Jammersreviews

Warning: This review contains significant spoilers for Andromeda's "The
Mathematics of Tears." If you haven't seen the episode yet, beware.


In brief: Different-feeling and intriguing, although sometimes a bit rough
and cartoonish. An acceptable balance of several strange parts.

Plot description: The crew discovers the Andromeda's sister ship, whose
crew holds a mysterious secret.

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Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda: "The Mathematics of Tears"

Airdate: 1/29/2001 (USA week-of)
Teleplay by Matt Kiene & Joe Reinkemeyer
Story by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz
Directed by T.J. Scott

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
Rating out of 4: ***

"They were playing Wagner. It's the most fun I've had in about six
months." -- Tyr
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The hilarious above-mentioned deadpanned line of dialog comes at the end
of an extended fight scene in "The Mathematics of Tears" -- a scene that
transcends the ordinary by being a weird sequence of choreographed
action/chaos which is, yes, underscored by Wagner and takes on a life of
its own.

After the string of mediocrity that preceded it, "Mathematics" is an
acceptably entertaining episode that gets an A for effort and high marks
for being bizarre. It's not the tidiest package ever conceived (indeed,
there are parts of it that are just plain messy), but it somehow comes
together and works on its bottom line. Director T.J. Scott and the
post-production people bring order to what initially looks like madness,
and they have a reasonably good sci-fi premise to work with. It all ends
with that big fight sequence, which manages to be chaotic, elaborate,
pleasing, funny, and ludicrous all at once, in an entertaining way.

The story is one of those mysteries where the solution comes in the form
of a sci-fi twist, but even then "Mathematics" still has two entire acts
to go, with still more mysteries to solve and fights to be fought. It
begins with the crew discovering another High Guard starship, the Pax
Magellanic, which is in fact a sister ship of the Andromeda. Amazingly,
several members of its crew are still alive, having mysteriously not aged
in 300 years ... for reasons that are at first uncertain and then later
made clear. The senior officer is Lt. Jill Pearce (Monika Schnarre) and
the ship and its survivors have been stranded all this time without the
use of their slipstream drive. Apparently, their chief engineer, Dutch
(Nathaniel Deveaux), spent a century working to fix it before giving up.
Now that's patience.

Rommie attempts to interface with the Pax's AI system to find answers, but
discovers only memory gaps and scrambled computer confusion; the Pax AI
apparently suffered extreme damage. One interesting aspect here is the way
Rommie sees her sister ship as a literal sister; they'd known each other
back in the Commonwealth days, and Rommie hopes to restore the ship's AI
to its previous state of awareness. Beka calls it a family affair.

The story's primary twist is that Lt. Pearce is actually a walking,
talking, lying version of the Pax's AI in android avatar form. She's
hiding something important about the fate of most of the ship's crew,
which she claims had died while on the surface of a nearby planet
destroyed by a Nietzschean attack. Tyr doesn't buy it; the Nietzscheans
don't destroy hospitable planets even to eradicate their enemies. He tells
Dylan to draw his own conclusions rather than take Pearce's word at face
value. This advice seems particularly prudent once Pearce has been
revealed as the Pax's AI. The ship's crew are all androids she created to
ease the pain of loneliness.

The main plot flow of "Mathematics" is actually fairly light. It exists as
a key into the flashback narrative and later the climactic showdown
between Our Heroes and the Pax's androids. The truth lies in Pax's
traumatic, deeply buried secret, which Rommie finds only after extensively
digging through memory files: The Pax was programmed to love, and she
loved her captain. When the captain ordered her to self-destruct during a
crisis, the Pax refused and instead used her confused love as a tragic
logical instrument to destroy her captain and crew rather than herself.
Hell hath no fury like a starship scorned.

This idea brings up a few interesting questions about the nature and
dangers of AI emotionalism: The Pax's captain essentially had an affair
with his starship, something not permitted by the rules of the High Guard
(but don't despair, Dylan/Rommie fanfic writers!), and for good reason --
the cataclysmic events of the Pax's past provide a good demonstration.
Certainly the captain must shoulder some of the blame for the confused
actions of an AI with which he should not have become intimate (the sci-fi
ideas here fall somewhere in between the intriguing and the absurd).

As the story's secrets are uncovered, the Pax sends its androids to attack
Dylan and his crew on the docked Maru -- which brings us to that big fight
scene. It's intercut with cyberspace flashback images that resolve the
secrets of the plot. Meanwhile we have chaotic scenes where Harper, Beka,
and Tyr fight off an attack of androids. This attack involves a lot of
shooting and stunt coordination that has the ebb and flow of a
choreographed number. The whole thing is underscored by classical Wagner,
a choice that seems so unexpected and droll (and yet is justified by the
plot) that it elevates the sequence to some sort of madcap brilliance. And
Tyr's line about the fun inherent in fighting to the tune of Wagner is an
instant classic in my book.

What doesn't work in "Mathematics" is the way plot developments are
sometimes conveyed with choppy, whiplash execution. There is, for example
the matter of Harper deactivating all the androids with a single line of
exposition that simultaneously drops the bombshell that they are in fact
androids. It's a questionably executed moment that feels more like the
script grinding away than events actually unfolding.

There's also the way Dylan offers reinforcement for having figured out the
nature of Pax's android avatar by explaining that Jill Pearce is derived
from translating and mutating Pax Magellanic from Latin -- which is an
entirely rushed, implausible, and unnecessary bit of exposition.

I also found it strange and unintentionally amusing the way the
androids -- initially so perfectly lifelike and human -- move like jerky
robots and make whirring noises after the plot reveals that they're
androids. Pretty hokey, if you ask me.

And lastly, there's the deus ex Tyr that never accounts for how Tyr got
from the Andromeda to the Maru to help save the day. (Useful reminder:
There are no transporters on this series.)

On the other hand, I don't care too much about these flaws. I liked many
of the stylistic choices, like the use of gold for the Pax, the oddly
disconnected look and feel of the flashback sequences, the strange AI
figure that greets Rommie in Pax cyberspace, the sheer artistry of some of
the photography in the final fight, and the framing of the shot where
Rommie and Rev talk about the mathematics of tears.

"Mathematics" is far from great sci-fi or great television and is
sometimes, well, silly. But it manages to elevate silliness to an art form
that ends up looking pretty creative.

--
Next week: Tyr goes bananas.

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Copyright 2001 Jamahl Epsicokhan. All rights reserved.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this article is prohibited.

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Jamahl Epsicokhan - jammer@...