Origin Season One
Hostile takeover
UK/US YouTube Premium, streaming now Creator Mika Watkins Cast Natalia Tena, Tom Felton, Sen Mitsuji, Nora Arnezeder, Siobhán Cullen, Madalyn Horcher
Origin is a bold experiment in televisual entertainment. Not because it’s part of YouTube’s burgeoning drama output, but because it appears to be a series entirely constructed from science fiction clichés. One thing’s for sure: Origin ain’t short for originality.
Remember the blood test scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing? Who doesn’t? It’s a classic. But would you really want it stretched to 10 episodes? Origin creator Mika Watkins clearly thinks it’s a great idea, but you may never want to hear anyone utter the phrase, “It’s not me!” ever again.
Let’s switch on the clichéometer. A number of characters who don’t know each other (ding!) – each with a dark secret revealed in Lost-style flashbacks (ding!) – are woken up from cryo-sleep (ding!) to find their ship, the Origin – yes, the show’s named after the ship (ding!) – empty, the crew having bailed (ding!). Oh, let’s switch off the cliché-ometer before you get a headache.
Pretty soon they find a breach, lots of very contorted corpses and two ( just) surviving crew members, who each claim the other has been taken over by an alien. And guess what? (This won’t be a spoiler, as it’s almost impossible not to see where this is heading.) Soon the alien leaves its current host and takes over someone else. But – gasp – who? Nine episodes of stinky red herrings later you will have stopped caring.
The central bunch of characters is wearyingly familiar. The shouty, irritating self-centred one. The not-to-be-trusted one. The handily tech-savvy one (always useful for getting info out of computers). The moody, taciturn, ass-kicking one. The nervous but ultimately plucky one. Their flashback backstories are little better. The Japanese guy is ex-Yakuza, of course. The flame-haired Irish girl comes from a coastal, religious community of thatched cottages. The American woman is a gun-toting security officer. Only Tom Felton, as the sulky Logan, has a flashback that surprises because it’s so sweetly unexpected, but the ex-Harry Potter actor is hampered throughout by a whiny American accent and a tendency to say “Fuck!” as if embarrassed his mum might be watching.
Origin is executive produced by Paul WS Anderson, and like his 1997 movie Event Horizon, by far the best things about the show are the production design and the gore. The sets for the ship are very impressive – though probably totally impractical – as are the CG effects, while there are some effective moments of tension and body horror. But no amount of blood or beautifully lit consoles can compensate for the fact that for most of its running time Origin is a bunch of lacklustre characters running up and down corridors in a plot holding pattern. Dave Golder
We’re pretty sure we recognised one location (used in a flashback) from Doctor Who’s “The Ghost Monument”.
A series constructed from sci-fi clichés