Star Trek Voyager is often cited as the first sci-fi show with a female lead, and it was definitely touted as a selling point before it premiered. But as it turns out, Voyager was beaten to the punch–by this show, Earth 2. Premiering in 1994, Earth 2 focuses on–you guessed it–colonists trying to survive on an Earth-like planet after Earth has become unlivable. It’s very much in the vein of a space western, but it’s also a family show, and these two aspects clash from time to time. Lasting only one season, Earth 2 started off popular but plummeted in the ratings as it went on. Is that a sign of its quality, or did it die right as it was getting good?

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Defiance moved into its third season by making some huge changes to the status quo. Some turned out way better than expected, while others were more of a letdown. With the finale feeling like it may very well be the end of the series, how did Defiance shape up overall? New storylines, new characters, even a new race of Votans… but was it well executed, or did many things end up being rushed to fit this apparent finale?

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This month’s What Could Have Been comes as a special request. The Tomorrow People was a 2013 series about a group of people who developed superpowers (the eponymous Tomorrow People), who are being hunted down by a group called Ultra. It was a CW series, and as such has more of a YA bent to it than what we’ve mostly covered so far on the site. It was also a remake of a 1970s British sci-fi series, one that actually lasted quite a while (8 seasons). The modern incarnation wasn’t so lucky and got canceled after its first. Now, I should admit I’ve never actually watched The Tomorrow People myself, so if there are any silly errors you’ll have to forgive me. But, I was able to dig up a little info on where the series would have gone, and it sounds like it would’ve been quite the shakeup. Without further ado, let’s look at The Tomorrow People season 2 that could have been.

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After taking a month off, the Obscure SciFi Primer returns with a strange cross-genre offering, Century City. Century City is a sci-fi legal drama–quite possibly the only sci-fi legal drama ever, actually. Airing on CBS in 2004, it managed to film a mere 9 episodes, and of those, only 2 actually made it on TV before it was canceled, so it never really had a chance to succeed at all. Think of all the awful shows you’ve watched throughout your life: even those likely got a 13 episode upfront order produced. So was Century City really that bad, or did it simply get shafted even worse than Firefly and all our other cut short favorites? Let’s find out.

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Warping in on an unusual day of the week, the Obscure Sci-Fi Primer returns with a fan-requested show: the extremely short-lived 1999 series Harsh Realm. Clocking in at a meager 9 episodes, this is by far the shortest show to appear in the Primer to date. Harsh Realm deals with virtual reality, much like another show we’ve covered already. But while VR.5‘s virtual worlds were highly personal ones, Harsh Realm is far less so, having started as a high-tech training simulation for dealing with potential nuclear apocalypse. It’s also an (incredibly loose) adaptation of a comic book, and had a number of X-Files writers working on it, like Chris Carter and Vince Gilligan (although the latter wasn’t a writer here).

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Now that it’s been a few weeks since the season 2 finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., we can get enough distance to take a look at the second season as a whole. This season was a marked improvement over the first, continuing the trend that started with the post-Captain America 2 episodes of season 1. It continued some plot threads from season one, but the main thrust of the season was largely centered on new territory for the MCU: the Inhumans. We’re going to look at three things here: the development of characters, the overall progression of the various plot threads, and some of the more general themes present throughout.

And it’s a retrospective, so duh: spoilers for all of season 1 and 2 ahead.

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A proposed Enterprise redesign for another undeveloped movie, by Ralph McQuarrie of Star Wars fame.

We’re going to try something new this month. Instead of a season for a show that was canceled, it’s going to be a look at the plans for a series that never actually materialized at all. Hopefully it’s just as popular, as I’ve got a few more of these we can examine in the future, and let’s face it–there are a lot of canceled shows, but not all of them had enough planning and forethought put into them that they could fill out a full article. And what better place to start out than in the franchise that featured in the first “What Could Have Been?” That’s right, we’re looking at a Star Trek series that never got produced: a continuation of the original series, with new characters and an upgraded ship called Star Trek: Phase II.

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This month, the Obscure Sci-Fi Primer hops back over to cyberpunk with the Fox series Dark Angel. Unusually for a sci-fi series on Fox, it actually managed to get a second season before being screwed over, which makes it the first show in the Primer to have lasted longer than one (although the two seasons are radically different). More typically, it was shunted to the Friday Night Death Slot and quietly killed to make room for Fox’s next victim, Firefly. The show was created by James Cameron, the king of the box office himself, and Charles H. Eglee, and was originally made with the idea of a feminist superhero in mind. Set in a dystopian version of Seattle, of all places, Dark Angel possesses a lot of cyberpunk themes while focusing heavily on genetic engineering and secret government projects. But is it worth watching now, just 4 years away from the time it was set?

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This month’s “What Could Have Been” is brought to you by special request (a while ago, actually, but I wanted to cover Odyssey 5 in a Primer first). As it turns out, Odyssey 5 doesn’t have a whole lot of information out there on how it would’ve progressed; Manny Coto, the show’s creator, has been fairly tight-lipped about his plans and still has a fervent belief that he may be able to resurrect or remake the show some day. It’s hard to argue with the idea that the show would likely be far more successful if it were made today than it was at the time, although ratings weren’t behind its cancellation. Almost everything I’ve found comes from one source: the DVD commentary for episode 1. However, there’s still enough tantalizing tidbits here that we can reconstruct some of the series’ plot and eventual resolution. Let’s look at the plans for Odyssey 5 Season 2 and beyond.

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This month, the Obscure Sci-Fi Primer returns to take on the little known series Odyssey 5. It’s kind of a generically vague sci-fi title, something that sounds like it’s referring to some space outpost (or maybe it just reminds me of Babylon 5). The truth of the series is actually quite different, keeping a fairly grounded approach to its time travel-based subject matter. Odyssey 5 first premiered on Showtime in 2002, the same channel that hosted our earlier subject Total Recall 2070. The show was created by Manny Coto, who went on to run the final season of Star Trek: Enterprise, right when it started to get good. With that in mind, let’s take a look at this forgotten series and decide if it’s worth digging into.

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