Amazon’s Pilot Season is upon us once again. This year is the first in which I’ve partaken, and the only one that interested me was their sci-fi offering, Oasis.
Set in an oddly-near future 2032, Earth is heavily polluted and implied to be a dying world. Richard Madden (best known as Robb Stark on Game of Thrones) stars as Peter Leigh, a priest who comes from a troubled, mysterious past but found God after meeting his wife. Supporting him are Bollywood fixture Anil Kapoor as the interim head of the expedition Vikram Danesh, Antje Traue of Pandorum fame as security chief Keller, and fellow Game of Thrones alum Mark Addy as drill worker Halloran. A bearded Haley Joel Osment also appears an awkward comic relief botanist, which was odd but fun.
Within the opening moments of the pilot (just before yet another usage of Rag’n’Bone Man’s “Human” in a piece of popular media), we learn that Peter’s wife was terminally ill and passed away some time recently (the exact circumstances are not revealed until later in the episode). His work with the church occupies him now, until a representative from an organization maintaining a colony across the galaxy requests he join the expedition. Outright dismissive at first due to a previous conflict with the expedition’s anti-religion founder, David Morgan, it is a message from Morgan himself expressing a vehement change of heart that ultimately brings Peter across the cosmos.
Upon his arrival, things immediately do not look good – violent sandstorms ravage the fledgling settlement, coupled with air so dry it makes your nose bleed and a water shortage have the base on its last legs. Oh, and Morgan is missing.
As if that weren’t bad enough, nearly everyone on the base is plagued with vivid hallucinations of loved ones, leading to several fatal accidents. Peter makes it his mission not only to do the best he can to counsel the beleaguered colonists, many of whom would have taken anyone but a priest in his place, but get to the bottom of what the leadership seems to be hiding about the happenings on Oasis and find their missing leader.
The juxtaposition of science and faith naturally takes center stage, and while there isn’t much time to go too deep with these thematic elements, the scenes where Peter simply listens to others’ woes and confessions and comforts as best he can are effective without being too preachy, and it creates a dynamic of friction among other less-faithful crew members without resorting to violence and intimidation that is refreshing to see – people are still treating each other well (for now) even with things as bad as they are, but the tension is there.
Refreshing is actually the word I would use to describe Oasis, if forced to use only one. Much like the excellent Syfy series The Expanse, Oasis incorporates elements of hard science and a lived-in feeling to the world to ground it, making the stories and characters that much easier to swallow. There are some larger leaps in logic and suspension of disbelief; humans being capable of intergalactic travel in fifteen years and the fact that Traue’s character is sending messages to her daughter when logically the trip should have taken so long that many hundreds of years have gone by at least are a couple. Nonetheless, Oasis feels like it falls more on the side of believability than not, and I appreciate that.
Another thing Oasis has going for it is the focus on character, story and drama. There’s no human-instigated violence, and the closest we really come to a confrontation is Traue’s character halfheartedly unclipping her holster and hovering her hand near her pistol when Peter tries to take a vehicle. Instead the pilot has a real sense of exploration and the planet itself has an unsettling sense of “otherness,” managing to make a simple desert environment feel somehow alien. The lack of violence and great sense of place gives Oasis a unique quality; it is a science fiction drama that can maintain a watchable slow-burn, pulling you in and never quite letting go of a niggling feeling that things are not right.
The mystery of the hallucinations and by extension Morgan’s disappearance and cryptic clues left for Peter form the basis of a compelling hook that, naturally, receives no answers before the cliffhanger ending. The fact that I care about what happens next, especially to write as much as I did in the survey for the Pilot program, shows me that this is an Amazon Original worth supporting.
It has its shortcomings, mainly in the veracity of the setup and some rushed things here and there, but once we arrive on Oasis, the program becomes eminently engrossing, and the shaky scaffolding falls away to reveal a solid foundation for a sci-fi mystery.
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