The show is, instead, much more comfortable with the idea of The Nightflyer as a sort of traveling memory palace, starting with the small memory chambers that are my favorite piece of the show’s production design, and expanding through the entire ship in ways that become increasingly less distinctive. The same is true in a later episode in which biological matter and human tissue are discovered in a place such bloody, sinewy business definitely doesn’t belong. ![]() Israeli actress Maya Eshet brings an otherworldly oddness to her role as Lommie, a cyberneticist who communicates with the ship by physically jacking herself into the computers through an implanted portal in her arm, an act of penetration that stops short of being explicitly sexual only because the show is scared to follow its dominant metaphors down the rabbit hole. If the show has a point of semi-innovation, it’s the nearly Cronenberg-esque interest in the blending of technology and biology, unfortunately delivered without a Cronenberg-esque sense of how to visualize these big ideas. Over five episodes sent to critics, Nightflyers layers in the creepiness, without rising above “unsettling” into “scary.” Even if attempted jump-cut scares never sink in, Nightflyers sometimes replaces frights with low-level gross-out moments. You know that very soon, characters will start hearing voices filtering through those halls, so what a sad coincidence that Karl arrives on board still nursing psychic wounds from the death of a young daughter. Inside, however, it’s the same labyrinth of underlit hallways, exposed metallic piping that seem to dominate every vessel, the same clanging and echoing passages and foreboding sliding doors that hermetically seal like the shutting of a coffin. The Nightflyer is a vast ship and, from the outside, it looks like a carefully engineered marvel. 'The Expanse' Officially Revived for Season 4 at Amazonįrom Alien to Event Horizon to YouTube Premium’s new drama Origins, the genre-bending tropes Nightflyers is playing with are more than familiar. Nobody, including xenobiologist Rowan (Angus Sampson), necessarily believes what Karl is selling, but they’re out of options and they’re so desperate that Captain Roy Eris (David Ajala), who prefers interacting with his crew via hologram, has authorized the presence of a dangerously powerful psychic named Thale (Sam Strike), a so-called “L1” controllable only by a psychiatrist (Gretchen Mol’s Agatha), who naturally happens to be Karl’s ex. Astrophysicist Karl D’Branin (Eoin Macken) believes that after they pass through something called The Void, they’re going to encounter a specific set of advanced alien beings. It’s 2093 and waves of a deadly disease have made Earth close to uninhabitable, so The Nightflyer is heading into the farthest reaches of space in hopes of making first contact. The pilot, directed by Mike Cahill ( Another Earth, Rise) and written by Jeff Buhler, has an ad-free running time of nearly an hour and introduces some of the team aboard The Nightflyer. ![]() The network calls this a “fan-forward viewing experience,” which is definitely a network-forward alternative to calling it a “two-week dump in early December.” Syfy is premiering Nightflyers in a pair of Sunday-through-Thursday five-night bursts starting on December 2. Martin’s name is simply a better hook than associations with the underseen 1987 film, still of the same name, or a more practical approach that would just be to say that if you’re a fan of spaceship-as-haunted-house sci-fi, Nightflyers is one of those.ĭecently cast, interestingly claustrophobic and boasting occasional tiny bursts of inspiration, Nightflyers isn’t going to suddenly hook those broad Game of Thrones demos, but there’s an audience out there that’s always thirsty for hard sci-fi and this is for them.
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