A group of various specialists embark on a last-ditch voyage into the void to establish contact with an advanced alien race aboard the vessel Nightflyer. The future of humankind may depend on their success, but even from the outset it seems that this mission is cursed with ill fortune, or something altogether more sinister.

Based on a novella George R R Martin wrote in 1980, Nightflyers sounds not dissimilar to a lot of other shows in the genre, including the recent YouTube special Origin. A bunch of mismatched folks on a ship voyaging to a better tomorrow for the good of humanity isn’t exactly new ground, so it comes down to how interesting you can make the execution.

Nightflyers begins with a fairly tried and tested trope of a scene set some time after the show proper starts, although it might have been a little clearer on this rather than just leaving the audience to assume for several minutes. In any case, that initial scene gives us at least some idea of how things are going to go sideways on the titular starship, so we need to settle in for the why.

Unfortunately again, there isn’t much here that breaks new ground. The central premise of trying to contact advanced aliens who might hold the key to the survival of the human race now Earth is dying could be plucked from any one of a dozen similar properties. The specific plan for doing so, and the attendant tensions it causes for the crew of the ship due to certain prejudices and fears, is similarly pretty standard fare in the genre. Even the characters themselves are mostly a ticklist of genre tropes more than they are individuals. The driven scientist with the tragic past; the aberrant human treated as a freak by everyone except his psychologist handler who really ought to know better but is too earnest to do so; the pessimistic scientist who couches his scepticism in sarcasm; the tough Amazonian warrior type literally bred/engineered for space travel – all of these have been done, more than once, elsewhere.

When things start going wrong, the problem is that between the extremely template nature of the characters and the show’s tendency to drip feed relevant plot exposition incredibly slowly, it’s difficult to care too much about any of it. Again, this idea of people trapped on a starship with terrifying events befalling them apparently at random and no real idea of the cause has been done before, more than once, and there’s nothing here to make it new or innovative.

Visually, it looks pretty good, with decent CGI for the exterior ship shots and obvious money having been put into the sets which all have a weighty, lived-in feel. Clearly budget was not an issue here and the source material comes from the same guy responsible for the most insanely popular piece of genre TV in living memory, so why it’s quite so average is anyone’s guess. I can only hope that it’ll improve as time goes on.

Verdict: After the first hour, the main emotion I had towards this was a sort of mental shrug. It’s not terrible – hell, it’s not even bad, but it’s so very predictable and cookie-cutter that it’s difficult to feel particularly engaged by it one way or another. The televisual embodiment of the word ‘meh’. 5/10

Greg D. Smith