Netflix Made the Worst Show of 2019

have you ever seen a series of television so bad that your brain slowly decomposes into a sort of gooey paste well thanks to Netflix is another life you could probably now suck my brain out of my ear with a straw I remember a time when as a general rule Netflix originals were pretty good but well let's talk about this show episode one across the universe is the beginning of my pain the show opens with this pretty decent shot of a load of mirrors capturing the face of who we can only assume as our main character her being surrounded by mirrors all pointing directly at her face there's a really nice touch if not a little cliche it does set up her ego really well without a single word being spoken we get a couple of lines establishing things like she's selfish before he starts a shoot it appears she's some kind of vlogger she starts talking but she can hardly begin before she's interrupted by a lighting malfunction for some reason she decides the space she needs to look out the window and out of the window she sees a UFO flying towards the building she's in that apparently none of the other people looking in that direction already had noticed yes okay you can't really blame them it wasn't in any of the previous shows we see the UFO flying towards the city before the show decides that city doesn't exist anymore and the UFO crashes in a field in the middle of nowhere there is a goddamn piece of alien technology sticking out of some field in the middle of nowhere okay anyway we then get one of the most generic title sequences for a sci-fi show I've ever seen I think complete with star field and random planet before we get introduced to our main characters oh these are our main characters okay I guess she wasn't never mind that he will be our main character Nikko and her husband Derek also her daughter but this scene is here to establish quite a lot of stuff and it does it through quite a lot of poorly executed exposition you are a scientist in charge of other scientists all trying to communicate with an alien artifact that landed on earth six months ago pretty sure he knows most of that already anyway and this scene we learned that that alien artifact that crashed on earth was a big transmitter that Erik who's been in charge of researching it has finally figured out where it's been transmitting to and that Nikko has been asked to lead a mission into space to that location that mission is supposed to take three months to get there and three months to get that cut to a month later Nikko is on that mission and she's being woken up from stasis because there's been a complication along the way there's a load of dark matter blocking their path so they didn't know about for they set off at this point were also introduced to William who is the ship's AI and is represented by a hologram meaning like you know he can't touch anything and stuff he discusses the dark matter problem with Niko apparently they can't go through the dark matter faster than light because they'll be flying blind and they might hit a planet but we travel through the dog matter do you know how unlikely that is planets are you know pretty big but they are infinitesimally small when compared with the sheer size of space there's a great resource for demonstrating this kind of thing called if the moon were only one pixel which are linked below this whole map is of the solar system and it is completely to scale so all of the proportions here are accurate let's have a look at the distance between the planets [ __ ] that's quite a way isn't it hmm hang on hang on play with me [ __ ] don't know umm so let's see what comes next welcome to us but you know I have to fill this time with something oh there it is Oh No we might hit a planet so that's the amount of space you can have in between planets when you're only considering one dimension in an actual solar system where planets are going to be more tightly concentrated than they are anywhere else that's quite a lot of space now of course avoiding risks even when they're very small risks is fine but this is on a similar level to saying go outside what if a thunderstorm starts and I get struck by lightning planets are ridiculously rare in open space the show could definitely come up with a better reason to not go through the dark matter than this now just wait until you hear why they didn't notice the dark matter in the first place census on earth mister we didn't notice it because we didn't notice it shut up we soon get introduced to the rest of the crew most of them are insufferable idiots that you will learn to hate through the course of this story having made the decision to go around the dark matter instead of through it in case they hit a planet Niko informs them that they're going to be doing a slingshot maneuver around a nearby star they try it but it ends up putting too much strain on the ship for Niko's liking so she calls it off this man Ian is kind of unhappy about that also you can see the ship turning and the Ark that it's going round is [ __ ] tiny like you guys not know that stars are big this is serious a it has a radius of a million kilometers without doing the slingshot maneuver there alternative is to just take the mission much more slowly which will add months to their journey they figure out a way that they feasibly could do the slingshot maneuver and save that time the ship's AI informs them that it's risky and that there's an 11% chance of failure if they employ that method and failure in this case means they all die obviously only an idiot were taken 11% chance of death over the infinitesimal small chance of hitting a random planet while traveling through space so I guess this crew who is specially selected for one of the most important missions of all time are all idiots because the debate they then have isn't deciding between travelling at light speed through the dark matter or taking the much longer path around the dark matter it should we take the slow path around the dark matter or do the slingshot maneuver with an 11% chance of killing assault going through the dark matter isn't seen as an option the debate comes to a standoff between Nikko and Ian Niko believes they should take this slow safe path whereas ian believes they should take the quicker path that might kill them all the only reason he gives that he wants to take the faster route that might kill them all is because he wants to get home faster or as he puts it there are people on earth waiting for him that he wants to get back to you also without making any other arguments in favor of that decision keep saying it's the best thing to do for the mission Niko please this is our best shot what the [ __ ] no it's not this is the risky shortcut that you want to take because you want to get home faster how is this your best shot anyway Ian says he wants to get home faster because there are people waiting for him Niko says that if you kill everyone on the ship then they're going to be waiting a lot longer you [ __ ] [ __ ] or cut that destroys the ship they're all on their own - which Ian responds single decision we will never make it that you're the one second-guessing the decisions you [ __ ] idiot your captain is ordering you to take the slow route to which you go now I wonder is killing everyone though it's faster this is the core of the conflict for the first episode a guy wants to get home faster so he wants to risk killing everyone and then keeps trying to tell us that it's the best decision for the mission despite providing no evidence of that the story happened because this member of the crew is an idiot why did we recruit him shut up well he's supposed to be the antagonist at least the crew don't side with him oh [ __ ] that pause means there's gonna be a bait-and-switch here doesn't it ah [ __ ] they do side with him they get so pissed off with the Niko's decision to not kill everyone that they mutiny you're putting the mission in danger I am she's putting the mission in danger what the [ __ ] no that was you okay so Niko obviously refuses to give up her command so they beat the [ __ ] out of her and put her into cryo sleep I'm sure she's gonna stay in there for a really long time then we have a scene where Ian persuades the rest of the crew that weren't present for the mutiny that Niko was unfit for command and all the necessary people recognize his new authority they then get ready to do the risky slingshot maneuver all very well aware of the 11 percent risk it goes critically wrong and the ship takes massive damage so August a member of the crew who's not annoying enough for me to have mentioned yet goes in wakes Nico up after like three seconds of her being out of the action Niko returns to the rest of the crew and they just start taking her orders again as if they weren't saying that she was mentally unfit for command like two minutes ago what the [ __ ] is even the point of being captured of the ship if the crew is just gonna take orders from whoever they feel like at the time anyway Niko saves the ship but they all get lost in the process and have no idea where they are now there are a couple of scenes in this episode where it's made pretty clear that there are other crew members in cryo sleep who can be woken up if any of the acting crew need replacing now if you're uncomfortable - situation I get it it's up to you you put you back in your stoma to wake up your replacement oh great if I'm asleep I won't care that you're putting me through an 11% chance of death okay I'm getting distracted the point of showing that clip was the line at the end were I can wake up your replacement it's clearly established that there are other crew members available to be woken up so Nikko being a sane and rational person should obviously replace all of the crew members that mutiny against her because they wanted to risk their life so that they could get home faster right I mean they beat the [ __ ] out of her you know seems like the kind of thing that would get you replaced you know but no Nikko keeps all of those crew members on including in she considers doing something about Ian and only Ian not the other mutineers but we get told the equipment to put people back into soma sleep is not functional that's the only reason we get that she doesn't do anything I can't put them back to sleep I guess the only other choice is to leave them as Acting members of the crew can't relieve them of their duties can't confine them to their quarters no choice but to let all of these incompetent treacherous idiots keep running this incredibly important mission in this instance Nikko didn't do the rational thing because well the plot needs to happen hey just like how she didn't want to hit a planet Nikko decides it's a great idea to spend some time alone with Ian doing repairs on the ship he in tries to sneak up on Nikko with a knife and she reacts by kicking him into a wall of electricity [ __ ] it that sounds feasible what did he even