Palanan
2020-03-27, 11:14 PM
First episode of a new series on SyFy.
Short version, don’t. Really, please, just don’t.
It’s hard to know where to start. Thirty seconds in, I had that little resigned feeling it was going to be terrible, and from that point on it was only a question of how it could possibly manage to keep getting worse.
The show looks like it was shot in the back of someone’s high school, with an overload of neon to make up for any actual set design. It takes place in another galaxy, where for some reason everyone has weirdly pointed ears. Most of the show’s budget was apparently spent on latex alien headpieces which look utterly cheesy, and the digital spacecraft “effects” are unspeakably cheap.
There is an evil empire, and the soldiers wear cheap and hokey armor with brightly illuminated guns. They can’t seem to decide from minute to minute whether to be stupid or goofy, but not for an instant do they feel like a credible threat, much less the menace they’re supposed to be. The bad guy is a walking stack of evil clichés, and virtually everyone is inept or helpless apart from our tough little heroine.
Who is the most annoying character on the show. She’s supposed to be a gritty streetwise survivor, hard girl with attitude, etc., but she comes off as trite, smug and shallow, not to mention utterly unsympathetic. There’s an attempt at a story about how she’s the last survivor of royal blood, who’s on the run but doesn’t want to be queen, yadda yadda something something.
The story fails to engage partly because it’s as shallow as a driveway puddle, but mainly because we’re not given any reason to like her, and her shady associates (because she’s too cool and edgy for friends) end up being more interesting than she is, if only just barely. As near as I can tell, her character concept is “Starlord but a biracial female,” down to her opening scene where she steals an artifact and fights her way through the competition. (Except it’s dinky and ridiculous.)
It’s difficult to imagine how this could be so bad, unless it was on purpose—but if it were intentionally bad it should have been more enjoyable. As it is, this is the dried crust on the bottom of the SF barrel, the mingled residue of overbeaten tropes with an attempt at contemporary sass. It has the cheese of Dr. Who without the earnest heart, the chassis of Guardians without the snark, and dim echoes of Firefly without the chemistry of the crew.
I forced myself to watch the entire episode, but I won’t do that again. It’s hard to believe this is SyFy, the same channel that once gave us Battlestar Galactica. Gods, how the mighty have fallen.
Short version, don’t. Really, please, just don’t.
It’s hard to know where to start. Thirty seconds in, I had that little resigned feeling it was going to be terrible, and from that point on it was only a question of how it could possibly manage to keep getting worse.
The show looks like it was shot in the back of someone’s high school, with an overload of neon to make up for any actual set design. It takes place in another galaxy, where for some reason everyone has weirdly pointed ears. Most of the show’s budget was apparently spent on latex alien headpieces which look utterly cheesy, and the digital spacecraft “effects” are unspeakably cheap.
There is an evil empire, and the soldiers wear cheap and hokey armor with brightly illuminated guns. They can’t seem to decide from minute to minute whether to be stupid or goofy, but not for an instant do they feel like a credible threat, much less the menace they’re supposed to be. The bad guy is a walking stack of evil clichés, and virtually everyone is inept or helpless apart from our tough little heroine.
Who is the most annoying character on the show. She’s supposed to be a gritty streetwise survivor, hard girl with attitude, etc., but she comes off as trite, smug and shallow, not to mention utterly unsympathetic. There’s an attempt at a story about how she’s the last survivor of royal blood, who’s on the run but doesn’t want to be queen, yadda yadda something something.
The story fails to engage partly because it’s as shallow as a driveway puddle, but mainly because we’re not given any reason to like her, and her shady associates (because she’s too cool and edgy for friends) end up being more interesting than she is, if only just barely. As near as I can tell, her character concept is “Starlord but a biracial female,” down to her opening scene where she steals an artifact and fights her way through the competition. (Except it’s dinky and ridiculous.)
It’s difficult to imagine how this could be so bad, unless it was on purpose—but if it were intentionally bad it should have been more enjoyable. As it is, this is the dried crust on the bottom of the SF barrel, the mingled residue of overbeaten tropes with an attempt at contemporary sass. It has the cheese of Dr. Who without the earnest heart, the chassis of Guardians without the snark, and dim echoes of Firefly without the chemistry of the crew.
I forced myself to watch the entire episode, but I won’t do that again. It’s hard to believe this is SyFy, the same channel that once gave us Battlestar Galactica. Gods, how the mighty have fallen.