Last week we started watching Into the Night on Netflix due to its promising cover description promising a thrilling story around a hijacked passenger aircraft and some apocalyptic event related to the sun. The trailer didn’t look all that great, though, but we still decided to give it a try.
The story starts with NATO officer Terenzio Matteo Gallo arriving at Brussels airport. Something got him to panic and after attempts at getting a flight ticket to “somewhere in the west” he assaults a soldier guarding the airport, grabs his rifle and decides to hijack a plane that was originally heading to Moscow. At the same time, multiple news channels show shocking events from the US and other nations describing mysterious deaths…
What the show manages to convey really well is the whole idea of having a plane full of people from different backgrounds with everyone feeling quite unique. That being said, at the time of the hijacking only a handful of passengers were abort and it seems like all of them were at least living in Brussels at that time. Given Brussels’ central role in Europe and the EU in particular it would have been great if the mix would have also spanned nations instead of “just” background. It didn’t help either that the only really non-Belgian character, Terenzio Matteo Gallo, was primarily annoying and constantly hostile towards Ayaz (originally from Turkey), throwing xenophobe slurs at him all the time despite Italy and Turkey being both in the NATO…
There are also other aspects of the show that I would like to write about here but I cannot avoid spoilers here. Sorry 😞 You’ve been warned!
Another aspect we were quite disappointed with was the plot. The original idea sounded promising enough but in the end the passengers and crew were mostly dealing with their own distrust of each other and started to fly from country to country and continent to continent in a weird way that simply doesn’t feel plausible. Going from Brussels to Scotland to Canada and back while outrunning the sun? Even with quick stops to refuel I simply don’t see that. Perhaps they explained it somewhere but I didn’t notice it.
The first season consists of six episodes in total. And if you think that flying between all these cities in the course of so few episodes and doing any major plot development at the same time were tough, you’d be right. Season one ends with pretty much none of the major plot elements being resolved. We still only know that NATO knew of something related to the sun. That’s it.
Tl;dr: While I absolutely loved the premise of the show the execution was weird and many of the few characters were primarily annoying. Sorry, but I cannot recommend this show unless they do a 180 in season two.
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