About the Show
The year is 2063, and humanity’s colonies beyond Earth have just been hit without warning by an alien force everyone calls the Chigs. The United States Marine Corps is suddenly fighting a real interstellar war, and its newest unit is the 58th Squadron — the Wildcards — a group of young pilots barely out of training, flying Hammerhead fighters off the carrier USS Saratoga. Their commander, Lt. Col. T. C. McQueen (James Morrison), is an “InVitro” — a tank-born soldier created for labor — who carries his own war with human prejudice into every briefing.
Created by Glen Morgan and James Wong after their work on The X-Files, the series ran one season of 23 episodes on Fox in 1995–96 and treated its war the way M*A*S*H and Vietnam films treated theirs: mud, fear, gallows humor, and episodes that end with names read over empty bunks. Story arcs covered everything from a rogue AI war (“Who Monitors the Birds?”) to a Chig emissary and a mystery about who really started the war. Fox cancelled it on a cliffhanger, with the fleet in ruins and two of the squadron’s fates unresolved.
Why This Show Matters to Sci-Fi
Space: Above and Beyond was military science fiction television a decade before the reimagined Battlestar Galactica made the same territory famous — carrier decks, exhausted pilots, an enemy whose motives stay uncomfortably human-adjacent, and a chain of command that makes mistakes with real costs. Morgan and Wong wrote it as an argument that a war series should feel like one, and its serialized storytelling was ahead of what American networks usually allowed in 1995.
Its afterlife is the frustrating part: the show has never had a proper streaming home, which is why a series this ambitious survives mostly on the strength of its fans’ memory. It remains one of sci-fi TV’s great one-season wonders — the show people describe to friends starting with the words “you have to find a way to see this.”
Where to Watch
The series is not sold or streamed on YouTube — or anywhere else right now; the complete series exists on DVD (now out of print). Watch the original 1995 trailer on YouTube.
