'Odyssey 5,' worthy heir of 'X Files'

'Odyssey 5,' worthy
heir of 'X-Files'

Showtime's gripping sci-fi-er puts it on HBO's turf

By Dan Jewel

     Over the past few years, HBO has managed to win legions of new subscribers by convincing viewers they simply couldn’t live without “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under.”
   This summer, Showtime may finally have a competitor with its new series, “Odyssey 5,” a tense, atmospheric swirl of sci-fi deliberately reminiscent of “The X-Files.”
   The premiere quickly, and grippingly, sets the stage. A NASA crew is on a routine mission aboard the Odyssey 5 space shuttle when they witness the earth explode and vanish beneath them. An alien called The Seeker rescues the quintet and sends them back in time, giving them five years to figure out what happened—“Seek within your own,” sayeth the Seeker—and to stop it from happening all over again.
   Ideally, of course, this means the show (airing Fridays at 10 p.m.) should run five years, building to the moment of potential doom. Judging from the frenetic pace so far, the writers are liable to run out of ideas, oh, four years shy of that mark.
    As viewers we’re already suffering from severe information overload.
    Somehow connected to the earth’s destruction, we’ve learned, are a genetic therapy experiment turning patients into killing machines, an Artificial Intelligence creation that has spawned wormlike “sentients” squirming around the internet, a sinister space satellite program called “Blue Sky,” and violent gelatinous creatures disguised as human beings. “The X-Files” took about six years to cover this much ground, and it still lost most of us.
   “Odyssey 5” has a host of other obstacles to overcome.
    The characters tend towards types. There’s Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roché), the randy British scientist; Chuck Taggart (Peter Weller), the swaggering captain; his son Neil (Christopher Gorham), the brash astronaut with something to prove; and top pilot Angela Perry (Tamara Craig Thomas), trying to keep her influential father from controlling her life. The only fully drawn personality is Sarah Forbes (Leslie Silva), a devoutly religious news anchor.
   Of the whole batch, only Silva shows the proper amount of emotion, while the others offer strangely one-note performances. The earth is destroyed, along with all their loved ones, and they register mild surprise. Some slimy "Alien"-esque organism leaps onto Kurt’s face, and they register…mild surprise (mixed, in Weller’s case, with a nearly constant expression of bemusement).
    I keep waiting for someone to exhibit an expression of actual fright, but no such luck.
   But the show, created by Manny Coto, a veteran of Showtime’s “Outer Limits,” has tremendous visual flair, and the setup leads to some fascinating subplots.
    Neil, for one, finds his 22-year-old soul back in the body of an irresponsible 17-year-old—with a high school girlfriend to match. Sarah has another chance to try to save the son she lost to stomach cancer and to save the marriage that failed soon after.
   “Odyssey 5” is at its best when it explores how the future can be altered in ways both momentous and miniscule. Already, our heroes have caused the premature death of a NASA staffer and changed the outcome of a football game.
    Alas, the writing fails utterly when it strives for comic relief, most of which takes the form of painfully stupid double entendres uttered by Kurt. This is the sort of stuff a 12-year-old boy might come up with, if he hasn’t already outgrown it. Early in the pilot episode, for example, as a phallic mechanical arm captures a satellite, Kurt leers obscenely at Sarah and moans, “stick it in.” Aside from Austin Powers and the occasional congressman, grown men don’t act this way.
   Despite its flaws, “Odyssey 5” is the only show on the air (aside from “Alias”) that might actually ease the suffering of all those former X-philes desperate for another hopelessly intricate conspiracy to puzzle over. If it learns to parcel out plot developments with a bit more restraint, it might go the distance after all.

-Dan Jewel is a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York.

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