This Friday on Odyssey 5 ep 01: Pilot

Well here we go, Pilot show one. I always have trouble with the first show usually, especially a 90 minute one. You always have to learn new characters and the such. I am having this problem here as well. My attention span started to slip shortly after the earth blew up. You recon a car like that would really have been able to survive and float off into space? I like most of the cast so far and found the Sara story particularly heart wrenching about her son. I then tried to put myself in the place of Taggarts wife, If my wife sat me down today and told me she was from 5 years in the future, how would I receive this information? The one thing I don't understand is why she wouldn't least try to verify the story with her son. The first thing I would have done was yell, Neil, get your butt in here and hear what your father is saying. I find Kurt pretty annoying right now but have no doubt that's the way he is written for me to feel. The seeker is kind of interesting, I hope we will find more out about him and also the stuff that has taken down 50 worlds. I was not drawn to the suspense of the warehouse scene kinda guessed there would be something in there and got the feeling I had scene this all before. I was a little intrigued by the nanites at the end and that peaked me enough to want to check in next week so that is good.
All in all hard to judge not to great, not terrible and I did like the special effects they had a pretty good feel to them.
I will give this one a 5 since there is nothing to judge it against.


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Looks like it can be really good, or it can turn into a soap opera.

This one is more difficult for me to learn the names of the characters, as they aren't used as much in the show. You hear them once or twice throughout the pilot and are just expected to remember them, with the one exception of Neil, who has an easy ready-made mnemonic association anyhow: an astronaut with the same first name as the first man to have set foot on the moon. Makes me want to pick out a crewmate of his to call "Buzz."

Notable that the two who responded most selfishly at first were the two at opposite ends of the moral and philosophical spectrum: the churchlady reporter who just wanted to save her immediate family and not the earth with which they would surely die anyhow and the absolute nihilistic hedonist who tried to clean up with a football bet on his memory of how the game turned out, hoping to live it up for the time he had. Face it, saving the world might well destroy their own lives and families. The burden of involuntary heroes throughout the ages.

On the subject of the football bet, either this show was on a premium cable channel or I got a DVD boxed set that was uncensored in the ways that US TV is. Because in his little three person viewing party, I saw some pretty sights I thought you're not supposed to see on US television. I'm not complaining as I have "better" stuff than that on DVD's of a certain nature. Just saying.

One has to wonder about the legitimacy of their "mission," though, as they seem to be set on stopping artificial life, which it leads you to believe is also what The Seeker was, who sent them back.

Neil was rather impressive. From a party animal on sex, drugs and rock & roll at 17 to a promising astronaut at 22. Boy's come a long way in five years.

All in all, off to an interesting start. Give it a 7.

___
Cool is irrelevant. I'm over 40.

Well, well, here I am again, this time with a review. Of course I'm happy with the choice of show we made because that's right into my, say comfort zone, in terms of TV shows. I especially like shows that are playful and imaginative (like Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls), highly dramatic involving crime (like Dexter, Breaking Bad), or the good old science fiction drama with an intelligent premise, which I believe Odyssey 5 to be the case. And like the crew of Odyssey, who will have to re-live their personal dramas from the last five years, I'll have a chance of revisiting this TV drama I enjoyed so much some five years ago. It'll be interesting to see how time and experience affect my impressions.

Again, the premise I think is fantastic. Seeing how the characters struggle through their old issues would be excellent for character development, while dealing with the artificial life storyline (and ultimately finding out what happened to Earth) will give them something new and hopefully exciting to do.

The major problem with the premise is that it suggests the need for a five-season show to develop it: one season per year they went back, culminating in the same mission in which they saw Earth destroyed as the series finale, and we obviously don't have that, just nineteen episodes instead. To minimize that, one of the characters mentions that by invading the warehouse, they made thge enemy aware that someone is on to them, so destruction of the Earth may happen in five years, or next week. I'm glad they left that possibility open, and nothing is really programmed anymore, as was shown by the little butterfly effect concerning Kurt's football bet.

The characters are diverse enough, so the viewer will probably find someone to identify with. We have Chuck, the tough, no-nonense leader; Neal, the cool whiz kid, Angela, the strong scientist woman; Sarah, the Christian mother with major family issues; and Kurt, the cynical, nihilistic, depraved genius. My personal favorite is definitely Kurt.

I'd also be eager to talk about the artificial life forms, but based solely on what we've seen on the pilot, there isn't much we know yet, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.

As for having seen the episode itself again, I felt that it now, unlike then, dragged a little in some parts for a ninety-minute presentation, but that perhaps has to do with the fact it was fresher in my memory than I expected. One thing that I missed, the first time I watched, and now again, is more details on Angela's reaction when she went back to the space shuttle five years in the past. I would love to see her WTF look and the million questions she would have at that very moment, but the moment she was safe in space, they cut the episode into another scene.

Still, even if the pilot lacked some action and this little detail mentioned above, I say it was an excellent piece of science fiction with a great premise, and lots and lots of potential. Based on that I give the first episode a 9 in the Odyssey scale.

This Friday on Odyssey 5 epp 01: Pilot
These pilot episode are tough on me the first part was really great and exciting but once the initial action was over I started to fade away. For some reason I’m stuck on those Phillips screws on the windshield why I don’t know. The car thing was a little hard for me to grasp if our world was to explode I believe everything would just vaporize to nothing. You would have thought the shock wave would have destroyed anything in earth’s low orbit. What a ship the Alien had too bad they didn’t have time to check it out but they were off to save the earth. When the Alien mentioned wherever he goes worlds are destroyed well maybe he’s the problem. If it was me when I returned to the past I think I would have just thought it was some elaborate dream. There is now way I would have tried to explain it away to my wife like the he did this would only lead you on a trip to the funny farm. It did get exciting as time went by I was thinking pull them tubes and bust the tank open why dick around you know nothing good was brewing in there. The cussing part I’m afraid will grow old on me as time goes on. Didn’t see the point with cussing all the time. About the only thing I understand is when they tried to use their knowledge of the future it didn’t work out.
This one gets six on the O5 scale.

I enjoyed the pilot but I worry that this could turn into a very typical SciFi "aliens are here" drama. But for now, the story is intriguing.
I thought that the special effects were well done. Especially the weightlessness. I'm not sure how they did the "flying through the shuttle" stuff. The spinning through space and losing the guy in the pod was a little over done. I was starting to lose interest. It dragged along in places.
The f-bombs and nudity are definitely a premium cable kind of thing.
I liked the way that they cut the "I'm going to use my knowledge of the future for my own selfish reasons" story line quickly by showing that the future is not going to be a repeat of what they experienced the first time around.
It will be interesting to figure out how Neal went from burnout to whizkid.
As for the aliens, I can't figure out how it is related to the artifical lifeform program. The program seemed to be involved with the satellite and triggering the destruction of the earth. But the warehouse scene shows us what seems to be a live alien lifeform.
The other mystery is the seeker. If the destruction is related to the program/artifical lifeform 'Leviathan' then how would it have spread throughout the universe? Maybe it didn't really originate with the program?
The other thing that I pondered was whether the problem with the satellite was 'planned' but I can't figure out if it mattered that they managed to catch it.
I'll give this one a 7 because it held my interest for most part and the characters were/are interesting.