Which season do you like best?
1st, 2nd or 3rd? I guess the 3rd season was the best. How about you?
shareagreed. it got more adult, and i ALWAYS loved medea. season three is my favvvv.
shareWhen I watched it on TV back in the day It was the first season, but now I think I would like the 3rd season the best
shareWow, seriously? I always felt that the 3rd season was by far and away the worst. Reasons being:
1) With Jay out of the coma, a major point of tension was lost.
2) The connections / parallels between Upworld and Downworld became hazy at best and were often dumped altogether.
3) Rather than getting more adult, I found that the writing / storylines started getting more generic, dealing with the same old "teen issues".
4) Conversely, major plot points from the previous two series were scaled back or abandoned altogether.
5) A general feeling of sloppiness and half-heartedness to the whole thing. (Whatever happened to Macro? He just vanished mid-season without comment ...)
Basically, I thought the 3rd season felt like a different show altogether - it lost its originality and became like so many other teen-orientated fantasy / sci-fi shows. Even though seasons 1 and 2 were perhaps more child-like at times (but hey - it's a kid's show!), they retained the originality and high quality of the show's premise, as well as a strong sense of narrative.
Even though I think the 1st season had a slightly stronger story arc, I think the 2nd season was the best - for the extra elements of darkness, emotion and thought-provoking mystique.
Does anyone else out there prefer either of the first two seasons over the third? I'd be curious to see if I'm in the minority on this one ...
I definitely see your point. I thought season 3 was good but the show seemed to kind of lose its point having Jay awakened from his coma but the downworld was still existent. I think when Jay came out of his coma, he should have shared with his friends what the downworld was like and told them that they were all there to. Kind of like when Dorothy wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz and says "And you, you, and you were there!".
I always wondered if any characters in the upworld were the EXACT same people as in downworld. For example, when Jay met Nikki in the upworld (who played that circus girl Baz in downworld), she knew right away who he was even though the two characters never had any previous contact in the upworld. There was also that part in season 1 where Medea put on the vest of power and supposedly travelled to the upworld because in the next scene, she was shown as a coma patient at Driftwood and then in the background there was an image of Medea laughing. It's also interesting to think about how it was that in the middle of season 2, Medea suddenly became a good character and sided with Jay, Alpha, and Flash. I always wonder what it would have been like if Sierra was on the show during the time that Medea's character was a villain. Wow I guess there's so many aspects of The Odyssey that you could spend all day pondering.
> Wow I guess there's so many aspects of The Odyssey that you could spend all day pondering.
Totally. That's why it was (still is!) one of my favourite shows.
As to how Upworld characters related to their Downworld counterparts ... I'm not sure. The show never made any definitive statement about that whole matter.
I tend to think that, whilst in his coma, Jay was able to sense everything - and everyone - around him, kind of like extra-sensory perception, and wove it all into his Downworld fantasy. (Right at the end of Season 1, when Jay put on the Vest of Power, Dr. Oswald appeared in the limbo between worlds, even though Jay had never met him while he was conscious.) So everyone who appears in Downworld - Baz, Medea, Finger, Fractal, etc. - is someone real from Upworld, whom Jay has somehow sensed and is now dreaming about them.
However, Medea offers an alternative insight in the Season 2 episode "The Big Picture". She tells Jay "we've all been abandoned", referring to everyone in Downworld. Perhaps, whenever a kid in Upworld feels abandoned or lost, a little piece of them goes to live in Downworld?
Who knows? It was never ultimately explained but just added to the rich texture of the show.
Yeah the "we've all been abandoned" thing reminded me of the fact that Keith in the upworld obviously didn't have his parents around very much. His parents were never shown on-screen but whenever he made reference to them, he would always say something like "oh they won't care...".
I think it probably is a bit far fetched for me to say that Nikki was the EXACT same character as Baz in the downworld. Maybe Nikki just knew who he was because he could have been more popular in the upworld than he realized. But there is still the confusing aspect of when Medea put on the Vest of Power and then she was shown as a coma patient at Driftwood, then afterwards in the downworld Medea claimed that she had "been in Jay's world". I think it would have been cool if the writer's were to have Sierra make some sort of subtle reference to having experienced the downworld. Then she would easily be able to relate to Jay's coma experience during their relationship after he awoke in season 3.
This is a bit off topic now but does anyone know how old Andrea Nemeth was when she was portraying Medea/Sierra? I remember in one episode, when Val first saw the poster of Sierra Jones and Keith explained to her who she was, Val asked him how old Sierra was and he said 14. However I always thought the actress looked like she could have been almost 20.