Abaddon (7 Jul. 2000)

In the late in the 23rd century an outdated star ship is on a ten-year reclamation project. The crew is in suspended animation and awakes to find a mysterious object floating in space. The ... See full summary »

Director:

Steve Anker

Writers:

A L Katz, Scott Nimerfro

Stars:

Keith David, Max Martini, Jill Teed

Cast

Episode cast overview:
Keith David	...	Captain Ira Merit
Max Martini	...	Curtis Sandoval (as Maximilian Martini)
Jill Teed	...	Gwen Hutchinson
Byron Lucas	...	Augie Berger
Dion Luther	...	Gordon 'Gord' Knight
Corbin Bernsen	...	Virgil Nygard
Allixandra East	...	Isabelle 'Bix' Bixel

Storyline

In the late in the 23rd century an outdated star ship is on a ten-year reclamation project. The crew is in suspended animation and awakes to find a mysterious object floating in space. The pod contains the body of a rebel who was executed 150 years earlier for the slaughter of more than a million people and is still alive.

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Genres:

Drama | Fantasy | Horror | Mystery | Sci-Fi | Thriller

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Details

Release Date:

7 July 2000 (Canada)

Company Credits

Did You Know?

Trivia

Per the title, Abaddon means "A place of destruction" and in the the Bible in the Book of Revelations he is the king of tormenting locusts and the angel of the bottomless pit.

User Reviews

A vague mystery without a message

The setup for this episode is great, a charismatic rebel leader awoken from stasis and a ship full of bickering, direction-less individuals with excessive personal problems topped off with a company-man representative no doubt holding secrets about the real nature of the cult leader's past and a perfect outlet for the frustrated crew.

The episode itself however is a mess. The dialogue is jumpy and confusing, character motivation and reasoning is completely opaque and worst of all there's no point to much of the dialogue, characters perform their parts in the story for no audience-discernible reason. Throughout the episode characters reference events or situations of the utmost gravity that drives all of the action and progression of the plot yet the audience is never privy to these situations of life and death.

The eventual traitor of the episode (who's identity is broad-casted clearly about a quarter of the way into the episode) and the rebel leader himself complain that the crew of the spaceship are not listening and not being reasonable and so must be killed so the much more important work back on Earth can be undertaken by the rebel leader. The problem is that they never even try to convince the starship crew with anything but vague moral platitudes and never even reference a conflict or issue back on Earth that is so important that they must be killed over it. It's incredibly hard to sympathize with the rebel leader character despite the fact that we are obviously supposed to side with him over 'the company'.

Atrocious writing and plot construction kill this story before it even has a chance. Even a solid performance by Keith David can't save this vacuous time-killing episode.