Andromeda Episode 8: The Banks of the Lethe

Captain Hunt uses a black hole to chat with his fiance in the past, like in that movie Frequency.

Episode Summary

Andromeda returns to the site of the black hole it was stuck in for 300 years, this time with a group of Perseid (blue alien) scientists. Captain Hunt is allowing these scientists to study the black hole during their stay on Andromeda, while also hoping they’ll join the New Systems Commonwealth.

Contact with the Past

Hunt’s mind wanders. The black hole reminds him of the life he left behind, and more importantly, his fiance Sara (played by Kevin Sorbo’s wife, by the way). Rev Bem suggests he send her a message – she wouldn’t answer, of course, but it would be therapeutic.

He sends the message, and she actually replies because of the black hole being all time distortiony or whatever. Sara’s parked just outside the black hole, 300 years in the past (not too long after Hunt initially disappeared). She’s chartered a research vessel and put together a crew in the hopes of pulling Past Andromeda out of the black hole.

Hunt explains to Sara that since he’s in the future, her rescue mission obviously failed, but she doesn’t care. As Sara attempts to pull Andromeda out of the black hole, a Nietzschean ship arrives and starts attacking her ship.

Back to the Past

Meanwhile, Harper and the Perseids have been working on a teleporter, which they test on a melon, hoping to send it several seconds into the past. The melon explodes, but Captain Hunt doesn’t care and uses the teleporter to beam himself into the past.

It miraculously works this time, and Hunt arrives on Sara’s ship intact. They hang out a bit, and he helps her with her Nietzschean problem via trickery, then tells her to pack her bags to go back to the future with him. Unfortunately, Andromeda can’t handle teleporting two people, so he’s tearfully forced to leave her behind.

The Perseids sign the New Systems Commonwealth charter and leave. Rommie tells Hunt that the little nudge his wife gave Andromeda in her rescue attempt was enough to prevent it from falling deeper into the black hole. So she technically did free Andromeda, it just took 300 years.

Thoughts

This episode was a little similar to episode 6 in that it involved time travel and Captain Hunt making big decisions and sacrifices.

Harper conveniently pulled yet another super advanced technology out of his ass – the matter transporter, albeit with help from Perseids this time. Who wants to guess we’ll never see this technology ever again? The scene where they tested it on a watermelon was cute, though.

The main detractors of this episode were the action scenes with the Nietzschean attacks in both the past and present, which really weren’t needed, coupled with bits of lackluster acting.

I’m able to look past these flaws (this time) because the good outweighed the bad, and I was plenty entertained through the whole episode. What more can one ask for?