expect to happen if he managed to kill her like Oh guys the captain's mysteriously vanished yes I would judge actually they would probably be dumb enough to fall for that wouldn't they while all of that was going down in space with Nikko there was also a subplot going on on earth which is mercifully much shorter Erik Nico's husband is still in charge of researching the alien artifact and we get to see some of that research in action how is he researching at you ask well cue pigeon he's playing at pigeon noises okay well let's see what the justification for this is it could literally just be that he's playing it random stimuli to see how it reacts and that wouldn't be too bad surely he doesn't think that pigeons have some kind of innate quality that means they can communicate with aliens that would be crazy here's his line of logic hear me out so the artefactum it's something called infrasound yeah human ears can't pick them up but elephants can't alligators whales and pigeons this thing did not travel across the galaxy to talk to birds of course not generally so what if we can get birds to talk to it like how they dismiss that woman's idea as like oh no that would be silly of course it didn't cover to speak to birds which is gonna pitch in the sounds cuz that's probably something it's gonna respond to I don't really need to tell you why this is cheaper but I'm going to anyway there is almost no logical through-line here the fact that it emits something that humans can't perceive with their senses in this case very low-frequency sound or infrasound doesn't mean it has any kind of connection to the random assortment of animals that happen to be able to perceive that thing your TV remote probably emits signals using infrared light there are snakes that can see frequencies of infrared light this does not mean that there's a connection between TV remotes and snakes and it certainly doesn't mean that there is a connection between TV remotes and hissing noises thankfully for the sake of my sanity this strategy doesn't end up working he doesn't get any kind of result from doing this but I'm fairly sure that that's not because the show actually realizes how dumb this idea is and that it would never work in fact I'm pretty confident that the show actually thought it was a genuinely clever idea I'm fairly sure that the only actual reason that this fails is for the structure of the story so that we can see two scenes of failure before the final scene of success although I personally count every scene of this show as a scene of failure in this attempt to communicate with the artifact he plays it Mozart his logical through line here is that in 2026 a group of scientists beamed this music towards the star to which we now know the transmitter is transmitting Wow that actually has a logical through-line they might have heard this song before so let's play it to them again to see if they recognize it that works well done that's much less batshit unfortunately though the right to still manage to demonstrate that they don't even have the most basic understanding of simple science in this case how sounds work because the artifact emits infrasound Eric wants to play the music to the artifact in infrasound he first plays it normally in a way that a human ear can perceive and then drops it down into infrasound here's how he phrases the instruction to his team that that's what he wants them to do drop frequency noun 1 her 2 second a drop in every drop frequency down to 1 Hertz a second and drop it into infrasound a Hertz is by definition something happening once per second him saying lower it to 1 Hertz per second basically demonstrates that he just doesn't know what that word means and this is such a basic thing to get right I mean I learnt this in middle school but this is also something just so simple and easy to Google the science should not be this egregiously wrong in a science fiction show anyway he plays at the music in infrasound nothing happens and the scene ends the last scene of this in the episode is him still waiting for the artifact to respond his boss comes up to him to fire him and just at the last minute the artifact does respond it shows them some pretty colors and it plays the mozart back to them really really loud or at least it's supposed to seem like it's really loud in actuality it's very very clear that it's just been dubbed on afterwards he takes his hands off his ears before he's even had time to react to the fact that the music has stopped anyway he celebrates and that's the end of his story for this episode and what a bad opening episode it is for every problem I've highlighted they were easily plenty I haven't in this scene Eric points a tablet with a camera on it and his daughter and the holographic phone call at the other end is for some reason able to produce a perfect image of the back of her head scientific explanations for things like why they're lost by the end of it continued to be flimsy this member of the crew is too fat to fit in the stasis tubes we get shown all of viens dialogue I could go on doing this for a very long time but I think you get the point this show is bad there are countless little problems countless medium-sized problems and countless huge problems characters make completely stupid decisions that make absolutely no sense just in service of furthering the plot how did any of them ever get to the positions they're in queue well maybe we'll find an answer for that in episode 2 through the valley of Shadows although of course I've already seen it so I know we don't the show is just dumb the episode opens with the scene of Niko telling the rest of the crew that she's killed Ian this was an accident right Ian Eurex it was a threat are you saying you killed him yes but she failed to mention anything about how Iain had a knife on her she just decides not to talk about that part instead she just says he was a threat to the mission [ __ ] you he was a threat he cared more about being in command you don't know that so this guy had got violent with her before because he thought she wasn't appropriate to lead the mission then when they were alone he'd started talking to her about how he didn't think she was appropriate to lead the mission then snuck up on her with a knife and Niko decided not to mention any of that anyway because this episode needs a plot suddenly their oxygen reserves fail and they lose basically all their oxygen and asked me that they only have enough oxygen left to breathe for five more hours they decide to use those five hours to look for a source of oxygen that they can use to replenish their depleted supply they plan to search on planets they detect a planet scan it from a distance and find that it has oxygen on it all right we got an atmosphere 60% nitrogen a 30% organ 10% oxygen Niko wakes up a new pilot to replace Ian for the mission who flies them down to the planet in a shuttlecraft there they mine oxygen crystals from inside a cave hmm so if the oxygen is in those crystals like part of their chemical makeup how did they plan on breathing it exactly why would they have equipment that allows them to extract oxygen for a mineral that why [ __ ] it so they collect all the oxygen they need and put it in this small briefcase yes I'm sure the entire crew will be able to breathe for several months with that amount of oxygen but as a complication while they're down there it turns out the planet has a surprise moon hang on how did they not notice that the planet had a moon exactly we see it didn't show up in my first radar Scouts okay it was in such a low orbit that it didn't show up on their scans wait [ __ ] what it's a moon so remember what they can detect by scanning the planet all right we got an atmosphere 60% nitrogen a 30% organ 10% oxygen oh also a moon Moon's can't actually orbit that close to a planet there's such a thing as the Roche limit a moon like this cannot exist within that limit the moon then causes the ground to start blowing up the science continues to be stupid and the crew are in danger most of them escape just in time except the pair in the cave Niko is faced with the decision to go back and save them or just leave insuring the safety of the crew and the mission in a move that I genuinely didn't expect she leaves making the tough decision to ensure the safety of the mission while letting two people die I'm just kidding this show isn't interesting they show her flying away but the only reason she flew away was to subvert audience expectations so that she could fly back and rescue them man I'm glad that happened for a second there I thought we might have some moral ambiguity it's much better to just have a cliche saved at the last minute moment this story suffers from all the same problems that the story of the first episode does but puts its own unique spin on them cause and effect is the baseline of storytelling things like stakes are absolutely built on cause-and-effect it's all about how one event progresses to the next and when the reasons that events take place don't make sense the whole thing falls apart the stakes are completely destroyed by the knowledge that at any time the writers might just pull something out of their ass to serve what they want to happen in the story you know something like a moon a skilled writer or even a competent one can cause the events that they want to happen in their story to happen without demolishing all semblance of logical cause-and-effect anyway this episode also has a couple of subplots Nikko isn't dealing very well with the knowledge that she's killed Ian we also keep up with Eric's antics on earth we see him get told that Earth has lost contact with Niko's ship shortly after that he gets tracked down by the vlogger from the beginning who we find out is called Harper glass she asks him some questions which he refuses to answer about whether or not the ship is safe or if the fact that they've lost contact with it means it's been destroyed because she wants to report the information to her followers and after that we see him works and more on the artifact basically nothing happens except we get that cliche that really needs to die where a character who's been trying to figure something out recently in this case Erik is having an unrelated conversation in which someone says a word and then they go a word a word and it makes them realize something that's related to the problem they were trying to solve earlier I answered exactly zero over questions but somehow she kind of got everything she knew it she filled in the gaps we're not hearing exactly it's not what we're hearing it's what we're not hearing really come on how many cliches do you want to cram into these few seconds man it must suck for the people who originally came up with this dialogue that's been just copy and pasted into everything imagine having loads of people using what is essentially your writing and never getting credit for it this leads to them figuring out that