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Welcome to the Adventures in Odyssey Academy Awards!  Here are the winners of our golden AIOHQ awards for the Fall 1999 season!

Despite any reservations about the episode, there's no doubt that, well, whoever he is, turned in a stellar preformance as Dr. Blackgaard in these two episodes.   I've noticed that through the series, Dr. Blackgaard lost more and more of his composure as he was foiled again and again.  In "The Nemesis" and "The Battle", he was cool and confident.  Then in "Waylaid in the Windy City", he was forced to beg for his life from Richard Maxwell.  In "A Name, Not a Number", he was his old self, but we saw that he had to do a lot more work to get what he wanted to get done.  In the Darkness Before Dawn series, Blackgaard was composed on the outisde, but far more desperate on the inside.  He was suffering from a virus and in a few places where we got to see "inside" the man himself, we could see to what his greed had driven him.  He was not a happy man.

Finally, in this last performance of Dr. Blackgaard, he was even more desperate, his voice betraying what his life of crime had done to him.  A great acting job that far outshone the episode itself.

This is a tough one because I believe that, in general, most of the new characters are not nearly as interesting as the old ones.  However, after some thinking, I'd say that Mandy is the one to whom I've become most attached.  She is the sweetest character in the series, but still manages to feel like a real child at most times.

While this storyline hasn't really continued into other episodes, I think that it's the one with the most possibilities.  I wish that it were introduced with more drama, though...afterall, a new worker at Whit's End is a big deal.  There are a few other stories, such as Aubrey's inevitable salvation, but this one seems like it may produce some interesting plot twists.

These epic stories in the grand tradition of AIO epic stories, keep the spectacular sound effects that we expect.  Runners up in this category would have to be "A Look Back" and "Blackgaard's Revenge".

This grand episode was still the most exciting, imagination-filled episode of the year.