Andromeda Episode 54: The Unconquerable Man

What if Dylan Hunt, not Gaheris Rhade, died in the first episode?

Episode Summary

Hunt and Harper pull out Gaheris Rhade’s preserved body from cryostasis. Rhade’s family on Terazed wants the body so they can give it a proper burial. Suddenly, there’s a flash…

Alternate Timeline

We get a reprise of Hunt and Rhade’s fight from the first episode, only this time Rhade is victorious, kills Hunt, and gets stuck in the black hole. For the majority of the episode, we see certain scenes and events from previous episodes play out, only with Hunt being substituted by Rhade.

Rhade’s relationship with the Andromeda crew is vastly different: he’s at odds with fellow Nietzschean Tyr, he treats Harper like crap, Rommie (with no android body in this timeline) doesn’t like how he killed her captain, and he is romantically involved with Beka. Rhade also makes a hologram of Hunt because he misses him so much, and they play 3d checkers together.

Compared to Hunt, Rhade really sucks at rebuilding the Commonwealth and keeping his crew together. Beka and Rev Bem leave, and Rhade is forced to kill the contentious Tyr. All he has left are Trance and Harper, but the latter has been infested with Magog larvae (as in the “normal” timeline).

The larvae start to hatch, and as we saw in Ouroboros, Harper attempts to remove them with a tesseract machine, but it causes a bunch of time distortions to form all over Andromeda. Rhade prepares to destroy the machine, but Trance stops him. She tells him she thought he would be the “one” but he’s obviously not because he sucks so much.

Setting Things Right

Trance guides Rhade through a time distortion back to the first episode, right before his fight with Hunt. He kills his past self and assumes his identity, then heads off to face Hunt and fulfill his destiny of dying.

The episode ends with a return to the present, where everything is back to normal.

Thoughts

This was a pretty cool idea for a clip show – revisiting events from previous episodes but from a new perspective. I do wonder if this should be considered a clip show at all, since there’s plenty of new footage of Rhade interacting with all the past episode events.

Recycling clips and rerunning stories from older, better episodes was a very cheap way of making an instant “good” episode. But at this point – after suffering through some low quality episodes, with the worst still yet to come – I am perfectly fine with this.

Given how far Andromeda has fallen since these early episodes, I actually would have preferred this timeline with Rhade as captain. He’s more interesting than Hunt, dealing with a situation that is more desperate and dire, with everything constantly falling apart all around him.

Since Rhade kills his original timeline self at the end of the episode, then soon after dies in the duel with Hunt, does this mean there were two Rhade corpses on Andromeda? And no one noticed or said anything?