Sally Manton wrote:
Here's another little exercise, if anyone's interested, in two parts:
If you could change just three things about the series - with no restrictions on cast, budget, scripting etc - what would they be?
My goodness, this is *hard*. I was going to mention a few things about individual episodes, but I see there's a separate question for that, so... Hmm. Thing is, I'd be afraid of changing things *too* radically for fear of messing a good thing up! But let's see...
1) To echo a couple of other people: more for the women to do! I wanna see Jenna and Cally kicking ass! (If I can also include under this heading a little more character depth for Dayna, or Soolin developing into the interesting character she became more quickly, then I will!)
2) Make the third season more interesting... somehow. Lose the embarrassng alien-of-the-week episodes, at any rate (except for "Sarchophagus"), and replace them with... I dunno, interesting character-based episodes (like "City") and eps. that actually have some relevance to the post-war state of the galaxy.
3) This is a toughy. I was idly thinking something like "Have Ensor live for one more episode, just to give him a chance to interact with the rest of the crew," but that seemed a little too minor given my imaginary power to change any aspect of the series at all. But that makes me think of something I *would* have liked to have seen, which is a better exploration of Orac. A better sense of exactly what his limitations are, a better sense of how his predictive powers work (and why we never saw them again after "Redemption"), but, most of all, a little more exploration of him as a character in his own right. That machine always did seem to have his own agenda... One of the few things I actually liked about DotG was that we got to see Orac acting autonomously, putting the crew in danger, and then getting snarky when they complained about it. I would have *loved* to have seen more of that sort of thing, and of Avon trying to deal with it without reprogramming Orac into uselessness. Come to think of it, *that* may have been an interesting thing to do in a third season episode or two...
If you could change just three episodes, which are they and how would you do it?
OK, I think this is a little easier.
1) Gotta agree with Una on "Rumours of Death." Recast Anna with someone who has a little more chemistry with PD (or with anybody, for that matter). Lose the silver lame sheets. I wouldn't object to a little more info on exactly what the political situation on Earth *is*, either, or to making the torture scene slightly more intense. (I think it's a good episode, really. But it could have been a much *better* episode, and it's one that deserves to be as good as possible.)
2) Shove "Harvest of Kairos" out the airlock and replace it with something *good* in which neither Jarvik nor a lunar lander appears. The Sopron can stay, as long as it behaves itself.
3) Re-write "Animals" so that it plays as if it *were* actually written with Dayna in mind. Make Justin less icky, Og less laughable, and the brainwashing scenes painful in a *good* way instead of a bad one. (OK, so I don't *always* agree with Una! :))