I saw this when it aired back in the 90s and I remember that I enjoyed it and was disappointed when it got cancelled. Well I revisited this recently as a marathon binge watch and it is startling as to how bad it is.
The core premise, that of a first contact that goes horribly wrong, is an engaging idea. Unfortunately, we spend 21 of the 23 episodes watching tropes and cliches from other SF shows, westerns and combat type shows. It's only in the last 2 episodes that the writers get down to the meat of the story and then it's curtains. In the meantime we get hours of tedious conversations where the characters tell us about themselves. We also get hours of brainless gunfights and second rate space dog fights. I'm not surprised it got cancelled due to low ratings.
I don't know whether it is because the show has a sort of retro feel (true even in 95) but the inability to plausibly create a future is almost laughable. Sure the show, ironically enough, seems to look backward to the Vietnam war and WW2 and even WW1, but this shouldn't by itself have doomed the future 'look' of the show. Not only does this show not plausibly suggest technology for 2065, it didn't even foresee things that would be common place before the end of the decade it was made. These guys inhabit a nearly entirely analog world. It's like 1985 in space, complete with screen displays that look like old Arcade games. Weapons that are bigger than a plumber's tool bag are less accurate than throwing stones. The whole thing just makes you cringe.
And sure, I know that SF set in the future is on a hiding to nothing because the future rarely ends up looking like we thought it would. But there is wrong, in the way 2001: A Space Odyssey was wrong about humanity travelling to the outer planets by the turn of the millennium and having video phone booths and computers doing simple monitoring yet being the size of a small house: and then there is wrong in the way Space: Above and Beyond is, in which everything is all wrong only a few years after it was made.
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Reply by Jacinto Cupboard
on December 6, 2020 at 5:47 PM
There's something about a production that failed to deliver on a promise that attracts even more criticism than offerings we don't expect much from. I think most people would have a low expectation of something like Friday The 13th: The Series.
That might seem unfair and in many ways it is. But audiences for movies and TV shows invest in them. The cost might be a theatre ticket; the time taken to watch it; the opportunity cost of doing something better. And the emotional and intellectual cost can't be dismissed either. We are being invited to immerse ourselves in another world for a time. It is only human to be disappointed if that place wasn't worth the visit or wasn't 'as advertised'.
I have seen people defend writers and directors with the rejoinder that they owe us nothing and don't need to justify their creative choices. But writers and directors are not painters. There is no promise or invitation to a painting. You see it in a gallery; you like or don't like; you either stay longer or keep moving.
And anyway, accepting that writers and directors don't need to justify themselves to us isn't the same thing as them being exempt from criticism.