Space Island One

I like this a lot. There's a TV movie called Trapped in space 1995 which this show I think heavily copied, even orienting themselveson the way the actors in the movie looked, which was great idea because I love that movie even more than this show. This show is awesome because the script is well written, the actors are great actors because in the 90s you actually still had to have talent to be allowed on the screen, love the 90s graphics and style of the space station and the way people look. The show is a bit very strong on promoting feminism in several episodes and strong on promoting artificial intelligence and making masculinity look bad at times, therefore for this sexist and pro robot stance I'll give it 8 stars, other than that it's very good, only unfortunate thing is they had a low budget because they're Europeans, that gets through to the viewer just a little bit. If guys know of any other hidden treasures like this let me know thanks.

... And the sets were on par with early Dr Who rather than anything high-tech like Bab5 or Star Trek, but damn, I loved those people, and I was SO ready for Season 2. Which never happened. If there were a DVD I'd buy it in about a second.

The little robots, the "roams", and their creator the Scots mechanical genius Lyle Campbell were great comic relief; the pilot Shannon and the station commander Kathryn McTiernan were a wonderfully tense pairing, the simply competent Brit and her over-the-hill Yank second-in-command and pilot. "Harry" Escherbach and her foil in the lab, Paula Hernandez were another study in subtle contrasts.

The show was very much character-driven ... but the plots were not bad either. As I say, I've been looking for DVD for about 8 years now.

Great concept, engaging cast, excellent production (for its time)... It all added up to much less than it could have, but was still very watchable if you took it with a grain of salt.

I had the feeling that the original intent was to do a truly 'realistic' space show, and that someone chickened out. It seemed like as soon as the first ratings came in, undoubtedly low, increasingly fantastic elements started to creep in to the series. These were fun, but more of a nod to the Doctor Who crowd than at all consistent with the original premise of Space Island One: life on a space station.

Still, I found the series to be an important 'island' of innovation in a perpetually childish and overwrought TV SF landscape. If you want to see a better show built on similar lines, try to track down the 1980s series Star Cops. Or the 1970s series Moonbase 3. Clearly, these low-key SF tend to come out of the UK every decade or so... We're overdue for another!

...if you're really, really dull. Seriously, children enjoy flashy lights and whiz-bang sounds in outer space and really don't care if the little toy rockets driven by their little toy spacemen don't carry reaction mass. Adults prefer something that could actually happen; where the plot is actually driven by the characters; where those characters can be interesting without being caricatures or clowns.

This is a show for adults. Thus far I've seen the first five episodes, and it's the ONLY genuinely hard sci-fi space-based television show I recall ever having seen. EVER. Here you will find NO magic gravity and NO sound in space. There are NO particles-of-the-week, NO omnipotent aliens. If you don't exercise you'll experience bone loss. This is a solid 5.5 on the Moh's Scale of Scientific Hardness.

It's a total breath of recycled, carbon-scrubbed, artificially oxygenated fresh air.

Wish I could find a place to buy videos of this show! We're taping it at 1 a.m. on Mondays.

For us, and my friends with scientific training, this is a great show. It's much more realistic than any other "science" show I've seen -- the lab is kind of messy, there are personal tensions about research results, research is seen as an ongoing thing you do every day.

It is kind of dry, but that's partly why we love it.

We saw the first part of a two part one where they're abandoning the station -- and they didn't show the next episode, the next week! So we'd really like to find that one!

Kathges