. Tyr, Dylan’s weapon master, to make sure the choice of sending Tyr of all people makes no sense. Harper’s like, "Uh, how do I stop the rebellion now? And by the way, people are dying out there because we made a promise." Okay, that’s my paraphrase. One of the real quotes is a heartbroken "But Dylan always keeps his promises." Tyr doesn’t volunteer the slipfighter’s services in helping the rebels.

Everybody’s going to die, and Harper feels that it’s his fault for rallying them to begin with.

Harper begs his cousin to call a halt to things somehow or at least come with him into space. They’ll lose and they’ll die. It’s pointless. It turns out that Harper’s parents died protecting him from a slaver raid. He sees his father’s defiance as an act that got them killed and an example of when you shouldn’t fight. His cousin says he can’t leave or stop fighting, he’s part of this. Harper is made to look like a total coward. Usually he’s a character who prefers to talk his way free, but if he has to fight he’ll throw himself at enemies much bigger than he is. About the only threat that backed him down during the first season was the Magog, and they’re his personal demons. I kept waiting for the hard Harper to come out this episode, but it never happened.

Harper then leaves Earth with Rommie! Dylan finally gets his fleet free and is all "I’ll take this as a victory, let’s go to Earth." Except that the rebellion has been brutally crushed and he’s far too late.

Harper, looking very small and in a lot of emotional pain, figures his cousin is dead. Instead of even bothering to offer sympathy for Harper’s guilt and dead, Dylan pours salt on the wound by handing him a transmission Brendon got out about rebellion and living free and all. Dylan says that other slave worlds are starting to revolt. Unspoken is that they will no doubt be crushed too. So, Dylan says, Brendan won, and so did Harper. Here’s Harper, probably thinking that if he hadn’t brought up helping Earth none of this would have ever happened and his cousin would still be alive, while Dylan’s all "Hey, how about those slave worlds?" Then he leaves Harper to grieve.

Thank you, Dylan. Thank you so much. Thank you for giving Harper and Earth some hope by sending two people to do nothing, then failing to arrive. Thanks for failing to see that as having done something wrong. There is no excuse for doing it so half-assed. There is no excuse for putting it on a split-second timetable. Dylan had delusions of godhood that didn’t pan out, that killed millions of people, then didn’t even have the decency to apologize. I wanted to kick Dylan in the head.

And I still can’t believe Harper didn’t fight and I definitely can’t believe he took off. Yeah, he’s a main character on the show and can’t stay on Earth, but running off to leave his cousin to die is not what he would have done. We’re given no onscreen support for this aside from cowardice, which is out of character. If the authors had made Rommie coldcock Harper and carry him away it would have made much more sense. [ed. note: I found out on a SlipstreamWeb forum that a scene of Rommie threatening him if he didn’t get on the Maru and saying that she couldn’t bear to lose him here had been filmed but cut for time. Arrrrrrgh.]

Now I assume that we shall never hear of Earth again, since nobody but Harper cared to begin with. With no strategic importance and any ground support crushed, Earth will be left to itself.

Dylan has some good moments, like when he says to the Dragan general, "You didn’t talk to Cuchulain about me before you executed him, did you?" But his cheesy 80s track suit is distracting as all hell. Plus there was this smugness about him throughout--"Earth doesn’t matter." :::"I’m Captain Terrific" smile::: "Unless we make it matter."--that not even having millions of people die because he made too many promises breaks.

My dad, who doesn't even like Harper: "I would never trust Dylan again. He's not even human."

Gordon Michael Woolvett is great as Harper throughout, trying his utmost to sell his script. He’s always acting and reacting. Harper’s story about him, Brendan, and Isaac is subtly done yet powerful. His initially halting but slowly building speech to rally the rebels is really well done. "Singapore... Johannesburg...." Harper wants to believe that Dylan will come in time--it’s Dylan--yet he can’t entirely believe and it kills him to have to tell the rebels with such certainty that their backup will arrive. All of that comes through.

Beka gets to show off her stuff, and she does it without the braid extension. Hearing her trying to soften Rommie’s "Earth is just another slave world of no strategic importance, so why should we care?" for Harper was appreciated. Brendan is good, very effective, and the scenes between him and Harper really give the feeling that these characters have history together. Tyr is excellent... and more sympathetic to Harper’s plight than Dylan is! Did they switch brains? My favorite Tyr moment has to be his reaction to Elsbett’s attempted seduction. Elsbett is ballast here. And do we have to look forward to having a seductress of the week on the show now every time we have female character show up?

