Starhyke

At first, I thought it was a cartoon. The special effects were just animations.

The script and acting was atrocious, but worst of all was the background music.

This music single handedly ensured I stopped watching after the first fifteen minutes. Why oh why have such annoying music playing all the time? There is no rhyme or reason to it, and doesn't change with what's happening on screen.

Terrible.

There are some very different opinions on this series. Having recently watched it, it deserves a lot of the criticism, but not all.

The pacing is a problem, for a start. It needed to pack more action/dialogue/gags in, but it often seemed that the cast were pausing for a laugh track that was never added.

The humour is not up in Red Dwarf territory, but the series does improve as it goes on. The scriptwriters certainly knew the genre they were sending up. But by the end, I could see why it didn't get a second series.

Enjoyable in parts, slow, sometimes clumsy, often showing the limits of the budget, could have been better in many other ways too... but quite likable, in its own confused way.

I'm not going to blame the actors; I mean everyone's got to eat right? It's plausible that they're capable of recreating something that could pass for human emotion, they've simple chosen not to.

This leaves only the writers and directors of this catastrophe, and I DO hold them accountable! Try to imagine every awkward moment from various sci-fi shows you've ever seen and mash them together in montage of mental cruelty. Sadly this doesn't even fall into the "so bad it's good" category; just sit there and fight the urge to skip to the next scene. I mean it must get better at some point? Nope.

I'm sorry for all the people involved with this production. Please, please, run your script by a target audience. Do they look bored out of their gourd? Yeah, that means you're just not quite there yet.

For reference point, Red Dwarf rules! So I'm not a genre hatter, I'm just disappointed. You can do better, we deserve better.

I figured it would be unfair to review this show after only one episode despite very strong urges to pan it straight away, so I held out and watched the lot. Unfortunately the first episode is an excellent indicator of what is to come.

The program is not totally rubbish as many claim and there are redeeming features to be found. Some of the characters are quite amusing, such as the doctor, Sally and Dotty the cyborg. Rachel Grant is Hot, the Reptid makeup is quite good and doesn't look cheap, the special effects are excellent (as they should be by 2009), and there were a couple of places that genuinely made me laugh but they were surrounded by so much nonsense that I cannot for the life of me remember what they were.

Almost everything else about the show is bad. Most of the jokes are painful, and there are too many characters to properly develop. Many scenes go absolutely nowhere and are abruptly ended and forgotten about. Bearing in mind the episodes are only 23 minutes, that is particularly disappointing.

Forget comparing this show to Red Dwarf. Forget comparing this show to Hyperdrive. Starhyke doesn't compare to anything that has actually been shown on telly, which is probably why it has never been shown on telly. It may however be possible to edit the series into a passable hour-long special or pilot.

All that said, I applaud the creators for at least giving it a go and they have done well to complete a whole series on what is clearly a tiny budget, especially going up against the BBC's finest. It does show some promise, but it needs some decent writers or the actors need to have a little think about their characters because I get the impression they are not necessarily being portrayed as the writers intended. Maybe that is the director's fault.

I would probably watch a second season... well, the first episode at least.

When you were in third grade did you have that weird friend who thought it was hilarious to make fun of Star Trek by calling it Star Feck with characters John Leak Pee-hard and Do-me-onna Toy? It turns out that his idea of growing up was to change the names to Captain Belinda Blowhard and Chief Engineer Sally Popyatopov. Whatever potty humor he had before he increased ten times. He still chuckles and blushes when people mention sex. Green clouds appear when characters fart. His idea of intellectual humor is having a half-android character confuse an order to "scan" for (imagine) "scat" and start vocalizing. The thing is, these actors *could* have acted. Some of them have real careers (and some sadly seem to have gone nowhere, so we'll never know). But they have almost nothing to work with here. But.... BUT there is just enough to make you wonder what happened. In the first episode they are emotionless characters because all humans have had their feelings suppressed. This means they are contributors to the genocides of thousands of alien races. Now suddenly they have their emotions back, and they maturely decide to... boink each other (off camera, of course), install a chocolate fountain, get drunk on this strange thing called al-co-hol, and boink some more. This could have been a redemption story about how people could change from being the borg-like villains to becoming heroes. It could have been commentary on nationalism and fascism. There's even a side plot about some unknown force getting in their way and sabotaging things for nefarious purposes, which doesn't really start to go anywhere until episode six -- the last episode, with a big "To Be Continued" at the end. And it never continued, of course. It was never even released until many years after it was filmed, so they had a pretty big clue that it wasn't going to be continued. If the whole series would have been like most of that episode, it probably would have gotten at least five stars. Actual humor would have gotten it to four. Three stars is generous.