This article is a sequel to my previous Sci-Fi Heaven piece that was published last October. In that article, I wrote about four of my favorite science fiction shows: Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, The 100, and Star Trek: Voyager. With this article, I’ll be talking about four more amazing sci-fi shows!
- The Expanse
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The Expanse is a show I’ve only recently discovered. This past winter break, I decided to search online for some new sci-fi shows to watch because I had been re-watching so many of my favorites over and over again; I discovered I wanted something more.
The first show I found was The Expanse, and I was definitely not disappointed. Set a few centuries ahead of our present time, the premise of the series begins with the understanding that humans have colonized our solar system. The dominant powers of Earth and Mars exist in a state of cold war. Meanwhile, the millions of “Belters” living beyond the inner planets in the asteroid belt and on the moons of the outer gas giants are exploited for resources by the two rivals.
Amidst the chilled tension of the solar system’s status quo, a Belter mining ship named the “Canterbury” goes on a standard mission to harvest a lone asteroid for its ores. On its way back to Ceres (the largest inhabited rock past Mars), the crew encounters a distress call, beginning a story filled with mystery, drama, politics, intrigue, and an adventure of the most alien kind.
Amazon Prime is now the exclusive home of The Expanse, where you can now watch all three released seasons, with the fourth planned for release sometime later in 2019.
- Star Trek: Discovery
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Star Trek: Discovery is the first of the third generation of Star Trek shows. This new vein of Star Trek stands in a much more millennial contrast to the older staples like The Next Generation or The Original Series. It alters the formula for a much younger audience, introducing Star Trek to an entirely new generation.
Discovery stands as a prequel to the original journey of Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise, and perhaps even more interestingly, the first two episodes of Discovery serve as a prequel of sorts to the rest of the show. Opening aboard the USS Shenzhou, protagonist Commander Michael Burnham, played by American actress, Sonequa Martin-Green, is serving under Captain Phillipa Georgiou, played by Malaysian actress, Michelle Yeoh. The crew of the Shenzhou is investigating a damaged satellite at the edge of the Federation’s borders, a seemingly benign mission that precipitates an all-out war with the Klingon Empire.
As the show progresses, it becomes clear that with this particular run around with Star Trek, the journey through the final frontier is no longer the focus, but the setting. Instead, it is the journey of the crew of the USS Discovery that is the central plot, following an incredibly diverse cast of characters through a personal journey of exploration, mystery, and hope.
Star Trek: Discovery airs exclusively on CBS All Access (which can be ordered independently or through Amazon Prime) every Thursday night and is currently in its second season.
- Stargate Atlantis
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Stargate Atlantis was the first major spin-off of Stargate SG-1, which itself was a continuation of the 1994 Roland Emmerich film, Stargate.
Set in the Pegasus Galaxy, Stargate Atlantis follows an expedition from Earth sent to explore the lost city of the Ancients: Atlantis. The Ancients were a precursor race of humans that had roamed the stars millennia before our present day and the original builders of the stargates. Atlantis was the capital of their empire in the Pegasus Galaxy, but had been submerged underwater and abandoned after their defeat at the hands of the Wraith, a species whose hunger for human life and insurmountable numbers allowed them to defeat the ancestors of humanity.
10,000 years had passed since the Ancients abandoned Atlantis, and the team of explorers departed Stargate Command on Earth—the main setting of Stargate SG-1—for this new galaxy to explore. After their first contact with the still-powerful Wraith, their journey becomes a race against time to guard the location of Earth from their ever-hungry enemy. However, their mission is still to explore and to find new and ancient technology, and with stargates on almost every planet, the possibilities are endless.
Stargate Atlantis is available to watch on either Hulu or Amazon Prime. Check it out!
- Firefly
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Firefly is a one-season show that could have been so much more than it was, but even with that in mind, it is still a brilliant and intriguing piece of work. Set in the distant future, humans have spread out far from Earth and inhabited a new solar system. A previous civil war between the inner and outer planets resulted in the inner planets’ complete control over the solar system, although even they can only control so much.
Captain Malcom Reynolds leads the Firefly-class ship, Serenity, on smuggling and transport missions between the mid and outer-most planets. Accompanied by a very diverse crew, ranging from Reynolds’s second in command, Zoe Alleyne Washburn—a black woman and a war veteran who fought in the civil war alongside Reynolds—to Inara Serra, a Companion who, as a professional escort and courtesan, brings in a great deal of the stories involving the upper classes of the Firefly universe.
Perhaps the most intriguing characters on the show are Simon and River Tam. Initially stowaways on Serenity, the Tams join the crew and offer their unique talents—Simon is a top-grade surgeon, and River is… well, River is quite the enigma. She is a strange girl, quiet, awkward, yet she appears to have intelligence beyond anyone around her and has near superhuman strength and fighting ability. It is River’s mysterious past that sets up the conflict of the show between Serenity’s crew and the inner planets—a conflict that is only resolved in the movie that ended the series: Serenity.