The exterior shots of Earth are mostly bad, but the underground warren, which looks like it was a subway station once, the Bostonians live in is a well-realized, skanky environment. Yeah, we now have canon reinforcement of Seamus Harper Online‘s assertion that Harper is from Massachusetts. Check out the American flag in the background in some shots. The people look legitimately dirty and downtrodden.

I give "Bunker Hill" a B-. It was suspenseful and I cared about Brendan and the rebels and Harper. The episode would have gotten a higher grade if not for Coward!Harper and EgoWritingChecksHeCan’tCashAndNotSorryAboutIt!Dylan.

Next week: Time travel, alternate realities, and the crew in jeopardy. Someone will go, someone will be saved, someone will be changed forever, lots of someones will wear weird costumes.... Harper’s Magog infestation goes into overdrive. Big changes for Rev and Trance.

As Harper’s infestation takes a turn for the worse, the crew faces distortions in time and space.

Robert Hewitt Wolfe sure does a great swan song, since "Ouroboros" has action that’s well done for the first time in a long time balanced with great character moments and momentous changes. Except for a few small things, the episode left me very happy.

We bid an official farewell to Rev Bem, who’s been MIA for most of the season anyway. Poor Brent Strait must have had a major problem with the makeup because he couldn’t even don it for his final episode, instead providing a voice dub for another actor in the costume. A "Dear John" hologram message lets us know that Rev, his faith broken, is leaving the Andromeda crew to go walkabout and find himself again. Or something. And he apparently didn’t bother to do any research into a cure for Harper’s infestation the way he’d promised to. It’s not terribly surprising that Rev is all platitudes and no action after all.

Harper, understandably, is upset. Another promise to him broken. (As Dylan had--by necessity and stupid planning--broken his promise to help Earth rebel against the Drago-Kazov Pride last episode in "Bunker Hill," costing millions of people and probably Harper’s cousin their lives.) Since Trance doesn’t seem to be working on a cure either, it looks like it’s all up to Harper. Explaining why he’s upset to Dylan, who went after him after he stormed off the bridge, he gets hit by another attack by his larvae, and this time the medicine isn’t making them settle down. Dylan is panicked and obviously feeling helpless watching Harper’s pain and shouts out a code red for immediate medical aid.

Trance confirms that the larvae are now immune to the medicine. Harper has a week to live before they hatch. The poor guy, obviously at the end of his rope, still has to do the work for everybody by demanding to go to Sinti to get Perseid help. He gets Dylan to promise to kill him if the Magoglets start to hatch.

The Perseid Höhne returns to the show, this time with an assistant, and he’s excited by the opportunity to work on a machine that should manipulate strings and tesseracts (since Harper intends to try to expand on Satrina’s tesseract technology to remove the larvae using the implant from "Into the Labyrinth"). Having an interactive subject like Harper is great too. Harper finds their glee inappropriate--obviously--but can’t argue with the results. Höhne and Rekeeb’s input is bringing the machine to completion faster.

Rommie is upset at the thought that they might be forced to mercy kill Harper. As she and Dylan do some repairs--since Harper is otherwise occupied--she tells Dylan that she may have started out thinking that the Maru crew was untrustworthy and "unprofessional," but she never had an engineer as close to her as Harper is. In fact, she doesn’t think she ever had a crewmember as close to her. Dylan says that they’ve become family, "even Tyr." Rommie is regretful, saying that they shouldn’t have deviated from military detachment, making me wonder how she’d react to Harper’s death. Dylan says that it’s far too late to change things. "They needed us, and the truth is... we needed them. They’re all we have."

Moments later, Dylan suddenly finds himself 300 years back in time as the Andromeda Ascendant faces the Nietzschean ambush. When he gets back to the present, he’s no longer in the same area he was before. His first thought is that he may finally be cracking from the strain of having lost everything he’d known, with the latest stressors of Rev’s departure and Harper’s death sentence being the final straw. Yet he disappeared from Rommie’s sensors for a while and had come back at a different part of the ship.

Rommie suspects that Harper’s machine might be responsible, but it hasn’t even been completed or started working yet.

