“Space: Above and Beyond” Review


Space: Above and Beyond: Created by Glen Morgan, James Wong. With Morgan Weisser, Kristen Cloke, Rodney Rowland, Joel de la Fuente. The Earth is embroiled in a desperate war against alien invaders, and this series focuses on one squadron of Marine pilots involved in it.

I had a strong memory of really liking this show, but I knew that it was military science fiction from a time when scifi on TV was pretty hokey at times, so I was happy to see that the first episode opened so strongly with the drill sergeant from “Full Metal Jacket” making an appearance.  It throws a few seemingly unrelated concepts at the wall with tank born super soldiers with no home after a war with synthetic humanoids combining with an assault by alien forces on a human colony on a far off planet. It all eventually kinda sorta all ties together and the stories go from pretty ok to downright bad at times.  The synthetic stories and concept haven’t aged very well, showing particular 90’s elements that are no longer in vogue, specifically androids with cool looking eye caps and circuit boards just randomly hanging off their necks to indicate they’re androids and not humans.  I loved the final project and I think it’s one of the reasons I grew into loving military scifi so much as an adult.

My one big complaint about the show is that the main characters seem to be “general purpose” space marines, depending on the requirements of whatever episode they were in, from leading ground forces to piloting their own “hammerhead” fighter ships to running the guns on smaller cargo landers.  I get that the necessities of the show’s structure is the reason this happened this way, but that structure could be better laid out if the show was made in modern times.

The reason I went back to watch this was that I found a couple paperback books that have stories from this universe and wanted to have the show fresh in my mind when I read them, so now they’re up next on my TBR pile.  They’ve been there for about a year now!

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