We were introduced to an array of some very interesting characters during "season one", which consisted of four feature-length "films" made for TV by Alex Beatons "action pack".
And this weekly one-hour television series followed pretty much the same format. In fact, the production value was a little bit higher than the first four entries. I am watching the first episode right now, many of the special effects are much better then in the action pack releases. To me it is about the same as watching the live action RoboCop series which was being played in syndication around the same time, some of the same people who worked on that show worked on this show. And some of them actually worked on Star Trek the next generation including Morgan Grendel who wrote the episode "the inner light" which has been considered possibly the best Star Trek episode ever.
But when they started showing this, there was only one minor change: The character of "Centra" (Catherine Blythe) who portrayed Bascom's computer hacker was replaced by a different girl, Natalie Radford as "Nika". I always liked Centra more.
For the first at least six episodes, The list of characters did not change much except for maybe swapping out the actor who portrayed Jake Cardigan's son, and I don't know if Cardigans wife, Kate, played by Sonia Smits ever appeared again. But Sid Gomez eventually was replaced by Maria Del Mar as "Sam Houston".
It was around that time in the show, people started losing interest. We had gotten used to the team of Cardigan and Gomez, and suddenly there was a brand new character that we had to get used to and the show wasn't allowed the proper amount of episodes for us to accept Sam Houston as a replacement.
I always thought she was OK in the part, and I liked the ripped up pants that she always wore.
But I never understood why the show which was being shown on Syfy channel at the time suddenly stopped being shown. They didn't even play the last four episodes at the time.
There were some other problems with this show that I just learned about, during the first "season", the actor who played the character of Bennett Sands (Ray Jewers) suddenly passed away. Which had serious repercussions to the stories from then on. I never knew this until I watched "Tek Lords" and they do an homage to Ray Jewers. The final episode of the first season dealt with his murder but never shows the actor.
And Bascom himself (William Shatner) only appears in a few episodes. Of course he was working on Star Trek Generations that year.
But this show was just one of those shows that could have done well had it been given a chance to develop, it really wasn't that bad. Especially for a show made in the 90s they started getting more interesting with their speculative fiction, and sometimes we will see a device that they had on this show... Computer gloves used for navigation, even three dimensional representations. Of course the concept of holography hasn't hit the main stream computer market yet even though there are some devices that display a 3-D screen that appears to float in the air. But the idea of interactive characters that feel as if they are there when you touch them is probably years from being something that we will see in consumer computing. But this show even introduced the concept of MP3 music players that could be worn on a wrist like a watch, MP3 was a technology opposed by the RIAA. But now it is a common streaming format. Also, touch screens which are very common today especially on hand devices. And hand devices like the iPhone were introduced in shows like this.
I believe I installed windows 95 about halfway through the first season, that was a major change for computing that year.
