Harriet Monkhouse wrote:
Oh, I meant to tell you, Betty, I saw a Tyr Anasazi bear on a stall at Eclecticon. The maker told me it wasn't quite finished - no Nietzschean forearm spikes, for a start. But the hair was pretty good. And no muscles.
Ah, I bet he even looks good as a bear! But, you know, while I normally don't go for musclebound guys, on Tyr they *work*... I think in large part because he seems so very unselfconscious about them. And his ultra-biff physique makes such an interesting contrast with his oh-so-soulful eyes...
Ahem. Where was I?
And Una Salus did make me think "Oh... my... Dylan/Tyr fanfic could be... interesting."
I'm *not* touching that one on this list! :)
Back to B7 wannabes in general, one thing that interests me is their solutions to crew numbers.
What I find interesting is the common approach they all take of having great big ships with a tiny (and rather inadequate for practical purposes) handful of crew. Sort of the opposite of the Star Trek approach, where you've got a ship full of hundreds of people, but simply ignore most of them in favor of the series regulars.
I seem to remember that one reason why Gan was killed off was that they decided six (live) crew members were too many to handle in an average plot, so five plus two AIs was the best solution.
That may have been one reason, though I do remember hearing it said that it was mainly for dramatic purposes: that killing off a character was a way to keep the threat of the Federation serious, as opposed to Coyote and Roadrunner effect, where you know they'll make it out unscathed every week.
Andromeda's characters map very obviously on to B7's first-season crew, but they failed to understand about the numbers problem, as giving the AI an android avatar means seven humanoid(ish) crew. The result is that in a lot of episodes one or two characters get the week off, which is sometimes explained within the plot and sometimes not.
This is rather starting to annoy me, too, especially when a few words of explanation would be easy enough to write in in many cases, and could even be used to serve the purposes of character development. I can easily imagine, for example, why Rev Bem might have wanted a few episodes off by himself after the events at the start of this season...
Farscape started off with four humanoids plus Pilot and Rygel, who I suppose could be regarded as Zen and Orac equivalents (one's helpful and bonded with the ship, one's portable, annoying and has a massive superiority complex).
Hmm, Rygel-Orac isn't a mapping that had occured to me! As you can maybe tell, I was partially mapping him onto *Avon*, although his personality really is a lot closer to Orac's, now that I think about it. His skills are vastly different, though -- I don't think *anybody* is gonna nominate Orac for ship's diplomat -- and he's not remotely as useful as Orac most of the time.
I'm discounting Moya as a character, though one could argue that she is, and that they therefore started with seven.
Well, she and Pilot come as a unit, so I tend to count them as one character, more or less.
Ignoring Moya, though, the arrival of Chiana brought them up to five humanoids plus two, the B7 solution. But since then they've added two more humanoids and lost only one, and Crais has effectively joined the gang.
And don't forget Crichton's pet hallucination. I think he ought to count as at least half a character. :)
The result is that in mid third season, which is where I'm at, they've had to split the crew between two ships who get alternate episodes.
I haven't gotten to that one yet (I've only seen up through the 3rd season time travel ep -- which rocked, btw -- though in a few more weeks I should be all caught up!). But so far they seemed to be doing a pretty good job of making the show work as an ensemble, even if some characters got a lot more to do than others in any given episode. Then again, maybe the addition of Jool will put them over the limit of workable character numbers. Yet another reason to be annoyed with her, maybe...
And Lexx solved it by a drastic pruning to three humanoids plus one robot head, with occasional fellow passengers (I suppose Lyekka was the longest-running of these), so doesn't encounter the numbers problem at all.
And, for a lot of the first season, anyway, Kai spent not-insignificant portions of many episodes frozen...