Thank you Character Map for finding me the accent. I'm not sure I'll use it again, but it's in the title where it can fool people who never read more than the title.
Originally aired:
October 24, 1993.
I don't remember this episode at all, judging from the synopsis.
Teaser. Aqua-Sphere 7, some fracture zone. A minisub goes by and the captions tell us it's a sea launch. Then it docks and the captions tells us it's a sea launch docking. Seriously.
Ford is on the phone complaining about how the scientists in this post live in isolation. He's about to offload a replacement team. Wasn't the BioSphere thing about this time? Might be topical. Ford yells into the airlock after getting no answer. The new scientists have an override to get them in. One of them is a bit player who plays a scientist in a future episode.
Ford on the phone tells us (we're on the bridge) about the place being torn up. There's chatter. Ford yells at everyone to calm down and be quiet. Ford says there's been some kind of incident and the entire team is dead. Six bodies. "Something has turned this place into a tomb." Credits.
I'm sorry, but we needed to see something of that set except for Ford sticking his head in a generic airlock. This isn't suspenseful. It's like having someone describe a horror movie scene to you. Badly.
Hallway. Bridger is interrogating Westphalen about what they know. She just finished the autopsies. I'm glad they didn't have her handle bodies that might be infected with a fatal, strange disease on the seaQuest. Except they did. The crew that went over are in an isolation chamber in the moon pool, but they just hauled the bodies over in sacks? Way to go.
Ford wants to know why they're being quarantined, because he's retarded. Westphalen explains that they might have picked up a virus or bacteria. Ford smarts off at her and reminds us of the plot, because he must think Bridger forgot. Bridger tells him he didn't forget. Then he starts freaking out about the faces on the bodies. Bridger tries to console him, but tells him his ass is in the lockup until Westphalen says they're clean. Ford whines about not being a lab rat. Bridger calls on a scientist in there with him, who confirms the quarantine is important.
The scientist talks about this work log that says the dead guys went outside to map a faultline. The log says they found Something which Doesn't Exactly Belong Down Here.
Hyper Reality Probe. Stacy Haiduk's hand in a glove. Her wearing the glasses. Her narrating finding the spot. CGI of a generic wall. It's rugged. Then something shaped like the head of a pill bottle, but green and rusty. Marked Liberté. It's a space station and this is the Andromeda Strain.
Crocker rambles about how they went down to find it (it's a space station) but never did. Bridger remembers hearing of salvage. He orders the probe in. CGI of the interior. Flashing light for no reason. The probe has a steady headlamp. Vague shapes. One is an arm among pipes. Rotted skull in space suit.
Moon Pool. Lucas skips into the moon pool with dirt on the space station. Lucas thinks the confederation behind the space ship is hiding something. He ran in skipping like he's six and now he's all suave. He found out a scientist stayed behind when the space station was "abandoned". Bridger met him years ago at a futurists conference. He was a geneticist. Lucas says he disappeared after the station went down. There was a cover-up. Ford blows up and Lucas turns off his comm. Bridger makes him turn it back on. Ok. Apparently this geneticist isn't one of the corpses. Lucas is dressed a lot like a European college student this episode.
Bridger figures out that the away team all have the virus that killed these people from the station. Westphalen was there ten minutes ago and smarts at him. Bridger is not supposed to be dumb. Westphalen informs Ford that they're going to stay in quarantine. Ford smarts off. Redshirt with southern accent asks if he can phone his wife or something. Incidentally, this aggression is meant to be a symptom, but it's not far off Ford's normal personality. Bridger kisses the plague dogs' asses and asks them to have faith in Westphalen.
Bridger walks out of his room in civvies. Lucas catches him with the geneticist's location. But Lucas got caught and traced. Westphalen has a list of questions for the geneticist. Bridger blows off the list. He says he's going to haul the doc along with him. Where are they supposed to be? Hitchcock explains that a shuttle is waiting on the surface for him. Ok. They thought about that.
Bridger tells Hitchcock that she might have to relieve Ford if he goes crazier. He expects her to do so.
Moon pool. Ford wants to know what's going on, because he can't open his hand. Westphalen thinks aloud and pisses him off. This time he actually sounds afraid instead of just pissed. The director must have said something. Ford has realized he's locked up with his future murderers. Westphalen tells him to fight.
Ominous music underwater as a new sub arrives. O'Neil says it's the Lafayette from the North Sea Confederation. What sounds like real French informs O'Neil that they are there for the ship.
Surface. Montbard, France. Bridger gets out of a car that was antique in the Fifties but is apparently a rental. It's a tiny, cramped little set. Crocker tries to pick up a passing woman. She spits French at him and slaps his face. Bridger comes back because nobody is home. Now they're on a stake out.
