Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pandora’ On The CW, A YA-Themed Sci-Fi Series That’s Pretty Darn Confusing

Sci-fi is a genre that has conventions that seem to get carried over from show to show, decade to decade. Aliens with ridges on their human faces, speaking English. People talking like cruise ship sailors when they’re piloting even the smallest shuttle craft. And a hero or heroine with a deep, dark secret. All of this can be found in Pandora, a sci-fi show with a young adult component added in. Read on for more…

PANDORA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young woman starts a run from her woodland home, then transports to a more barren hillside a few miles away. She turns to see her home destroyed by invading forces, killing her parents.

The Gist: Soon after the attack, Jax (Priscilla Quintana), arrives at the Space Training Academy on Earth, at the request of her uncle and only living relative, Prof. Donovan Osborn (Noah Huntley). It’s the year 2199. There, she immediately meets the professor’s teaching assistant, Xander Duvall (Oliver Dench) and they get along, though she doesn’t exactly feel welcomed by her uncle’s officious tone.

During her first day of class, she’s befriended by Atria Nine (Raechelle Banno), a purple-haired clone from the planet Atria, who has emancipated herself from the servitude most Atrian clones go through. She takes Jax to a local hangout, where she meets med student Greg Li (John Harlan Kim) and Thomas James Ross (Martin Bobb-Semple), whose father was an telepath who squandered his abilities on gambling. Dax also befriends Ralen (Ben Radcliffe), the son of the Zatarian ambassador, who is viewed with suspicion after the long war between his world and the allies of Earth. Finally, she also recruits her roommate Delaney Pilar (Banita Sandhu), who is directly connected to the Datastream and has higher processing powers than most species, to their study group.

After Osborn informs her that the investigation into her parents’ death is closed, Jax is determined to go back to the planet where she lived to find out what happened. With Ralen and Greg, they steal a ship to go to the planet, where Jax not only finds Xander leading an exploratory crew, but a portal into another dimension or existence or something. They end up withstanding an attack from an unknown species, and on their way back to the academy, Xander finds out that the alien has the exact same DNA as Jax, whom Prof. Osborn has given a code name: Pandora.

Our Take: Pandora’s showrunner, Mark A. Altman, has experience with YA-flavored adventure shows like The Librarians, so this isn’t the first time he’s tried to marry a genre show with the usual ins and outs of teen/college-era drama. And there are portions of Pandora we actually liked, especially Quintana’s performance as the tough-as-nails Jax. But Altman and his writers try to jam so much exposition in the first episode, it becomes a confusing mishmash. It doesn’t help that he falls into the trap of larding the first episode down with jargon and what we like to call “Trek-ese.”

What is “Trek-ese?” It’s the convention of having people on a ship’s bridge talk out all of the operations they’re inputting into their stations while speaking to the captain in a very formal tone. It’s a carryover from nautical procedures, but it feels like everyone who has written a sci fi show since Star Trek falls into this trap at some point. And Altman does during the scenes when Jax, Ralen and Greg take the stolen ship to Jax’s home planet. These inexperienced cadets already act like they’ve piloted a ship for years; Greg does make fun of Jax’s formalized order for him to stay with the ship, but it was too little, too late; for once, we’d like to see people pilot a ship through space and talk like actual people, not ship’s officers.

But there was so much of this, along with backstories for all the characters, crammed in with all the jargon, it was hard to get a hold of what Jax’s story actually was, why her uncle invited her to Earth, and why she’s such a threat to humanity. Subsequent episodes may clear this up, but the first one was such a jumble that we don’t know if we want to waste the time.

Sex and Skin: Nothing more than some flirting between Tom and Nine.

Parting Shot: Osborn to Xander: “I assure you, this Pandora’s demons are very, very real.”

Sleeper Star: We like Banno as Atria Nine, because she seems to be a bubbly party girl, but she talks to Tom about the sacrifices she’s had to made to emancipate herself, the cost of which we hope we’ll see her deal with as the season goes along.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Jax, Ralen and Greg go in “cruise control” to Jax’s home, Greg kicks back and plays Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.” “I do love my classical,” he says. We get it; it’s 180 years from now. But as much as we love that song, we’re not sure it’ll still be listened to 180 years from now.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Pandora feels like a show that should be binged instead of watched week to week. Maybe when it hits Netflix, you’ll want to watch it over a chilly late-fall weekend. But it just feels like a show that’s not worth the time investment of watching it in weekly installments.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Pandora on The CW