Like a Doctor Who Story Minus The Doctor (Unfortunately)

The Rig is an oil refinery off the coast of Scotland. It and its crew have secrets. Corporate has plans to decommission the rig. Then there’s an accident. Or is it an accident? Then weird things happen that no one can explain. The crew was hoping to go home, but suddenly a thick fog came up, and all radio communication to the coast is down. People start acting strange. An ancient entity has been unleashed. Everyone is in danger. Everyone gets paranoid.

The Rig is, on the surface, a serious British Science Fiction ecothriller that wants to make important statements about The Environment while serving up the mystery and slow-burning thrills. It has actors we’ve seen from Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, and many British cop shows, with Iain Glen, Owen Teale, Mark Bonnar, and many others ready to chew the scenery. The problem is we’ve all seen this before. Lots of times, it feels as if this was a Doctor Who episode… but if it was, it would have been over in an hour instead of six.

The Rig wants us to think it’s terribly important. It seems to think its audience has not seen the last five-to-ten years of Science Fiction thrillers. It acts like nobody has seen Alien before. It plods along with its characters acting confused and angry for six whole hours. Worse, it acts like nobody has seen Doctor Who. That’s the problem. If The Doctor had shown up, they would have figured out what was going on and found a way to communicate with the Science Fiction Thingie, and it would have been over in a padded-out single episode. The weirdest thing in The Rig isn’t the Science Fiction Thingie but watching Emily Hampshire, who usually plays goofy, manic eccentrics in shows like 12 Monkeys and Schitt’s Creek, play the terribly serious, button-down scientist who’s trying to figure everything out. Her character is a well-worn trope.

The Rig – When Characters Act Stupid for Plot to Happen

There’s also dodgy writing where the characters act like complete and utter idiots. When Mark Addie – the blustery King Baratheon from Game of Thrones, no less – shows up as a bonafide corporate baddie who gets people killed (another trope that goes all the way back to Aliens), the characters continue to listen to this asshole instead of locking him up in a cabin or throwing him off a balcony. Instead, they let him walk around the rig talking to people, still giving orders and manipulating them again. This is an instance of a screenwriter thinking he’s being very serious when it’s just lazy writing. Characters stand around complaining about the same thing for over five hours before taking an action that becomes disastrous, then go back to complaining again. Honestly, this is just a Doctor Who episode, only made pompous and stretched out to six hours. By the last twenty minutes of The Rig, the characters in the show have become the biggest bunch of idiots on television for letting a dangerous bad guy walk around free.

The Doctor Who Dilemma

If The Doctor had shown up, they would have waved their sonic screwdriver and started communicating; some of the characters would refuse to listen to them and get killed, then The Doctor would have mucked in the control room, probably causing the bad stuff and bad guy to explode and sorted it all out with the Ancient Entity and a warning about the Environment. Yes, you could argue that The Doctor has become a Deux ex-Machina character, but this is the challenge of writing Science Fiction. You have pulp hero saviour characters like Doctor Who, or you write about how Humanity is helpless in the face of Greater, Lovecraftian forces.

British television has a tradition of dystopian Science Fiction ecothrillers going back to the 1970s; shows like Doomwatch set the gold standard for the genre, influencing shows like The X-Files. The writers of The Rig seem to have forgotten about the shows and movies that came before and think they’re inventing the wheel. And it’s been renewed for two more seasons, which means more overlong, overwrought drama to come.

And it also teaches us one valuable lesson: Doctor Who makes everything better and more fun. Oh, and mercifully shorter.

The Rig is on Amazon’s Prime Video.