Some sci-fi comes and goes before it barely has a chance to begin... less than two years ago, or thereabouts there were three sci-fi shows launched on mainstream networks...

Threshold - A team implement an elaborate contingency plan to prevent the bioforming of our planet by an alien race sufficiently advanced to travel interstellar distances, master dimensions out with the regular three and to be able to "hack" our DNA with sound... yet too damned stupid to target their big shiny thing at a major population centre...

Invasion - Invasion of the body snatchers... in Florida but with all the speed and urgency of a glacier...

And Surface - Strange goings on below the seas as a new species is discovered and bad things start to happen.

Invasion was the only one of these to actually get a full season. Surface got left on a pretty major cliffhanger and Threshold didn't even manage to air all of its half season. Threshold is perhaps understandable... it was a generic production from the addled brain of beloathed Trek producer Brannon Braga. About the only thing it had going for it was Brent Spiner and even he didn't see terribly interested in what was going on. You could pretty much have made this any kind of secret cover up show and it wouldn't have made a difference and of course, there was never really any sense of progress and naturally all the clichés were trotted out. Overbearing military, people escaping and so on and so forth. Not that the idea was without merit... it was simply badly implemented in an entirely banal way... so, no surprise it crashed and burned.

Invasion was more of a slow burner. Gradual infiltration of the town... and even the people who got body snatched didn't seem to sure they weren't human any more. Still, it had a building tension in it... clearly enough to keep some people hanging around, certainly more than the other two. Really though, it focused a lot more on the personal drama than the OMG ALIENS, aspect of the story

Surface was the most interesting - kind of a proto-Heroes, actually - and presented several disparate threads that came together. A mystery that began to unfold, some good action... but nothing unrealistic or at least... not jarringly so. The characters were all understandable and true. It would be fair to say that they were quite realistic and not quite from the regular cookie cutter of sci-fi characters... we didn't have any main characters from the military or ex-military running around like Rambo... I guess we DID have the hot scientist but c'est la vie... if a scientist is female it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for her not to be hot. Still, it presented the most intriguing multi-threaded story of the three... and yet cut down in its prime.

Naturally, had any of these had "Star Trek" in their titles, they'd have been allowed 3-4 years of rubbish episodes before fans started to get weary of them... Threshold... deserved the axe. Invasion had the potential to be interesting even if it wasn't exactly rip roaring fun... Surface is possibly the greatest loss, it had threaded together a multi-faceted stories and we had just had the mother of all cliffhangers...