Route of Ages
The Route of Ages is a fictional portal in spacetime, in the fictional universe of the science fiction television show Andromeda, sought by many of the show's characters throughout season four (see MacGuffin).
Description
It is this portal through which Trance Gemini takes the Andromeda Ascendant and her crew. When the Andromeda passed through the Route of Ages, she arrived on the planet Seefra (later revealed to be Tarn-Vedra), where captain Dylan Hunt finds out that he is the last of the Paradines, a highly evolved and human-like type of Vedran.
The Route of Ages derives its name from Vedran mythology. In the episode "The Weight, Part 1" the character Flavin says that the term Route of Ages was the name of the mystical road which linked the houses of the Vedran gods in the celestial city Atashe.
Appearances
The Route of Ages brought a lot of strange spatial and temporal anomalies to the Seefra system in Season 5, like a possible-future version of Dylan Hunt, or vast amounts of solar radiation to reignite the legendary Methus Suns. The Route of Ages appears as a blue outline of a hypercube, spinning, changing, and morphing.
In the episode "Pride Before The Fall", scientist and visionary Peter Musevini journeyed through the mythical Route of Ages in his time-traveling journey to obtain the DNA of Andromeda crewmember Beka Valentine to help create Nietzschean progenitor Drago Musevini's genetic code. Thus, he created Drago Musevini using his own DNA and that of Beka Valentine, bringing about the existence of the legendary Progenitor of all Nietzscheans.
In the episode "The World Turns All Around Her", former Andromeda crewman Tyr Anasazi traveled through the Route of Ages with the newly united Nietzschean Prides as he sought a way to weaken the Spirit of the Abyss and destroy the Magog, the aggressive race which threatened all the inhabitants of the Known Worlds. He perished there, slain by Dylan Hunt and Telemachus Rhade after he sought to bargain for a way out with the Spirit of the Abyss using Beka Valentine.
In the episode "The Heart of the Journey", it was revealed that the Spirit of the Abyss was located in the very center of the Route. From there, it controlled and guided the hordes of the Magog in their onslaught against the galaxies. The crew of the Andromeda used Trance Gemini's sun to ultimately destroy it. Once the deed was done, the Route of Ages turned into a slipstream portal, therefore reuniting the nearly mythical planet Tarn-Vedra, homeworld of the legendary Vedrans, with the space-faring inhabitants of the Known Worlds.