Customer Reviews

Andromeda - Season 1 Collection

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The first season of andromeda is a bit of a disappointment. It doesnt have too many episodes that can really 'hook' an audience but if you bear with it just to see the character developments you won't be let down. It doesnt take until the end of season one where the lead characters really start to show who they are and give life to themselves. The Season finale was also a really great story I think out of the first season that was my favorite. The only thing I don't like about this show is how the production company releases the DVDs. I prefer a complete DVD collection of the whole series not the 'collection 1 of season 2' and so on. I guess the company does it this way so people can buy their favorite episodes instead of buying the whole series. I recommend waiting for the series collection to come out before buying if you are a die hard Sci fi fan as I am. Here is also a season one run down list of episodes with brief plot lines so you can better see if this is for you or not before spending the money.

episode 01. Under the Night 2000-10-02
Captain Dylan Hunt and his ship the Andromeda Ascendant are rescued by the Eureka Maru, an opportunistic salvage ship, after being trapped in the event horizon of a black hole for 300 years.

episode 02. An Affirming Flame 2000-10-09
Dylan and the crew of the Eureka Maru agree to join forces and become one team aboard the Andromeda Ascendant as they set forth on his mission to restore the Systems Commonwealth.

episode 03. To Loose the Fateful Lightning 2000-10-16
Dylan (Kevin Sorbo) inadvertently gives a group of child warriors power to destroy a solar system.

episode 04. D Minus Zero 2000-10-23
Beka (Lisa Ryder) and Tyr (Keith Hamilton Cobb) square off against Dylan (Kevin Sorbo) for leadership of Andromeda during a dangerous face-off with an unknown enemy.

05. Double Helix 2000-10-30
Captain Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo) must save the Andromeda from the Nietzcheans, who are trying to persuade Tyr (Keith Hamilton Cobb) to help them destroy the ship and rebuild his Nietzchean life. His new life would include a wife to carry on his
lineage.

06. Angel Dark, Demon Bright 2000-11-06
Dylan (Kevin Sorbo) is faced with a difficult decision when Andromeda slipstreams back in time -- days before the climactic battle of the Nietzschean Revolution where the Commonwealth was defeated and the Nietzschean Alliance was destroyed.

07. The Ties That Blind 2000-11-13
Beka's (Lisa Ryder) con-artist brother unexpectedly shows up claiming to be a devout Wayist making the Andromeda a prime target for Restorian attack.


episode 08. The Banks of the Lethe 2000-11-20
Finally, after 300 years and a black hole keeping them apart, Captain Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo) reunites with his true love, Sara (Sam Sorbo).

episode 09. A Rose in the Ashes 2000-11-27
With their communication with the crew of the Eureka Maru completely cut off, Dylan (Kevin Sorbo) and Rommie (Lexa Doig) are forced into exile on a prison planet and must befriend fellow inmates to attempt any escape.

episode 10. All Great Neptune's Ocean 2001-01-15
Tyr (Keith Hamilton Cobb) and Rommie (Lexa Doig) are framed for the assassination of the Castalian president (Allan Morgan).


episode 11. The Pearls That Were His Eyes 2001-01-22
Beka Valentine (Lisa Ryder) receives a distress call from her beloved Uncle Sid (John de Lancie), but to her disdain realizes that he has become Sam Profit, a big business tycoon.


episode 12. The Mathematics of Tears 2001-01-29
Andromeda (Lexa Doig) encounters her damaged sister ship, the Pax Magellanic, that leads the crew of the Andromeda Ascendant on an eerie mission.


episode 13. Music of a Distant Drum 2001-02-05
A crash landing on a strange planet leaves Tyr (Keith Hamilton Cobb) with a complete loss of memory and a mystery crate to protect from not-so-brotherly Nietzcheans.


episode 14. Harper 2.0 2001-02-12
Harper (Gordon Michael Woolvett) finds himself overloaded with information when a dying Perseid (Mike Desabrais) transfers data into his brain.


15. Forced Perspective 2001-02-19
Dylan (Kevin Sorbo) is taken captive and forced to admit that he killed the Mobius leader and overthrew the Mobius government more than 300 years ago.


16. The Sum Of Its Parts 2001-02-26
A humanoid robot (Matt Smith) visits the Andromeda crew, helps them fight off a culture of organized machines and learns what it means to be a living being.


episode 17. Fear & Loathing in the Milky Way 2001-04-09
Trance (Laura Bertram), Harper (Gordon Michael Woolvett) and their former employer Gerentex (John Tench) are unwilling partners on a wild ride to find a valuable artifact.

18. Devil Take the Hindmost 2001-04-16
Rev Bem (Brent Stait) gets a call from a Wayist friend (Mark Holden) in need of his help to save the Hajira and its settlement, Serendipity, from being taken over by slavers.


19. The Honey Offering 2001-04-23
An arranged marriage between two rival Nietzschean Prides puts the Andromeda Ascendant in danger when Captain Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo) agrees to transport the bride (Kimberly Huie) to the wedding.


