TV-Reviewed

Bladerunner meets Flash Gordon in this latest Sci-Fi channel offering. Charlie Jade is a private investigator living in a corporation-controlled alternate universe known as the Alphaverse where things aren’t as peaceful and well-ordered as the general populace is led to believe. Crime is rampant and a real threat to the average citizen who is just trying to get by. Enter our sympathetic gumshoe, the muscle-car-driving, hard-narrative-giving Charlie Jade. He’s only trying to help, and wants nothing to do with the sinister Vex-Cor–the corporation that runs the city, an alternate version of Cape Town, South Africa.

When Charlie becomes involved in a case involving a young woman with no source of identification, which is an unheard of thing in such a tightly controlled society, he is propelled forward into something much larger and grander than he is used to dealing with. All he wants to do is continue on as he has, take a vacation with his girlfriend away from the city, and forget about Vex-Cor and the other problems surrounding his life. However, when the girl who had come to him the night before is hit and killed by a car, the police come to ask Charlie some questions and he realizes that the girl’s story of being from somewhere else and possibly of having been raped could be true. And an old familiar name comes up: 01 Boxer.

01 Boxer is the son of Brion Boxer who was the founder of Vex-Cor. Charlie realizes that he very well could have been the man who raped the girl. He goes in search of 01 and locates his possible whereabouts in a small dusty town out in the desert. However, he is too late as he comes pulling up in his Aston Martin to the only watering hole around for miles. 01 gets away in a Vex-Cor helicopter. Of course, our undaunted hero gives chase.

Charlie follows the helicopter in his car until it flies over a strange-looking Vex-Cor facility. Throughout the episode it is shown that this facility is where Vex-Cor has developed a machine capable of generating wormholes that allow travel from universe to universe. In fact, during the pilot, it is shown that there are three universes: alphaverse (cyberpunk-like place where Charlie lives), betaverse (a copy of our universe), gammaverse (an idyllic version of our universe). Vex-Cor had created a link before, apparently, but are now trying to recreate it between all universes. But, things go wrong and the machine becomes overloaded.

All three universes have simultaneous stories going on. Charlie’s is only one of the stories being followed. It can get kind of confusing, too, when the jump is made between verses. The obvious solution the producers came up with was to give each verse a different “look”. For example, the alphaverse has a greenish tint to it, where as the gammaverse is bright and cheery and the betaverse is more realistic looking.

In this first episode, the effect is done dramatically with the overloading of the wormhole generator. When things go haywire, all three universes come into contact and ripples of the different verses emanate outward from the epicenter of the resulting explosion. Rings of a brightly-lit reality collide with those of a greenish overcast one. Charlie witnesses this from his vantage point atop a nearby mountain peak. Not to forget that he is then thrown to another one of the verses after the explosion.

The pilot of Charlie Jade may very much show a blend of ideas from various sci-fi TV shows and movies from the last thirty years or so, but there is something promising here, something that hints at Charlie Jade being just a bit different. While not stellar, the show is definitely entertaining–and definitely a welcomed edition to the existing sci-fi universe.

Charlie Jade - The Big Bang
Original Sci-Fi Channel Air Date: June 06, 2008

Rating: 6.8