SummaryAstronaut Niko Breckinridge (Katee Sackhoff) leads a team to look into an alien artifact in this sci-fi drama from Aaron Martin and Noreen Halpern.
SummaryAstronaut Niko Breckinridge (Katee Sackhoff) leads a team to look into an alien artifact in this sci-fi drama from Aaron Martin and Noreen Halpern.
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.
“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.