Moon pool. Hitchcock is telling Ford about the French sub. He's forgotten Bridger is gone and he's in command. He orders an attack. Hitchcock doesn't buy this. Ford says to give it over now. She tries to talk him down, badly. She reminds him something dangerous could be on board the station. Now Ford is doing the giving an order line. She points out that she has two sets of conflicting orders now. Ford wants to know what the captain thinks. Is this all dialog from previous episodes?
Hallway. Hitchcock walks down it and into the bridge. Lots of people seem to just hang around the seaQuest bridge. Hitchcock announces she has relieved Ford of command. She phones the French and tells them to back off. She more or less dares him to attack. The French captain remarks that seaQuest is a peacekeeping vessel. They back off.
A nervous french man in a trench coat and derby hat comes up. Crocker is in his way and gets barked at. Bridger introduces himself and the geneticist tries to shove the door shut. He lives in a dingy little basement apartment up a flight of stairs from the street. The geneticist denies everything, but he has a picture of himself and somebody else in space suits right on his coffee table. The geneticist is freaking out. I think they made him up to look a bit like Mengele.
People are dying, Bridger says. That's what people do. The only things that survive are pain and guilt. Bridger wants to know what it was like in space. Apparently it was a deep experience. They're bonding. He offers the geneticist a chance to play tourist. This guy is an easy sell all the sudden. Sure, lives in danger are nothing but a chance to be in a cool submarine seals the deal.
Geneticist is in the launch doing some Cousteau. The sea is dark, mysterious. He regrets coming and pulls out a big flask. Bridger wants to know what happened on the ship. Their experiment went very wrong. Only he made it back. It was not an accident. The geneticist was in a safe room. He escaped before the self-destruct fired.
Bridger returns to seaQuest and asks after Ford. He's not good. He's falling apart. Oh yeah, and a warrior sub has arrived. The station has been pumped dry and pressurized. Was that wise? Do they want more victims? Maybe someone for Ford to play with.
Moon Pool. The geneticist has a seaQuest vest on now. Lucas is staring into a stereoscope and making notes. Yes, a blue light covers his eyes.
Westphalen and the geneticist are talking about his work with chromosomes. It was a bioweapon. Really? Lucas sticks his nose in, literally, and says somebody was playing God. Ford snaps at him about watching the patients and taking notes. Now the geneticist is breaking down, but remembers some more. Lucas starts laying the guilt on him. Lucas is wearing a very strange shirt that looks a bit like a patchwork quilt now.
Krieg walks into the quarantine with some party favors. He's in one of those suits. He inches up by Ford and tries to give a pep talk about how he wants to help. He puts a VR helmet on Ford's head and Ford pushes him over and grabs at the suit. He's going to tear it. And it's torn right as Bridger says he's going to tear the suit. Krieg tries to bugger out but Bridger tells him to stop. In this situation, Krieg might be the last one to die.
Westphalen stares into a microscope. Bridger asks what's up. Turns out the geneticist ran off to drink. Bridger chases after him. He's very drunk in the mess hall. Bridger sneaks up and sweeps his drink off the table. He gives the rant about being damned if the geneticist is going to give up on Bridger and his crew. The doc says he doesn't know what to do. Bridger wants to know why his hero sucks.
Apparently there were two survivors. The doc and another. Pierre. He was in the test chamber but did not get sick. Ok, so they planned to test this bioweapon on their own people. Nice. And they were not wise to this? Pierre cried for help, but the doc would not give it. The doc watched Pierre die. Killing four or five other people didn't count, but killing this one survivor was too far. Pierre was never sick, but I guess got left behind. They need a sample of his DNA. Hey, they have corpses!
Bridger wants a launch so he can go over. Then they detect satellite tracking. The French are going to nuke the site from space to cover things up again. The satellite can't tell the difference between seaQuest and the station. Bridger and Crocker are going over with the doc to the vessel full of crazy plague because...why? If anything, shouldn't it be the doc and a redshirt?
O'Neil read the French email. I guess it's not a nuke from space. It's a nuke from an aircraft. It's in the water. They fire off countermeasures. The nuke got locked on the countermeasures and blew 'em up. This shakes the space station and Bridger tells us the station will not take much more of that. Corcker says they'd better hurry. He's a quick one. They sort through the bodies and find Pierre by his watch. Crocker asks if Bridger wants to carve and Bridger is not impressed by his joking. The doc finds a cannister full of the plague and hands it to Bridger. He collects these things and uses them to lure scientists back to his van.