there might be a hidden message in the way that the artifact is playing the mozart back to them and that's the end of their story for this episode speaking of the end of this episode there's actually a cliffhanger just as the episode is about to end on the ship with Nico one of the crew who hasn't been annoying enough for me to name yet starts violently convulsing like a xenomorph is about to erupt out of her unfortunately that doesn't happen instead the show just cuts to black before we know what's happened I can't wait to find out what happens next in episode 3 nervous breakdown this title is actually a pun you'll realize why soon the episode starts with a flashback to Nico and her family finding out about the UFO that crashed at the beginning not really sure why it's here it's not at all relevant to the episode at hand we don't really learn anything new here it's it's pretty pointless moving on to the plot of the actual episode the story seas the crew dealing with an alien pathogen they picked up on the planet they landed on last episode of course we already start the story with one set character the next person to start exhibiting symptoms is Nico who instead of going goes blind and the third character just start displaying symptoms is Michelle I haven't mentioned her yet even though she's been really annoying throughout this whole show basically her character is that she's an [ __ ] and annoying for example here's a scene of her from the first episode 27 you might as well cut off your balls because nature is gonna do it for you why 27 why not 26 or 28 27th oh my god Amy Winehouse Demetrio silly and glass all brilliant and all dead by 27 this is our introduce to her as a character who irrationally thinks the number 27 is special because of all the billions of people in the world who have died three of them have died at the age of 27 and someone who acts like you're an idiot if you don't immediately know what she means when she says the 27 club she's an [ __ ] but not in any way that actual real [ __ ] actually just comes across very much as oh the scripts told me I need to be antagonistic one day you wake up and you are ancient you should not even get out of bed let alone lead a mission across the galaxy website as you die old Wow she's also one of the idiots whom you need and beat the [ __ ] out of Nico in the first episode now she's not completely OneNote by which I mean there are moments in which she's not screeching at people but in episode 3 we get the scene what did we manage to do exactly what did you do Xavier oh you house he helps great everybody gets a [ __ ] ribbon I don't need your help sending a goddamn email show we're all gonna die you realize that right first Patrick gets sick now Nico who's next slightly later on from that she tries to murder Nico but apparently this is the virus making her go crazy on my first watch through this I genuinely didn't realize that there was supposed to be something wrong with her but no these are these are symptoms apparently they figure out that the virus is airborne and that everyone on the ship has been contaminated by it they say that the disease attacks the nervous system and therefore the symptoms of it are completely unpredictable hence Petra having spasms Nico losing her sight and Michelle continuing to act within her character I'm guessing that's [ __ ] science but I really don't know enough about this area to really comment all I can say is that it doesn't ring true to me now of course the problem with having bad science is that if someone who's watching actually know that the science is wrong it's gonna completely break their immersion and there's no real reason not to get the science right the danger introduced into the story by for example the movement broke the Roche limit could just as easily have been introduced by say a volcanic eruption or an earthquake the show very clearly wants to be taken seriously but then shits all over itself with mistakes like these ones that is again assuming this part is scientifically inaccurate I don't [ __ ] know but neither does the show anyway having established that anyone who's not in Soma sleep on the ship is infected with this disease they decide that the appropriate course of action to take is to just chill out for a bit you see the first person who displayed symptoms Petra her symptoms have gone now which they take to mean they probably don't have to worry everyone else's symptoms are probably gonna disappear too it's not like Niko is literally still blind because she's carrying an alien infection there's no need to run further medical tests or anything like that so everyone including the ship's doctor and the ship's biologist just chill out for a bit and have a couple of drinks the thing that absolutely baffles me about this one is that them doing that is in no way important for the plot the show just sort of decides that they should be irrational here for no real reason anyway then Petra's nervous system falls out I'm not joking that's what they wrote the stages of this alien disease are first something completely random happens to you then you feel fine again and for the three people watching who need me to tell you this that can't happen they may as well have written that her brain fell out through her ear wait not even that it dissolved and fell out through her ear that it fell out over air and it's like completely solid form just squeezed on through Niko decides that their best course of action is to flush all of the crew and the infected air out of the airlock and wake up a replacement crew I can't really fault it for that it makes sense to me they believe they're all condemned to death so they may as well make sure the mission stays safe at this point is probably worth mentioning Bernie he blames himself for bringing the virus on board the ship because well he's the one who brought the virus onboard the ship there's actually a brilliant scene where he's getting accused of being an idiot and he defends himself by listing everything he's been through since the mission started only the writers get the events of theorem show wrong let's go through that scene now through the following mutiny yep there was a mutiny it was a hearing spinning like a merry-go-round while there's been a lot of turbulence on this mission at no point was the ship spinning but I guess he could be confused maybe a very public electrocution his last execution that left a very distinct mother I mean Ian did get killed but it was in no way public it was in a completely private room with no one else there so no again no landing on the road planet went completely smoothly no that was a surprise moon now I'm willing to accept that it's possible all of this was deliberate the guy he's talking to wasn't awake for all of those parts so maybe bernie is supposed to be lying here to make himself look better the problem is that this show has gotten me to a point where I can't tell anymore characters have been saying clearly accidentally stupid things through this whole thing so how am I supposed to tell the difference pigeons well everyone else is getting ready to throw themselves out of the airlock Bernie is trying desperately to find a cure because the show is just a patchwork of cliches Bernie's attempts fail then at the very last second he accidentally stumbles upon the solution as like oh my god that's it he accidentally shines some gamma rays on a sample of the pathogen and they die and he's like oh my god also this guy dies the crew are literally about to flush themselves out of the airlock when wait Barney's coming with news being saved at the last minute by someone bringing a surprise solution Wow does this show not know how to do anything else here's the point they had to flush the entire crew out of the airlock because they were all infected but the entire crew is getting ready to flush themselves out of the airlock without Bernie and you know if they leave him in the ship that makes their entire sacrifice redundant despite that William has to tell them to wait before bernie arrives and he's only coming because he's found a cure I guess if he didn't find a cure they would have just left him in the lab to infect the new crew that wakes up this is just another piece of writing that doesn't make sense in service of the plot being able to happen again in something that's overwhelmingly competently written this wouldn't be a big problem but this is how this entire show is written events don't happen because those events would happen but again the question of does this story actually makes does the plot actually function is thrown completely out of the window to deliver us a formulaic paint-by-numbers story anyway so they've discovered that the pathogen causing the disease is obliterated by gamma radiation just a reminder by the way the pathogen is airborne and in all of the air in the ship that's why everyone is infected in the first place but the pathogen is obliterated by gamma radiations so they pull up by a nearby star stand by one of the ships only windows and soak themselves in gamma apparently this solves the problem of an airborne virus in a ship where most of the rooms don't have windows the gamma rays don't give them immunity or anything it just kills the pathogen so what's their plan to sterilize the air in all of the rooms of the ship that don't have windows like basically every other room on the ship that air is going to remain infected so they're all just gonna get sick again and so is anyone else knew that they'd wake up no just don't ask questions this works okay it just works just does oh by the way they all expose themselves to gamma radiation until they were visibly in pain well those paint looks on their faces definitely makes sense because gamma rays basically kill all living cells but according to the show the only symptom the experiences they're all sterile now I guess the gamma rays decided only to kill the cells in their junk it was like someone being shot in the head with a bazooka and going oh no I've lost my sense of smell anyway also during this episode they managed to fix the soma sleep tubes so they all go back into soma sleep so that like the rest of the journey can go faster for them but then there's an episode cliffhanger where Nico wakes up and discovers like oh the power is out and something is hunting the crew sounds cool hope they don't just reveal this is all a dream ten minutes into the next episode that'd be pretty shitty or would it actually make for the best episode of the show so far well you'll find that out in a bit but let's do the Erik subplot of this episode first it goes like this Harper continues to pester Erik for information he has on the artifacts and on Nico's ship well after the third time of her asking him for information he decides enough is enough so he challenges her to a trivia quiz under the conditions that if he wins she has to leave him alone and if she wins he'll tell her everything he wants to