Roy Eris (David Ajala), captain of the Nightflyer, stays locked in his cabin and only appears to the crew as a hologram. Then it goes back to the beginning of the voyage, showing astrophysicist Karl D’Branin (Eion Mackin) leaving his wife and daughter on Earth to lead the mission. The first episode flashes forward to a violent stalking incident on board the ship, grabbing the viewer’s attention while telegraphing what’s in store for two key characters.

“We’re a virus that has killed its host, and we’re looking for a new host to infect,” says Rowan (Angus Sampson), the ship’s xenobiologist. The hope is that the aliens will gift us with knowledge that will save the species, even after we’ve soiled our nest back on Earth. Overseen, written, and sometimes directed by Jeff Buhler, the miniseries is set in 2093 on the Nightflyer, a starship leaving the solar system to make first contact with extraterrestrials.

It promises to be AMC’s The Terror in space, but only delivers in fits and starts. That SyFy is releasing all ten episodes over the next week and a half, beginning Sunday night, seems like either an attempt to adapt to the Netflix/Amazon era of content dumps, or an admission that this lavishly funded effort is being burned off because it didn’t come out the way the network wanted. Martin’s novella and a series of short stories - and a same-titled 1987 film adaptation - SyFy’s Nightflyers is a encyclopedia of science fiction and horror cinema influences, but despite outstanding production values and some fine sequences of terror and body horror, it succeeds mainly at making you want to revisit the work that inspired it.

Nightflyers rr martin