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Has anyone seen the new FOX show "SPace: Above and Beyond" ? This is gonna be a hit. Good quality Sci-Fi. I think what I like the most about it is that it shows what life might be like on Earth in the future. Most shows only deal with life in outer space. I also like how they have taken our military(here in the U.S.) and transformed each section into a space outfit. If you havent seen this show check it out on Sunday evenings at 7 on FOX
41 responses total.
Yeah, I agree- it's pretty cool. :)
Guys? As for science, this is the worst -- not even a nod to the idea that these are in space -- they have created a monster: a modern military show transplanted into space by the simple dodge of changing the names. Do they hint that there is more than one protaginist country aside from the USA? No. Do they alter the tactics or dialogue to even nod at the idea that the show isn't taking place inside a gravity well, surrounded by oxygen? Nope. Is this show going to fly? Depends on what "keep your nose up" means when there's nor "up" or even a horizon.
I ended up liking _Space:A&B_, despite myself. While, _Babylon 5_ is definately "Science Fiction", this show is definately "Sci-Fi". If I want interesting characters, good plots, moments of inspiration, and good science and proper effects, I'll watch B5. OTOH, if I just what to watch something blow up, I'll watch SPACE. :-)
I had hopes for -Space- when it first came out, but my hopes have been declined after the most recent episode. So far the characters have been very 2-dimensional, and the plot is a bit hazy. I wont stop watching it yet, I think we need more good science fiction on TV. I just hope this show can become a good show.
Well, they blew it on the spaceship parts. (Funny, that always seems to happen.) The first episode was otherwise good.
Very weak, very unimaginative.
It seems to be slowly developing. It took Star Trek TNG two years to get on track. Let's let them get through season one before we blast them too badly.
Here's a major quibble: They've made a big point of modeling the structure of "our heros" on the current Marine Corp. Well, currently, and I think it's *reasonable* to assume that it will be the same in the time period of this show, when you train someone to be a fighter pilot, that's what they are, a fighter pilot. All the time. When they arn't fighting, they should still be flying patrols to keep their skills honed. You don't have them flying missions one week, and then doing ground assult, "grunt" type duty the next week. People are trained for specialties and then that's what they do. Current air force pilots, Naval and Marine aviators, fly *every* day when they are on duty. Even in peace time. It's such a demanding skill that it has to be practiced every day or you quickly become rusty. Espescially carrier pilots. Another problem: Their renditions of their carriers are still modeled on naval vessels.(They even vaguely look like the ships from Star Wars.) They still can't shake the concept of an "UP" and a "DOWN". They have this big complicated nifty looking structure up on top for the bridge. They might as well put a big sign their that says: "Command staff here. SHOOT HERE." This is the same mistake Star Trek made. The reason that naval vessels have their bridge up high is so that they can see to pilot the vessel, and in the times before radar, so they could see the enemy. Curve of the earth and all that. The higher up you are, the farther you can see. But there's no reason to do this on a starship. Since you're not actually looking out, there are no windows, and all your outside views are due to remote sensing anyways, you should put your C&C under as much physical shielding as possible. The Enterprise's bridge should have been buried in the dead center of the saucer section, not right up on top where the crew can be easily wiped out, or suffer the most radiation.
I'll second that, thought I would agree to observation domes on the outer surface of the ship. It should be noted that the battle bridge in ST:TNG and Auxiliary Control in the old Trek *were* buried inside the ship. The UP and DOWN thing gets to me, too. Arrrgh! If the ship spends long periods in freefall, it should spin. If most of the time is spent accelerating, then UP should be toward the front (skyscraper layout) with an observation dome at the top *and* way at the bottom, with the bridge perhaps a few levels under the forward/top dome room. In the case of a nonspinning (mostly accelerating) carrier, fighter support facilities can go on extensions a la _Galactica_, except there might be three or four of them, equally spaced around the hull. For a spinning carrier, the best place for the flight deck is in the center - that's the part that's moving the most slowly. Should be much easier to land on one of these than on a sea-going aircraft carrier. Match speeds with the mothership, fly in gently, match spin, gentle push toward the elevator platform with attitude jets.