20. Star-Crossed 2001-04-30
Rommie (Lexa Doig) falls in love with a surviving android (Michael Shanks) of a destroyed ship, only to be betrayed as he turns out to be the ultimate enemy.


21. It Makes a Lovely Light 2001-05-07
Beka (Lisa Ryder) jeopardizes the crew when she takes a mind-altering drug while attempting an exhaustive piloting mission that could bring Dylan (Kevin Sorbo) to his long-lost home planet

22. Its Hour Come Round at Last 2001-05-14
Andromeda's (Lexa Doig) memory of her current crew is wiped out when an old core personality is accidently re-installed.

Great characters, great special effects, great music, and pretty good stories. Andromeda is a very fun show to watch. I love the intro/theme to the show, especially the second season's. Gene Roddenberry shows usually have cool voice intros with the themes, like in Earth: Final Conflict (which had possibly the best intro ever). Gene Roddenberry can't miss! First Star Trek, then EFC, and now Andromeda. All great. (Well except Voyager -- haha, I hated Tuvok -- worst, most boring character ever invented.)

As for the DVD set, what more can you ask for. Anamorphic widescreen, 5.1 sound, and extras on top of extras. The TV spots are awesome and the ADV previews are good too. It's a huge box that has a dominating presence in your DVD collection. I love the box, with its large pictures on it, it's like owning artwork. It's a great waste of space, but what a beautiful waste of space it is.

The one main complaint for the first season I have is that sometimes they can get FAR too sappy/lame. Some of the things Rev Bem says, for example, will make you want to cringe. Same goes for Trance, she can get preeetty lame, too. There are some very lame, lame, LAME episodes this season! Barf worthy! But there also some great ones. The season-ending cliffhanger was among the best anything television has ever produced. As far as other characters go, Sorbo's Captain Hunt is amazing, as is the character of Tyr, and Harper is hilarious ("Trust in the Harper, the Harper is good").

I am now into the second season and the lameness I was talking about has thankfully been diminished greatly, showing that the writers/producers have learned some important lessons from the first season, and improved. So far the second is even better than the first. And Rev Bem looks different now, haha! It reminds me of how Worf's appearance changed over time on TNG, same with Quark and Odo on DS9.

If you love Star Trek, you cannot possibly not like Andromeda. I also very highly recommend checking out Earth: Final Conflict -- an overlooked gem of a sci-fi show, which is also presented in glorious widescreen. I swear these things feel like movies.

This really is brilliant SciFi. I thoroughly enjoyed series 1 box set. The best treat was I thought that Voyager was the end of an era. I'm so glad to find another series that matches or exceeds the StarTrek series.

Studio: Please release some more full season box sets. Buying the 5 individual collection sets is way too expensive. I agree with the other reviewer -- just release series box sets. We don't need these 2 disk collections.

One last comment. The packaging is ok. But why do these box sets need to be so big. Take a leaf out of Fireflies box set. They use super thin individual disk boxes. The other annoying thing is that with these big multi-DVD boxes the disks actually fall out of the clip during the long transit to Australia, resulting in scratches on the surface. The FireFly box on the other hand hold the disks in place super firmly.

Congratulations on an outstanding series everyone involved in the production.

First I'll review the show, then the box set itself.
The Show:
From the first few moments I knew this show would be enjoyable. The production values are pretty magnificent. The CG battles are easily on par with feature films. The makeup could use a lot of work, but the sets are pretty solid. The characters are definitely unique. My favorite being Tyr (Anasazi, out of Victoria by Barbarossa) the Nietzschean mercenary and perfect foil to Kevin Sorbo's Dylan Hunt. The plot seems to meander quite a bit in this first season, with more filler than I like, but when it works it works spectacularly. The season finale is some seriously tense television.
Overall I love this show, dispite its flaws. It seems to think it has the epic scope of Farscape, DS9, or Babylon 5. And at times it reaches those heights, but not consistently. At its heart it is a character driven action show, and on that score it delivers by the boatloads. If you're a sci-fi nut like myself you'll find little not to like. Personally I see it as both contemporary and companion to the show Farscape.

The DVD/set:
As with all ADV products I've run across, the sound and picture quality are magnificent. That's never the problem. The box set is pretty dry on the extras I like to see, namely interviews and behind the scenes footage, both with the cast and the writers. Though there is a lot of info on the background on the world, I'll give them that. Again, as with other ADV box sets (*cough* Farscape *cough) you're truly better off waiting for the box than buying each "collection" individually. Unlike the FS boxes however, you can buy this and still afford food that month.

Overall: The show got better in the 2nd season, and it could use more interesting extras, but its still a great and underrated show.

Well, first of all, Season 1 of Andromeda has been considered to be "brilliant" by fans of the series who also feel that later seasons are lousy. So if you held off on buying the five 2-disc volumes, this is your chance to own the complete first season for about half the price.

I also purchased the 2nd season on individual volumes and enjoyed those as well. I wished ADV would have done this in the first place.

Kevin Sorbo, straight off the "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" series, plays the charasmatic captain of the Andromeda - an intelligent, sentient spaceship that can heal itself. That's good because with a crew of 6 (7 counting the ships's humanoid form), you can't get hull repairs done easily.

