The Greys

I watched the last episode of Defying Gravity last night. It was an excellent series – the best sci-fi I’ve seen in a long time. For a start the “sci” was largely believable, while the “fi” was a lot more than just shooting aliens with lasers.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s set in the near future, and is based within our own solar system. No warp drives. No extra-solar alien planets populated by space-faring races. No teleport devices – in fact no shore leave at all, unless you count 20 minutes or so in a refrigerated space suit on Venus. What it did have was strong characters, made all the stronger by gradually unfolding back-stories, excellent sets which looked like they could have come straight out of the NASA design book, and an ongoing plot which, though slow at times, did have the effect of drawing you in if you were prepared to stick with it.

An ongoing plot, however, pretty much guaranteed that ratings would progress mostly downwards, rather than up (it’s a disincentive for people to tune in halfway through). It didn’t start strongly enough to overcome that, so only made it as far as one series. For that reason, even though I thoroughly enjoyed it, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to watch it unless you quite like the idea of being left with only a fraction of the story completed.

Alas, it’s an all too familiar tale: Programme gets commissioned; Writers plan for a multi-season storyline; programme gets cancelled part-way through the plot, which rarely gets resolved (unless the producers manage to wrangle the money for a film or comic book out of someone). If you’ve stumbled across this page because you did watch Defying Gravity, then you might like to follow this link to find the resolution to a few of the dangling plot lines.

So farewell DG, you were too good for the TV of our time. Oh, and could you TV execs please stop commissioning series if you’re not going to show any commitment to the integrity of the story. At the very least, try to find another way to deal with this issue, other than just leaving your viewers in limbo. Again.