Okay, I have watched every episode of Outcasts. And it yo-yoed between mediocre and awful. Why? Well, it all got a little out of control to be honest, after what was a frankly painfully slow pair of opening episodes which established the world and the people in it with the speed of a geriatric gastropod and the all the detail of a senile account of an event which happened in the individual's infancy. The main thing to blame for the whole show being a disappointment, really, was the writing.
It's a shame that a nation which has brought Doctor Who and Being Human (at least, before it too became overstuffed with ideas in the third series) to the international table still suffers and can't do decent sci-fi drama justice in the way that the States do. Look at Battlestar Galactica, for Christ's sake, then look at Outcasts again. Not only is their a a lot lifted from the Americans' series, it's been copied and mimicked badly.
And it was a decent premise, really- a new society in a stronghold/ frontier city/ shanty town mutation on the planet Carpathia (never explained why they went with such a daft name). It's a hotbed of deceit, politics and relationships struggling as they try to set up and maintain their society. Except that they've already set it up; the show doesn't really seem to know where it wants to go, down the hardships of establishing a society route or the established society overcoming a new issue avenue. We get conflicting implications of when the city was built (ages ago, according to some characters' weariness with it and their assertions "I was here when we were building this place", recently according to others' insistence that everything has teething problems). None of it really adds up, and then they throw every science-fiction worn and wearied metaphorical "this relates to you" storyline into it.
In an eight episode series, there was barely time to acknowledge the plot points they crammed in, let alone explore them or do them justice. Let us look at a few factors that went into the series, and didn't gel with anything else going on around them.
-Richard Tate (the President) being broody and political
-Stella (the Head of PAS, the police force inside the city) doing the Harrison Ford routine, "I just want my family back!"
-Tipper Malone (token Irish guy) being involved in everything and being seemingly the only DJ in 17,000 people
-ACs, bred clones- flogging the stem cell and medical good metaphor past death- especially with the obligatory "they're human too" story built around a catalyst of a special needs violent AC made that way by, of all people, some unseen scientists and Richard Tate's face at a window.
-White outs, natural disasters that involve the ground deciding it wants to be airborne in increasingly violent bursts, leading to a "whiteout cycle" they try to predict like rainfall and at other times state they can't predict.
-Stella getting her family back, at least her daughter, and then the two of them sulking around each other and having a family element of "you're not my mum" played out emotionlessly. Hermione Norris cannot do motherly.
-Julius Berger, an unclear Important Person being all mysterious, religious and obviously up to no good from day one.
-Randomly unexplained survivor from the first Pioneer team who scouted the planet turning up when everyone thought he was dead and throwing diamonds around in a bar. Then dying, and not being mentioned again, in one episode.
-The Big Bad of the series, the Host Force. A living planet! That's not been done before!
-Hallucinations. Yay. Not been done before.
-Cass being a bad guy back home called Tom Starling, caught for murder. He's now a PAS officer. A copper. Great.
-C-23/ C-24, a weird flashy virus that made people look as though their faces were evaporating.
-Omega Project, an offshoot of the AC project, which means that Fleur, another PAS officer, is actually an AC-lite with some of the President's DNA. Just in case the "they're human too argument" was too subtle, they actually have conversations where characters say "they're human too", "it's what we are inside that matters", etc etc.
There are a lot more plot points, like armed forces planning uprisings, that sort of thing, but those are the main factors I can think of. Given very little attention, unsurprising seeing as any of them could have been coupled with three others from that list and lasted the series. It was a mess, a big brainstorm that had been thrown together and then, apparently, the team writing the series have just said "let's keep it all."
I cannot express my disappointment in the series more, mainly becuase from the get-go of adverts for it it looked a bit naff. I've not been disappointed as much as had my fears confirmed. After The Deep last year, and now this, and the dissapointing "finale" of the third series of Being Human, I'm not sure the BBC should try any fantasy/ science fiction series for a while. Stick to period dramas, perhaps.
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