I had been looking forward to this enormously but, based on episode 1, something seems to have gone awfully wrong somewhere and I'm not sure exactly what it is. It all seems terribly flat, somehow. Peter Harness has written some terrific scripts, director Craig Viveiros' direction on And Then There Were None was absolutely brilliant, and there's a capable cast. But the story never grips, what should be huge dramatic moments just don't land. Someone who knows more about film production than I do might have better insights but I suspect major production woes (which would explain the long delay in it getting to air) as the editing seems off and the cgi is nothing to write home about (unless: "Mum, I just watched some unimpressive cgi"). The music is also very poor and I notice it's the first major credit for composer Russ Davies which seems to be either a big risk or the cheap option, as if there was corner cutting in post.
top of page
bottom of page
Episode 3 offers up some cgi Martians that look incredibly poor when interacting with humans. The Martians' comeuppance is shorn of Welles' irony, there's no actual climax and it just drags on and on. Peter Harness' script is horribly structured and makes the story tedious and incoherent. In its way this is just as bad as Chris Chibnall's appalling season 11 of Doctor Who which means that 2018-19 has seen the BBC go on a run of unbelievably inept SF dramas. Woeful.