While still working on the machine in machine shop 17 with the disturbingly giggly Perseids, Harper sees the door open and an obviously confused Tyr walk in. Bare-chested, Tyr gives the impression that he’d just come out of the bathroom or something. He’d walked through the doorway expecting his bedroom to be on the other side. Being Tyr, he grabs Harper by the scruff of his neck and demands to know what he’d done.

The next thing they find on the other side of that doorway is open space, which, as vacuum tends to do, tries to suck them out of the ship. Harper manages to save Rekeeb from sliding out, getting a major déjà vu moment since he saw himself doing this at the beginning of the episode while the Magoglets were partying in his gut, while Tyr deliberately lets go so he could pull Höhne inside and shut the door. Sure, it looked like Tyr had risked his life to save Höhne’s, but he probably just wanted to get the doorway clear so he could close it. Thinking things like that probably lets him sleep a just Nietzschean sleep at night.

Hearing about the incident, Dylan’s really upset, because machine shop 17 is at least 50 meters away from the ship’s hull, making the whole thing impossible.

Harper’s machine was spindling and mutilating time and space even before he finished it. Or, rather, after he finished and used it in the future.

As time/space distortions are opening up all over the ship and Sinti, Dylan and Rommie struggle to get to the bridge, Trance and Beka face spontaneously appearing Kalderans on the Maru, and Harper, Tyr, Höhne, and Rekeeb get ‘ported around the ship then threatened by some High Guard officers from 300 years ago. Tyr, whom the officers target for being Nietzschean, splits off to run and do battle with them while Harper and the Perseids try to find machine shop 17 and dismantle the machine. Höhne had set robots to finishing it in their absence. Oops. Well, it’s not like he knew this would happen.

Harper, getting random attacks from the spawn all the while, has to rally the Perseids, who are now wondering if all of this means that everything is predetermined. Dylan, separated from Rommie, really gets upset and commands the doorway to open to the bridge. Good try, guy. When he meets up with Rommie by random chance, she lets him know that she sees the pattern to the distortions, so they manage to find the bridge at last and get the ship away from Sinti so the distortions would stop spreading there. Beka is saved by her future, horribly-scarred cyborg self. Trance trades places with a Trance from that future after Future Trance Warrior Princess tells her that things had gone very wrong, and this was a way they might make things right. Beka trusts the haughty, non-purple Future Trance not at all but consents to follow her to the machine shop, hoping that Trance’s luck will lead them right.

Höhne dies after Harper and the Perseids are literally dropped into the engine room. If Rekeeb had helped Harper pull Höhne up onto the catwalk instead of whimpered and cringed, maybe they could have saved him. But Rekeeb didn’t. Höhne’s hand slips off Harper’s shoulder and then slides out of his grip, with Harper almost going over the railing and falling to his death with Höhne.

After showing up in the Maru and getting shot at by Kalderans, Harper hands Rekeeb a gun and tells him to help defend himself. On their next ‘port they run into Beka and new Trance. Harper happily accepts a hug from Beka but turns his gun on the dread-locked warrior princess who tells him that if he wants to live, he’ll follow her.

Finally they find machine shop 17, right after Dylan and Rommie do. The machine is done. Dylan is all "c’mon, use it," but Harper says that Höhne‘s death makes things more complicated. If they used the machine to try to cure Harper, Höhne would stay wrongfully dead. If they destroyed the machine, making sure it couldn’t ever be turned on, Höhne would live and scary Trance would be replaced again by cute, purple but still Machiavellian Trance. All Harper has to do is destroy his only chance at a cure. They also have to decide soon because the stresses of the day have worsened Harper’s condition and left him minutes to live.

Rekeeb gets tired of listening to them debate it and takes matters into his own hands by threatening them with the gun Harper had given him to defend himself against attackers. He wants them to destroy the machine to bring Höhne back. Tyr and an attack of invading Magog attack stops the standoff by distracting Rekeeb and letting Dylan disarm him. After much cathartic shooting of the Magog by the entire Andromeda crew, the attack is over and it’s decision time.

Dylan puts the decision into Harper’s hands, a hard burden in general but far worse for someone who’s weak and sick. Harper decides that Höhne, being a genius and far more important than him (Beka immediately refutes that) and his friend, should live. He can’t go through a cure that would cost Höhne’s life. He’ll destroy the machine. Himself(!!!!). Dylan, perhaps trying to make him change his mind, reminds him what will have to be done if he isn’t cured and the eggs start to hatch. Tyr interrupts to say that he, not Dylan, will mercy kill Harper because he made a promise. Yep, Dylan gets subtly pounded on the promise thing again.

