He’s another character you’ve seen before - same powers, same arc, same generic bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold - made interesting for the fleeting moments when you don’t know who he is or what he can do. Karl to help communicate with the aliens, but his bloated notoriety at the start best mimics the show’s own misguided sense of grandiosity. In case it’s not already clear, there’s a lot going on in “Nightflyers.” Much of this review could’ve been dedicated to the dwindling importance of Thale (Sam Strike), a telepath brought onboard by Dr. Of course, he uses his knowledge of the ship to spy on everyone onboard, including Melanthia Jhirl (Jodie Turner-Smith), who knows he’s watching her bone down with other crew members, seems to like it, and may or may not start an earnest romantic relationship with the Cap’n to reward his perverted voyeurism. How they manage to dull a story that includes a two-foot tall robot spider with red lasers shooting out of its eyes - a spider, mind you, with pretty great, albeit unintentional, comic timing - is through earnest, unceasing, and quite wearying self-seriousness.

So much information is held back in Jeff Buhler’s 10-episode first season, and so many strange things keep happening (with unreasonably calm reactions from the people onboard), that “Nightflyers” quickly pivots from an intriguing foray into hard sci-fi to a confounding slog through the most boring blackness of space. The mysterious destructive force plaguing the characters also ends up leveling the series. Well, someone might know, but despite an “accident” involving glass that makes John McClane’s barefoot jog look pleasant and creepy ghosts trolling passengers in the hallways, well, no one’s saying what’s up. It malfunctions a lot, and no one knows why. You see, the technology onboard the eponymous spaceship, the Nightflyer, is malfunctioning. Not that far into “ Nightflyers,” Syfy’s bleak adaptation of George RR Martin’s bleak 1980 sci-fi novella, a large mechanical spider starts shooting up the crew with searing red laser beams.

Nightflyers grrm