Nightflyers Series Review

Nightflyers (2018)
Season 1 - 10 episodes

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Created by: Jeff Buhler
Starring: Eoin Macken, David Ajala, Jodie Turner-Smith, Angus Sampson, Sam Strike, Maya Eshet, Brían F. O'Byrne, Gretchen Mol
Rated: TV-14
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Plot
A crew of scientists embarks on a mission aboard a ship called the Nightflyer to investigate a mysterious alien signal, but they soon begin to question if something is already on the ship with them.

Verdict
This starts out as a rather typical space adventure, but with each episode this series wants to add more story lines. It reaches a point where nothing seems important. It jumps to the next idea without resolving the last one. With no focus, and an unclear mission the series hopes that each new reveal will keep you engrossed, but all that does is fuel my disinterest. As someone who watches sci-fi of varying quality, by the eighth episode, I completely lost interest in this show, the characters, or their plights. The show is disappointing. This series throws too much at you; bombarding you with all these crazy ideas, but no satisfying resolutions. This should have focused on a couple of ideas instead of trying to include anything that could possibly happen on a space voyage.
Skip it.

Review
This is inspired by George R. R. Martin's 1980 novella, and it takes numerous liberties. The novella was adapted to a film in 1987. Martin was not directly involved in this adaptation which was canceled shortly after the first season.

You've got scientists on a mission to the great beyond. They're hallucinating. That might be the ship that no one knew is conscious, the telepath, or an alien race that sent back a probe. Could the mysterious hologram captain or ship's mechanic that plugs a cord into their arm be the cause? There is so much going on in this show. It really seems like they wanted to take every plot that's every happened on a space voyage and cram it into one show. There's a lot of stuff, but the characters are flat. The mission is completely unclear, there just so to provide a reason to be in space.

This commits one of my biggest peeves. The first episode starts with a how we got here scene where a crew member chases and attacks another. We see this resolved in the eight or ninth episode. It's a teaser, and it's use is almost always a cover up for lack of quality.

There are a lot of sci-fi references and pulls. Solaris is a prominent one with all the hallucinations. The ship appears to be killing people and everyone is afraid of the telepath. I assume his role is to transcend language and communicate with the aliens. Everyone assumes the hallucinations are due to the telepath, but they're not. The captain only appears as a hologram. While you expect he may not actually exist, the show has a different twist.

I wondered if the mission was something more nefarious like in Alien. It's not. Episode four provides a lot of questions and few answers. That's a theme of this show. If the ship is conscious, how does it make people have visions? The aliens send back a probe that seems to be outside of time. How did that physical object get into a crew member's room without anyone noticing?

In episode five, a crew member must enter the ship's computer to stop the conscious ship. This has been done before, but the show tries to do everything; not doing anything well. In episode six the crew boards an abandoned ship for supplies, but the ship isn't abandoned. This show is full of ideas, it just doesn't take the time to explore them. 

Dire problems in one episode no longer matter in the subsequent episode. I've saw so many unresolved plot lines that I wasn't sure which ones mattered. If you ask the question, 'What is this show?', I'm not sure I could provide a good answer. This show includes too many ideas for a simple explanation. It gets progressively worse with the mindset that no idea is worth skipping. This show will challenge you. You'll think it can't get worse, it can. You'll want to watch the entire season to get to a conclusion, but the show will push you to stop watching.