from http://tv.zap2it.com/shows/features/features.html?26512
The series opens in the near future, where the Odyssey 5 shuttle crew is performing routine assignments 190 statute miles above Earth. Its procedures are interrupted by a brilliant flash of light, followed by the horrifying sight of the Earth below being swept away by a swirling maelstrom.
One of the party is killed in the ensuing shock wave that engulfs the ship, leaving five survivors drifting through space: mission commander Chuck Taggart (Peter Weller); his son Neil (Christopher Gorham), a mission specialist; Dr. Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roche), the science officer; mission pilot Angela Perry (Tamara Craig Thomas); and CNT news correspondent Sarah Forbes (Leslie Silva).
As the oxygen supply wanes, the survivors drift into sleep, awakening to a startling sight. They are on a featureless expanse, where they have been rescued by a mysterious yet apparently benign alien being known as the Seeker (John Neville). This enigmatic entity tells the crew that many other advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy have met the same fate as the Earth, but the Odyssey 5 astronauts are the first survivors he has found.
In what he says is the only chance to save Earth, the Seeker projects the astronauts five years into the past, although they retain their knowledge of future events. Thus, the crew must relive the five years leading up to the Earth's destruction while trying to determine who or what destroyed it and then prevent it from happening.
That's all just in the first half hour or so.
"One of the few criticisms I've heard of the pilot is that it has about five episodes' worth of information in it," says Gorham, who relishes playing the double layers going on inside his character. "There is just a whole lot going on with this show. There is a nice balance, even for people who are not sci-fi fans. My wife is totally not into sci-fi, and when anything like that came up in the pilot, she would completely zone out of it. But there were so many other things that she loved, because the story and the characters really are very, very human."
And they have personal agendas apart from "only" saving the world. Sarah, we learn in the opening scenes, has recently lost her young son to cancer, so her first move upon arriving in the past is to rush the symptom-free child to the doctor in an effort to get his treatment started sooner and change history.
There are all sorts of tensions going on in the Taggart family as well in both time frames of the story.
"Neil has been the black sheep of the family," Gorham explains. "His older brother, Mark, has always been the golden boy, so to speak, chosen since birth to follow in his father's footsteps and become an astronaut. Neil has felt overlooked his whole life, and he starts to rebel when he reaches adolescence."
"In the five years between high school and when the action of the pilot starts, something clearly has happened to bring about a turnaround in Neil, and there has been a big rift over something between Chuck and Mark, his other son. Neil steps in and fills that void and becomes the astronaut Chuck always thought Mark would be. But part of Neil still suspects that, in his heart, Chuck would have preferred that Mark be the one, so he and his father still have some issues to work out."
Those emotional issues become even more complex after Neil and Chuck begin reliving the last five years of their family drama. Chuck has to weather some stormy times with his wife, Paige (Gina Clayton), while Neil has to suffer through the indignities of teen life yet again.
"Suddenly Neil's being treated like he's 17 again by everyone except his father and his three other crewmates," Gorham says. "He has to go to high school five days a week and sit through every class again. In many respects, I think Neil really has more to cope with than the other characters."
"I mean, a lot of people think, wow, going back to high school would be great! I say, yeah, it'd be great for about a week. We forget how brutally painful those years are in some respects."
Thankfully, "Odyssey 5" is a good deal less painful, an imaginative new series that emphasizes characters over technical wizardry and boasts enough tantalizing story threads to get its central characters through five years and beyond.
Odyssey 5 is great, I totally enjoy it. It have great potential and with every pass episode it gets better. 
