Another Life

There is a much better, more emotionally affecting show lying just beneath the generically futuristic trappings of Another Life, but in its first season, it fails to develop its characters in a way that would give its extraterrestrial threats and space-horror scares any sort of significant weight.

Nitpicking sci-fi conceits is usually a waste of time (who cares how implausible a lovestruck robot fixing a ship’s FTL drive is?), but there are enough glaring omissions of logic in Another Life that it’s impossible not to get pulled out of the story at times. ... What the series does have is Sackhoff, and she’s more than up to the task of reminding the viewer why she’s anchoring this series. Whenever she’s onscreen, the show’s sophomoric writing instantly becomes more plausible

The United Colors of Benetton crew fights among themselves a lot, but viewers get such slight sketches of each character in early episodes, it’s hard to care about many of them. At least the space stuff is more interesting than the homefront melodrama.

This is an earnest but hard-edged drama about extraterrestrial first contact and deep space exploration that Frankensteins together bits of classics and near-classics. But the the whole never congeals into an original statement. And the storytelling is so ungraceful that I got whiplash from the first four episodes.

It's about the journey, not the destination. And what a weird, confused little journey it is.

“Another Life” has a complete lack of character development within Niko’s crew because they're too busy worrying and yelling. ... Blair and Sackhoff are always welcome presences on any show, and it’s telling how much the four episodes of “Another Life” that I could stomach simply annoyed me.

There's really no other way around this — the work on Another Life is not good. The writing is atrocious, leaving the actors to follow a jumble of disconnected emotions or pointless journeys within their characters (or maybe they were just looking to escape) and the directing is...off.

A fascinating universe, it's quite a shame we likely won't see more than 2 seasons! Give it a whirl.

It's a mix of great and awful. I would not recommend it to alt-right children as they may be offended by characters that are not cishet euro-christians. On to the adult issues... The acting is a mixed bag of, "How did she deliver that line with feeling and a straight face?" to "That is absolute felgercarb" and the writing matches it. I really feel as if some more plot line control would really benefit it in a second season. By the end of the first season far too many plots had been opened without being addressed, almost on the level of a Robert Jordan book. The human interaction as acted and written often feels forced, almost as if they had a bunch of devout myth followers write a pornoflick. Not a single one of the characters is notable or worthy as a fully developed human. The sets, CGI and all the other details almost seem to be from a different production as they are far better than the writing and acting. I remember an era with good writing and bad effects and this is almost the opposite, poor writing and amazing effects! The tech is unbalanced, as an example lightspeed comms with better than fiber bandwidth are more fantasy than sci-fi. I suspect that is because the show is as much a soap opera as science-fiction.

Yes it's not great as the scores reflect. But for sci-fi fans there is still a lot to enjoy. Also there's lots to laugh if you don't take it all too seriously.

There were a bunch of movies in the '50s where a guy creates a spaceship to go to the Moon, but does he invite the best scientists, pilots and engineers to help crew the ship? No, he invites the neighborhood equivalent of the Three Stooges--- and off they go on their bumbling fumbling way. So here--- it's the most important space mission ever, but do they crew it with disciplined, focused, sharp space veterans? Of course not-- rather it appears to be a crew of peevish, unfocused, whiny losers --- I think they're supposed to represent Gen Z or Millennials and their "bad attitudes" or some such rubbish. OMG--- pretty much not a single one of these people should ever be doing anything except selling hamburgers at McDonald's. Did anyone ever hear the phrase "psych eval"? Another feature of certain really bad Hollywood productions these days is that the writers seem to think that writing characters with "interesting" personalities comes down to obnoxious or annoying. Pretty much every character on this show falls into one, if not both, of those "personalities". Even the folks back on Earth, the captain's husband and child and the female general, just make my skin crawl. The kid especially--- I can just see her stage mother behind the scenes grooming and pushing her to be some sort of child star. EEECH! I think if I were trapped in an elevator with most of these people for more than 10 minutes I be strangling them. P.S. The musical choices in this piece of drek are beyond incomprehensible. The music seems to be chosen by a not-very-bright 11 year old teenybopper who seems to think this is a very bad Spanish soap opera (which it sort of is)-- but of course not-very-bright 11 year old teenyboppers should not be let anywhere near sci-fi. P.P.S. SPOILER ALERT: So as this juggernaut of nonsense progresses, we start having multiple AIs who are all as peevish, petulant and annoying as the human crew. Great--- when you've got a winning formula, double down. P.P.P.S. I've come to realize I don't think I like a single character in this entire series, including the AIs. Tough to build a series when you don't have even one character who you actually would want to spend an elevator ride with (to repeat myself). (Well, the black security guy who comes up in Season 2 maybe, also just maybe the computer hacker who comes up in Season 2-- as long as he gets a better haircut and showers frequently.)

terrible writing, the acting is phoned in, the camera work is disjointed, I really cannot understand how this got greenlit or got a second season.