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Does Andromeda have a premise?

I'm sorry, it's probably unfair of me to be critical of this show considering how little I know about it. But, I can't help it; this is at least mildly amusing...

If you go to the Premise screen for Andromeda at Global Episode Opinion Survey , where people can rate the episodes from various genre shows, the entry for Andromeda literally says, "This series currently lacks a Premise."

To be fair, I guess there's a possibility that that means that a Premise has not been typed in for the site yet. GEOS went through a minor facelift recently, so perhaps, the Premise for Andromeda was lost and what we're seeing could be a default message. On the other hand, I checked several other shows, and they all have a Premise entry. Maybe, the show really doesn't haven't a Premise.

Seriously though, I was just bored enough this weekend to watch a few minutes here and there of a two-part storyline that I think is their season finale. I can tell there definitely is some kind of "premise" there that I'm too unfamiliar with to understand. But regardless of the "premise", I think the goal of every episode is to have more flashes, bangs, explosions, strobe lighting, and annoying music than all the episodes before. It's like they're in a contest against themselves to see if they can continually out-do their own spectacle. At this rate, episodes about three years from now will consist of nothing but bright light and noise, eliminating the need for a script or actors altogether.

Again, that's probably unfair of me. But, if you look at the ep ratings at GEOS, you'll notice the last two seasons are in decline compared to the first two, with season four being only slightly better than three. So, even those that watch must be getting disappointed. Season five already looks questionable considering the pink-clad blondroid we've seen pictured here in another thread.
 
NinjaSquirrel, I'm not a big watcher of the show, I've only seen pices of a few episodes, but, I think I can give you a bit of an answer.

At the beginning, it seemed to be a battle of Good vs Evil, to pick up the pieces in the universe, sort of thing. It seems that at that second half of Season 2 (or maybe it was midway through season 3) the show lost it's way, and became about Dylan, Dylan, and Dylan (I think he became the Producer or something during this time). The current commercials on Scifi Channel, have the tagline:
New enemies, New Allies, and a new Destiny, so it appears they are attempting to give the show a direction again with this latest season.
 
I used to watch relative regularly in the first season and a half and then progrssively fell off their bandwagon.

In the beginning they had a show runner who had the show set up to run with a long term arc that involved a couple / few separate threads and ideas. It *definitely* had a premise back then and looked like it had potential to be pretty interesting.

Then somewhere during the second season the suits at their syndication company (with the full backing of Sorbo, from the sound of what I read) decided that that was too hard for an audiance to follow, and fired him. Then they upped the bimbo factor of their female characters (who were quite attractive women), and turned it into "Herc In Space" with an adventure of the week, and much less interesting character development.

I haven't watched it for more than a few minute in quite a while, but my impression is that it is now not inaccurate to say that they don't have any more of a premise than a typical (not even a "good") sitcom.
 
The show started out being about a man trapped at the edge of a black hole's event horizon for a few centuries being stuck in time while civilization fell thanks a big ass war. Eventually he was pulled away from the event horizon by a salvaging ship and found the huge civilization he was a part of to have been utterly destroyed and he vowed to rebuild that civilization. One man trying to make a difference.

But then, that was too boring or something to TPTB, so a big multigalactic civilization was rebuilt very quickly completely off screen and the show instead changed to that one man having "adventures," which was mostly an excuse to have as little a story arc as possible and an excuse to bring in weeky female guest stars for him to flirt with to no end. Last season they tried to do something that was supposed to be like a story arc, but most of it made no sense at all requiring a viewer to just accept huge gaps and leaps in logic and thought in attempts to force the plot to make sense.
 
Not to mention that Dylan has suddenly become older than the universe and can influence its fate. That's quite a promotion. Does he get dental with that?
:rolleyes:
 
The premise of the show came from an undeveloped idea of Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek). Majel Roddenberry and Robert Howitt Wolf developed the story. It was to be an long story arc about the rebuilding of an commonwealth after the captain of a starship (Kevin Sorbo) had been in suspended animation (for a lack of a better description) for 300 years at the edge of a black hole.

It was a pretty good story until as stated above the suites especially Kevin Sorbo, decided that we fans were too dumb to follow a good story and really only wanted an space going action show. So almost overnight the Commonwealth was reorganized and the saying in our household became Hercules in Space.

To accomplish this amazing feat, Robert Howitt Wolf was replaced and the stories became the stupid it can be solved in a one hour time slot type. :mad:
 
I noticed that Majel Roddenberry is still considered an Executive Producer. I think her name is the first credit to show up at the end of an episode. If it's so bad, I wonder why she still supports it, or better yet, I wonder why she doesn't try to step in and make it better. Shouldn't she want to protect her husband's work?
 
At the time the changes were made there was talk that Majel was not happy with what was going on and was going to leave the show as well. I am not sure what the whole story was, I stopped paying attention to the show at that point. Any time I happen to see some of it, I'm glad that I stopped.
 
You know what I don't understand?
How come a "PoS" show like this got renewed every year?
Who watches?
They're finishig the fourth season and got green-lit for a fifth?
I watched the first and in the middle of the second I was so sick and tired of all the explosions, sparkling fire, fights, sparkling fire, Harper, sparkling fire, Kevin "This is my SSSHIPPP" Sorbo, that I literally gave up.

And series like Crusade, Firefly, Odyssey 5, Jeremiah light years better than Andromeda don't get the same luck.

It's hard to swallow.


Almir
 
Believe it or not they were renewed for three more years after the second season. I guess only SciFi pulls the rug after it makes promises. But it figures the good stuff (Farscape) gets pulled and the bad stuff stays. :mad:
 

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