Childhood’s End

"Overall a decent adaptation, however, some parts of the show were a bit rushed and could have been done in more depth."

A fleet of alien ships suddenly appears overhead, carrying a mysterious race of Aliens w/ odd benevolent intentions: They’re here to fix all of the world’s problems. There has to be a catch, right? That’s the set-up for Arthur C. Clarke’s novel adaptation of Childhood’s End, which just recently ran as a mini-series on the SyFy channel. One of the key themes is the death of religion, since, who needs to pray to God when aliens can just magically fix everything instead? The aliens are the “Overlords,” as they’re called in both book and TV series. The entire first episode builds toward a reveal of what Karellen, the Alien “Supervisor for Earth,” actually looks like, though since he speaks with the commanding tones of Charles Dance. Overall a decent adaptation, however, some parts of the show were a bit rushed and could have been done in more depth. SyFy were also clearly intent on transforming a 60-year-old book that doesn’t have a ton of dialogue into something that contemporary TV viewers would enjoy. This has angered some diehards of the book. The mini-series favored broad strokes of Utopian bliss but it was also unafraid to poke into Clarke’s darker ideas. And since most of the fears and uncertainties Clarke evokes remain timely in the 21st century, they still leave a powerful impression.

3 stars

Reviewed by: on January 15, 2016