seaQuest DSV – Season 2
By Mal Simons, Blockbuster.co.uk

The crew of the seaQuest return for another action packed season of adventures with more of a sci-fi twist. Starring the late Roy Scheider and Jonathan Brandis.

In an interview years ago, the late, great Roy Scheider once described season 2 of seaQuest as ‘BayWatch’ underwater; it is true that is hard to ignore the sheer number of ‘beautiful people’ on the seaQuest, mostly in their early twenties. The powers that be at the time wanted a younger cast to attract a wider/different audience so released some of the older cast members from their contracts.

Out went Krieg (John D’Aquino) and Chief Crocker (Royce D Applegate), two of the stronger members of the Season 1 cast. Stacy Haiduk and Stephanie Beacham (Lt.Hitchcock and Dr. Westphalen) left of their own accord and in came the ridiculously good looking Rosalind Allen, Kathy Evison, Peter Deluise and Edward Kerr. Anyone who has seen real sailors knows that the crew of the seaQuest must have it pretty sweet in order to look that good… all the time!

Putting beautiful people aside however, seaQuest Season 2 doesn’t have so much in common with BayWatch as it does with Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show takes on a completely new direction – away from a conservation focus and on to Navy missions, Alien encounters, underwater black holes, time travel, giant carnivorous plants (which is very much the low point of the season) and a will they, won’t they relationship between the Captain and the ship’s doctor. Very Picard and Beverly Crusher.

The season begins after the events from Season 1 which saw Captain Bridger sacrifice his submarine in order to close a gap that had opened up in the Earth’s crust (or something along those lines). We have a new seaQuest getting underway and having to get right into action when a group of genetically engineered folk take over a UEO prison, kidnap a leading general and start blasting away at key air-processing facilities from Space (we have to have these facilities due to us cutting down all the rainforests). It is a race against time in order for the crew of the seaQuest to stop these terrorists before they kill every normal human on the planet.

Later on in the series we have ‘Playtime’ which has the seaQuest catapulted 250 years into the future; ‘The Sincerest Form of Flattery’, an episode where an experimental sub is stolen that has a partial imprint of Bridger’s personality – Bridger against Bridger while ‘Special Delivery’ has the genetically engineered character Dagwood found guilty of murdering the genetic engineer that created him. Near the end of the season the crew have to battle hostile aliens.

For seaQuest fans, there is a lot to like about this year. More character development – mainly through shore leave (apparently the Navy’s more generous with this in Season 2, every other episode starts in a bar), Darwin the Dolphin, Commander Ford (Don Franklin) and boy genius Lucas Wolenczak (Jonathan Brandis) return along with a buffed up Miguel Ortiz (Marco Sanchez) and the bespectacled Tim (Ted Raimi) – well, there had to be one person that an imperfect member of the audience could relate to, plus at one point, he even dates the gorgeous Kathy Evison.

All in all another season of a great show. It is true that this is the weakest year of the three but it is still better than most other Sci-Fi series. The transition from Science-Fact to Science Fiction was difficult for the series but at least this set the show up well for another refresh in Season 3. Episodes Include

Episode 1 – Daggers
In thus exciting two-hour premiere, Captain Bridger is interrupted in his inspection of the newly designed seaQuest by violent trouble at a genetically engineered life forms colony.

Episode 2 – The Fear That Follows
A phantom signal picked up at a UEO station is found to be a communication from another world, and the seaQuest becomes the site of an incredible interplanetary meeting.