Scavenger Elida just wants a quiet life grabbing junk and selling to the highest bidder, but her old life is about to catch up with her in a big way.

Based on the 2018 Vault comic by Magdalene Visaggio, Vagrant Queen emulates quite a few big-hitters in the genre while mining from the Big Bag of Sci-Fi Tropes in a fairly inoffensive way and not getting away with as much as it thinks by self-referencing that it does so.

Elida is actually the heir to the throne Eldeya; her family were murdered by the same revolutionary government she fled into obscurity from, who still want her dead. So far, so standard. Elida now ekes out a living as a scavenger, grabbing bits of junk to sell to shady dealers, sidestepping other unpleasant individuals in the same trade, and flying around on a ship perpetually on the verge of falling apart.

Aesthetically it’s mostly referencing Guardians of the Galaxy, insofar as something on this kind of TV budget can reference a multimillion dollar movie franchise, so it’s packed with neon, bright colours and costumes that all echo (in a distant way) those movies.

Narratively, it shoots for the humour of Guardians, laced with the story beats and atmosphere of Firefly/Serenity, and it’s this combination that starts to make it trip over its own laces. Whedon’s beloved (but short-lived) genre vehicle had its fair share of humour, but it was all contextual. None of it ever descended into wacky for the sake of being wacky, and there was always a strong element of legitimate risk and fear underpinning the gang’s adventures.

Here, we have an arch-bad guy who seems to be carrying around one of those knives that toast bread as you slice it but straight-facedly describes it as an exquisitely crafted heirloom, and chewing the scenery to the point of digestion with dialogue so hammy even Sixties Batman TV series villains would have rejected. Assisting him are an army of identikit soldiers in identikit power armour with identikit personalities set at default dumb henchman. And it doesn’t matter how many jokes the characters drop about how every bad guy looks the same and this makes them really easy to imitate, it doesn’t take away from how bland this is.

It’s not without its merits. Adriyan Rae is a charismatic enough presence as lead character Elida, Alex McGregor does her best with her definitely-not-Kaylee-from-Firefly engineer character and Tim Rozon has the looks if not quite the charisma of a young Harrison Ford as the – you guessed it – rogueish handsome dude with a complicated past related to Elida and a love for his battered old ship.

Its final big reveal before the credits doesn’t land as hard as the writers might want it to, mainly because it’s the exact sort of cliché we’ve seen a million times before, but it does enough to merit watching next week to see where it goes. It’s uncomplicated and derivative, but it somehow never quite outstays its welcome.

Verdict: Trashy, occasionally funny and certainly visually ambitious stuff from SyFy. It won’t win any awards for concept or execution, but it’s charming enough to merit sticking around for now. 6/10

Greg D. Smith