Syfy's Nightflyers is never boring, but it struggles to rise above the uneven handling of George R.R. Martin's material

The A.V. Club

"This is an abrupt show," says Alex McLevy. "Plot developments are introduced pell-mell with little chance to build, leaving the viewer with a sense of whiplash as they attempt to process what happened in between scenes. At one point, it’s suggested that a month has passed onboard the ship, with nothing to mark the passing of time save for a character announcing as much. Some of this is a problem of editing—characters will suddenly appear in different places aboard the ship, which, when there’s a force creating ominous digital projections of people in the story, can easily cause confusion—but mostly it’s a problem of scripting, where diegetic mysteries being grappled with by the characters too easily shade into mysteries regarding the narrative of the series itself. It would be simple to get bogged down in the proliferation of confusingly rendered characters and plot points...There’s a sense all of this has been done before, and showrunner Jeff Buhler doesn’t quite know how to make it feel new again."

ALSO:

• Nightflyers is a bonkers everything-but-the-kitchen-sink science-fiction extravaganza
• Writers have introduced a lot of needless malarkey into what George R.R. Martin created as a relatively straightforward narrative
• The special effects are inconsistent, sometimes impressively detailed and other times patently fake-looking
• Nightflyers reinforces that the lightning-in-a-bottle success of Game of Thrones is exceedingly rare
• Nightflyers flails when it comes to doing anything new with a metaphor that’s been worn thin, that of space travel as an escape from grief
• George R.R. Martin on Syfy's adaptation: "I was amused by the idea of it becoming a TV show"