The Universe: The Complete Season Six by A&E HOME VIDEO

Actors

• Erik Thompson

Format

• Box set
• Color
• NTSC

Editorial Review

This cosmically entertaining History Channel series recalls the classic Monty Python sketch in which a door-to-door documentarian cannot interest his audience in mollusks until he steers the subject to the creature's sex life. The Universe isn't peddling sex, but catastrophe and apocalypse, all excitingly rendered in state-of-the-art CGI. Season six continues to explore the “mysterious, mind-blowing secrets of the universe” with thrilling countdown episodes such as “Catastrophes That Changed the Planets” (insert your own Kardashian joke here) and “Worst Days on Planet Earth.” Other action-packed episodes explore the birth of the solar system, the sun's “evil twin,” UFOs, and surviving a crash landing on Mars. But this season also boldly goes where the series has not gone before. One episode takes a fantastic voyage into “The Microscopic Universe.” Perhaps the most provocative is “God and the Universe,” which asks if science is finding “elusive evidence of God.” Beyond most of the episodes' preoccupation with “carnage on a colossal scale” (an episode about comets cautions viewers to “brace yourself for these frozen intruders from the great beyond”), The Universe makes advanced concepts accessible for a general audience and boasts an admirably diverse roster of male and female scientists, who present some impractical (but fun) experiments to clarify their theories. But more, between all the collisions, eruptions, extinctions, and “orbital maelstrom,” season six may spark profound and thoughtful discussions about why we are here and our place in the universe. –Donald Liebenson