Welcome to Commonworld, in the year 2143. It’s been built above the ruins of the old world, and the opening sequence of Sky One’s new interstellar thriller showed us the crumbling remains of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral mouldering beneath glittering futuristic super-scrapers and sweeping skyways. Thanks to rising water levels, London has become an island.
It looks good, and while there’s nothing here that’s going to out-imagine Blade Runner or the new generation of Star Treks, it’s only fairly recently that you’d find such advanced CGI in a TV show. Whizzing through this exciting cyberscape comes flying police officer Ash Harper (Savannah Steyn, bearing a noticeable resemblance, luckily or otherwise, to retired thespian the Duchess of Sussex). She comes screaming down from the skies in her nifty little interceptor to apprehend a most wanted villain, Verona (Imogen Daines).Her reward is a night out with her team, hosted by veteran Sergeant Wendell (Neil Maskell). But it suddenly turns nightmarish when a squad of masked robo-goons appear, arrest Ash on an incomprehensible charge and march her off to the nick, or whatever they call it in the mid-22nd century. Commonworld likes to sell itself as a benign polity keen to promote “environmental integrity and societal cohesion”, but we know that’s code for “repressive dystopia”.
Ash is sentenced to indefinite detention “off-planet”, and is blasted heavenwards in a spherical transport craft to the prison vessel Hemlock. Here she joins a motley all-female crew of felons, all of whom are itching to kick, scratch or beat her to a pulp because she’s a cop. As it happens, Ash is part of Commonworld’s aristocracy, where her mum, Rebecca (Parminder Nagra), has achieved the exotic rank of Arch-Marshall. She’s pulling out all the stops to get her innocent daughter released, but before she can, the jailbirds launch a murderous putsch, seize control of the Hemlock and go charging off across the galaxy at warp speed.
What they want and where they’re headed remains moot, though we know one of them, Dr Emma Grieves (Natasha O’Keeffe, alias Mrs Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders) is a very important person and “mustn’t fall into enemy hands” according to Dr Benedict Lee, Director of Commonworld. He’s played by a bearded Craig Parkinson (pictured above) with almost comical solemnity, in a rather posh voice he never used in Line of Duty.
Plot-wise Intergalactic might have some promise, even if you could find every aspect of it in forerunners from Brave New World and Alien to getaway movies like The Fugitive or Passenger 57. What it lacks is dramatic weight, since the action feels like an audition for a student production where everybody’s over-acting like mad in a desperate bid to get noticed. The cast (or most of it) ticks all the boxes of being young, glamorous and diverse, but everybody is battling to show off their personal tics and quirks.
Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson plays Candy, who has a long forked tongue, a forehead densely planted with green blobs, and a library of animal noises and spaced-out expressions. Tula Quik (Sharon Duncan-Brewster, pictured right) is the leader of the on-board rebels, and delivers every line with seething ferocity and staring-eyed, pent-up fury. Her daughter Genevieve (Diany Samba-Bandza) strives desperately to out-psycho her mom, with the aid of retractable tentacles that shoot out of the back of her head. Nobody’s told her that’s it’s a really bad idea to fire fusillades of bullets inside a pressurised spacecraft. Verona is more low-key and just sneers, snarls and swears a lot.
Anyway, we wish Ash luck as she tries to figure out how to deal with her hostile comrades, who’ve only kept her alive because she’s the only one who can fly the Hemlock after Tula and co rashly slaughtered everybody on the flight deck. The level of conversation is primitive at best, and the food on board looks awful.