What I’m Not Watching: Another Life

New Netflix UFO first contact series. It’s rare that a show flunks out with me as fast as this one has. Maybe I’m unfair, maybe I have impossible standards of mediocre TV. Certainly my tolerance for bullshit like FTL, non-functional starships, and implausible human social structures in SF decreases asymptotically with the newness of the work; I ignore or even enjoy it in pre-’60s SF (H. Beam Piper and Robert A. Heinlein can do no wrong), tolerate it in ’60s-70s (Star Trek TOS & TAS are cool, even if it’s technical nonsense), eyeroll in ’80s-90s (TNG is not cool; I tried rewatching recently and made it 8 episodes in before going insane. Babylon 5 and Stargate SG-1 were competent and avoided most of my technical and social complaints), and just say “fuck that” in the 21st C.

So, this. Starts off badly with vapid people oohing and ahhing at maybe the shittiest CGI spaceship ever drawn, an overhead drone shot with fisheye lens for no reason, a shitty CGI impact & Photoshop crystals growing, and lens flares everywhere. Yeah, this is gonna be a chore to look at, isn’t it?

Then the main character, Astronaut Niko (Vic from Longmire) & her trivial other are introduced and start “As You Know Bob”-ing each other. With an iPad with shitty plastic prosthetics on it so it doesn’t look like an iPad. Apparently this is the distant future, not the present like the previous scenes and the lame Midwest honky fashion suggests?

Next scene she has a shitty CGI starship which makes no structural sense the size of a… tanker? The ring suggests it rotates for pseudo-gravity, but is so thin this thing would have to be city-sized instead. And it’d be vulnerable to radiation, especially when they cruise right up to a giant bright star like Sirius A (8.6 LY away). Rough estimate from on-screen size of the ring is 1mm thick, 10cm across, which would put a 20m thick ring around 20km wide & 30-40km long starship. So something is very wrong here.

She said she’d be gone 3 months each way to Pi Canis Majoris, 96 LY away. They have FTL, but haven’t gone anywhere with it? So why does she have to go into what seems to be cryogenic sleep? You’d use cryo for a STL ship that would take centuries to get there, not for magic FTL.

Immediately we’re informed that the star isn’t where they thought (what, no) and there’s a “dark cloud” in the way. And her first concern is maybe they’d hit a planet. OH FUCK YOU. Space is fucking huge; hitting a planet in light years of cloud would be like hitting a BB in the ocean, if you were a microbe.

Making a pit stop at Sirius to get to Pi Canis is like making a pit stop at Barstow on the way from LA to Poughkeepsie, New York; yeah, it’s thataway (they are in the same direction from Earth), but you’ve barely started. The star map shown is ludicrously wrong in scale.

Now there’s a black man hologram who’s apparently the ship’s AI. It’s paranoid about the aliens being hostile, and is inexplicably Human-behaving. I loathe machines pretending they’re people, and presenting your AI slave as black is some nasty shit.

The crew apparently don’t know each other and have to introduce themselves, except they don’t finish the introductions so the audience is left in the dark; there was no on-Earth briefing or training, they were just loaded aboard in cold-storage? They say spaceships haven’t had uniforms in decades, which I find even less plausible. Shitty space teenager has to lounge in a sofa and text her parents during debriefing; so they have FTL comms, but decentralized command like an isolated exploration ship?

Everyone talks over everyone else, finishes their sentences, which would be fine if it was witty Howard Hawks banter but instead it’s lame technobabble and bad leadership. The writers for this have never spent a minute in an engineering or military organization.

Now trivial other, left behind with the annoying child (best decision yet; I’m annoyed they’re ever on screen), has gone crazy and is trying to use bird sounds to talk to the shitty CGI UFO, and explains this in a “Holo-Call”, which is two actors sitting in the same room with some shitty CGI static to suggest they’re light-years apart.

This is 20 minutes in and my hate for the incompetent writers and filmmakers could set fire to the planet. I’m done, stopping. Fuck this.

☆☆☆☆☆ I award you no points

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