Odyssey 5
"It just occurred to me this is one scenario NASA really forgot to program into the simulators."—Kurt Mendel, upon witnessing the destruction of Earth in "Pilot"
A sci-fi TV series that ran on Showtime in 2002.
Beware of spoilers.
A routine mission for the crew of the space shuttle Odyssey turns to nightmare, as they witness the very Earth explode implode from orbit. As they drift into space they are rescued by an alien, calling itself "The Seeker", who reveales that Earth is not the first world to suffer such a fate and offers to send their minds back in time, so that they may try and stop it from happening. After going back, the crew of the Odyssey struggle to readapt to what their lives were at that time, and to learn to work together toward their common purpose. The show mostly falls on the hard end of Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, except for the jump back in time, which falls on the really soft end.
The team is led by Commander Chuck Taggart, a hardened and quick-witted old-school NASA veteran who is often paternal towards them, in part because of his son, Neil, who is also flying missions with him. Neil, having gone from a pot-smoking metalhead to NASA's youngest astronaut is largely motivated from growing up in his older brother's shadow and despite having surpassed both him and their parents' expectations he still occasionally clashes with his father. They are joined by Kurt Mendel, a Nobel Prize winning geneticist, whose extreme cynicism and hedonistic attitude not only serve as counterpoint to Chuck, but very often earns him raised eyebrows and disgusted reactions from even the more liberal members of the crew (he even gets punched in the face in the Pilot). Angela Perry, the shuttle's co-pilot is in many ways the son Chuck wished he had. Tough and determined, her striving to earn her own place in the world is very much the result of being the daughter of a US senator. She also had a relationship with Kurt in the past. Sarah Forbes, a news anchor and the first journalist in space serves very much as the team's emotional anchor. Deeply religious and having lost her infant son to cancer years ago, she is then thrust into the brutal position of watching him waste away all over again. Her mellow character and friendly demeanor act as the glue that holds the crew together, and she sometimes fills a maternal role for Neil.
During its runtime the show was plagued by Executive Meddling (like the last 6 episodes being delayed for two years before being aired in the US) and was finally cancelled, despite having one of the highest ratings on its network. Since then it's attained a fairly strong cult following.
- Abusive Parents: Subverted with Sarah, whom people in the new timeline accuse of mistreating her son when she's actually trying to prevent the cancer that originally killed him.
- Achilles' Heel
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Played straight with both The Seeker and the entity which the team encounters in The Choices We Make.
- Apocalypse How: The series begins with a class X and revolves around the characters trying to undo it.
- Agony Beam: The synthetics' method of communicating through conventional cell phones is rather unpleasant to humans.
- Artificial Intelligence / A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Sentients, the main antagonists of the series.
- Bad Dreams: A character has recurring nightmares about the end of the world for a while after they're sent back.
- Butterfly of Doom
- But What About the Astronauts?
- Beneath the Mask: Kurt has, on numerous occasions, shown a very much kinder side than his usual persona.
- Cut Short: Ends with Angela abducted by the AI's and Kurt being arrested on suspicion of killing her. Plus the mysterious "Cadre" organization within NASA, which the team assume have something to do with the AI's and the impending destruction of the Earth, actually turn out to be trying to stop the AI's and believe that the Odyssey 5 team are the traitors.
- Cutting the Knot: Humorously justified with a character's secured laptop.
Chuck: Okay son, you gotta get into that laptop.
Neil: Give me another twenty four hours. I've great minds working on this.
(cut to a couple of stereotypical cap-n-earrings hackers hammering a screwdriver into the thing)
Neil: (watching worriedly) I'd feel a helluva lot better if i knew where we were going with this, would you please be careful!
It's then revealed that they're just disconnecting a chip so they can go around the security measures.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Inverted with Angela Perry; she's friendly enough until she thinks a man is trying to manipulate her.
- Do Not Pass Go: Dr. Mendel uses the phrase in a letter written to his future amnesiac self to underscore the importance of locating and watching a certain videotape explaining his loss of memory.
- Drama Bomb: Paige's death.
- Dramatic Space Drifting: Unsurprisingly played straight in "Pilot" after the Earth implodes.
- Earthshattering Kaboom: Of course.
- Freudian Excuse: Angela's suspicion of manipulative men clearly comes from her Sleazy Politician father. Subverted in Taggart's case -- he remembers his father as a Jerkass, but later comes to realise Dad was just going through a rough patch, unaware that his life would be cut short before he could make up with his son.
- Government Conspiracy: The Cadre
- Groin Attack: Barely averted when Kurt Mendel has an attack of paranoia and is convinced that his friends are Synthetics. Angela gets Kurt to swallow his medicine by pointing a Beretta 9mm at his testicles.
Angela: "I will do it, Kurt!"
Kurt: "Oh God, even as a Synthetic, you are a ballbuster..."
- Hand Cannon: Chuck is quite fond of his Colt .45 Peacemaker revolver. He even does a flashy showcase for Kurt just before they encounter a Synthetic for the first time, but subsequently finds that Synths have no trouble taking several shots to anywhere but the head and staying on their feet.
- Hollywood Science: Lampshaded when the Odyssey team consult an abrasive sci-fi writer clearly based on Harlan Ellison (who conceived the series). As they can't tell him the truth (that they've travelled back in time five years to avert the destruction of the Earth) the team pretend they're writing a science fiction novel. The sci-fi writer goes into detail on how cliched and scientifically implausible their 'novel' is.
- Kill Sat
- Mental Time Travel: Because it's impossible to physically travel back in time the aliens send their minds back into their old bodies.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Notably that Earthshattering Kaboom, but none of the characters can resist tinkering with their own personal lives as well, despite agreeing not to do so.
- Something Only They Would Say
- Standardized Space Views: Creatively averted with the series' opening.
- That's No Moon
- Ridiculously-Human Robots: Justified, since Synthetics are designed with the specific pupose of being able to blend in human society. Spoofed when a sci-fi writer derides the idea of Ridiculously-Human Robots as "a cheap tool TV shows use to save on special effects".
- Sleazy Politician: Angela's father, though he actually does care about her -- he just isn't above lying to her as well.
- The Un-Reveal: We never found out if the AI's (the main day-to-day opponent of the time-travelling Five-Man Band), or a misguided/genocidal attempt to stop them (by aliens or the US government) was behind the destruction of Earth.
- Unwilling Roboticisation
- Weather Dissonance: Since the crew of the Odyssey go back in time, they inevitably arrive to an event which, as they remember it in their original timeline, was accompanied by stormy weather, but in the new one there is a massive heat wave that even makes the news. Turns out to be Sentients manipulating the weather to power a Doomsday Device of sorts.
- What Could Have Been: According to the Word of God the series would have ended up with humanity changing into human-AI hybrids, which is certainly a bold concept.
- White Void Room: In the pilot where they meet a member of a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
"God really IS an old, white guy."
- And also where Chuck was to meet the Sentient responsible for creating the synthetic virus in Flux.