Month: July 2005

Very nice.

Picking up from a good cliffhanger last season, like Battlestar Galactica, Atlantis doesn’t seem to have lost the pace. The drama grabs you from the start, and doesn’t let go. It’s an hour of television that passes very quickly, for all the right reasons.

Fracking awesome, as Starbuck would say.

This is how you open a second season, not losing one bit of the pace from the first episode. It’s tightly written, and carries over the outstanding production values of the first season.

Well. This is different.

“Avalon” is interesting, let’s put it that way. There’s a lot that works, and a lot that doesn’t. It doesn’t give me the return in energy and excitement I was expecting, and feels more like another slap to the SG-1 franchise. But it gives me hope….

The same year Star Trek Voyager turned off the lights, and packed up the sets, a new show was being created. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga quickly knocked together the idea of having the new Trek series be a prequel – a controversial decision to say the least.

The first season opened to some spectacular ratings in the US, dipping dramatically and suddenly. This continued until this year, when the show was eventually cancelled for its lacklustre performance in the Nielsen ratings. That’s not to say the ratings fell due to show quality – UPN never did any decent advertising after the premiere. The result is a high budget Trek series that tends to twist and turn with exactly what it wants to be. Season One has a clear theme, however – exploration. Season One is the year that shows what the show would probably have been like, had the ratings not fallen. The wonder and excitement is there, there isn’t much danger – it’s all about “seeking new life, and new civilisations.”