know my Oracle that's all I don't sure that anyone anyone who can't beat me at a pub quiz that is the trivia quiz scene is also really dumb it's free of anything plot breaking it's just got one small problem that's really funny to me so the multiple choice answers appear on a screen and they're color coded right and to make this pop quiz all futuristic participants indicate what answer they've picked by pressing a ball which then glows in the color of the answer they've picked really bright so that like anyone else taking the quiz can see like forget it being easy to peek over at what other people are answering this system makes it hard not to look there's a big green glowing thing in the middle of that table anyway Eric wins but it's later revealed that he's decided to give Harper the information anyway for reasons that we don't yet know which brings us to episode 4 guilt trip that shot of Saturn it's [ __ ] gorgeous by the way episode 4 is by far the best episode of the show by which I mean it doesn't have enormous plot breaking problems through the previous three episodes there are a couple of things that we've learned about Nico's character one that she misses her family which like yeah and two that she had a mission about ten years ago that went tits up and half of her crew died her ship was an assassin when a complication put it in danger her decision resulted in 10 crew members dying but the rest surviving and this episode focuses on that well it focuses on that after the first 10 minutes the first 10 minutes are an extended fake out in which the show pretends that the ship is under attack by some hostile creature that we never see like half the crew get killed and then it's revealed it's all a dream you could literally just start the episode here and you wouldn't miss anything important it's literally completely irrelevant so I'm just gonna not talk about it and skip to the parts that actually matters in the story a few minutes ago talking about the last episode I set up the question is this dream fair count pretty shitty or does it lead into the best episode of the show so far and the answer is both the episode isn't well written it still suffers from a lot of the same problems the previous ones do but this is the first episode where if someone told me they really liked it I wouldn't be baffled as to why that could possibly be the case the story itself is still held together by a few flimsy explanations in characters acting completely irrationally for the sake of the plot but this episode at least tried to do something that wasn't just a bunch of tropes and cliches thrown into the vague shape of a story and then held together with blue tech craft glue into the power of belief it turns out the soma sleep equipment is broken again and it broke halfway through Nikko being put to sleep as a result she's halfway between the states of safely under and awake which is preventing them from waking her up to add more tension the system is hemorrhaging power and is gonna run out and shut down in a short while if it shuts down while she's in there she'll die for the moment though she's having incredibly vivid dreams about those things that have been troubling her the guilt of leaving her family behind on earth as she goes on this mission and the guilt of being responsible for a lot of deaths on one of her previous missions for some pretty contrived reasons it's decided that she can only be woken up once she's worked her way through that [ __ ] and come to terms with all of that guilt again the actual reasons that the story is happening a pretty [ __ ] but for a change the story itself is actually interesting enough first we establish all the Gilbert she's feeling then to try and deal with it she lives out a fantasy of saving everyone on that previous ship that doesn't help she realizes that she just has to accept that she made the decision she made so instead of living into fantasy she stands by the decision she made the first time and makes it again in the dream this episode actually does a good job of establishing the guilt and then working its way through it the scenario itself while the means to actually get to it were contrived is to my knowledge original are coming to terms with your past story isn't groundbreaking but it's okay and certainly more than I expected from the show at this point character motivations are consistent and all makes sense in this story and I'm very glad that the final solution was her just accepting that things are the way they are it does still have its problems probably the biggest of which is the fact that it uses its first 10 minutes to just bait the audience with stuff that ends up being completely irrelevant to the story the episode is far from well-written but it does show improvement this episode doesn't have an eric subplot and instead has a subplot with the rest of the crew that are actually awake it's executed almost adequately and that's very little noteworthy about it Boni realizes that if they can't go back into soma sleep for the rest of the journey they're going to need more food and they're going to run out of food before they get to their destination they discover that there's a moon that they could take a four light year detour to go visits but may support life so they decide to take that detour to see if there's anything they can eat there Nico wakes up to discover there on that DITA and she not too chuffed about it Michelle found a moon that could possibly support life possibly so you don't even know if this moon has anything we can actually eat so apparently the crew don't know whether this moon supports life or not but then in that same scene they're able to use their ship scanners to zoom in so far on the planet that they can literally see individual trees Bernard they're the crew has no idea if it supports life or not they just don't know Oh also in the last episode it was a minor plot point that their long-range sensors were down and they were flying blind because of it but I guess they forgot about that anyway the episode ends with them finding out that there's another artifact like the one on earth on this moon episode 5 a mind of its own is a very different beast to the previous four while the previous episodes were their own self-contained stories that had elements of an overarching plot within them this is almost entirely set up for future episodes loads of new plot points get introduced that don't get resolved by the end of the 40 minutes a very basic overview of the plot is that they learned to gather food and study the artifacts they discover that this artifact is older and rundown they find a piece of the artifact that's fallen off and take it back with them and they don't leave by choice they get chased off the moon by these weird bug creatures over the course of that time a few different things happen Burnie gets a twig stuck in his leg which later results in an infection the episode ends with this unresolved as he's going back to the ship to get proper treatment this character his name is Sasha gets left alone with the artifact starts hearing voices specifically his own voice then gets pulled into the artifact by his reflection and the next time we see him he's acting odd and he sees [ __ ] again it's himself again this goes unresolved by the end of the episode a little babby version of one of those bug sneaks onto the ship nico and the pilot cast find a load of flowers that make them feel high when they're near them william glitches out and goes offline and then there's a fire and the hangar which all goes unexplained there is an awful love triangle subplot between these three characters just imagine every love triangle cliche ever and you know what this plot is like it ends in a scene terrible to describe where he kisses her and then she kisses the other guy seemingly into both of them it seems this plotline is unresolved as well which unfortunately means we're going to be seeing more of it it's mentioning that there's no way they had enough time to gather really any food the food gathering portion of the mission was cut incredibly short by Bernie's infection so they're definitely gonna have to stop off somewhere else to get food if they don't want to learn back here again in terms of writing quality it's fairly consistent with what we've got so far it doesn't really done anything outrageous though there are no surprise moons but it's all set up I'm fairly confident the stupid is yet to come when we find out what all of this stuff means and by fairly confident I mean yeah there was a lot of stupid from this episode condensed into the Eric subplots like that often is so remember when Eric gave Harper the classified information that she wanted just because he wanted to my work classified well it turns out the reason he wanted the information public was in case anyone anywhere in the world had any ideas and could maybe help him figure out the coded message he deliberately leaked the government secrets well at the beginning of this episode he gets found out since he deliberately leaked government secrets about aliens they try to arrest him but he escapes and spends most of this episode subplot on the run just kidding that would make sense instead they're like well we can't be too quick to judge let's see if this actually works maybe someone out there does have a good idea what the [ __ ] he doesn't get in anyway penalized for this they're just like let's see if anything comes of it apparently also since they released this information to the world they've had hundreds of responses okay so there were hundreds of responses hundreds I get hundreds of responses when I ask people what they think of Star Wars films this is world-changing information leaked by what's apparently the most popular news source in the world Harper glass and they only get hundreds of responses okay I guess there aren't that many people excited to release their theories on the new information about the alien artifact Eric thinks that one of the people who responded is on to something so he goes to visit Marcus person sorry no the character's name is Marcus Peterson apparently to make this trip they all had to change their clothes Marcus tells them two things the first is that the waveform of the encoder message actually looks like the outline of the artifact the second is that the message is binary of the RGB code for the color white you spent ages studying this message and you didn't think maybe it's binary you needed the creator of Minecraft to tell you that this guy has done the simplest easiest decoding ever why are you in charge of this research who hired you on top of that the RGB color code for white is just going to be the maximum value in all three columns to express colors in RGB you give three values one representing red one blue one green to get white you turn all three of those values as high as they'll go we normally measure this out of 255 making the RGB code for white 255 255 255 but we