Abduction
Black Oil
Colonization
Super Soldiers
($39.98 each 2-disc set)

While Fox TV's cult-hit The X-Files entertained audiences for nine seasons, it was the episodes involving extraterrestrials that were the real show stoppers for me. The show never did decide whether it wanted to be horror or science fiction—two very different genres. Unless you're a true collector who demands every episode, including those involving earth-bound events ranging from the bizarre to the horrific, it's the alien episodes that gave this series its science fiction credentials.

We reported on the first of these four box sets, Abduction in our June 2005 eNewsletter. The next three sets continue the saga's mixture of fear, paranoia, conspiracy theories (which, depending on your point of view may have warped, or attuned the psyches of a whole generation of viewers), and sparse but effectively employed special effects.

Black Oil is a reference to the oil-like, alien substance that invades humans and is visible in their eyes. Colonization, as its title implies, involves an attempt by aliens to colonize the Earth, complicated by the presence of a rogue alien faction that wants to prevent it. And Super Soldiers refers to an evil government plot to breed nearly invulnerable fighters.

The best of these box sets are the first three. Like nearly everything else involved with the series' final seasons (particularly Seasons 8 and 9), Super Soldiers is a step down from the best that The X-Files produced.

The extra features here include a good number of episodes with commentary tracks. On the technical side, The X-Files was never an audio/video showcase, and the revealing nature of DVD is no help. The video transfers here are fair at best, spotty at worst. Colonization and Super Soldiers, in anamorphic widescreen, are easily the best looking, though even they are plagued by video noise. The Dolby Surround 2.0 sound is never bad and intermittently interesting, but the highest praise I can give it is that it never detracts from the stories. The most rabid fans will be satisfied, though not thrilled, by the overall quality of these DVDs. But most of them probably own the full season box sets already.

Space: Above and Beyond
The Complete Series
20th Century Fox
$49.98

Way back in 1993 Fox launched a little TV series about space marines fighting aliens. These aliens—nicknamed the Chigs—triggered an interstellar war by attacking a remote Earth colony. As we come onboard, the war isn't going well for the Earth forces, and our heroes have their backs against it nearly every week. There's no guarantee we're going to win this one, and that's still a question mark up to the series' final, shocking episode.

Shot on what was obviously a skimpy budget, Space: Above and Beyond was doomed from the start. It was scheduled on early Sunday evening against Sixty Minutes. Fox apparently considered S:AAB a kid's show, and thus a good alternative to the popular, long-running TV news magazine. It most certainly was not a kid's show. After 9PM would have been a far more appropriate time for its dark, serious, and often somber tone.

What it had going for it were good stories, fine writing, and a cast that delivered consistently rich performances. The show was created and largely written by X-Files veterans Glen Morgan and James Wong, and has become something of a cult classic. Its loyal fans-including me—have waited a long time for this DVD release.

While skimpy in the extreme (no extras), the video transfer of the 4:3 source material is crisp. This is another show with very dark photography, but shadow detail is generally good. The Dolby Surround audio isn't particularly impressive compared to the best sound I've heard from more recent TV science fiction shows, but it gets the job done without detracting from the drama.

Space: Above and Beyond is another show that never got the chance it deserved and came to a poignant end. But at least Fox treated it better than Firefly, giving it a full 23-episode season. In this case, however, I doubt if we'll see a feature film, no matter how well the DVDs sell. The cast is now too old to play young space marines.

Stargate: Atlantis: Rising
Miniseries (Pilot)
MGM
$25.98

Stargate: Atlantis: The Complete First Season
MGM
$59.95

Spun off from last year on the Sci-Fi Channel, Stargate: Atlantis has turned into an interesting series in its own right that might well extend the wildly successful Stargate franchise right into the next decade.

The Miniseries is the pilot and it's indispensable if you hope to understand what's going on. Briefly put, mankind has discovered the home city of an ancient and now extinct race called, oddly enough, "The Ancients." That city is in the distant Pegasus galaxy, and Stargate Command launches an expedition to investigate, traveling through the Stargate. But it's a one-way trip, at least at first, because of the amount of power it takes to get there.

Once on the scene, the adventures begin. There's a new, interesting cast who have a city to secure (it's underwater on the team's arrival—truly the Atlantis), new friends to make, and new enemies to resist, including the creepy Wraith. The Wraith survive by sucking out the human life force, (one of the show's creators must have seen the 1985 movie bomb Lifeforce, aka Space Vampires). The Wraith have been terrorizing the Pegasus galaxy for millennia. The good news is that they sleep for a hundred years or so between snacks. The bad news is that our heroes manage to awaken them early.

It's a promising series with an interesting premise and strong characters. The DVD transfers are excellent (the miniseries is nearly feature film quality and a good route to finding out if you might like the show or not). The video is clean with little edge enhancement and the audio is engaging.

Farscape: Starburst Editions
ADV Films
$24.98 (per set, 3 sets per season)

Battlestar Galactica
Universal
Season One: $59.98 (includes miniseries)
Season 2.0: $49.98 (10 episodes)

I've written extensively about these two series, possibly the best science fiction series ever produced for television. Farscape has finished its four year run and is now in its second iteration on DVD. The first DVD releases were outrageously expensive. But now we have these new, reasonably-priced Starburst Edition sets, each containing about seven episodes. The Starburst Editions are now two-thirds of the way through season three—the best of the four seasons by far. But season three will not have its full resonance unless you've spent seasons one and two getting to know and care about the characters.

Farscape is heavily serialized. This is a difficult show to watch unless you start at the beginning. The show didn't really get its space legs until season two. Season one had a lot of standalone episodes, many of them forgettable.

The video transfers on the Starburst editions released so far appear identical to those in the original DVD releases. Both the audio and video are exceptional for a TV show, even though seasons one through three are 4:3.

(While Season four is widescreen, its original releases looked far worse than the earlier seasons; someone at the transfer house appears to have discovered the edge enhancement button. I'm hoping that the Starburst set will put that right, but I don't expect it will.)

The Starburst sets also include many extras and deleted scenes not on the original DVDs. With Farscape's now far more affordable prices, you no longer have an excuse for not sampling one of the best science fiction series of all time.

Spoiler Warning: Farscape's four-season run and abrupt cancellation ended on a cliffhanger, resolved in a subsequent miniseries, The Peacekeeper Wars. Whatever you do, don't watch this miniseries before you've see all four full seasons. You not only won't know what's going on, you'll see serious spoilers. As with season four, the video transfer of the minisieries is definitely inferior to the transfers of the first three seasons. But it's still a must-have to complete the saga.

It's too early to tell for sure, but the new Battlestar Galactica has a shot at displacing St. Elsewhere as the best TV drama series of all time (well, for me at least). (By the way, where is St. Elsewhere, oh ye gods of TV on DVD??)

Like Farscape, BSG is heavily serialized. But it plays like a very long miniseries (actually, it began as a miniseries, which is available in the box set of season one.) Starting with the current, second season the show was split into two mini-seasons, each with 10 episodes separated by a hiatus of several months. The first half of season two is formally dubbed Season 2.0, and is currently available on DVD, at a seriously high price of fifty bucks for 10 episodes. I expect Season 2.1 (or 2.5, or whatever they choose to call it on the next box set) to be available in early summer.

For more comment on Battlestar Galactica, go to our October 2005 eNewsletter.