Another Life Season One (Spoiler-Free) Review

I suspect many of you haven’t heard of Another Life, Netflix’s attempt at a gritty, complex sci-fi series that dropped on the same weekend as the final season of Orange is the New Black. I honestly hadn’t heard about it until I signed into Netflix and saw that Katee Sackoff (best known for her stellar turn as Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica) was headlining the series. Being a fan of BSG (which continues to be the best sci-fi series to ever air on television), I decided to check it out, and by the end of the show’s ten-episode first season, I was left confused at what the show was trying to accomplish and unsure just how I would review the series. But one thing I did know: This wasn’t a good series, much less a great sci-fi series.

There are a lot of problems with Another Life, but I can safely say that none of the problems originate with the show’s cast. Led by Sackoff, the cast does their absolute best to elevate the material they have been given – which, if you watch the series, you will see is quite the feat. The problems with the series exist from the most basic elements of the narrative, with a show that can’t seem to decide what story it wants to tell. The series opens with the revelation that a mysterious alien artifact has landed on Earth, and a team is immediately dispatched to try and determine what the artifact is and whether it’s here for good or ill. On that team is Justin Chatwin’s Erik Wallace, a scientist who might just be able to crack whatever code is present in the alien entity. But Earth isn’t about to hedge their bets on the ability of scientists to determine what the artifact wants, so a spaceship is launched carrying the best of Earth’s astronauts (a range of different science specialists along with more general astronauts – it’s not really all that clear what each character is there to do, even after ten episodes). That ship is commanded by Sackoff’s Niko Breckinridge, who just happens to be Wallace’s wife. Quite the smart and highly connected couple.

So, ostensibly, the series is set-up to split our time between space and Earth, with the narrative balancing itself between the mystery of the artifact and the question of whether or not the astronauts will discover the source of the aliens (at the outset, it seems everyone thinks the artifact originated at a specific planet, but so little is made of this that I was never completely sure why the decision was made that it was from that planet). Unfortunately, that’s not the show we’re given. Instead, Another Life turns into two vastly different shows. The Earth side of the equation (which takes about 1/3 of the season’s narrative) lags for much of the season as a dull, uninspired Arrival/Close Encounters of the Third Kind knock-off (hell, the story has Selma Blair in it, chewing scenery as a smarmy cable news reporter, and it doesn’t seem to realize the fun that can be had with her and that character until the final episodes of the season – a complete waste). Once the story finally kicks into high gear, it’s already the ninth episode of the season and we’ve barely spent enough time with any of the characters in this arc to know their names, much less care about their well-being. On the flip-side, the space portion of the story quickly diverges from any connection to the alien artifact narrative and spins into an Alien/Star Trek knock-off – way more entertaining than the Earth-bound side of things, but not without its own set of issues.

If it was hard to care about or remember the characters from the under-served Earth arc, it’s just as difficult to do the same for the space narrative, as the series keeps killing off characters as soon as they start to make an impression (don’t worry – it happens so often over the course of the first season that I can’t call it a spoiler). It’s also incredibly convenient that Earth sent up a whole host of replacement astronauts, all waiting in deep space sleep, to be woken up in case something went wrong (although we’re never given an accounting of just how many spares are waiting in their pods for tragedy to strike). And why is there such a large body count on a mission to find a planet?

Well, that would be because every episode seems to have a self-contained space arc that sees our heroes dealing with various emergencies that put the life of the crew in danger (and yes, there is indeed an incident where something jumps out of a crew member’s body a la Alien). I can understand that spending time on exposition, or even just taking time to get to know the major characters better, can become boring over the course of multiple episodes (the moments where the series tries to give us some character backstory comes across as stilted and messy), but I find it hard to believe that this much action and adventure would happen during a simple trip across the galaxy. The silver lining to the crazy drama is that it does serve to make the space side of the series more interesting than the Earth realm, so there’s some entertainment value there even if the overarching narrative rarely makes any sense.

I’m guessing you can tell from this review that Another Life isn’t about to get my stamp of sci-fi approval. If you’re looking for some solid sci-fi to watch, I would suggest checking on CBS All-Access’s Star Trek: Discovery or Amazon’s The Expanse, both of which got off to rocky starts, but are top-notch television now (and both will be back for new seasons in the coming months – I can’t say the same for Another Life). It’s all well and good to try and emulate excellent sci-fi shows in your own series (and I applaud the writers and producers for casting the series with a wide range of actors from a varied racial, ethnic, and gender identity backgrounds), but Another Life does little in its first season to distinguish itself from the stories it’s trying to mirror. In fact, it manages to muddle the story so much that I found myself forgetting there was even an alien artifact at the heart of this all. Save yourself the ten hours and take a pass on Another Life. Life’s too short to waste it on bad TV.