Cant's see Space: A&B very well on my TV. I saw the commercials which dcid little to impress me, and reminded me of the Channel/Fireball combo in Magic (cheese), but after viewing an episode of the show, the plot seemed to be half decent.
I thought the pilot was kind of weak, and haven't happened to watch since. Too many "stock" bits in the plot... just like a John Wayne war movie. OTOH, I almost fell out of my couch laughing when the Marine drill sargeant turned out to be the same actor from "Full Metal Jacket"!
Somebody on this show reeeaaly likes Johnny Cash.
When are peole goin to learn not to listen to country music?
Hopefully by the time we have Air craft(er space craft) carriers in space.
Does the Sci Fi channel actually rerun old episodes of BatttleStar
Galactica. (Even if they do happen to be on at the same time as S: A &
B, ie difficult to determine which one to watch.)
The Sci-fi channel definitely owns the rights to Battlestar Galactica, because it was played incessantly, every night at 8, for the entire first year that the channel was on the air (and there are only 18 episodes!)
And when that got old, they got the rights to Galactica 1980. There was a brilliant move, eh? >8)
Has Space: A&B gotten any better yet ? I gave up on it over a month ago and haven't heard anything about it since.
There has to be more than just 18 episodes of galactica. Are your sure? Or are they so bad it just seems liek there were more?
18 episodes of original Galactica sounds about right. It's actually less, I think, with several two-parters each counting as one episode. I don't know the exact count off hand. Space A&B has gotten worse. The Marine pilots aren't even flying, 'cept that one time they flew an enemy aircraft back to the enemy homeworld.
Battlestar Galactica only ran one season. I think the episode count was around 15 or so.
I remember hearing the number 18 episodes for Galactica, but that was counting the two-parters as one. So I think it's a little more than 18 hours of tape.
As I remember it:
1. The pilot, and later shown in theaters. 3 hours, interrupted near the end
by Jimmy Carter's middle east peace treaty. The theatre version was some
2 hours long, commercials accounting for some of the extra.
2. "Lost Planet of the Gods" (The pyramid episode) 2 hours
3. Some goofy wild west episode, 1 hour.
4. A prison colony episode, 1 hour.
5. The ice planet episode, 2 hours. (This one never made sense; why not just
go around the bloddy thing?)
6. They went somewhere to buy seeds (1 hour)
7. Not sure what this one was. (1 hour)
8. "The Living Legend" (Commander Cain and the _Pegasus_) 2 hours
9. "Fire In Space" 1 hour
10. "War of the Gods" (Count Iblis) 2 hours. At the beginning of this, they
find the wreckage of a large ship, big enough to be the _Pegasus_. This
never gets confirmed, however, despite their going back there near the
end of the episode.
11. and 12. Two not very memorable or important episodes, each 1 hour. One
of them featured some king of rollerball-type sport.
13. They find this ship containing a family in suspended animation. This was
a 2-hour episode, shown all in one night the first time. We are
introduced to Terra, the Eastern Alliance, etc. They capture an Eastern
Alliance destroyer.
14. The Eastern Alliance guys, Baltar, and a bunch of other bad guys break
out of the prison ship. The E.A. guys recover their destroyer and get
away. (1 hour)
15. They follow the destroyer into Terran space One of the fighter pilots
lands on "Terra", they stop a nuclear war, and discover that "Terra" is
not "Earth". (I think they were leaving this open for some flexibility
in producing the next season.)
16. A memorable battle with a Cylon Base Star (tm). It ends with a barely
received audio of the 1969 Moon Landing.
Next season: I don't know exactly how many, but they were simply God-awful.
