Oasis

Oasis ... is a taut, suspenseful, character-driven one-hour space drama set in the not-so-distant future on a habitable but increasingly haunted planet, Oasis.

There's not a lot of artistic flair to Kevin MacDonald's direction, but he tells the story cleanly enough and there are some fun quirks to the execution.

The first episode of Oasis is a tense, well-acted sci-fi drama full of tantalizing, even theological, questions.

Oasis is occasionally too hefty, but when it can relax it works as an interesting and haunting mystery laced with mysticism and a lingering creepiness.

Oasis is mysterious and provocative, feeling like the closest thing to Battlestar Galactica since Battlestar Galactica.

If the point was to get viewers hooked, this should certainly do the trick.

You've seen everything on Oasis before, done both much better and probably much worse. I'll probably hold out for better versions in the future.

People who watch nothing but SyFy programming and GoT disciples who really miss Robb Stark are the target audience here; everyone else may feel like this slow-burn space-madness headscratcher simply isn't their cup of Tang.

The storytelling does an excellent job of establishing a sense of place, then working within it to create an increasingly suspenseful experience.

The show is based on the cult novel "The Book of Strange New Things," by Michel Faber, and presents a convincing if intentionally uninviting view of the future, where Patsy Cline music is pumped in on a continuous loop.