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"Earth can be darker than space," so read the tagline for the ambitious cable sci-fi/fantasy series Odyssey 5. Returning from a lengthy mission in deep space, the crew of a shuttle discovered that they cannot go home because there is no home to go to: The Earth had been destroyed by a huge explosion. A mysterious alien called "the Seeker" (played in the two-hour pilot episode by John Neville) offered the crew an opportunity to prevent the catastrophe and save humankind by traveling five years back in time. There was only one hitch: The crew members were not their "present" selves in the past, but had all grown five years younger, and were still mired in the personal problems that plagued them at this earlier stage: One of the crewpersons was stuck in an unhappy marriage, another was weighed down by a drug dependency, still another was a pimply faced, neurotic high school kid, and so on. The principal characters were the Taggarts -- Chuck (Peter Weller), Neil (Christopher Gorham), Paige (Gina Clayton), and Marc (Kenneth Mitchell) -- and Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roche), Angela Perry (Tamara Craig Thomas), and Sarah Forbes (Leslie Silva). Odyssey 5 launched its 19-episode Showtime cable network run on June 21, 2002.