The next season was the "We don't have the big bucks anymore for all the big sets and all the space battle FX, so we're just going to drop them in present day california with their flying motorcycles." right? Your comment to number #5 above: "This one never made sense", could very well serve as the *theme* of BG. The one with the ship on fire: "Put on your helmets and open the hatches you *Morons*!". All sorts of contrived plot complications becuase they depicted space as if it were an interstate highway system, rather than a 3 dimensional volume with travel in any direction possible. Dumb, dumb, dumb, and dumber.
I don't remember anything about the show, but I remember wondering why they didn't take some Cylon parts, and build some Spylons, programmed to infiltrate the Cylon war machine and mess with its software. Never apply a hardware fix to a software problem.
On a more sophisticated note, I felt they seriously underestimated what a race of cybernetic beings would be like. They insisted on portraying them as always having more-or-less human form to make them more palatable to the drooling, err, viewing audience. For instance, the cylon ships shouldn't have been vehicles that cylons rode around in, there should have been cylons who actually *were* ships.
Sounds rather like a more recent SF show, with living creatures as spaceships. >8)
Re #26:
And the ships should have been kept airless. However, in the book, the
Cylons were living creatures.
Re #24:
Space (or at least hyperspace) as Interstate Highway System sounds more
like Babylon 5's jump gates. Speaking of which, _Galactica_ contained *NO*
accounting for dealing with interstellar distances. No where was it hinted
how (or whether) interstellar travel was accomplished in any reasonable amount
of time. Was that minefield that they went through in the movie supposed to
be a wormhole?
(The book mentioned hyperspace engines, and had the minefield surrounding
the planet.)
According to TV guide:
Christmas Eve finds the 58th in dire straits; its
transport vehicle, damaged in battle, is hurtling
uncontrolled into enemy territoryand the pilots
must struggle to stay alive no power...
Ahh, so a ship is *moving* with *no power* (presumably with no thrust,
either). They might get something right yet. 'Course, with no power, there
should also be no gravity without spin. I wonder how badly they're going
to screw this one up.
Well, they've come out with a comic for the Battlestar series... (and
ignore 1980.) {_eCo}rZgh
Space Above and Beyond has done a wonderful job on haedware. It has no idea about plot or continuity, however.
Or good music (Johny Cash? What the heck are they doing playing his
music?) or the science, or good writing, et cetera...
I personall like S:A&B in spite of a truly bad title. I've only seen a few claustrophobia, cockroaches) Still, I think it has great promise, and you all ought to give it a season to find itself.
You'll have to admit it could use a lot of work.
I really enjoyed it at first myuch the same way I did Earth2...but the story line has just kinda fizzled....for me anyway
Sheesh. You all sound disappointed about the show. In one of the responses way up there, someone likened the show to a John Wayne war movie. I happen to like John Wayne war movies, so the comparison does not detract from the show at all. The two complaints that I heard the most is lack of character development and bad science. If that is what you are looking for in a show, then this is definately the wrong show for you. You should either keep watching the soap-opera-esque Bablyon 5, or turn off the TV and read a book. :) I think that S:A&B is trying to be a real simple show. It is offering you a bad guy, a good guy, and shoot 'em up plots. It goes a little beyond that in trying to keep the general overall show story line going, but not much. I liked Classic Trek, Battlestar Galatica, Knight Rider, and other Glen Close shows (I think that is the name of the producer for BG & KR.) for the same reason. All of these shows fulfill the desire for the short-story space-opera type genre that I grew up on. 'Sides, I usually get to watch less then 3 hours of prime-time network television a week. There need to be shows like S:A&B on for people like me. I find it really hard to keep a hash table of previous shows in my memory so that I can understand the references made. (Shows like Bablyon 5 come to mind. <g>)
But *why* does the science have to be bad? It's not as if anyone is advocating that this show be a weekly lesson in physics 101. Just that, the ships and other equipment should appear and behave, to the best of anyone's ability to determine it, the way they would appear and behave if these events were real.
Glen Close is an actress. Can't think of the name of the producer of Battlestar Galactica, but Donald Bellisario (of Magnum PI and Quantum Leap) was one of the under-producers.
That would be Glen Larson. <robh is embarassed to admit that he knows anything about BG at all>
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