Talk:Star Wanderers, Season One

Expectations

I expect the crew of Star Wanderers to come to terms with their current situation in the next episode, putting a number of them into Statis Pods for long-term storage, getting the rest of the crew set-up for long-term storage, and in the mean-time setting up hydroponics to feed everyone while getting some of the space station construction equipment readied to harvest material to fuel the ship.

That being said, there's going to be one episode where they're grilling Professor Espinoza to make sure that there aren't any sleeper agents among the crew. Mixed with this episode are the efforts of the other crew to try and triangulate their position in the galaxy by using Quazars to see where, and possibly when they are.

Once they've realized they can't find anything to guide them back to Earth, they have to make the best of a horrific situation. The computer's artificial intelligence is fried, and the only way to get themselves moderately functional is to clone Korey the Kawar's intellect and put it into the computer system, and re-teach it how to activate the systems. This works to great success, but it's painstaking to teach him operations.

Fortunately, things like the Statis Pods are on independent back-ups.

This is going to be slow-going, so your suggestions of how to make it interesting (anyone) will be helpful. They're going to have to rebuild themselves up as far as fuel and picking a g2 star (like ours) to go to, hopefully finding a planet supporting life. I expect them to be en route to the g2 by episode 10, so we're going to gloss over a lot of it, and we may be on the way by episode 5 just to keep the audience interested.

What do you think? Suggestions?

Okay, so this series essentially is setting up a situation very much like Lost in Space and Star Trek: Voyager and Space: 1999 with maybe a bit of Farscape as well as Starlost. Reminds me a bit of a failed Canadian series as well, about a ship with five cloned crewmembers looking for a home for a gigantic gene bank for the human race. But I digress...

You've established this big ship, full of people (although a fair number are in stasis, if I read you right), lost somewhere in the galaxy, right? And because the ship was sabotaged, it will take a long time to even figure out where they are or how to get home.

The first question that comes to my mind is "What is the galaxy like?" Is it composed of primitive races with stone axes and a few godlike transcendants who barely notice our heroes? Are there ruins everywhere, indicating somebody or something smashed interstellar civilizations into extinction (shades of Revelation Space and the Wolves, eh?)? Are there no other sentient life forms left, just remnants here and there (like Red Dwarf but not played for laughs)? Are we talking monsters of the week? A soul-suppressing galactic empire that never developed the Y-D Drive? Have some godlike aliens stage-managed the situation of the Erebus One to accomplish some strange goal? Perhaps the defeat of their ancient foe (Vorlons/Arisians versus Shadows/Eddoreans anyone?)? Perhaps the ship has traveled forward in time thousands of years--so that humanity is already out among the stars and have fallen into a Dark Age, or been conquered by someone, or are extinct? Or maybe they awaken a species that needs hosts to inhabit/eat, and so must lead these dangerous creatures away from Earth? Or is the galaxy just very, very weird--with habitable worlds few and far between, those few nearly always inhabited by something dangerous? Zahir 15:22, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, as for the galaxy itself, it won't be discussed if they're actually in the Milky Way somewhere or lost entirely to some far-distant galaxy. They suspect it's not even the Milky Way, that somehow they were thrown out of the local cluster of galaxies even, because there are no Quazars that they can draw triangulation from, but we as viewers won't ever know for sure, just like the people of the show.

I see there being habitable worlds, however, I think the technology will also vary in height. What I'm seeing as the plot is this group of humanity, realizing they're cut off and may never again see the rest of humanity are going to do what they were sent to do--colonize. They're going to strike off and find a world--Earth-sized but orbiting a gas giant in a wide orbit so that they don't suffer from the radiation. Because the gas-giant is triple Jupiter's size, it actually gives off a glow--so there's some light, even when they transit behind it.

They're going to eventually land on this planet and colonize a continent that is relatively uninhabited, and far away from the native societies that they see on the other continents, hoping that they can at least regroup until they find a better world, and then abandon this new planet. They will build a space station to facilitate transit of goods from the world, allowing for a station society (the space station is in pieces in the cargo-hold of Erebus) and a world society. The world society will maintain high-tech, but will be "gearing down" so that they can build up the necessary industry.

The natives will be human sized and shaped...but more simian in nature (fur, crepuscular (dusk/dawn activity, mostly). They will be much stronger, and have a different emotional sense than the humans, which will cause some friction as they come to terms with each other. Think 13th century Europe for the tech level, if that helps.

They won't actually encounter the natives until some time later this season...I'm seeing them having to build the station through season one, and when rations start running low, and hydroponics won't cut it anymore, they start looking to the lush world below, with the life below being discovered at the last episode, with someone (or several) being taken captive by the natives. (This series is going to somewhat parallel C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series...but not enough that you'd notice.)

A very interesting set-up and plan. Quite different from other space-based series indeed! Might I suggest the term "Abo" for the natives, from "aborigine"? Zahir 22:54, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

To add some racial tension, I may well have that actually be their name, but the xenophobic part of the humans who choose to stay on-station will take it for Aborigine, and make it somewhat of an epithet. BoArthur 14:57, 20 August 2008 (UTC)