Film:
DVD:

Created by Rockne S. O'Bannon
Starring Roy Scheider, Stacy Haiduk, Rosalind Allen, Royce D. Applegate, Stephanie Beacham, Jonathan Brandis, and Michael Ironside

Features:

• All twenty-three first season episodes
• Over thirty minutes of deleted scenes

Released by: Universal Home Video
Rating: NR (suitable for all audiences)
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Get Star Trek TNG instead.

It's the year 2032 and man has finally decided to try to colonize the sea floor. It seems that the sea floor is one of the hottest places to get the natural resources that we humans so vitally need. So, the Navy has developed a super-submarine named SeaQuest. The sub is part war machine, part research vessel. The former captain of the SeaQuest went insane and nearly started an underwater armageddon so they've had to find a new captain. Who better to take this job than the man who designed her? Meet Captain Nathan Bridger (Scheider). There's only one problem: he doesn't want the job. It's gonna take quite a bit of persuasion and trickery to get him to take this on.

Think ecologically-minded Star Trek and you've got the idea of what this show's about. It blatantly follows the same formula that made Trek work (and later on, not-work) for nearly four decades. There is a captain of the vessel who is always placed in the position of the choice of doing what is right for his crew and what is right for mankind. The crew is made up half of scientists and half of military personnel who are constantly find themselves in a "Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" type of battle. The show has an overly sentimental character in the form of a dolphin who has been fitted with a decoding device that allows him to communicate with humans in English. Now that we can really talk to him, we really don't want him getting caught in a tuna net, do we? Every week, they are faced with either some man-made ecological disaster that they have to stop or they are faced wth the loss of a member of their crew at the hands of some man-made bio terror. It's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea for our times.

The DVD set is not much to write home about. It contains all of the episodes from the first season of the show. They are contained on four double-sided discs. This is a bummer for me, but probably won't bother very many other people. See, I've got a DVD changer and when I want to watch a series of shows like this, I will load up the changer and be able to get through a majority of the season without having to ever leave the couch (a good catheter and colostomy bag helps this as well). With these dual-sided discs, I'm interrupted from my vegetative stage at the end of every disc because I have to get up and flip the damn disc.

To make matters worse, there are typically only two or three episodes per disc. That means that I am forced to get off the couch at least once very three broadcast hours. That's typically just enough time for my muscles to just begin to atrophy before I have to wake them up again. In other news, the only special features on this set are the deleted scenes for some of the episodes. These are shown with the timecode on screen and provide with little to no context for how they might have fit into the episode they were deleted from. The nice thing about this set is that they provide you with a little information on each episode's menu. They tell you the original airdate of the episode, who guest stars, and provide you with a brief synopsis of the episode you are about to watch. It's a nice way to package the entire thing.

If you are a die-hard environmentalist or just like the show, you might want to pick this one up. However, if you are just looking for something to watch, get Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's just a far superior show.

• Buy it from Amazon.