As We Travel The Universe

When I was 10 years old, I loved the short-lived early-Fox-network sci-fi drama Alien Nation. Half detective show, half race parable, all with aliens. Imagine my joy over finding on DVD a collection of five post-cancellation made-for-TV-movies. But my friends, it is a Bleak and Remorseful Christmas, for it turns out that things that seem cool to an 10 year old are less impressive to a 28 year old. This is not a very good series of made-for-TV movies, and no amount of puppet-aliens or gigantic cellphones or teenage douchebags acting new age-y so they can bone a Tenctonese chick or references to the "OmniNet… information highway" can bring back that feeling. The first movie, Dark Horizon, is in fact a good-enough offering, as an overseer/warrior from the imperial order of Whoever Enslaved The Tenctonese travels to earth on a reconnaissance mission for retrieval of their former possessions. But while the payoff necessary for a revival of these characters for 90 minutes kind of depends on a reckoning with the slavemasters, you can’t really do that four more times, so we’re stuck with some second-rate stories about experiments on Tenctonese and the CIA and religious fanatacism and two other movies that despite my better judgment I’m probably going to watch today. But don’t you make my mistakes.