"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." When a scientific mission brings Dylan back to the black hole that captured him, he makes cross-temporal contact with his fiancée Sara, who is trying to rescue him 300 years in the past.
(First aired during the week of November 20, 2000)
Written by Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz
Directed by David Winning
| Okay, Seamus, You're the Love God Baby |
| SEAMUS: It scans you, destroys you, transmits you through the projector and then rebuilds you from the particles up. Hilarity ensues. |
SEAMUS: Trust in the Harper. The Harper is good. |
SEAMUS: Call me the love god, baby! |
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GUEST STARS
Sam Sorbo – Sara Riley
Alex Diakun – Hohne
Eli Gabay – Captain Khalid
Twilight – Elizabeth Thai
Elizabeth Thai also played another Than pilot – "Refractions of Dawn" – in "
Under the Night".
WHAT HAPPENED
A familiar sight looms outside the Andromeda. As a favor to the
Perseids, Dylan has brought a team of scientists to examine the black hole that trapped him and his ship for 300 years.
The Perseids are thrilled to have the Andromeda as a research platform. Her computing power is just what they need to study the singularity, though their condescending comments about her limitations leave the starship fuming.
Dylan is too busy obsessing about the black hole to be bothered. "The thing didn’t just swallow my ship," he tells Beka, "it swallowed my life."
He goes to his cabin to brood. As he stares a picture of himself and his lost fiancée, a reversed time-lapse sequence taken from "Under the Night" tells us we’re about to see events from 300 years earlier.
Sara Riley – the lost fiancée – is staring at the same picture. She is aboard the starship Starry Wisdom, which is pulling into orbit around the black hole.
The ship’s crew finds the Andromeda on the edge of the event horizon. "Hold tight," Sara mutters, "we’re getting you out of there." (
spoilers)
ANALYSIS
"The Banks of the Lethe" suffers from several contrivances. The plot gets going because
Harper is ridiculously smart, and it wraps up with Dylan being surprisingly dumb.
Andromeda’s technology is
usually plausible and consistent. The science in this fiction has been a reasonable extension of early 21st century science, and the one big change in the show’s rules -- time travel in the slipstream -- is limited by the fact that almost everyone involved thinks it was a impossible-to-duplicate accident.
(
Trance knows better, of course. But Trance is playing her own game.)
All that goes out the window here. We’re asked to believe that you can broadcast into a black hole and get a signal out, that the signal is "accidentally" going to reach the time and place where it’ll do the most good and that Harper can complete a working teleporter and time travel machine in a matter of hours.
That’s an awful lot of suspension of disbelief just to get across the bridge to the plot. "Revolutionary technology while you wait" has been the bane of scores of Star Trek episodes, and it doesn’t play much better here.
Remedial Heinlein
Unfortunately, Harper is the only genius this week. The episode grinds to its mawkish conclusion only because Dylan shows a complete lack of time-travel creativity.
We know stasis technology exists in the Andromeda universe. We also know that the Than homeworld survives the Fall.
There’s no reason Sara couldn’t have gone to the Than homeworld, gone into stasis, and met up with Dylan 300 years later. Even if it’s not possible to go into stasis for that long, Sara could have left news for Dylan at a reputable and long-lived law firm.
Alternatively, Dylan and Sara could have arranged a time to return to the black hole and try again. After all, if Harper can whip up a time travel machine in an hour, he should be able to design a better information processing system in a year or two. Heck, this is time travel we’re talking about there – Dylan might be able to show up in two years to retrieve Sara two minutes later.
All these are classic science fiction tricks – in fact, Robert Heinlein put a character a situation very similar to Dylan’s in his novel The Door into Summer – and Andromeda’s writing staff is well-read in classic SF novels. If they ignored these possibilities, it’s because they wanted to force a specific tear-filled conclusion.
That’s cheap. "Angel Dark, Demon Bright" was a moving episode because all the characters were working at the peak of their abilities to surmount an almost impossible challenge. Here, we’re being asked to feel Dylan’s pain as he loses Sara forever – but why should we when we can think of several reasons why he doesn’t have to?
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK
"We say atoms are bound by weak attractors. Why not admit the truth: the universe is held together by love." – Michio Von Kerr, Wayist Physicist, CY 9942
WHAT WE LEARN
Andromeda is the last surviving
artificially intelligent starship.
The Perseids sponsored Earth’s membership in the Systems Commonwealth, and are the first to sign Dylan’s charter for a restored Commonwealth.
Not all of the Nietzscheans betrayed the Commonwealth.
Dylan and Sara met when he saved her from a Magog attack.
Both paperbacks and
Ayn Rand are still in use in the fifty-somethingth century.
Trance names her plants.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Did Sara make a new life for herself? Will she and Dylan meet again?
REALITY CHECK
Unless love really does hold the universe together, there’s no explanation for how Dylan and Sara were able to communicate. Their initial disbelief about receiving a signal from a black hole is well-founded.
How does Dylan’s hologram receive information from the Starry Wisdom? Even if it’s a normal ship-to-ship transmission, why does Dylan react as if he’s "there" on the ship? Is there a Quantum Leap -style imaging chamber, and if so why haven’t we seen or heard of it?
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK
Dylan gets one too many convictions when he is imprisoned for treason. Maybe he’ll find "A Rose in the Ashes". Or maybe he’ll just neck with Iman.
Where's Jammer, you ask? He's been really busy with other projects (not least of which is
getting caught up with his first reviewing love, Star Trek), and so we've provided this review to give Andromeda fans something to do while he's digging out -- and to remind them that we still cover the show.
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