Man am I angry.  I was so looking forward to the start of season 2 because I knew that was when Maya arrived.  I fast-tracked watching Season 1 just to get here.  And immediately I was disgusted.  Helena Pinocchio Russell opens with a captains log and we get a deluge of nonsense.  It’s 342 days since the moon left earth orbit for one, they’ve gone through another “space warp”, and there are 297 crew on Alpha.  On top of that, Victor, Kano and Paul are all gone and the crew have new outfits.  Forget Maya for a minute, what show am I watching?

I know I may be a bit of an anomaly in watching TV, but attention to detail matters a great deal to me.  I could accept that time has gone by and maybe we’ve repopulated some of the population with kids since just last episode we were at 280-ish.  17 seems a bit unlikely, but not impossible.  But then there’s the time issue.  Dragon’s Domain took place 877 days after the moon left earth orbit.  That was episode 8, this is episode 25.  So maybe we have to take into account that the show is not being shown in chronological order but we are given the gift of a new resident with Maya – are you telling me she was hiding out on another part of the base for all of last season?   And where does that mean Victor, Kano or Paul are hiding?  Oh, I know!  Maybe Maya had a thing for Sandra and killed off the real Paul, then masqueraded as him to start dating Sandra… Ok, that’s a leap.  It’s like the writers and creators of the show just didn’t care what happened before and that was a blow to me.  It made me feel like it just wasn’t worth it.  The history of the show could be rewritten in one single episode…

Now if I can get past that, which is hard, I have to get past the pronunciation of “titanium” (which I have never heard pronounced as tit-anium, always ty-tanium) which should be an easier task, but my heart has been torn asunder by the cavalier disregard for everything that’s happened so far!  If I manage the nearly superhuman feat of getting over that too, we have a typically weak script with a lot of back and forth that I’ve come to expect of the weaker episodes of the series.

The Alphas find a planet that might have titanium, so they go exploring.  The Eagle is pulled to the planet and Mentor reaches out to them.  Mentor is played by Brian Blessed, so hey, something good.  But he’s a ridiculous enemy who swirls his cape when he spins around like a wannabe Count Dracula.  He’s syphoning off the Alphan’s mental power to fuel his biological computer Psyche.  It turns the people into mindless slaves.  He threatens Koenig, saying if Koenig doesn’t send the rest of the base down, he will destroy them all.  Koenig orders “Directive 4” which basically tells Alpha to launch a full scale attack.  Maya has no idea her father is a jerk who keeps slaves in the basement, but Koenig convinces her to check with a really great script that just says “go and see” over and over.  Sold me, I’ll tell you.  So she does, realizes her dad’s a jerk, releases Koenig who then destroys Psyche and Mentor in the process.  He then abducts Maya and says she’ll be welcome with them.  He gets the only good line when Maya complains that she’ll always be an alien with them.  He say, “We’re all aliens until we get to know one another.”  Amen.  At least there was that…

I am delighted to have the shapeshifting Maya along with us now and still find her beautiful even after all these years.  She was my first TV crush and she’s still got it! But do I care about the Alphans?  We lost between 3-4 on this story but gained one.  But we gained 17 at the start of this story so no count is really worth a damn.  We lost another Eagle too, but who cares – they can be rebuilt. I don’t even care that one of the dead guys had the last name of Picard.  Had this been a better episode, I would have had a field day with knowing that Jean Luc’s family made it out to the moon, but what’s the point.

The new opening was ok, but it’s not the same show.  Maybe this is a parallel version of the Alphans.  I could accept that more than the idea that this is just the same crew.  I mean, Victor was damned cool and no one so much as mentions him.  According to what I’ve read, the script referenced his death which would make less sense since he was alive 2 years later, when Dragon’s Domain took place so all I can say is, thank god they did take that out of the script!!!  And where is Pouting Paul? I’m not a happy chappie right now and I am just hoping that the next episode brings a better story with it.  Maybe Maya can still save the show…    ML