By Owen Quinn author of the Time Warriors and Zombie Blues
I was recently made aware of just how many movies and television shows the younger generation have never heard of, never mind seen. So to that end, we look back at some characters you really need to see before you kick the bucket.
In another universe I wouldn’t have to be writing about Odyssey 5. It would have been on all our lips like Quantum Leap. My first view of it was on a late night slot on television and by the end of the hour and a half I was hooked. very few shows have caught my attention in the first episode like this for example X Files and The Walking Dead but Odyssey 5 was a trailblazer for other shows today. It had swearing, full frontal nudity all wrapped up in a sci fi coat.
The characters were flawed; three dimensional good and bad in all their glory. To get the show’s premise you should click on the video above which is the show’s intro and gives you everything you need to know. What is beautiful about odyssey 5 written and created by the late Manny Coto, was that it played with our expectations of time travel in the same way as it did the characters. They all know what is going to happen in their lives and the world so all they need to do is live it again and look for signs of the mystery of what caused the Earth to explode and stop it. However this is not the case as their very investigations begin to change the future within months. These themes were also explored in the series Travellers. The Odyssey was the name of the shuttle they were all on when the Earth died. The titular 5 refers to the occupants of the shuttle. Three of them are astronauts Chuck Taggart (Peter Weller), his son Neil (Christopher Gorham), scientist Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roche), astronaut and senator’s daughter Angela (Tamara Craig Thomas) and reporter Sarah Forbes (Leslie Silva).
Sarah Forbes played by Leslie Silva, was a high profile news reporter who bagged a place upon the Odyssey shuttle mission. Out of all the five people sent back in time, Sarah represents the one with the most to lose and the most to gain. In the original timeline, Sarah’s young son Corey died of a rare form of cancer.
Its symptoms went undiagnosed until too late. As a result Sarah’s marriage to her husband Paul fell apart and she began an affair with her boss at the news station, Troy. Now Corey is alive and well and Sarah has a two fold mission; save the Earth and her son.
Being returned five years in the past, Sarah is still married to Paul. It must be hard to pretend to still love someone you’d grown beyond in your mind and heart but Sarah goes along with it. The type of cancer she knows Corey will get is hard to diagnose and with no symptoms showing at this point in time, Sarah has the luxury to watch for them. and do something to stop it from happening.
Her contribution to the team is her access to news networks and weird stories that may be the work of the synthetics or the Sentients. She alerts the team to the ten year olds murdering family members or being the sole survivors of house fires. It turns out her reporter instincts are right as the children are being controlled to build a machine to create a portal. The team don’t get to save all the children but most of them are not taken and returned to their families.
Equally she and Angela try to stop the kidnapping of a little girl but somehow their presence changes events causing another child to be taken instead leaving Sarah and Angela the new suspects. As the others found, knowing the future is not a guarantee that events will take the same path. Chuck and Neil learn this lesson all too well when Chuck’s beloved wife Paige is murdered by a synthetic skin that changes her into an assassin. Kurt discovers he doesn’t know sports results as well as he thought he did which places his life in danger. With ther arrival back in the past and subsequent investigations are changing events so the future is shifting. Maybe this will apply to Corey nd Sarah can save him. Have what they have done already managed to prevent the destruction of Earth? They don’t know but this future knowledge threatens their own well being.
Sarah arrives home one night to discover Paul has taken Corey having discovered that Sarah has been giving the kid medication that has not been prescribed by a doctor. Unable to tell anyone the truth about what she knows, Sarah looks like a crazy mother before the court at the custody hearing. Her story falls apart on the stand and Corey tells the court he didn’t like the medicine and his mummy told him she was now a doctor. Looking like she is abusing her son, Sarah has supervised visits only which upsets Corey as he doesn’t want to leave his mother. Despite begging her husband to believe her, Sarah is alone and the more time she spends apart from Corey, the less she can do to help stop the cancer taking hold.
The scene where she receives the phone call telling her she has lost her case is heartbreaking because we as the audience know she is racing against time to save her child. In reality, we would do the same but that’s what Odyssey 5 does best. It has a heart and really has you wanting to reach out and hug the characters when they are kicked in the nuts. You’d think that given they are trying to save the world, fate would give them a break but sadly not.
Her actions end her marriage before it did in the original timeline and worse still, she meets Troy, the man she will end up with. Despite herself she can’t resist Troy’s advances which results in her breaking up his relationship leaving her looking like a marriage wrecker. By th season’s multiple cliffhangers, Paul realises Sarah has been right all long as Corey is diagnosed with cancer. What a beautiful and terrifying theme to include where you witness your child dying twice, burying them twice. It is such a pity that we will never get to see what happens. Knowing what she knows, would Sarah have tried to use synthetic tech to save Corey? Would she have made a deal with the devil to keep Corey alive? What impact would that have on her relationships with the team? Would saving your child cause the end of the world? Those are fascinating themes that could have been explored but never will be. Manny Coto passed in 2023 and he ever got around to finishing the story in another medium.
But Sarah has fun as well. She gets along with Harry, a synthetic that turns out to be a super nerd of sorts and teaches her the Vulcan nerve pinch which she uses in future episodes when fighting the synthetics. She is upset when Harry dies but it shows them synthetics are not all the robotic killing machines as portrayed so far.
And that’s what it is to be human: to laugh amid the terror and tragedy. Of all the Odyssey crew, Sarah was the one that had reason to fight harder than anyone else.
The Time Warriors and Beyond 