SeaQuest DSV – Season One
Picture: C
Sound: B- Extras: C- Episodes: C+
On the heels of James Cameron’s The Abyss (1990)
and its lesser feature film competitors Deep Star Six and Leviathan,
writer Rockne S. O’Bannon created a TV response and even had Steven Spielberg
on board to co-produce it. The result
was SeaQuest DSV, a show with serious initial buzz that was expected to
be Star Trek underwater and boasted a look at work in the future when we
built a colony to explore the ocean in 2032.
Roy Schieder, Spielberg’s lead in Jaws back in 1975, was hired
for the lead role of Captain Nathan Bridger and his lead work in Peter Hyams’ 2010
(1984) was another reason he got the part.
Season One launched in 1993 with 23
episodes that included some guest stars and teleplays that tried to build the
show’s own world. The great journeyman
veteran director Irvin Kershner even helmed the pilot show. The episodes here are, with guests where
applicable:
1) To Be Or
Not To Be*
2) The
Devil’s Window* (Roscoe Lee Browne)
3) Treasure
Of the Mind*
4) Games
5) Treasures
Of the Tonga Trench (Yaphet Kotto)
6) Brothers
& Sisters
7) Give Me
Liberte (Udo Keir, Daniel Stern)
8) Knight
Of Shadows
9) Bad
Water
10) The Regulator
11) seaWest (David McCallum, David
Morse)
12) Photon Bullet (Seth
Green)
13) Better Than Martians
(wrestler Steve Austin, Kent McCord)
14) Nothing But The Truth*
15) Greed For A Pirate’s Dream* (Roscoe
Lee Browne)
16) Whale Song
17) The Stinger
18) Hide & Seek
19) The Last Lap Of Luxury* (Carl
Lumbly)
20) Abalon* (Charlton Heston)
21) Such Great Patience* (Kent
McCord, Dustin Nguyen)
22) The Good Death
23) Higher Power
Unfortunately, the innovative, clever, mature, interesting
adventure show with an edge Schieder thought he was getting when he signed on
turned out to be a sillier series pandering to that UFO known as the family
audience. It was too technical for
families, yet not nerdy and complex enough for hardcore Science Fiction
fans. What’s worse, it was not even
considering the older audience tuning in for Schieder, so the series was a
disappointment. Schieder still stayed
on beyond this season and hoped things would get better, but for this season,
it was just not working out much.
Then there is Jonathan Brandis, who was being primed as
the next big star and was getting roles beyond the run of this show. Unfortunately, the appealing and talented
actor who the camera liked took his life just a few years ago and we lost yet
another great face of tomorrow. It is
with great irony I watched his work throughout. Even if this was one of the biggest TV hits of all time, there is
no telling if that would have helped him, but he definitely added to the
show. That is especially apparent when
the scripts were not that good. Over a
decade later, he carries the show as much as even Schieder, who is not easy to
compete against.
The 1.33 X 1 image is surprisingly poor, with a digitizing
of the live action footage that degrades it, likely coming from the
digitization of the entire episodes for the then-new kind of digital visual
effects. They look old and dated;
somewhere between the bad garbage we have been getting too often lately and an
Atari 2600. The Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo is better with Pro Logic surrounds and decent dialogue reproduction. Extras only include the deleted scenes on
the episodes above marked with an *.
- Nicholas Sheffo
