"The Andromeda Strain" Breaks Ground With Gay Sci-Fi Character

It’s microbes versus humans, and the microbes are winning.

It’s an old premise for the new A&E miniseries The Andromeda Strain, based on the 1969 techno thriller by Michael Crichton, a book that pioneered and popularized the very genre of storytelling that mixes actual science with action-oriented accessible popular entertainment.

But this time around, the cast of characters is markedly different than it was in the original novel or its 1971 film adaptation. This time, one of the characters, Major Bill Keene, played by Ricky Schroder, is gay. It’s perhaps the most high-profile example to date of a leading gay character in an American science fiction or genre movie.

“It was my decision,” screenwriter Robert Schenkkan tells AfterElton.com regarding the inclusion of the gay character. “The novel was written in 1969, and all the scientists were white heterosexual males.” (One of the male characters was changed to female for the original film version.)

“If you’re going to update the story, which is our mandate, you have an obligation to reflect the world as it is,” says Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Kentucky Cycle.

The Andromeda Strain tells the story of a highly lethal pathogen that arrives on Earth via a downed satellite, eventually killing all but two of the occupants of a remote Utah town. A group of diverse medical specialists is assembled at a secret underground laboratory to try to unlock the secrets of the microbe, which is rapidly mutating and spreading beyond the quarantined area. Major Bill Keene is one of the specialists.

From left to right: Ricky Schroder, Benjamin Bratt,
Christa Miller, Daniel Dae Kim, Viola Davis

The gay character is one of the miniseries’ leads, but there is only one brief mention of his homosexuality, in a scene between him and Dr. Charlene Barton, played by Viola Davis:

DR BARTON: How about you? You gotta girlfriend back home tying ribbons around old trees?
MAJOR KEENE: No ball and chain for me.
DR BARTON: Can’t get a date, huh?
MAJOR KEENE: If you don’t ask, I won’t tell.
DR. BARTON: I always thought that was a stupid-ass policy.

While there is a brief hint of romance between two other heterosexual characters, none of the scientists’ personal lives factor into the story much. In a way, the incidental nature of Major Keene’s gayness — it’s more back-story than anything pivotal to the plot — is almost as remarkable as his appearance in this prominent science fiction miniseries, which had a reported cost of $15 million. It’s an example of what many gay viewers have long called for: characters that just happen to be gay or bisexual, not characters whose sole function in a plot is to somehow “deal” with their gayness.

Schroder as Major Keene

But according to Schenkkan, the character’s gayness is based, in part, on an element in the original novel. In the book, Crichton invented the notion of the “Odd Man Hypothesis” — the idea that an unmarried man with no personal ties is the most dispassionate and logical in a time of crisis. As a result, it is this person — Major Keene in the miniseries — who is given the only key able to stop the underground facility’s self-destruct mechanism, should the lethal virus somehow escape containment.

“In thinking about who this [‘odd man’] would be in a military context, I thought he might be gay,” says Schenkkan. “This is something that many people in the military unfortunately have to deal with,” he adds, referring to the military’s policy of expelling its openly gay members, something that makes ongoing romantic relationships difficult for gay service members.