Right from the start, it’s obvious this series is really just a standard police-department drama, complete with all the cliches, albeit slightly transposed into the far future of, erm, 2040 (or maybe not; it’s unclear from the title sequence if that’s the year or just Brogan’s badge number. Considering that Gerry Anderson’s earlier series gave us an alien invasion by 1980 and a functioning moonbase by 1999, however, a near-future date is on brand).
The characters are all police-series cliches. We have our hero cop, Brogan, transferred in from New York to Demeter City with a trailing wife and kids struggling to adjust and make friends; our wise-cracking, womanising young smartarse cop, Haldane; our outwardly-cold but inwardly-caring woman cop, Castle. The city is multi-species, with humans rubbing shoulders with different sorts of aliens. Someone is apparently knocking off all the drug dealers of Demeter City, with a B-plot about a bag lady who turns up claiming to be alien royalty. In and of itself, that’s not terrible; so far, so NYPD Blue.
As well as the nice model work, there’s a teensy bit of CGI that’s not unconvincing.
Less good points: everything about it is boringly predictable. I’d guessed the murderer straight away (though admittedly I’ve also seen Space: 1999, which helped). Brogan suspects his teenage son is doing drugs with a dodgy friend… only of course it turns out, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine style, that it’s all perfectly innocent. The bag lady? Spoilers, she is alien royalty.
Much more seriously, we never actually learn what the murderer’s motivation is. And nobody seems to question it because, well, drug dealers are bad so it’s only natural someone would want to kill them. But I’d expect a little more: ex-junkie? Parent/sibling/child died of drug overdose? Home planet devastated due to drug extraction?
There’s a small role for a pizza delivery man, played by some British kid called Idris Elba. I wonder what happened to him? I should look him up on IMDB.
A Doctor Of Many Things 