So I watched the first episode of the new Netflix series “Another Life.” On a certain level, the show has promise:

1) The premise is interesting… an alien Macguffin lands on Earth and TMA-1’s a message to another star system. So since the humans can’t make any sense out of the Macguffin, they send a starship to this distant star (clearly the show isn’t set in the present, but if they said what year it was I missed it)

2) The production values are quite good. The sets and the exteriors of the starship all seem quite quality.

That said… after one episode I want every member of the ships crew to get fed through a woodchipper.

A) They’re on some sort of government starship…yet they do not wear uniforms.

B) They’re mostly twenty-somethings, for reasons which are unclear.

C) They act like teenagers. Not “19 years old and well-disciplined by a year in the Service” teenagers, but “14 year old petulant children unfamiliar with discipline, decorum, basic manners and a work ethic” teenagers.

D) There’s a violent mutiny within minutes of the first hint of difficulty.

E) They’re all Pretty People, with two exceptions:

E1) The Fat Guy with the beard and long hair: this Hurley lookalike, clearly a darling of the Space Service’s physical training program, will doubtless be set up to be the show comic relief or general doofus

E2) The What The Hell Is That character, apparently the ships doctor. Is is an android designed to be confusing and offputting, using its unnatural appearance to dissuade crew from wasting time and resources in the medbay? Who knows.

It’s the usual “most important mission in history,” and this is the best Starfleet has to offer?

And then there’s the production design. Sure, a great deal of effort went into making it all look good, but less went into making it look *right.*

α) The bridge. You know how we’ve all laughed about how Starfleet keeps forgetting to install seat belts? Whoever designed this ship forgot to install *seats.* While the ship is being buffeted and banged up by Stock Standard Sci Fi Space Storms, our bridge crew of mental defectives are standing around getting thrown into the bulkheads. Which, of course, are not padded in any way. But even assuming a smooth ride, you don’t want your crew just *standing* all day, when they could sit down easily enough.

β) Ah, but there *are* seats. After banging the crap out of everyone through several attempts to fly multiple close orbits around a star (a concept that made no sense whatsoever… seemed like they were going for “slingshot maneuver,” but you don’t go into a circular orbit even once around a target star, never mind three times), suddenly not only does a cockpit with “manual controls” open up, but jump seats magically appear for some of the other bridge crew to strap themselves in… *away* from their duty stations.

γ) And then there are several open, exposed, *large* lightning-based electroenzapulation panels littering the ship. Basically a chunk of wall, a meter or two wide and at least that tall, just sitting out there in front of Odin and everybody with constant forked electrical arcs zapping around ’em. Nobody paid them much mind, so I figured they must be some sort of weird decorative thing, or a strange way to display power consumption… something. Until one character gets knocked into one and gets burned to a dead crisp.

W.

T.

F.

Netflix. Dude. There are people out there who you can bounce your ideas off of to make sure stupid crap like this gets caught early enough so that dorks like me can’t pounce on them, point and laugh. Some of us even work cheap. They could point out that some of your ideas don’t make a lick of sense: while the notion that a star isn’t actually where it seems to be because of gravitational lensing could be an interesting one, it falls apart when you make it plain that humans have been zipping out between the stars for *decades*. Because in all that time stellar cartographers would have noticed the problem. the target star here is pi Canis Majoris, which is about 100 light years away… a journey of only 3 months. Things go wrong when they end up at Sirius (kinda along the way to pi Canis Majoris), which is 8.6 light years away. If 100 light years is a trip of only 3 months, then most assuredly humans will have traveled much further that Sirius in *every* direction by this point, and thus the news that pi Canis Majoris is being lensed will have been in all the papers. Cripes, if it’s only 8 days to Sirius (based on taking 3 months to go to pi Canis Majoris), there’s probably a Vegas-style resort in orbit around the place by that point.

That pile of stupid was scraped up from just the first episode. Guh.

Netflix did great work on “Lost In Space.” So how the frak they screwed this up… dunno.