have no idea what aliens would measure it out of so basically this guy has just seen a number repeated three times and gone this must be referring to the color white [ __ ] it episode 6 is called the episode begins with niko drift in space and has ship flying away from her we then have the title sequence but the music is missing it doesn't feel on purpose but who knows with these people we thank her to a title card that says three hours earlier whoa Nico's gonna be in danger in three hours I wonder what [ __ ] we're gonna pull out with their ass at the last second to solve it well let's start by looking at the [ __ ] they used to manufacture the danger in the first place do you remember when William went offline in the last episode and there was a fire well now apparently all the ship systems are [ __ ] and now the ship keeps like exploding itself basically nothing on the ship is working but what caused all this to happen why is the ship [ __ ] well if I started in that small box and now like everything on the ship is failing from the gravity - William - now the monitors are exploding for some reason from one fire NASA designed this pile of [ __ ] butter pray that never meet me in a darker everything's connected Michelle oh my god Michelle is being antagonistic she must be infected with that pathogen again no but really their excuse for one small fire knocking out basically the entire ship is that everything is connected why would you ever design a ship like this currently in real life we build spaceships with lots of redundancies so that if one thing [ __ ] up something else will take over for it you can't be too careful with this kind of thing but I guess in the future we've advanced so far that not only do we not have redundancies in our ships anymore they're designed to break completely if one part fails but will cause this fiery mess remember this little guy yeah it chewed through a wire and now the entire ship is Fugs great writing guys you really put the legwork in to get the story to the police you wanted it to be so how bad does the damage get well the crew spends the first 10 minutes of the runtime trying to solve everything and get William back on line to get him to reappear but since the whole ship is connected he starts glitching out he starts detecting fires when there aren't really any more fires and because of the fires that he's not really detecting he initiates an emergency protocol which because whoever designed the ship is a [ __ ] idiot for the sake of the plot the crew has no power over and can't stop the emergency protocol involves ejecting the soma tubes and crew living quarters so that they can be sent home only they haven't prepared for this protocol the life-support systems are in one half of the ship and the food is on the other so it's going to kill literally the entire crew if they don't undo it which is it's kind of the outcome I'm hoping for at this point so just to be extra crystal clear the entire plot of this episode happens because a bug chews through a wire which makes William detect a fire which isn't there so he decides the solution is to kill the entire crew this is equivalent to let's say your car gets an oil leak and it responds by locking itself so you're trapped inside it and turning on the heating until you bake to death someone somewhere decided that the AI should be able to make decisions for the crew that can easily kill them if it makes the wrong call they also decided that the crew shouldn't be allowed to overwrite those decisions even when said AI is so flimsy that it can be completely knocked out by a fire and an unrelated part of the ship they get a 30-minute countdown at the end of which the ejected part of the ship would enter Lightspeed and they'd lose it for good you'd think that if it was going to give them a 30-minute countdown to something it would probably be to the ship separating in the first place but then this episode wouldn't have a plot but no instead the protocol is to separate the ship right away so that nothing can be done about it and if you don't have all the supplies you need you just die and then it gives you a completely useless 30 minutes in which nothing can be done for you to twiddle your thumbs I guess like seriously there's no point to this time all the crew isn't supposed to be able to cancel the protocol or reconnect the ship the protocol prevents the ship's engines from being used and they have to find a way around it to actually get the ship back together the crew figures out a way to put the ship back together which involves Niko doing some work on the outside of the hull she does what she needs to do but is told to hurry back inside because they're jumping to Lightspeed in under a minute something that they still can't override well Niko is too late and the ship leaves without her there's no kind of atmosphere she's all alone more or less and then they come back and save her at the last minute man this show needed more of those moments but they're not in the clear yet they're exotic matter containment exotic matter being the fuel for their faster than light travel is failing this threatens to cause the entire ship to implode man that wire in that unrelated part of the ship must have been really important for incredibly contrived reasons the only way to stop the ship from being destroyed as if Michelle goes inside the Dark Matter containment and makes a [ __ ] face she dies man she looks so bad there I could almost believe she was exposed to loads of gamma radiation I suppose this is supposed to be the end of a Redemption arc for her but it's a pretty crap Redemption arc basically it goes like this throughout this entire show up to about 10 minutes before she actually dies she just complains about everything all you've done since day one is [ __ ] [ __ ] and complain can you just try for once to think about somebody else other than your [ __ ] self Cass actually said that to her earlier this episode just so the audience is very clear that this character is selfish remember that well without them showing really anything that would have made her grow other than her just being called out on it she just magically overcomes that floor and sacrifices herself this is what an ark is this episode's subplot involves Sasha basically throughout the whole thing he hallucinates himself in a red suit saying vaguely menacing things gets to him so much that he goes to throw himself out of the ship the hallucination basically just says to him don't be a [ __ ] he says what else can I do and the hallucination says let me in next time we see him he's acting sinister episode 7 living the dream hey so remember the really really great piece of writing about the RGB codes well this episode starts with a conversation about what the aliens message was but this time they refer to it as he recognized the pattern of gas than the puzzle is being RGB hex code for white I know they refer to it as hex code or hexadecimal code this is actually a different kind of codes instead of expressing the color as three values you express it as a string of six digits the hexadecimal code that represents white is F F F F F F which is appropriate I do feel we need you know an F for this show they've now referred to these two different forms of color code interchangeably almost as if they don't know the difference between them and couldn't be bothered to Google it but let's give them the benefit of the doubt let's say when Eric said RGB code what he actually meant was hexadecimal code well according to Marcus and also everyone else they received the messages binary what is noted in hexadecimal as F F F F F F or white in binary would be 24 consecutive number ones Marcus has said that he thought it was binary because there were little noises and big noises meaning the little noises were zeroes and the big noises were ones which means the message must have just been 24 consecutive noises essentially they've just sent us the number 24 from which Marcus went oh yes they're clearly referring to the color white and then he was right because the show doesn't realize how dumb that is this episode's main focus is on Eric with what happens on the ship being the subplot based on Marcus's incredible findings they decide that the response the artifact is looking for is to have white lights shown at certain parts of it they do that and a door opens up in the artifact first they send a drone in to see what they see and they see Sasha and they're like what then Eric goes in and probably regrets not bringing a torch to the place they've already seen is completely dark but [ __ ] it what can you do a the artifact starts conjuring up Eric's memories he's in a lecture hall which we're told is where he met Nico he sees a younger Nico and looks to be a younger version of himself there's also an equation on the board which were told no one's ever been able to solve Eric talks to Nico for a bit sure that she's an alien avatar Nico tells Erik that the problem on the whiteboard is possible and he starts actually solving it to his own surprise but then before he can finish the solution a fake version of his daughter appears and he turns his attention to her he leaves to cosplay as me the show's obligatory military idiot to take a team of soldiers into the artifact this team also includes Harper glass for contrived reasons before they even get into the artifact they can see through the door what the real Sascha is doing on the ship right now he sees them then the artifact turns black and then releases a pulse that [ __ ] up everybody in the nearby area including eric's daughter I should probably mention her name is Jana but it doesn't matter the subplot on the ship Caesar seemingly possessed Sasha asking all of the crew about what their plan is if the aliens turn hostile will they fight back what will they do what weapons do they have how can they fight he's trying to get information he ends up finding out about something called Operation brimstone basically the Salieri's faster-than-light Drive produces a lot of energy and that energy can be fired like a beam and destroy a planet if it needs to Sascha tries to figure out if there's any way he can prevent this show any way to stop it well the ships are weapons so you'd have to destroy them himself all right which is easier said than done he says it's easier said than done to destroy the ship when literally the entire plot of the last episode was that the ship was nearly destroyed because a bug nibbled through a wire and now the plot is gonna depend on the sylvari being hard to destroy just light a random fire dude everyone will die the reason he gives that the ship is hard to destroy is that William protects us from everything which is true until the ship takes minor damage then he'll probably kill the crew anyway Sasha probes the mind of this guy whose name I can't be bothered to tell you to try and find a way to turn off William has the show actually just forgotten the entire