★★★★★ 0/5

Outcasts: reviews

Some reviews have emerged for Outcasts, the BBC's new sci-fi series that will air in Australia on ABC1.

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Some reviews have emerged for Outcasts, the BBC’s new sci-fi series that will air in Australia on ABC1.

In the year 2040 a group of pioneering humans have been living on a distant planet for the past 10 years, following some serious trouble back home. They don’t even know if Earth is still there any more, but a second transporter ship – maybe the last one ever – is about to arrive.

The Guardian:
As often happens with an imaginary world this complicated, there was a tendency to force-feed the viewer information: a glimpse of Hoban’s medical file told us he suffered from “maladjustment and multiple personality disorder”; Dr Stella Isen was referred to as a “feminist academic”; she has a brain-reading machine she uses both to solve crimes and watch old memories of the husband that she left on Earth. Plucky PAS officer Fleur is accused of “idealism”; her PAS colleague Cass has a secret; PAS stands for Protection and Security; President Tate lost his kids to some disease a while back; he has a secret, too. That’s not to say that Outcast was without its surprising twists. They weren’t afraid to introduce a main character, give him a back story, put him into direct conflict another main character, then just kill him. There are already three fewer Carpathians to keep track of. It gives the drama an extra edge when you think anyone could go at any time. Clearly anything can happen in this brave new world. One gets the impression almost all of it will be bad. Now I’ve been educated, I can settle back and enjoy episode two.

The Telegraph:
Outcasts is one of the most staggeringly uninteresting dramas that’s been on television for a while. Set in 2040, on a planet where a small population of human settlers have set up home after something bad has happened on earth, it spent most of last night’s opening episode working on character development. Then, at the climax, we learned that another important character would be arriving in the next episode. So, stand by for more character development in tonight’s exciting instalment.

The Independent:
At first, Outcasts rekindled all my old prejudices, and yet gradually, like spacedust into an HS-9433X warp-drive engine, I was sucked in. Maybe that’s because the problems of establishing a new society on Carpathia can easily enough be seen as allegorical, in the sense that the purity of any ideology sooner or later gets defiled by human impulses and emotions.

Dameon’s TV:
In short: episode 1 was tight, both in writing, style and casting. Every scene, however innocuous, seemed to give us necessary information for the future and moved along quickly. The look of Carpathia was beautiful, even the ramshackle Forthaven, thanks to a great colour palette and good use of lighting. The cast was brilliant, not a weak link in the bunch. (Did Liam Cunningham’s President Tate seem like a strange cross of Captain Picard and Sean Connery to anyone else?) Even shorter: I’m diggin’ Outcasts.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM_-eFLJkSE[/youtube]

6 Responses

  1. Now I understand Outcasts. At some time in the near future all the members of the militant wing of the Ramblers Association were judged to be too violent and stupid to intigrate into civilised society. So…. they were all shipped off to another planet a long way away were they all lived happily hunkered down together. The law was everyone has to walk everywhere. No cars, bicycles or any form of transport was allowed. When anyone did go walking they were not allowed to take any maps, radios or gps (they do have weather satellites so why not gps?) and could only tale a light knapsack so when they did get lost they could really enjoy it and presumably talk about it in the bar afterwards.

    They are so dim that when an old man walks into the bar (obviously no guards or CCTV on the gate) and offers to pay for whisky with CUT diamonds nobody is that impressed. Instead of barraging him with questions on the lines of “Gosh, we thought we were the only settlement on this planet, where have you come from?” they try and beat him up in a “bar fight”. This obviously shows why they were kicked off Earth in the first place!

    These are people that think you can sit on a beach within walking distance of the fort and collect cut diamonds from the sand and it is all normal! No really!

    There is a surfit of expository dialogue and a few people get shot for no obvious reasons, but nobody cares, least of all the viewers.

    Obviously every Rambler worth their salt needs a good dog to go walking with, so in future episodes they will all fight each other to the death for the only dog on the planet (Don’t ask, no really don’t ask!) and nobody will ever know what happened as nobody will be watching.

  3. @Ryano – I’d much rather it be on ABC, at least we won’t have the 5-6 ad breaks during the show. And you know it will be on the same time each week for it’s run and probably start on time and not 5-10 mins late, good on the ABC for getting this one!

  4. It reminds me a lot of “The Deep” last year’s underwater science fiction drama. Too dark, too much exposition to cram in, melodramatic with no sense of humour or sense of adventure, and just a bunch of unlikeable people this >< close to killing each other. This is not what I want from my sci-fi entertainment.

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