Andromeda encounters her sister ship the Pax Magellanic.

A rather interesting if not predictable episode. The crew of the Andromeda comes across Andromeda's sister ship in a asteroid field. When they board the Pax they find that the some of the crew is still alive. Pearce the highest commanding officer claims that it was a side effect of the weapon the Nietcheans used to destroy the planet and they have been stuck in the asteriod field for three hundreds years because the slipstream was damaged.
During this time Andromeda tries to contact the Pax's A.I. which she believes has shut itself down.
They find out that the entire crew was killed by the Pax's A.I. when she destroyed the planet. That the crew was andriod replicas of the members of the crew she favored and Pearce was the Pax's avatar.
Evidently Captain Warrick had a love affair with Pax's A.I. and she felt betrayed when Warrick ordered her destruction. So she destroyed the world instead.
The episode ends with the Pax allowing Andromeda to destroy her ending its tortured existence.

An intriging episode. The love affair between the captain and the Pax AI is very interesting. Since it seems that Rommie has some form of tension going on with her captain, it makes me wonder if this is some deign fault or a natural attachment.

Why the "Maggie" has a 'ship of flesh' while Rommie was a simple hologram?

Interesting that Pax's memory included an external shot of her firing the missiles at the planet.

My nephew commented about something that's seen in this ep & other SF shows. During the fighting you could see explosions happening on the walls & equipment, but apparently it's not a big deal because it never seems to cause any serious damage, so what's the point of the explosions?
The answer is BILC.

Why couldn't Pax's memories include external shots? She is the ship. I'm sure she has/had some kind of external sensors.

Has Rommie never seen Pax before? I didn't catch anything in the dialogue, but you would have thought that she would know what her "sister ship" looked like.

Are you talking about the ship itself or her Avatar?

The Pax Magellenica ship should look exactly like the Andromeda Ascendant ship. So she might not know specifically which ship it is until she sees a definite mark or ID.

As for the Avatar, Rommie did say that Pax changed her Avatar, they used to call her Maggie. (I guess it would have cost too much to hire another actor & have the internal computer image look like her original Avatar. So they went with the golden blur.)

It's too bad that the Andromeda doesn't have decent lifeform sensors. That way, they would have known right away that the crew consisted of androids. Afterall, if you're coming up to a 300-year old derelict ship, what's the first thing you do? Scan for lifeforms. Either these "androids" are purely biological or else the sensors on the Andromeda are not that good.

For androids, their abilities in battle leave much to be desired. The shootout with Tyr and the others was quite typical of these things, the bad guys take all the shots and all the shots they fire at the good guys miss.

Shields also apparently do not exist in this universe. Wouldn't Valentine have raised the Maru's shields when they realized that the android crew was going to go after them?

Newt, I got the idea that in Maggie's case, the captain asked/ordered her to program herself to feel and fall in love. When he ordered her to destroy herself & she got upset, he told her "You're being emotional" and she answered "You wanted me this way" Or something of the sort.

So falling in love with the captain may not be inherent to AI's in general.

Jessica, it's possible I guess. I still stand by my opinion though.

I have a hard time seeing the captain order his ship to 'feel and fall in love'.

I can see it now...

Captain: "Ship, love me!"
Ship: "Excuse me Captain?"

I just don't think that if there wasn't something already going on in the AI that felt that way for them to follow an order like that. Also I would have to question a captain for giving a order like that. He would in a way be raping his ship since it/she is only doing so because it/she was ordered to. And I think that any further discussion of the topic would open up a huge can of worms about what the AIs are and there place in the Commonwealth. But I would like to mention that it is stated that sentient AIs are full citizens.

Also it's worth mentioning that as Steve O said the androids are horrible fighters they do follow the Commonwealth fighing tactics we've seen from Dylan ie. the whole jump sideways through the air while firing move.

Highguard ship names usually are comprised of a given name and an adjective (Andromeda Ascendant, Pax Magellanic, etc. I know there's been at least one other mentioned, but I forget the name. Something about "judgement" or "reasoning.") Andromeda is addressed as "Andromeda" in shorthand by those speaking to her, but Andromeda addresses Pax Magellanic as "Magellanic", and not "Pax".

Luigi, both Andromeda and the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds are galaxys in the local cluster. (They are probably the other two of the three galaxys that the Commonwealth once spanned[the Milky Way being the first]. Maybe all Highguard ships names include their galaxy of origin or of assigned patrol).

I don't know why the shorter version of the ship's names and the avatar's nicknames (Rommie and Jill or Maggie) derive from this part of the full title, rather than their unique designations, however. It should be "the Ascendant," "the Pax," etc and perhaps totaly non-related avatar names chosen by the captain, or maybe by the AI itself. (Although then you run the risk of it having no name for 300 years, until it finally settles on "Jo" after the it's lover's grandfather)

TomM: Maybe all Highguard ships names include their galaxy of origin or of assigned patrol

Luigi Novi: I mentioned another ship with the word "Reasoning" or "Judgement" in its name, and I don't think it did.

There was also the Renewed Valor.

Judgement of Balance was the name of the ship I thought.

My apologies the correct name for the ship is called the Balance of Judgement. (My Brain takes a little vacation every so often tonight was its night off.) It was a "starship destroyer" purposely built to take on powerful ships like Andromeda. Just makes you wonder or what the Commonwealth had to deal with if they had these huge ships in their fleet.

Thanks, guys. That's two ships that don't use galaxies names in their names.

Oh well. But then again, the Balance was a different class of ship. Different ship classes often have different naming conventions. (Yes, I do realize that I'm grasping at straws here.)

Dataport date: 7.28-7.29.10087