Into The Night - The Old Axolotl

Name - Into The Night
Released - 2020
Creator- Jason George

I had a late night last night finishing off the awesome Into The Night series on Netflix. This is a great series where there was lots of action and if you are into apocalyptic sci-fi, you would enjoy it.

When I first saw the series, I thought that it could be interesting, an aeroplane flying away to avoid the sun and was wondering where it could lead and more about this possible extinction event. Whilst I found the show very good, it was also equally missing on a few parts too, but did not distract fully from the enjoyment of the show.

Whilst thinking of this show, I was immediately getting Falco - Out of the Dark vibes as it seems to fit the series theme perfectly.

The series caught me by surprise first of all because it is in french! I learned later that it is the first netflix series from Belgium of all places and I guess this is why it had sometimes a weird euronews type feel to it at times. However, I quite enjoyed to listen to the french and read the subtitles. Often the show would have parts in english, german or russian depending on the characters, so it was refreshing rather than everything dubbed.

My expectations were that they would be flying non-stop west to avoid getting caught by the sun. I am not sure how long I could stomach constantly flying in an aircraft, or if that is even feasible to out run the sun?!

spoiler alert
What was disappointing was the background of the extinction event in that unlike say in Snowpiercer where the heat was rising so they tried to cool the atmosphere, there was some change in the gamma or something or other radiation of the sun altering the molecular structure of people, the food etc.. which just seemed a little ridiculous and hard to believe. You need to be a strong believer in Science to take that on. Putting that aside, the idea however is still quite good and interesting.

Where it gets really good is some of the storylines and character interactions that keep the action flowing, however this also detracts from the main extinction sci-fi element and falls down more there. Somehow, relationships in these extinction type films turn everyone to go crazy and do crazy selfish things rather than more peaceful, co-operative type situations. I guess this is more because it makes for more interesting TV if there are constantly many bad guys and they switch from bad to good and you need to keep up with it.

For me, the standout performance was from Mehmet Kurtuluş, whos on screen presence was amazing and really glued many storylines and characters together. I am certainly going to check out some of his other stuff. There were a few other strong performances too, which was keeping you watching.

Once they found a bunker, after we learned most bunkers weren't protection enough, the show did have a little Silo type feel to it, but maybe more modern. They idea of going up only in the night instead of day idea could have been explored more, instead, the military seemed to go rogue and turn into Lord of the Flies which I am not sure soldiers would switch to being so barbaric in a critical situation as this.

The show is 2 series long and quite short with 12 episodes in total. I didn't read the original book but am intrigued to give it a look because it seems this series isn't really a direct move to TV, but just the inspiration. The inspiration is from the book The Old Axolotl which is a recently written book by Jacek Dukaj and is more in the cyberpunk genre according to the Wikipedia article. It has certainly peaked my interest and I have added it to my reading list.

I am not sure if they will make a 3rd series, but they did leave a cliffhanger at the end of the 2nd series and you sort of know how it could play out, but then what? Will the show go more in the direction of the book?

Here you can see the promo video for the ebook when launched which gives you a taster of it. My preview reading of the book is that people start to digitise themselves and transplant their conciousness to become robots. This would be a cool direction they could move in, but the tech doesn't seem to be there in this film. Mostly Nato has stacked some seeds and the tech seems to low to follow in this direction.

Either way, a 3rd series would be pretty cool. There is a spin-off series in turkish with a submarine that I didn't watch yet. It could be worth watching.

As the series was produced in Belgium, I was happy to see that it featured the song from Angèle. Probably not the song you want to listen to when an extinction level event is going on around you, but it did bring a smile to my face. I am sure I featured her in a #threetunetuesday post before.

Thanks for reading.

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