Review: Into the Night, season 1

Laurent Capelluto and Pauline Etienne in Into the Night

Into the Night is a Belgian sci-fi thriller. It’s a nail-biting thrill ride with one of the best cliffhangers at the end of the season I’ve ever seen. It’s mostly in French with some English, Russian, and Arabic in the mix.

Into the Night has a fairly unbelievable sci-fi premise. The sun kills everything because of some polarity problem. The only way to stay alive is to keep following the night around the earth. Once you accept that as the world the story will be in, it’s off and running with the action and danger.

Terenzio (Stefano Cassetti) knew what was happening before anyone else. He rushed to the airport and highjacked a plane meant to go to Moscow. He made them fly west into the night.

Most of the passengers weren’t on board yet. Only the co-pilot Mathieu (Laurent Capelluto) was in the cockpit. Terenzio ordered the door closed. He accidentally shot Mathieu in the hand. This meant that former military helicopter pilot Sylvie (Pauline Etienne) was pressed into flying the plane with instructions from Mathieu.

There were six episodes of about 37 or 38 minutes each. Each episode began with one of the people on the plane in their normal life. Then we moved back inside the plane as it moved, landed, refueled, and kept going. Everywhere they landed, all the people were dead.

Regina Bikkinina, Vincent Londez, Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Babetida Sadjo, and Nabil Mallat in Into the Night
In front is Laura (Babetida Sadjo), a nurse, and Zara (Regina Bikkinina), the mother of a sick child. In back is Osman (Nabil Mallat), an airport worker who was cleaning the plane; Horst (Vincent Londez), a climate scientist who did much of the exposition regarding the sci-fi bits; and Ines (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) an Instagram influencer.

Folks who were important that I haven’t yet mentioned or described in the photo above were Rik (Jan Bijvoet) and Ayaz (Mehmet Kurtulus). There were others on board as well. The tension and struggle for power and authority took up a lot of the interaction among the passengers. But they also worked together to solve problems like how to fix the radio or deal with health problems and other threats.

The acting was very good. Most of the plot twists were in keeping with the sci-fi world created in the beginning. The only plot twist that broke my ability to suspend disbelief involved Ayaz and his wounds. I don’t want to give you the spoilery details, but he healed pretty magically from an incident.

There were some tropey elements in the story. The most annoying of them was the inexperienced woman flying a passenger jet. That made Pauline Etienne a lead character in the story, however, so I went with it.

The series was created by Jason George. Not the actor Jason George – the writer and producer Jason George. He also worked on The Gift, another interesting series.

Into the Night poster

Check out the trailer.

If you like action packed thrillers, I think you’ll enjoy Into the Night. I’m looking forward to season 2.

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