Date of airing: October 1, 1995 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.8 million viewers, 6.9/12 in Households
written by: Glen Morgan, James Wong
directed by: David Nutter
This episode was a nice follow-up to the two-hour pilot episode, even going so far as to continue a story from it, which I was not quite expecting. I was surprised to see that the events at the Tellus colony were picked up in the episode after they were shot down by the Chigs (the hostile aliens got names now, like they were never known under a different name), because I thought the premise of eventual survivors would be carried over for a few episodes until some of the off-screen attacks by the aliens could have led to some “rescue mission” plot device to fill an episode or two with. Granted, this is exactly what happened here, but because the episode was generally about the search for Kylen, the actual rescue mission was just a "minor inconvenience" for Lieutenant Nathan West.
That the second episode would go down that route, even go so far as to have Nathan go AWOL and hope that he can find his girlfriend among the survivors, was a surprise, especially the fact that Nathan went AWL in the first place, as it proved he was not smart enough to manipulate and convince the higher-ups to stage a rescue mission. Although the resolution to that story – Nathan was unsuccessful in finding Kylen, and she may still be a slave for the aliens (if she is still alive) – led to an interesting premise for a future episode: What if the Chigs continue to get human slaves for whatever they are doing behind enemy lines, and Kylen is one of those slaves? Plus, the premise of Chigs prisoners is solid enough to fill another episode or two of the series with, and, again, create a rescue mission episode 9what is it with me and rescue mission episodes?). The writers essentially created some additional storylines that could be followed up on later, and they could have used them to create some personal stakes for the main characters. After all, Nathan’s own mission is still to find Kylen, and he most likely will rest until he finds her, dead or alive.
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| The backstory is somewhere behind the dimly lit middle distance they are staring at. |
However, the episode had some confusing elements for me, and it may
have been the first sign of SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND to be more than just
a "human versus aliens" science-fiction military action drama. In fact,
the story might have been a little too complex for 1990s broadcast
network television after only two episodes. At the end of the episode,
it was evident that the guy in the suit, the one who wanted to shake
Commodore Ross’s hands and was rebuffed, may have been pulling the strings for McQueen’s group of Marines, but I was wondering why. Wonderful, the guy knew that at least some hotheads with the Marines could
find survivors on a rotten planet conquered by the Chigs, but the question
remains why the 58th was given a free pass here and what exactly the man
in the suit had to do with it, or why the writers needed to explain
that someone higher up essentially saved McQueen and his soldiers. Why was it so important for the guy in the suit to get a couple of survivors, but not important enough to manipulate and convince the higher-ups to stage a rescue mission? Why did it need Nathan to go AWOL for the guy in the suit to get his bidding done?
Maybe it is something I missed during the suit guy’s conversation with the so-called farthest man from home, maybe I did not get that suit man had an interest in some of the survivors and needed to instigate a rescue mission that may have been rejected by the Marine Corps and he knew that McQueen’s group would do it (if that was the kicker of the story, then it is ludicrous). Or maybe it is part of the story that will return in a later episode, but the fact is that the episode did not bother getting into it and just left things open. There was a complexity to the story, but one the writers did not go into at all with this episode, and maybe a few points of information could have been helpful to make me understand why Nathan, Shane, and Cooper (and McQueen) were spared a court-martial, especially if one could have been an intriguing premise for the next episode.
The events on Tellus were okay. It was dark and moody, I could barely see anything, the producers decided to not light up all of it to make things recognizable for the viewers who may watch television with their living room lights turned on, and dangerous things were waiting for Nathan and the two women whose names I forgot already. Consider me confused that the two ladies were not happy to see another human soul on this godforsaken planet, hoping they were about to be rescued. No, that was not the story at all, and instead, Nathan got a primer on the awfulness of being a survivor on this very planet, while Chigs were roaming around catching slaves. I was thinking about prison work or something like that, but the visuals were missing for that (there was only one shot of human prisoners following a Chig in line, but that was not quite slavery). Maybe the production did not have enough money to build a proper set that would have been blown to pieces with the next scene, but I would have loved to know what the Chigs needed humans for, or if it may have been a good time for Nathan to realize that there are human survivors and they are being held prisoners by the Chigs – something the Marines probably would like to know, for future rescue attempts and such.
That Shane and Cooper would go after Nathan seemed cool, and it showed that they cared at least a little about their new friend who decided to desert them on the USS Saratoga, but I found it absurd that McQueen would not even notice two of his soldiers separating themselves from the rest of the group for a collection of hours. Then again, maybe he already knew that some of Nathan’s friends would go after him to save him? It looked to me McQueen was not even supervising the mission at all and let his squadron just fly their mission and let them do whatever they needed to get the mission done. Suddenly I do not wonder anymore why McQueen lost his previous squad – he probably did not have control over them either.
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| Hawkes will not hesitate to put a bullet in your annoying face. |
When it comes to character work, the show has not done much yet. It is mostly about dark planets invaded by aliens in suits, and every once in a while, you get an action beat in space, where ships explode in typical 1990s TV visual effects manner, followed by scenes set in cold darkness and calmness. Yes, I appreciated the scene of Nathan searching the ruins of the colony, as there was enough calm in the scene to take it all in and analyze what the scenery was about, but it was also noticeable that the episode was wasting time here. It did not have a lot of story in the first place, as it was all about Natha going down to the planet to search for his girlfriend. If you take out the entire first act with the “farthest man from home” survivor, the episode would not be any different, only shorter. In a way, the writers still needed to figure out how to fill every minute of the series with intriguing plots – something this episode did not manage to do.
One fun thing: Nathan mentioned that the San Francisco 49ers have not won a Super Bowl in 68 years and are therefore losers – funny because the show is set in the year 2063, and the 49ers really did win the Super Bowl in January 1995 (68 years ago), eight months before this episode aired. So far, Nathan is right, the 49ers have not won a Super Bowl since.