But as Harper turns back to shoot the machine, Future Trance turns it on, removing the larvae and settling things permanently. Also making sure that she doesn’t get sent back to the future.

When Harper comes to, he’s depressed that his salvation resulted in Höhne’s death. Rommie says that all he can do now is earn it. So, what are they going to do with the machine?

Dylan has a talk with the haughty Trance Warrior Princess, saying that at least before he felt that his aims and hers coincided. He wonders why he should trust her now that she’s an unknown quantity with a self-announced goal to stop things from leading to a supposedly horrible future. He asks how saving Harper achieves her goals. She says that it didn’t, it might have even made things worse, which leads me to infer that in her timeline Harper died. She did it because Höhne’s a stranger and Harper’s her friend.

Even with all the action, we get to see plenty of great character moments. Dylan looks lost and obviously feels helpless in the face of Rev’s departure and Harper’s deteriorating condition. When Harper crumples in front of him, he helps him lie down and actually puts the medicine atomizer right to Harper’s mouth for him, trying to do something. Listening to Dylan’s panicked muttering here is interesting. In the scene in which he warps back 300 years it’s obvious how much he misses these people. No wonder he’s reduced to loudly trying to command doorways and time/space distortions to do his bidding. He passive-aggressively tries to get Harper to use the machine with his eyes and that "you know what I’ll have to do," which isn’t admirable since he’s the one who put the decision on Harper in the first place, but maybe he never thought that Harper would actually be willing to die to get Höhne back. It was really nice to hear Dylan acknowledge that his new crew has become family to him.

Beka is concerned and ferocious in the defense of her self-made family, and Future Beka kicks ass. Lisa Ryder portrays the two Bekas as different people who come from the same source and conveys a great deal of emotion in Future Beka’s brief scene. Laura Bertram also does great work as the two Trances, with purple Trance being sweeter and ditzier and obviously not very happy with what she turned into. Future Trance’s haughtiness and mostly bared breasts in their leather bustier already annoy me. I really miss the purpleness and the now long-gone tail. With Rev also off the show now, the crew now longer has anyone all that alien looking. But at least she can fight, though she better not be able to fight too well.

Tyr’s scene in which he says that he’ll mercy kill Harper since he promised it is very emotional. It’s obvious that he’s become very attached, and he looks hurt when Harper tells him not to enjoy killing him too much. Even so, it seems that Tyr’s emphasis on having promised Harper something is also a jab at Dylan. Multi-layered and nicely done.

Rommie’s snarky and protective, though perhaps I better amend that by saying that Android Rommie is. Android Rommie is becoming more and more her own person, as evidenced by the ridiculous blue wig she’s now wearing. But I can deal with the wig if the show follows through on the thought that she’s becoming more autonomous from her ship self, perhaps going through a teenage stage of rebellion.

Harper is excellent, prickly and in pain and cracking jokes and kicking ass and trying to be brave and sacrificing himself. And saving his own ass, since everybody who promised to help him welshed. Gordon Michael Woolvett has a lot to carry here, and he makes it look effortless. A nice rapport is shown between him and Höhne to support the later assertion that Höhne was Harper’s friend and Harper would be willing to die for him. Despite Harper’s cynicism, there’s a kind of hopefulness to him, as shown in the scene where he says that through sheer will he intends to shape the future and in a later scene that humans don’t give up. He retains his sense of humor as a shield in bad situations, such as the contortion he does to illustrate what the machine might do to him if he screws it up and is twisted into an "abstract painting. ‘Harper Descending Staircase.’" (And I love it that Höhne chuckles at the sight.)

Some sites have deplored the show’s violence, but I appreciate that it’s violence with a purpose and consequences. I believe that The A-Team style of violence, in which everyone gets out of their overturned cars alive and uninjured and nobody’s seriously hurt despite all the punching and shooting, is far more harmful to the audience.

And how glad am I that the show didn’t cynically hold back on a resolution to poor Harper’s infestation until May sweeps? Very, very glad. He’s alive and deloused! Whoooo!