plot of the last episode revolved around William being disabled by accident anyway this is the part that people on earth walk in on somehow bringing us to the end of the episode also the love triangle gets continued which I'd rather [ __ ] in my hands and claps and talk about we also find out that Burnie took some of those flowers that get you high off that mean this episode is in many ways like episode 5 in that it's mostly setups everything that happens in this episode is left open ended with no resolutions it certainly has its share of really bad writing but we don't know what most these events mean to the story yet so until they're contextualized and given meaning we can't really comment on whether or not they make sense oh also Harper got sucked into the artifact episode 8 how the light gets lost is 4 this shows strong the ship has made its way back to where they were at the beginning and is preparing to enter the cloud of dark matter apparently they're still concerned that if they go through it at light speed they might hit a planet so they go through it more slowly the ship's doctor Zane starts monitoring the crew's biometrics as they enter the cloud of dark matter to see if it has any effect on them also sasha makes everyone a salad yes this will be a plot significant salad a salad you know that reminds me didn't they go to that moon because they needed to collect food what happened with that they definitely didn't collect any well they were there so I guess they just took that for Lightyear dieter because they felt like it it ends up seeming like the Dark Matter does have an effect on the crew they all get emotional for most of them this means they get horny and start [ __ ] Nikko gets William to simulate Erik Zane and Burnie get together of all people the love triangle have a threesome it's all very gossipy teen drama and the show executes that ok Oh in case you weren't doing all the people in the background are Holograms that William made so they could have a party it's certainly not well written but it's more tolerable than the rest of this show is ok so it actually turns out that the thing having this effect on the crew isn't the dark matter like they thought it was actually Sasha put some of that flower that Bernie had in the salad that he served everyone and he'd got everyone hi he plays it off like this was an accident but we know this has got to be part of his plan oh by the way that guy conveniently doesn't remember having his mind probe one funny thing that really stuck out to me was the doctor zayn when he was monitoring the crew's biometrics got really excited when he thought the dark matter was having this effect on them dark matter is the ultimate serotonin enhancer and i discovered it I could approach it then when he finds out that instead of the dark matter it was actually a drug having that effect he gets pretty disappointed I am pretty sure he goes by he by the way the scene I'm about to play you has copyrighted music on it so I'm just gonna do the lines I'll never be in the dsm it wasn't the Dark Matter it was drugs garden-variety drugs yes the same I'm sure that if you found that you could cure depression by flying people into a cloud of dark matter that would be a huge discovery but discovering a drug with the same effects no no one will give a [ __ ] about a drug that cures depression the whole crew sleeps it off and guy who got mine probed wakes up to discover that the ship is denying him access to any rooms the hand print scanner tells him that this is because his ID is already in use he finds Sasha and accuses him of using his access code pretty sure you're not using access codes there dude you're using hand prints pretty sure he didn't steal your handprint but [ __ ] it Sasha mine probes him again and this time absorbs his entire mind but he still can't figure out a way to shut down William dude do you not remember the plot of this show anyways on to one of the worst aspects of this episode remember how a Nico got William to simulate Eric well they have sex as best you can without being able to touch each other because one of you as a hologram when Nico next wakes up and is embarrassed about what she did William says that he's in love with her now I can't pretend the show is pulling this out of its ass it's not a surprise moon it's very clearly set up that William is advanced enough of an AI that he can feel emotions right from the first episode when he gets upset about the mutiny I can't blame him that upset me too other way this zoom in on his face which is supposed to be in a serious scene I think is priceless I want to see one of you using this as a reaction gif on Twitter Nico is a bit freaked out by that and asks him to delete the memories of their sexy times anyway William starts glitching out because Nico rejected him ah you want to have your AI have emotions okay fine be my guest but if you don't want to tell me that that same AI which is critical in many ways to the function of this ship and has the power to kill the crew can be completely obliterated by feeling sad why the [ __ ] would you use that AI for such an important mission the fact that William can be basically taken out like this is beyond contrived so obviously Sasha takes advantage of this and uses the opportunity to completely shut down William oh also the crew discovers that there's a piece of alien technology in his brain the Erik subplot for this episode sees eric's daughter journey getting treatment after she was knocked down by the artifact and he finds that despite her being perfectly healthy this morning since the artifact blasted her she has cancer also Harper comes back out of the artifact but we don't find out what happened to her while she was in there yet which brings us to up sewed 9 heart and soul it's nearly over this story sees the crew trying to survive as Sasha tries to destroy the ship shouldn't be too hard his first strategy is to disable the cooling system on the ship's particle accelerator which now that William is offline is something he can do we're told that if the accelerator overheats the ship will be destroyed we then have a hilarious scene where Bernie gets covered in [ __ ] the joke is that he gets covered in [ __ ] before he goes into the particle accelerator and turns the cooling system back on is now a good time to mention how a lot of the screens in the ship are clearly just tablets glued to the wall well this is all happening they also try to get William back online but all Nico manages to bring up is an empty shell of the old William that doesn't have any of his old memories all he can say is that he's experiencing a critical system error and can't access any of the files that he's actually made of Nico tells him that the real him must be in there somewhere oh boy I really love that cliche after Bernie manages to successfully turn the cooling system back on for the particle accelerator Sasha switches to a different plan and steers the ship towards a black hole piloting them towards it at Lightspeed oh no the going at Lightspeed through the dark matter they might hit a planet they start getting pretty close to the black hole but Niko realizes that they're now not too far from their destination which is the star system that the artifact has been transmitting to wonder why it's been transmitting there I can't wait to find out so she orders the crew to bail out on the ship in the shuttlecraft and head for the planet that they initially set out for while she stays behind and tries to save William and the ship hang on a second the beginning we're told this is a six month journey three months to get there and three months to get back then when Nico is first woken up to deal with the cloud of dark matter one month into their mission which obviously would mean it's two months until they reach where they're going at the beginning of episode eight they actually enter that cloud of dark matter and they're at the same place they were in the beginning of the series one month into their trip they have a party which lasts like one night at most then immediately after they sober up they have to deal with Sasha's antics fix the cooling system then discover they've been routed towards a black hole and they're almost there before they got high they would have had two months left on their journey in fact more than that because they were traveling below light speed and now they're nearly there so I guess that party lasted two months you could call this a nitpick and it is there are certainly much bigger things wrong with this show than the timeline not stacking together properly but it really shows what a staggeringly low amount of effort was put into writing this series all it would take to fix this problem would be to change the one month later title card at the beginning to a say two months and 29 days later title card that way you can still have a delay caused by them not wanting to travel through the dark matter but then when they finally do make their way through it it's reasonable to expect that it would only take a couple of days but just like the rest of the show no thought has been put into how all of these elements actually fit together it seems that no point did they actually sit down to try to figure out okay how long would these events actually take because if they had I imagine they would have picked up on stuff like this but back to the plot the crew leaves in the shuttlecraft and Niko goes into soma sleep which allows her to communicate with William no idea why that works it just does this whole show has been poorly written but this part her seen talking to William and the whole arc surrounding it is the first part with really uncomfortable connotations in this situation where Niko slept with William the show has been portraying Niko as the one at fault and William is 100% innocent I ruined it I ruined everything Niko believes she's in the wrong William believes Niko is in the wrong and the meta-narrative of the show believes Niko is in the wrong it is my fault it's all my fault no no this is Sasha's fault he's the one who let that alien into his head I am talking about William come with me and I knew that and still I had him turn into Eric and then we were together and then afterwards I pretended like it didn't happen Neko took advantage of poor sweet innocent William and then cast him aside when she was done but let's talk about the circumstances under which she actually slept with William shall we she was under the influence of a drug that William knew made her entirely irrational there's even a scene where she thinks that they need to open the airlock because she thinks her husband is outside the ship despite the fact she knows he's on earth William sees this and is even the one to tell her she's being irrational but then when she says do me William he's like okay she didn't even take this drug by choice she was slipped it against her well do you think maybe she's in a state where she can't say