In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Syfy In the UK: Not yet acquired
Talking of generic Canadian-US co-production space opera science-fiction, here’s some more! The Killjoys of Space/SyFy’s Killjoys are a group of bounty hunters who have to track down criminals in a system of four planets ruled by a powerful corporation unimaginatively called The Company, the forced title for the show coming from the fact that’s what bounty hunters are nicknamed in this system.
What’s the organisation that employs these bounty hunters? Brace yourself, Brits. Why, it’s the RAC. Yes, the RAC. “The RAC is coming to get you!” Doesn’t that send shivers down your spine?
The three bounty hunters follow the golden ITC rule of casting first laid down in The Champions back in the 60s, in giving us two guys and a girl as leads. The girl – Britain’s own Hannah John-Kamen (Banana, Cucumber, Happy Valley, The Hour) – is the mysterious highly trained one, probably raised since birth to go around killing people; she’s also possibly a member of the rich elite that rules ’the Quad’ as it’s known. Working for her is regular goofball Aaron Ashmore and following this first episode, his brother Luke Macfarlane, who’s wanted by the Company because he knows something bad from when he was a soldier. Together, they all have to track down criminals while cracking jokes and trying to avoid sides in an impending civil war.
You’ve got a decent enough synopsis there, so you should be able to extrapolate from that. Possible love triangle? Yep. John-Kamen having secrets that will be revealed in time? Almost certainly. Lots of semi-decently choreographed but ultimately average fight scenes? Sure thing. A smattering of sci-fi jargon and ideas that very slightly distinguish the show from all other very similar shows you’ll have seen before? Absolutely.
But it’s Canadian sci-fi at its most generic. It even features some of the same guest cast as Dark Matter. Perhaps the only really good thing about the show is the main cast. John-Kamen’s good and you wonder what happened to poor old Aaron Ashmore’s career that he’s ended up here after Smallville, Warehouse 13, et al. Not a great actor, Luke Macfarlane is nevertheless clearly there to bring the funny, having starred in Canada’s only good sitcom of the past decade, Satisfaction.
As a result, this first episode at least was hard going, with aching gaps where there should have been action, decent dialogue, jokes that are funny or in fact anything to stop me yawning like the only thing that would keep me alive was constantly stretching my face muscles for a whole hour every day.
Still, you have to admire a show with the chutzpah to call itself Killjoys, at least. That’s not inviting some obvious jokes. Not. At. All.
In Canada: Fridays, 10e/7p, Space In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy In the UK: Mondays, 8pm, Syfy. Starts tonight
They say there are no original ideas any more and that everything has already been done before – it’s just a question of how you take elements of what’s gone before to create a new mixture.
If this statement is true, it’s doubly true of science-fiction, where for any given show, it’s almost certainly possible to name a very similar if not identical predecessor. A case in point is the new Canadian-US co-production Dark Matter.
Adapted from their own comic by the brains behind the TV version of Stargate, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, the show is roughly 90% Blakes 7 for starters – a group of six misfits, four men, two women, wind up on board an advanced spaceship. There they meet the seventh member of the crew, the ship’s artificial intelligence, and come together to fight oppression from a huge federation.
The remaining 10% of the show is pure Andromeda, with the ship’s artificial intelligence having a robotic avatar and the crew having turned good relatively recently, originally being a bunch of criminals until they had their memories taken away. And then there’s the slightly enigmatic woman with funny coloured hair who’s on board the ship but wasn’t one of the criminals and who has strange powers.
So far, so derivative. There’s even a little sprinkling of Firefly on top. The question is – does Dark Matter stick all these components together to create something decent?
The short answer is: not really, but at least it’s fun.
Even if you are an REM hater, ‘The End of the World As We Know It’ has never been more boring than in Between. A co-production between Netflix and Canada’s CityTV, it sees virtually everyone in the absurdly titled town of Pretty Lake aged over 21 keel over and die of a mysterious, unknown ailment. With thousands dead in just a few days, the government quarantines Pretty Lake, sticking an electric fence round it, leaving behind a town full of kids running riot while surrounded by the slowly putrifying corpse of every adult relative and mentor they’ve ever known.
The latter point should be a dramatic focus of the show, you’d have thought, with traumatised teenagers and infants blubbing and suffering from shock at their terrifying orphaning. But although episode two managed to give us kids dragging the dead bodies of their parents et al into a communal pit filled with thousands of bodies, followed by a group cremation, generally they’ve not been that upset. A bit miffed and puzzled as to what’s happening; a bit keen to send lots of texts, mope around with their boyfriends and girlfriends, and settle old scores with a bit of glowering. But they were actually all a lot more saddened by their loss of mobile phone coverage in episode three.
As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the show almost goes out of its way not to be too interesting or Lord of the Flies. None of the characters have anything going for them, having the self-centred entitlement of the typical teenager combined with the collective charisma of Ryvitas and a complete inability to care about the horrific deaths of their own parents right in front of their own eyes – not a Bruce Wayne among this lot, it seems. The show pushes the envelope of plausibility to open up possibly exciting plot scenarios, by giving the small town of Pretty Lake not only its own prison full of murderers but a zoo from which a tiger has escaped. But it’s a sign of the pausity of the show’s storytelling capabilities that this has so far failed to produce even the slightest thrill. There’s an escaped tiger everyone… an escapedtiger. No? Don’t really care. Okay.
Between‘s biggest lure is its mysterious ailment, neither bacterium nor virus, affecting only those over 21 and striking without symptoms or leaving a trace. Yet the show leaves that lying around in the background, barely touching upon it, in the exact same way Revolution chose to ignore its electricity-destroying nanites until it was too late for anyone to give a toss about them.
So after three episodes of enduring mind-numbing tedium, combined with a laughable ability to paint even a slightly plausible picture of either small town or post-apocalyptic life, I’m thinking it’s time to give up on this. But, you know, whatevs.
Barrometer rating: 5 TMINE prediction: If Netflix renews this for a second season, I’ll eat my hat
