Customer Reviews for
Andromeda - Season 4 Collection
expectations not fully metT
The season was better developed than season 1, but do not meet season 2 and 3 standard. Don't spend time on the next and last season.Andromeda - Season 4 Collection
Not nearly as good as the previous 3 years...
Season 4 of Andromeda was a disappointment as compaired the the outstanding previous 3 seasons. The music this season does not match the series and sounds more like music that should be played in a western movie. I hope they improve for the 5th and final season.Andromeda - Season 4 Collection
Must have for Sci Fi Buffs
I enjoyed this series when it was on television, and had to add it to my library when it became available on DVD. The acting is very good, the stories are interesting. Well worth the price...Kevin Sorbo can play a captain as well as a mythical hero. The humor is very good as well as the action.
Andromeda - Season 4 Collection
Great Series
I am disappointed on the loss of Tyr I thought he was an outstanding character played by a great actor. Rhade is is a character I think should have been in as a regular a couple seasons back as he seemed to fit in with the crew and the storylines. His introduction to this season was a bit shaky concerning the story but what the hay he's on board. Cobb trading Sci-Fi for a Soap Opera doesn't seem a good trade as I am sure the soap operas would have waited. I would have liked to have seen the Tyr character interact with Rhade through a couple seasons. With thier differing outlooks/ philosophies it would have made for great stories. I feel that they should just drop the Rev Ben character once and for all for as he evolves he bocomes less interesting and bringing him in for a story or two here and there totally changing the once strong idealist into the weak thing that I saw was just annoying.
-The last episode in this series was very confusing to me but I am sure it will be explained in the next season.Andromeda - Season 4 Collection
a downward spiral
Some shows start out bland and get better as they mature. Others start out at their peak and get progressively worse as time goes on. Andromeda is one of the latter kinds.
Season 4 saw Andromeda degenerate into an incoherent mess. The show's earlier seasons had their fair share of bad episodes, but they were often bad because of poor execution or oversimplification in favor of action. Season 4's episodes often just don't make any sense or don't have any relevance - they are very much mindless action hour fare.
When I first saw season 4, I had not yet seen season 3, so I assumed there would be things that I would have missed and that wouldn't make quite as much sense to me as they would have if I had seen the 3rd season first. But now that I've seen season 3, I have to say that season 4 *still* doesn't make any sense. Too many things were invented on the fly and then placed into the story as if they had always been there without any further explanation. Ironically, these self-contained action hours rely on the ability of the audience to pick up in the middle of an existing story every bit as much as arc-based storytelling would have. The only difference is that arc-based storytelling is interesting to long-term viewers and spontaneously invented backstory isn't.
One of the most severe blows to the show came in the loss of Keith Hamilton Cobb. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the loss of Tyr Anasazi was a big reason for the loss of quality. Season 1 had an excellent combination with Dylan Hunt as the idealist who was occasionally willing to compromise his ideals to get the job done, Rev Bem as the center of highest ideals, and Tyr Anasazi as a primarily self-interested, realistic balance. The show was able to stay afloat despite the departure of the Rev Bem character, because it still had Dylan's idealism against Tyr's realism. Season 4 changes all that. With Tyr gone, completely gone is much of what gave the series its initial potential.
Even in some of the first 3 seasons' worst episodes, you would have great lines like, "[when the universe ends] there will be 3 survivors: Tyr Anasazi, the cockroaches, and Dylan Hunt, trying to save the cockroaches." But season 4 has lost that in favor of Telemachus Rhade, who simply doesn't have the same Nietzschean flair that Tyr had. In fact, Telemachus is rarely ever interesting. His banter with Harper borders on laughably pathetic, with such lines as "Insulting a Nietzschean is not healthy for a human's health."
But even without that foil, all would not have been lost except for the pseudo-continuity and constant introduction of characters that we've never heard of as if we should know who they are. The first episode of the season introduces a number of new characters but acts as if they've been there all along, and it was frankly just weird. When I first saw it, I assumed that characters such as Tri-Jema and others had been introduced in season 3, but in fact they weren't and they all made their first appearances in season 4.
Tarazed, a planet last mentioned in season 2's "Home Fires" - and a planet that chose *NOT* to join the re-established Commonwealth in that episode - is all of a sudden the seat of Commonwealth government.
Tri-Camille "displaces" her "sister" Tri-Ortiz, presumably a reference to the Isabella Ortiz in season 2, but there are problems with this that should be obvious to anyone who's actually watched that season 2 episode.
We also now have melting Abyss people, and the first time this happens no one acts as if it's out of the ordinary despite the fact that it had never happened before in any season of the show. Then there's the dozens of people that Dylan "knows" but we've never seen before. Exactly when did he meet them? Don't forget, this guy doesn't have 40-odd years of time behind him, since he was frozen in time for 300 years.
There's the sudden introduction of a bad guy group called "Collectors" who have never before been a remotely bad presence, and we've now got "radical isotopes" and 3-d cubes as instant bad guy detectors.
The season's biggest failure is that, despite some major events like the Commonwealth descending into civil war, none of this is really leading anywhere. Sure, the new Commonwealth is practically in chaos (or is it? this season makes it hard to tell), but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you why that matters. Along the same lines: Rev Bem makes an appearance this season, and at the end of his episode, he says he wants to stay on the Andromeda, but he never appears again for the rest of the season.
I suppose I could be asking too much. How much story can you really expect from a show whose title says, "The universe is a dangerous place. We fight to make it safe"?
With those criticisms voiced, I will say that there are still some good moments in this season. The last few episodes of the season are pretty good, even if the last two kind of start acting like the whole "restoring the Commonwealth" thing was not what Dylan was *really* supposed to be doing all this time (what?!). One of them even has a pretty good scene that makes fun of technobabble and the absurdly precise time estimates until disaster that are common in Star Trek.
And one thing that all Andromeda episodes have going for them is that even the worst episodes tend to be far more entertaining than your average Star Trek fare.
Still, this one is hard to recommend as a purchase, even for fans of the series (though I guess it depends on why you like the show).
On the DVD side of things, the discs are double-sided, which cuts down on the amount of packaging but makes the discs far more prone to damage. There are annoying ads at the beginning of the discs that will be completely irrelevant in a few years, but they are fortunately easily skipped with the chapter skip. Although I haven't watched very many of them, there also seems to be a lot of special feature content like interviews and stuff.Andromeda - Season 4 Collection
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