Nightflyers lacks [Alien's] sci-fi/horror gravitas; it’s murky at best, both in its storyline and its character development, and grinds along at a snail’s pace trying to construct its elaborate scenario. It does boast terrific special effects and an abundance of blood and gore, both of which are used generously.

Not scary enough to be good horror and too simple-minded to be grand sci-fi, Nightflyers is just another schlocky TV show pretending to be more than it is.

A tediously generic haunted-house-in-space odyssey, one that Syfy is either (charitably) experimenting with or (more likely) rapidly exhausting by making all 10 episodes available simultaneously with its linear-TV debut.

Nightflyers is no fun. It's a grim, drab, thematically underdeveloped plot delivery system. It's a network show with a bigger budget and more blood.

The constant, clumsy back-and-forth story line is not [Buhler]'s only annoying affectation. He's also larded Nightflyer with references to other, better, works, from Star Trek to The Shining, probably intended in homage but really serving just to remind you how much better all of them were. And the abundant gore, no doubt a confused nod to Martin's original premise that horror and sci-fi can coexist in the same vehicle, serves no purpose at all. [Buhler] may think he's speaking in some advanced new artistic argot, but really, it's just a lot of outer-space jabberwocky.