I watched the first episode and part of the second. After that I had to stop to avoid breaking my tablet. The stupid, it burns.
The show opens with a nice special effect. The alien spacecraft looks cool and alien if not overly practical. The thing it turns into looks like a Christmas tree. It’s great what you can do with CGI software these days.
Where I part ways with the show’s creators is their failure to hire decent writers and a science advisor–or even a “You can’t do that because a first grader could tell you it doesn’t make any frickin’ sense” advisor. It puzzles me how shows like these get made. I mean, they’re spending all this money–well, I mean, not enough to spring for a shuttle interior set–or a shuttle exterior, or anything but the pilot. So they’re spending, like, sixteen dollars on every episode, they have all these people hanging around eating bagels and bananas, and nobody on set is smart enough to point out, “Uh, hey, folks, like, we’re supposed to believe two people with little hammers and a briefcase can bring back enough rocks in one hour to extract oxygen from to resupply a ginormous spaceship?” or “Wait, she’s gonna just breathe the air there? Did they forget it’s like 15 degrees above absolute zero?” or “Oh, the first alien artifact lands on Earth and we have all of, what, four people studying it?” or “What do you mean they’re going to land the ship on the planet? On its side!?!?! I mean, look at it. Using what engines?” Or, or, or….
I guess what the crew were really saying is, “Well, this sucks, but whatever. If they cared whether it made sense they would’ve hired actual writers, so I’ll just save my advice and continue to get paid. It’s not going on my résumé, I’ll tell you that for free.” Only to themselves, though. Only to themselves.