Invictus
I don’t watch a lot of TV. What little time I spend in front of mine is usually divided evenly between National Geographic and the History Channel. Exciting, I know. In this day and age where shows like CSI, Lost, Sex and the City, and Desperate Housewives rule the airwaves people find it incredible that I don’t have the faintest clue what Carrie Bradshaw does for a living.
Its not that I don’t enjoy a bit of drama every now and then; I just can’t justify spending hundreds of cumulative hours sitting in front a box and accomplishing nothing productive. But there are a few rare exceptions. A few years ago, one of the shows that I did invest a lot of time in was a sci-fi series called Andromeda. The funny thing is Andromeda was hardly the creme de la creme of TV productions: the theme music was cheesy, the special effects (or rather lack thereof) was dire and the script was laughable. The only reason why I followed it for as long as I did was because it was easy for me to draw some parallels between the script and my somewhat tumultuous life at the time, having just been transplanted from Singapore to Kansas.
The story itself is set thousands of years in the future in an alternate universe, where a prosperous democratic alliance of planets known as the “systems commonwealth” rules the known universe. En route to a battle engagement, the Andromeda, a starship captained by the protagonist of the series, Dylan Hunt, is ambushed gets caught in the event horizon of a black hole and frozen in time. Dylan and the Andromeda emerge 300 years later, only to discover that the commonwealth has collapsed and a universe in chaos.
With the only world that he’s ever known gone and displaced in time and space, Dylan Hunt sets about the impossible task of rebuilding his beloved commonwealth single-handedly. Its tough. After all, he’s an living anachronism longing to recreate dead ideals and dreams that few people understand and even fewer care about. He clearly knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell but he forges on anyway. The rag-tag crew of the Andromeda are wonderful companions, but they’ll never see things his way. In his heart of hearts Dylan knows he’s isn’t - and won’t ever be - where he belongs.
Somehow, I could relate to all of that.