yes to something like this it's not as if he has to take her orders the show's made it clear William is completely sentient he is by pretty much every measure the one who took advantage of her then when Nica wakes up and is sober and no longer wants anything to do with what just happened she is portrayed as absolutely in the wrong what the [ __ ] no I don't think the writers put these implications in here on purpose I don't think they really thought it through just like you know the rest of their show but this is really really uncomfortable please stop and the main character act for this episode is of course William learning to forgive Nico when clearly what he should have done is not have sex with her this resolves when Sasha finds the soma tubes that Nico is asleep in he tries to kill her with an axe she runs away he catches her is choking her to death and then right at the last second William saves her life but how do you save her life you ask Williams not a physical being he's a hologram so what could he possibly have done to save Nico's life electricity oh okay he blasted the deck with electricity it wasn't established he could do that and why can he do that why the [ __ ] did the people who were building this ship go we should put in an option to flood each deck with electricity it could be important well no obviously the writers wrote themselves into a corner and couldn't be bothered to think of an actual solution that made any kind of sense so they just pulled something out of their ass again if you want to have something happen that is this important it literally saves the main character life set that up beforehand or you establish a precedent that whenever a character is in danger just anything can happen that saves them okay so if he flooded the deck with electricity why is it that sasha is completely incapacitated while Nico is completely unscathed he's taken the brunt of it oh okay cool thanks this fixes the ship this fixes William apparently he can just decide to turn himself back on despite the fact that sasha initiated the shutdown protocol for him he went into the workings of William and shut him down turned him off but William just decided to turn himself back on what's the point of having a shutdown system for the AI if the AI can be like nah I don't want to be shut down this is followed by another really stupid scene where William tells Nico that we've not got enough power to escape the black hole so they cut open the back of Sasha's head plug a wire into the thing that's attached to his brain and used that to power the ship so they can escape great he survives this by the way he's he's alive in the next episode apparently they just have a wire that's compatible with this completely alien piece of technology know exactly how to perform the surgery to plug it in and [ __ ] this the episode ends with the ship and Nico rejoining the rest of the crew and them arriving at the planet they've been after this whole time the Erik subplot sees him you know rationally stressed out that Jonah his daughter has cancer Oh also remember how Harper was in the artifact well she has one of those alien things on her brain now from her we find out that these aliens are called the Akaya but she spends most of the runtime trying to manipulate Eric into letting her out by saying she knows how to cure Jana's cancer my pain is nearly over episode 10 the final episode hello so what are the answers to all the mysteries raised by this show why was the artifact transmitting a signal to this planet what was that signal what was it for what did it mean why did the artifact give Eric a load of puzzles why did it simulate Nico and his daughter why did it almost help him solve an impossible equation why was there a dilapidated rundown version of the artifact on that moon they found why why why why why why why well tune in next season to find out [Applause] this episode sees Nikko taking a team down to the planet they ever seemed the artifact came from they find that there's an artifact on the planet and they visit some alien ruins once inside they meet an alien and it's computer now we do get some answers to some questions in this episode although really they just kind of setups for new questions and basically all of those answers come from the computer just telling the crew some stuff the computer tells Nikko that this isn't actually the planet the Akaya from this is a planet called Zakir it tells them that the Akaya are bad do you know what they want the destruction oh my gosh they find out that the Akaya have an empire consisting of over 300 star systems but wait if they have that many why is it that the artifact on earth was transmitting to this star system specifically we tracked in a chi and signal straight year it came from an artifact oh ok thanks sure they find a mass grave of zikir natives and discover a kyon implants and all of the skulls of the bodies from this and this alone Nikko concludes we have to deal with the problem that is staring us in the face and that is a [ __ ] artifact it isn't gonna stop until it destroys every last secure wait hang on why is it you've decided that the artifact needs to be destroyed why have you decided that's the solution here you still have literally no idea what the artifact is for just that it transmits stuff and is in some way related to the Akaya as far as you know it could be some kind of symbolic monument or how the Akaya on this planet communicate with the Akaya on other planets you don't know that it specifically is the thing killing the secare natives and you don't know that it's not going to stop until they're all dead why did you say that one thing that you certainly do know is that proximity to an artifact isn't the thing that lets the brain machines work Sasha was possessed for ages and he was nowhere near an artifact or all that time so what do you think destroying the artifact is gonna do you literally have no idea but based only on the information that the Akaya are basically brain parasites and the artifact was sent here by them you decide that the solution to their occupation of this planet is to destroy the artifacts seems like the kind of decision you should probably spend a bit longer on you know maybe this decision should wait until perhaps you know what the artifact is just a suggestion don't worry she doesn't make the decision to destroy the artifact completely rashly that would be silly first she asks that random alien they found living in a cave whether or not it wants their help and it says yeah sure and then she decides to blow up the artifact yeah I'm sure that random native living in a cave will know all of the intricacies of the situation and will know exactly what should be done well done Niko you clearly have all the information you need to make an act of war against an alien race the episode has a few subplots but they're literally all just setups for cliffhangers so they're not really worth going into because none of them go anywhere there's this bit where they experiment on the brain implant that was shot round and round in circles for some reason William accidentally makes another AI that becomes his daughter she doesn't actually do anything Harper uses the most obvious manipulation tactics in the world to get Erik to take Janet into the artifact and we don't see what happens after that and Harper escapes and tells the world that the Akaya are Hera's friends the episode and the season ends with the crew back in space having destroyed the artifact on zikir they detect five unidentified ships flying towards the planet they're all identical to that artifact that landed at the beginning in a field in the middle of nowhere right next to a city they blow up secure and cut two credits this is quite possibly the worst written show I've ever seen it doesn't just have plot holes it is plot holes that's what it's made of the crew of this incredibly important mission feel like they were chosen by someone waiting outside a random nightclub in San Francisco asking anyone who got themselves kicked out if they wanted to go to space I wouldn't trust these people to build an Ikea cabinet together without stabbing each other let alone initiate first contact with aliens who are incredibly early on it's established that characters don't take actions and events don't occur because it would make sense for those things to happen but because the writers have decided that they just should happen regardless of whether or not they're plausible in the slightest and regardless of whether or not they contradict things that have already happened in the show even when those previous events are the core premise of previous episodes and it's all in service of a mystery that goes mostly unresolved by the odds we do get don't even make sense for example the only thing we actually learn about what the Akaya want is the guy which clearly isn't even [ __ ] true because the end of the episode sees them easily destroy the entire planet if the only wanted destruction that would be what they did in the first place clearly they have some greater plan than that and this computer has seen exactly what the Akaya have done to the planet it's on so how come it doesn't know the fact that this even got made in the first place with a relatively decent production value is an insult to any writer who actually puts work into their craft it would be a red flag to me if I saw the first draft of something and it was this bad if the second season of this got announced I would cancel my Netflix subscription if I was the person who paid for it which brings me to the title of this video is this really the worst show of 2019 well yeah I wouldn't have called the video that if it wasn't now obviously I can only consider it shows I've seen but I would be very surprised to learn that something worse than this had come out this year hey well excluding stuff that isn't made by major production companies I've now spent an hour and seven minutes talking about the show but I feel like I've only really scratched the surface of its problems and if I was so inclined I could make an overview of the problems in this show that would make this video look brief by comparison but that's all I've got for you today I hope you've enjoyed this long it's a long and thanks for watching it before I go I just like to say a special thanks to Brandon Walter King Sarah Nash Michael drell after show reaction Johnny do macGruber Thomas t pass C and heretic stupid webcam Breanna Sinclair I can stay Chris Newman Zachary Christiansen was Davison productions so called well Anna Cameron Bishop will be soon Jack McKenzie Elias bow Zach van Stanley Robert Davis Samuel Albert Mel Morgan now Alex mu J cap and choo Jason King Bret be fed a TV wanna cut about ER Timothy green marker Paris huge and Stan mr. gently benevolent Noah Luke and Paul Daniel you do have to understand if you're my patron mispronouncing your name is part of the deal bye you surprise it's a moon

