Outcasts review

I don't really like Outcasts, although sci-fi is my sort of thing. In fact my sci-fi knowledge allows me to refer to a very similar programme, Earth 2. American in that case, of course.

Very similar indeed. Both have a relatively close future where the earth has been more or less destroyed, by pollution in Earth 2 by, probably, nuclear war in Earth 2, they haven't been very clear about it. In both there is a small group of humans in a mysterious and dreamy landscape. Of course Outcasts supposedly has tens of thousands of humans in a settlement, not just a few dozen wandering around, but you'd never know. Only a few characters appear, and they don't seem to have much of a budget for extras. Whereas Babylon 5, for example, always managed to make main areas crowded with heavily made up Pakmara extras and Minbari and so on, and nBSG always remained conscious of the remainders of humanity through the fleet Outcasts is more like a bad episode of Voyager, where the whole crew seems to be made up of just the main characters. Star Trek is often like that. Although we see the original Enterprise able to stun whole cities with the rarely used stun setting on the ship's phasers and has hundreds of crew, including a large security contingent, every problem has to be personally handled by Kirk, or maybe Spock. In TNG little Wes Crusher gets put in charge of a geological survey, despite having no expertise or experience on that matter and the Enterprise-D being full of scientists and other we're-not-a-military-organisation Starfleet types. It's like that in Outcasts, a few main characters with a mass of invisible peasants I suppose we're meant to assume to be there and who apparently live in disused shipping containers and have no places of work, and so on.

Outcasts, like Earth 2, has a threatening band of engineered semi-humans beyond the walls, although in Earth 2 the walls aren't physical ones. Earth 2 had both criminals sent before the colonists and murderous, criminal eating, cyborgs wandering around, Outcasts goes with GM Humans, who have a personal grudge against the president of the, mostly English, colony. I like seeing Englishmen monopolising sci-fi programmes, it's all too often just Americans.

An interesting choice: the first episode centred entirely around two characters, an explorer and his domestic wife, who were both dead by the end, the wife killed by the husband who then opted for "suicide by cop". Turns out he'd also allowed the GM people to escape when appointed to kill them all. Meanwhile in the B plot a new ship was arriving from earth, probably the last one, which crashed killing almost everyone on board, with the survivors mostly killed by the GM people, called ACs.

Something else similar to Earth 2: problems with human breeding. Turns out the ACs can breed, having been engineered not too, while the human birth rate is collapsing. As in Earth 2 the leader's son's illness was the main motive for settlement.

I'll have more to say.

Edit: No doubt all low quality as I'm half asleep, but something else I noticed was the improbable frequency with which they walk along a corridor which seemingly goes around the outside of a circular room and which they need to walk all the way around on a regular basis. Bad architecture.

Dreamscape stuff and that.