Andromeda Episode 17: Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way

Gerentex, the rat alien from the first episode, returns and drags Harper and Trance with him on a treasure hunting expedition.

Episode Summary

Trance and Harper are tricked into visiting a drift by none other than Gerentex, the antagonist from the first two episodes. He gets on the Eureka Maru and holds Trance and Harper at gunpoint, forcing them to launch the ship with him aboard.

Gerentex reveals his scheme to get rich fast – finding the diary of a Perseid who claims to have found the way to Tarn-Vedra, the capital of the Old Systems Commonwealth and homeworld of the Vedrans. When the Commonwealth-Nietzschean War began, the Vedrans cut off all slipstream routes to their planet; Tarn-Vedra is pretty much Andromeda’s Atlantis.

Trance and Harper become unwilling partners with Gerentex.

Space Casino

A bounty hunter known as Reaper is after Gerentex and gets in a brief firefight with the Eureka Maru, but Harper and the others are able to escape and head for a space casino. There, Trance uses her precognitive abilities to score loads of cash for Gerentex to pay off an untrustworthy informant.

Reaper shows up again and causes trouble at the casino, but Harper and the others escape from him once again.

The Asteroid

The information Gerentex purchased leads him and the others, plus the pursuing Reaper, to the Perseid’s asteroid home. Harper gets his group through a booby-trapped passage, then locks the door behind them and removes the breathable air in the rest of the asteroid. Reaper is finally no longer a problem.

Gerentex and Harper find the diary and fight over it, but Trance puts a halt to the violence by threatening to shoot both of them.

Trance and Harper end up with the diary, but amicably part ways with Gerentex by dropping him off at a drift and giving him a profitable plant he can sell.

The B-Plot

In the episode’s B-plot, Captain Hunt learns that the Perseid’s aren’t too happy with their current arrangement with the New Systems Commonwealth (if you recall, they were the first to join) and are thinking about leaving. Beka solves the issue by opening a comm link with the Perseids and yelling at them; they stay in the Commonwealth.

Thoughts

This episode made me think of Indiana Jones, with the whole treasure hunting aspect, but with less interesting action. As in the last episode, I got Saturday Morning Cartoon vibes, this time from all the banter between Harper, Trance, and Gerentex that was more trite than clever.

Since Harper and Trance carried the majority of this episode, it was nice seeing different sides of them, particularly Harper’s vindictive side, which we caught glimpses of in earlier episodes.

We also learned a bit more of Gerentex (whose makeup is more refined than when we last saw him) and his rarely seen Nightsider species, which are the Andromeda equivalent of the Ferengi. Like Trance, I sympathized with Gerentex’s plight, and how he and his species are treated like pests and second-class citizens by the rest of the stellar community.

As in previous episodes, the B-plot was fillery. However, this time I feel the story of a New Commonwealth member becoming dissatisfied and wanting to leave had a lot of potential, and really should have been the A-plot of another episode.