Channel: Jay Exci

Views: 2,036,023

Keywords: another life, netflix, netflix original, bad show, another life review, another life is bad, bad, Niko Breckenridge, Katee Sackhoff, Samuel Anderson

Id: UauWDakHQo0

Length: 68min 51sec (4131 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CitizenTed]

I almost got through the first episode, but had to bail. It was too stupid for me to handle. Here's some of the stupid:

• Our hero Niko is a female pilot who is the best ever. By a strange coincidence, her husband Erik is also the most brilliant scientist ever. They also happen to live adjacent to where the alien ship lands on Earth.

• After two seconds of failing to communicate with the alien vessel, all of Earth's scientific community abandons the effort and leaves Erik, the most brilliant scientist ever in the history of everything, alone with a couple of interns to "figure it out". Because a gigantic alien vessel landing on Earth isn't that big a deal and the world's scientists had grant applications to fill out.

• After two seconds of consideration, the government drafts Niko to captain a spaceship and visit the alien homeworld to see WTF is up. They team her up with an ex-captain who is known to be volatile and unreliable. Because that's a good idea when you want to save humanity from potential extinction.

• The spaceship needs a crew, so the best idea is to draft a bunch of undergrads who spend 99% of their time rolling their eyes, arguing like teenagers, and failing every standard of discipline ever conceived for a military expedition.

• Within two seconds, the jealous and unstable ex-captain stages a mutiny. The teenage crew is incapable of reasoning why this is bad and acting responsibly.

• Back on Earth, Erik (who is the greatest scientist in the history of Science), discovers that the vessel appears to be communicating by - get this - audible waves. Thank God for his uber-scientist acumen, as every other scientist on Earth failed to make this observation, then quickly left the scene for good because there was a sale at Dunkin' Donuts.

• As was the case in "Prometheus", the only character on the spaceship who has a lick of sense is the holographic computer. Which tells us we wasted a lot of effort and money crewing the ship with meatbags.

• The ship travels FTL, but there is no discussion of the technology despite the fact it was very recently invented and deployed. Not only does it travel FTL, but it allows real-time video communication with Earth. This is also inexplicable, but it does make for dramatic FaceTime scenes between Niko (the greatest pilot ever in history) and Erik (the greatest scientist in the history of Science). Essentially, we have Star Trek technology in a Rollerball timeline.

I bailed. Fuck this show. GOOD NEWS THOUGH: after this idiotic sojourn into Galactic Stupidity, I switched to Amazon Video and watch "The Boys", which was fun, well-written, exciting, and completely engrossing.

Amazon-1, Netflix-0.

EDIT: I just read this in a review from Ireland's Independent: "The problem with Another Life is not the lack of originality; the problem is that it’s simply awful in almost every respect."

Like...OUCH.

[u/AUAIOMRN]

It's another "space" show where the crew acts like they're on some third-rate reality show, that's all you need to know.

[u/Scazzz]

I could not start episode 2, the first was so bad. Their motivations and the crew in general were so unbelievable that I could not go on. Awful show.

[u/DR_MEESEEKS_PHD]

https://youtu.be/UauWDakHQo0?t=3022

hmmm...

https://i.imgur.com/hPGr7tH.png

HMMMMMMMMMMMMM...

[u/AverageLiberalJoe]

I'm confused about how this shit even gets made sometimes. There are a ton of talented film school students all over the world who would pay the studio for the opportunity to write a big budget sci-fi series for Netflix. And yet Netflix still goes and hires the accomplished writers from 'Dr. Mom', a 90's movie where Joe Pesci dresses like a woman so he can still practice medicine incognito.

How does Hollywood just keep creating endless garbage? Why does Netflix hire suits to greenlight pilots?

[u/[deleted]]

I really don't understand how, or why, Netflix originals have become such flaming shit over the past 5 years. Cheap SFX, god awful writing, even worse casting. It's like they stopped giving a shit. Netflix is the new release-to-Walmart DVD experience. Netflix is about to get fucked even before you consider Disney+ and Comcast's new streaming platform.

[u/notjawn]

Netflix Original Series are getting so terrible now. I remember back when they first amped up the pace of these productions they were doing meticulous studies and focus groups about what people liked and disliked about tv shows. Now it seems they took all the dislikes and incorporate them into every series. Now it's coming to a head where it's just not worth it if the show doesn't get you in the first episode.

[u/regreddit_]

An hour and eight minutes.

That’s really how long you need to explain a bad show. That’s longer than the show. It would appear as if you actually love the show.

[u/SanityContagion]

Thank God someone agrees.

It passed some time. That's about all that was truly good about it.