Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda: A Few Reflections

The small-screen space opera Andromeda (2000-2005) went off the air two decades ago. In spite of having a run longer than most of its similarly syndicated contemporaries (it made it all the way to its fifth season) it does not seem to have left much of an impression pop culturally--rather less so than, for example, Xena: Warrior Princess. Still, it had some notable aspects, not least its association with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (like the earlier Earth: Final Conflict--or rather, Gene Roddenberry's Earth Final Conflict--Andromeda was marketed as Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda), one with some basis in that the show did clearly rework some of his old ideas. (Those who have ever happened upon the old Gene Roddenberry-scripted and produced sci-fi TV movie Genesis II know that Andromeda's was not the first Dylan Hunt who, due to his having been placed in "suspended animation" in a situation in which things did not go according to plan, found himself two centuries removed from his time in a post-apocalyptic future where he had to contend with a genetically altered warrior race intent on conquest.)

Of course, if the show did have a real connection with Roddenberry its actual representativeness of his work seems questionable, certainly if one compares this show produced after his passing with what we saw of his work when he was alive, not least the space opera with which he made his name, Star Trek and perhaps especially Star Trek: The Next Generation. If looking at Star Trek many dismissively refer to long-outworn clichés about "space Westerns" the reality is that the show's place in science fiction and pop cultural history is a matter of its marriage of space operatic adventure with the Wells-Stapledon tradition of socially critical, utopian, science fiction--its United Federation of Planets a "scientific World State" on an interstellar scale. (Indeed, this has much to do with the dismissal--the cruel-souled zealots of pessimism who have appointed themselves the tastemakers of the era despising its rationalism, humane values and progressive vision.)

By contrast in Andromeda the "Commonwealth" of which Dylan Hunt is always speaking, and which his fighting to restore is the premise of the series, seems rather a different creation from the Federation. Apart from having the disadvantage of having collapsed and as a result civilization succumbed to a new Dark Age, with all its less happy narrative implications (functioning societies don't fall apart like that), it does not seem to have stood for anything very particular--all as the Commonwealth's whiff of intergalactic monarchism and feudalism bespeaks the prevalence of space opera's penchant for high-tech barbarism rather than any Wellsian vision. So does the Commonwealth's resurrection by an old soldier on the basis of power-sharing by a last-days-of-the-Roman-Republic-style triumvirate--with the impression the more marked when one contrasts this with not just Star Trek but Genesis II. (That work may have had a post-apocalyptic context, but one can see in the scientific PAX endeavoring to "build back better" a civilization something like the members of Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come, with it relevant that its hero was an engineer rather than a military man like Hunt—by comparison with whom Hunt gives the impression of a barbarian chieftain with a little more vision than his contemporaries endeavoring to restore the romanticized glories of a Rome that, certainly seen from the bottom up, was not so glorious. )

I cannot say whether the show's creators and runners deliberately turned their backs on Roddenberry's thinking in favor of something less unfashionable in an increasingly cynical and nihilistic era--the arguments over the show's direction as commonly reported having been different from that in nature. (The emphasis in the show's press was on the battle between Robert Hewitt Wolfe's desire to have the show play out a long story arc over support from other producers for a more episodic narrative accessible to casual viewers, and--to go by producer and star Kevin Sorbo's remarks--a lighter, escapist, "good guys vs. bad guys" bim, boof, pow approach.) Still, however it happened, the divergence from Roddenberry's ideas seems inarguable--all as, unsurprisingly given the behind-the-camera conflicts and changes, whatever thinking they embraced as an alternative never seemed so sharp, so polished, as what we got in Star Trek (and still less, its incarnation as The Next Generation). Indeed, especially as the series progressed there was a haziness about it all, the episodes tending to feel half-made, and even dream-like, not least due to an abundance of hints that never went anywhere (just what is a "Paradine?"), and how what should have been big events never seemed to have any proper weight. (Thus did the episodes tell us that Hunt restored the Commonwealth--in surprisingly short order--but never really made us feel that the characters were operating in the service of a reestablished civilization, all as, of course, the fifth season was one big sideways shift from any main line of the story, straight into a junkyard like so much '80s-era post-apocalyptic B-movie fare, after which the series did not so much advance toward a resolution as slap on an ending and stop.) In short, if you were making J.J. Abrams' often opaque, "mystery box"-packed Lost even more muddled by making it as a space opera with intergalactic sprawl, genuine alien species' and cosmic stakes by way of a cheaper, more chaotic, sloppier, production process, this is what you would get. (A messier Lost--IN SPACE!) In the end the result was a show that, whatever the intentions that may have lain in back of it or the potentials it contained, is better remembered for its oddities, failings and smaller and more superficial pleasures than its narrative successes or its intellectual heft, and even by "cult" rather than mainstream standards has only a fairly slight following today.