Trance: "‘The darkest places’? I don’t like the sound of that."
Harper: "Me neither. I say we track him down and drag him back here whether he wants to come or not."
Tyr: "He’s a free... being. He’s made his will known."

Rommie: "The problem is, I wasn’t programmed or equipped as a science vessel. My expertise runs more along the lines of making things explode."

Dylan, to doorway: "Oh, come on! I am getting sick and tired of this cut and paste ship! Okay, here’s the deal: you will open onto the command deck, and that is an order. On three. One. Two. Three!"

Harper: "I don’t believe in destiny, I don’t even believe in density, except in the hands of Perseids. It’s a compliment. I believe in Seamus Zelazny Harper, I cogito, therefore I sum. And I sum to cogito that damned machine out of existence. Capisce?"
Höhne: "I do. I actually do. You seek to defy fate through a sheer act of will."
Harper: "Yeah, baby. You better believe it. A man makes his own density."
Höhne: "Destiny."
Harper: "Yeah, that too."

Rekeeb: "Your human tendency toward violence--"
Harper: "--pales before my human tendency not to give up."

Beka: "You can see probabilities, right? Glimpse into the future?"
Future Trance: "Sometimes."
Beka: "Good. Then you know what’ll happen if I find out you’re lying to me."

Dylan, on mercy killing Harper: "Harper. If we destroy this machine, you know what I’m gonna have to do."
Tyr: "What someone will have to do. I made him a promise. I’ll keep it."
Harper: "Thanks. Just try not to enjoy it, okay?"

Dylan: "Oh. Well. That’s a change in a way."
Future Trance: "What?"
Dylan: "Honesty."

For its masterful blend of great characterization and nicely performed action sequences, "Ouroboros" gets an A-. I docked it a few points from how stupid the Kalderans still look, my wariness of the new Trance, and annoyance that the crew would be willing to let a family member die to save Höhne and then make it even worse by putting the burden of the decision on Harper, who’s been sick and stressed for months.

Now lets hope that, having shown what it can do while working on all cylinders, the show doesn’t turn into the Kevin Sorbo Action Hour as Sorbo has been suggesting in interviews on and off.

Next week (well, this weekend by now): Dylan hijacks a cruise ship to escape from attackers and teams up with a poor man’s Beka clone. Argh. But I’m still hopeful that there will be more to the plot, since "Pitiless as the Sun"‘s preview looked like all Trance but actually spent most of its time in a more interesting plot involving the rest of the crew and gave us the wonderful Dylan/Beka/Harper conversation and introduction to the new bridge.

"Lava and Rockets" ::cringing at the name:: had three plots going on. Of those three:

Plot A: On the run from killer mercenaries, Dylan commandeers a tour ship and kidnaps its pilot. He gets ever more out of character as the plot goes on, culminating in the audience having to ask who this naked guy in the bed is who replaced our regularly scheduled Dylan who doesn’t throw everything he cares for aside in favor of impressing the chippie he’s having a fling with.

Plot B: Rommie and Tyr ride out in search of Dylan to rescue him and snipe at one another almost the whole time like the two bitchiest poodles in the universe. Lots of fun.

Plot C: Harper is having problems dealing with the new Trance, especially since he’s feeling ever more like maybe she’s the Biggest Bad of all, manipulating them for her secret agenda. Excellent.

The worst thing about Plot A is that it starts out fairly promisingly. Molly, the pilot Dylan kidnaps, is too perky and a lot like a poor man’s Beka but without the edge, yet she’s not brainless. I kind of like her. Then she and Dylan start sucking face at unlikely times, turning Plot A into a poor man’s copy of Speed.

By the time the remains of her tour ship is falling through the atmosphere about to burn up, with Rommie and Tyr fighting to save it, and she and Dylan are making out, I wanted to throw things at the screen. Then they follow that with Dylan and Molly gratuitously post-coitus in bed together--let me take a moment to shudder--as Big Daddy Smooth Dylan gives her a letter of recommendation to the military academy on Mobius. Not that she’s a great pilot or engineer, but maybe Dylan feels guilty about destroying her ship and career. But giving it to her after a bout of sex just feels smarmy and high-handed beyond belief, like it’s her payment for putting out. It can’t get uglier, I thought. Oh, was I wrong. He could get Molly to the academy in 24 hours, but instead lets her convince him to take her on a three-week cruise. Using the Andromeda Ascendant as the cruise