Anyway, his original crew is evacuated from their super deluxe starship just before the captain is alone stuck on the edge of a black hole. He's rescued 300 years later by the crew of a salvage ship - in like the year 10,000 something. They eventually all form a ragtag group of beings, from wildly different backgrounds, trying to restart the "Commonwealth" - an alliance of over one million worlds (that broke down while the captain was in his 300 year 'sleep').

I LOVE the bigness of everything in this series. The ships are supposedly many times larger than ships in other series, close-range combat is like a 100,000,000 kilometers (or so many light seconds) and they have bombs that can explode the suns of solar systems and take out many planets at once. When they have battles, it's typical for billions to be killed and, when they face the home base of the dreaded Magog (in the ending cliffhanger), it's claimed that there are "trillions of them" waiting - to eat us.

And there's LOTS of cool space battles without so many episodes where characters are overly "flushed out" (Star Trek: DS9 - ahem). I say go ahead and keep the characters mysterious until we're just dying to know their back stories (like what's the deal with the purple girl), and give us our action straight up - at least, at first - and save the sentimental stuff for later. This show has a lovely dark flavor that I'd like to see preserved.

I recently got hooked on "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" when Sci-Fi began airing the series; I was hooked from the first episode. I'm not sure about some of the science; for example, is it possible for a starship to edge close to the event-horizon of a black hole, yet not get sucked into it, since even light cannot escape a singularity? And why is there a starfield in front of the black hole, and the "Maru," as she's towing the "Andromeda" away from the event-horizon? Wouldn't the black hole swallow any star systems in the area-as well as both ships? Or does the "Andromeda Ascendant" have capabilities which allow her to safely maneuver that close to a collapsar? And why does the technically advanced "Andromeda" not have tractor beams for towing?

Other than that, its a great show-so great in fact, that the occasional science inaccuracies don't seem so bad.

The First Season DVD is a keeper. It has pretty good special features; the timeline of the Systems Commonwealth adds a nice bit of background history, as do the Argosy/High Guard ship specs. My only complaint is that the ship specs should feature blueprints of the ships along with the specs. Still, I s'pose that's a minor complaint. The print for the ship specs and actor/character bios are very small and difficult to read. But I can live with that. I like the commentaries and actor/producer interviews as well.

The second season "Andromeda" DVD graphics and features are a bit slicker and more sophisticated than those of season one, still, though season one's very much worth owning if you're a fan.

All-in-all, a worthy addition to the Roddenberry corpus of fine sci-fi shows. Its nice that Majel Roddenberry, "Star Trek" TOS's Nurse Chapel, and Roddenberry's widow, is executive producer. And series developer/producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, of "Star Trek Deep Space Nine" does his usual great job on this series as well. This series has an epic scope that comes across real well-you can actually believe there was a vast Systems Commonwealth, which collapsed three hundred years in Dylan Hunt's past.

If you're a fan, you'll need to order the season one boxed set.

Andromeda is a hugley underated sci-fi show, and a personal favorite of mine. Ok, the later seasons (4 and 5) are downhill, but season 1-3, for the most part, are absolutly great.

Andromedas best feature? Its fantastic characters.

Andromeda has some of the best characters in sci-fi, and each character is very interesting, with deep pasts and brilliant personalities. Be it the gorgeous and very mysterious trance gemini, or Dylans heroic character, you just have to like them all. Andromeda certainly has a brilliant cast. Ontop of this, the sci-fi elements, such as there take on slip-stream, are great, and the ship looks fantastic.

Season 1 also has some of the best written episodes, such as
"06 : Angel Dark, Demon Bright" and
"03 : The day of lighting".

Andromeda does have some cheesy make-up effects, and some even cheesier fight scenes, but to be honest you wouldent have it any other way. The corney one liners and the over-the-top effects are all part of andromedas charm.

The episodes are full of clever writing and little hints to future seasons, for example
*BIG SPOILER*
Trance being an avatar of a sun is hinted all the way throughout season 1.
*END SPOILER*

Any true Sci-Fi fan owes it to themselves to check out Season 1 of Drommie, it truly is a gem, Hugly underated...

A highly underrated series. After hearing some negative comments, I didn't expect much from Andromeda. However, I was very pleasantly surprised and I am now a big fan.

After watching the dissapointing Voyager, with its cliche storylines and mediocre character development, Andromeda was a refreshing experience. The plot and back story are excellent, the writing intelligent and original, the acting and character development superb. Special effects are some of the best I've seen on a television show.

One thing I really like about Andromeda is that the characters are not black and white like other science fiction series. All the major players have their own agendas, and only a little is revealed at a time. The show is full of plot twists, surprises and a lot of action. Several important themes are explored, such as philosophy, morality and science.

I highly recommend this collection to anyone who is open to something new and different.

i love andromeda but there is a new box set with all 5 season here available on amazon and its a lil over $100 but worth the purchase, slim casing and "ONE" sided discs!! something i prefer! its a space saver as well!