Reduntant dialog about how they have to get out fast. The doc is going to stay and die. Bridger isn't buying it. He punches the doc, claims the doc is exhausted, and drags him. Third missile in the water. Too late to intercept this one. Fifty seconds to impact. Hitchcock plans to shoot it. Bridger bursts into the bridge and tells her to let 'em blow it up. She asks about scattering the virus, which Crocker has in a tote bag. Totally secure, of course.
Moon pool. Westphalen complains about doctors that kill. Lucas, in a peach shirt over a peach shirt, is getting a reading. They have a cure. Everyone smiles. Westphalen breaks the news to the patients.
Epilogue. The doc remembers Bridger. He wants to know if the seaQuest is everything Bridger dreamed. Yes. Also, the doc likes the water.
This one worked. It's not novel. It's the Andromeda Strain mashed up with the MacGuyver episode where he's disarming the satellite around Vancouver. It works for what it is, and unlike last time the plot makes a fair amount of sense. The characters are cut-outs and it's weakened by relying too much on Hitchcock to carry the second act. Neither the actress nor the character are up to it. Crocker is an annoying stock character, but that's nothing new. Lucas is a generic lab helper for most of the episode. Would he even know how to help in a biology lab? His education is all computers. Did Westphalen just press-gang him as her new graduate assistant? I know he's a genius, but even assuming something visible was happening under a stereoscope it's unlikely that he would know what it meant. Maybe they cut out thirty scenes where he went over and called her about something that turned out to be a spec of dust on the lens.
Those are good jobs, by the way. Lab assistants get all the benefits of TAs but are generally not expected to teach at all. Mom had a few friends that went that route. You work on your thesis/dissertation and help out as asked, but that's it. No grading, no teaching.
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6 comments:
There's a saying: God in the details.
Seems you take that heart with your seaQuest reviews.
Still, most of the time, I find them more entertaining than the TV show, especially the costumes worn by Jonthan Brandis.
Plus, I'm always impressed with your writing style.
Keep up the good work.
I think I'm probably more critical because I have it in mind that I'm going to be writing about it. I might not pick it apart so closely just for myself, but sometimes that happens just for fun. Usually the better a mood I'm in, the more I notice the stuff.
"Still, most of the time, I find them more entertaining than the TV show, especially the costumes worn by Jonthan Brandis."
I guess I do comment on his clothes a lot. I really did have that one gray shirt. I think it jumps out because almost everybody else is in uniform. The wardrobe crew must have known it too because Lucas developed his own set look. So far he's only broken from it for the patchwork quilt shirt (which was a button-down too, not his usual speed) and a slightly too-big t-shirt he wore when they were in the Library of Alexandria. That's also the only episode so far that showed him in the wetsuit I think he spends the whole second season living in. I remember noticing he was always in that thing when I was a kid.
I can't take full credit for the as-I-watch reviews, though. I stole the idea from Television WIthout Pity. They go into a lot more detail than I do. I think most of their recappers watch the show they're working on two or three times per episode.
Actually, you could be writing for TWP. I love them, those bitter, bitter people who understand that TV is getting dumber and dumber every year.
Of course, I'm bitter also. But, you know, that's to be expected.
:-)
I'm not sure TV as a whole is getting dumber. Nick at Nite is only playing the very best shows of past decades, the stuff people remember twenty or thirty years later. There's always a lot of crap and a lot of average, but forgettable shows.
I spent a lot of time in the early 90s watching Nick at Nite. I don't mean to be completely down on it, but there's clearly some nostalgia helping those shows along with present day viewers just like there's some nostalgia helping me along with writing about seaQuest.
Not that there's no reason to be bitter, of course. Some of the TV shortcuts I see a lot really drive me up the wall and I've seen enough writers murder characters I cared about without having the good decency to write them off the show afterwards.
Actually, I agree with you. Nick has given new life to the best shows produced in the 1980's and early 1990's.
Of course, knowing you where born in the mid 1980's and seeing how you are enjoying what I saw originally broadcast makes me feel old.
But, TV is more dumb than some of the craptacular stuff they put out in the late 70's (but, I will admit, I found the Misfits of Science really dumb, but I have fond memories of watching it and actually liking it).
For me, TV (much like movies) have decided that character driven shows on broadcast TV is to lofty for the broadbased audience that the advertisers want. Hence we're stuck with American Idol, According to Jim and anything Adam Sadler and Dane Cook have done.
Reality TV is just cheaper. It can make less money and still produce more profit because they're not paying SAG scale to the "performers" or WGA scale to the writers, plus no FX budget to speak of. That's better to a network exec, but that kind of better has little to do with what's better for a viewer. I once read a message board post from a guy who knew one of the guys at Adult Swim where he admitted that one of the shows they flogged was truly awful and everybody at the office knows it, but it cost less than any three comparable shows in their lineup.
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