In recent years, genre shows like Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones brought mainstream audiences to science fiction and fantasy with their attention to relevant stories and realism. But for every prestige-class television show, there’s plenty of room for shows that throw most of that out the window in favor of plenty of action, excitement, and humor.
Judging from its brand new trailer, Syfy’s upcoming space opera series Vagrant Queen has all of the above, and I can’t wait to watch.
While I absolutely love the stories and budget that a prestige series brings, I’m a sucker for a rollicking space opera — the types that we saw in the early 2000s with shows like Andromeda, Farscape, Firefly, and Stargate SG-1, as well as more recent projects like Dark Matter and Killjoys. Drop a crew on a space ship and send them off on a variety of adventures from planet to planet, and I’m happy. Ever since the Syfy Channel killed off both Dark Matter and Killjoys, I’ve been looking for another show in the same vein, and this looks like it’ll do the trick nicely.
Based on a comic series from Magdalene Visaggio and Jason Smith, the show is about an ex-child queen named Elida (Adiyan Rae) who’s running away from agents of The Republic, who are trying to kill her and her relatives off. When a friend named Isaac (Tim Rozon) shows up and tells her that her mother is still alive, they work to try and rescue her. The series comes from Jem Garrard (Android Employed, The Switch), who headed up an all-women writers room and team of directors.
Every part of that sounds awesome. The trailer shows off plenty of humor, a ton of cool aliens, a badass crew of scavengers, evil empire-looking henchmen, spaceships, and quite a bit more. Will it be good? Who can say? But it does look like a helluva lot of fun.
The first, 10-episode seasons of Vagrant Queen premiers on Syfy on March 27th.
