Nightflyers

Chock full of dumb characters making dumb decisions, NIGHTFLYERS aims to go where no one has gone before...in making us want to pull our hair out.

The mission: an intrepid group of explorers has set out from Europa to rendezvous with an alien craft in space. You'd think a mission of this importance would require a crew of top-notch scientists and seasoned spacefarers. Not here. We get a crew of ding-dongs who wouldn't pass a psych eval. Add in a belligerent tool of a telepath whose sole job--wait for it--is to communicate in a friendly manner with the aliens, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Not long after launch, the mission goes sideways with weirdness. The captain knows all along why this is happening. Does he do anything about it? Say anything? Perform any corrective action? Nope. He pretends like he's ignorant instead of heading back to port because reasons. Oh, and the series opens with a murdery death scene far into the story that wipes out any worry for the characters shown because we know how they end up. Yay.

Strange mash up of horror, sci fi, psycho thriller and matrix kind of elements... some parts reminded me of event horizon... I liked the characters a lot

You ever come across a show you're really enjoying, come onto IMDb to look up the cast and find it has a 6/10 average with a ton of 1/10, 4/10, etc reviews? That's what happened with Nightflyers. This show has a great mix of suspense, horror, mystery, and science fiction. The sound design is absolutely wonderful (I'd recommend watching with headphones for something different), and the performances are engaging and on point. I'm not exactly sure what most people were expecting (George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones in space or Asimov/Asher level hard sci-fi?), but this is a damned decent show. Perfect? Far from it. But it's an odd, multilayered and entertaining sci-fi show - far from deserving of these silly, pretentious 4/10 reviews.

I really wanted to like this show. It started not bad, but with each week it is getting worse. It simply became boring, messy, not clear what is going on there, and don't let me start on logic, science or whatever scyfy is there. No tension, no action, nothing. I hope it will improve somehow but it is just getting worse...

It's not the most original story. It borrows heavily from Solaris, 2001, Star Trek, Sunshine, Strange Days, The Abyss... But the hate it gets is pretty ROFL worthy. I didn't understand why at first, until i understood that this series replaced the ultimately forgettable (yet seemingly more popular) "The Expanse". I love Sci-Fi, but honestly, all the reviews rating this below 5, you can just disregard them. IMDB should stop letting every opiniated crybaby write a review and figure out a way to filter out the petty fanboy drivel. It also seems a lot of these people did not watch the show, like they claimed to have, since they are bringing up issues, which are actually explained in the story. But as it stands, Nightflyers is rated a lot lower than shows many times worse, such as Killjoys, Dark Matter or Continuum and other cheesefests. This show is leagues better than those, yet gets rated a lot worse.

Back to the show. The setting works, eventhough it's not original (as stated above), characters and performances are better than most sci-fi series, there is enough mystery, to keep you interested without dragging it all out (like The Expanse). There are a few things that don't make sense, but ultimately don't detract from the experience, unless you have set your bar to the standard of the absolute best shows of the past few decades. If you let those things bother you, then you can stop watching about 95% of movies and shows all together.

It's a well made show, i enjoyed watching it, but does not break any new ground. If you liked the movies/shows i mentioned earlier, and wouldn't mind a "light-synthesis" version of those (content & storywise), then you might very well enjoy this.