Alien Nation: Dark Horizon (1994)

'Are you implying I'm kitty-whipped?' The first of a series of TV movie revivals appended to the one-season show which spun off quite successfully from the 1989 movie, this suffers from the quite common complaint in such efforts that feature length somehow doesn't make for something twice as good as a regular episode – indeed, it's weaker than the general run of the show, which sometimes did interesting things with the world established but not explored in the feature. Dark Horizon brings on two big threats: a virus engineered to be lethal to the Newcomers which a racist human group plans to spray over California, and the arrival of an alien overseer (Scott Paterson) out to recapture the Tenctonese immigrants (who are runaway slaves) and also interested in enslaving humanity.

Though we get Babylon 5-style CGI spaceships and a matched pair of evil matriarchs, all the build-up ultimately serves to show how small-scale the plot actually is, with galaxy-wide events dwindling into a soap centering on the cop team heroes (human Gary Graham, alien Eric Pierpoint), their family and friends. Typical of lazy TV writing is the way the plague ravages the extras but no one we care about dies and the raising of character issues – the alien cop's wife (Michele Scarabelli) is inspired by the treacherous Newcomer villain to rekindle her alien cultural identity – which are tidily hurried out of the way by the climax. It seems this ought to up the stakes and play as a large-scale epic, but the finish is just a kung fu fight in the desert and some cheap redemption. Directed by long-time s-f TV figure and series creator Kenneth Johnson.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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