Chris

I think the writer and the director have been struggling to convey what is at heart an intriguing proposition. What are they doing on Carpathia? What drove them away from Earth? What are the reasons for the state of the relationships between the key characters?

In the absence of any real inspiration, they have fallen back on dialogue as narrative and as a means of conveying tension. The result is leaden, cliched lines like "be careful out there" whenever someone goes on a mission and endless discussions about the dangers of radiation hotspots, failing crops and dying children. Alfred Hitchcock always insisted that it is fundamental, if you want your audience to feel the tension arising from a ticking time bomb under the table, you must occasionally show them the thing. Had any American TV studio made this series we would have seen at least one stillborn child by now, and possibly a lab full of scientists sweating over the failure of yet another one of their precious, limited seed bank. But all we get is endless discussion of the issue between a jaw-clenching Hermione Norris and Liam Cunningham, who treats everything as if it's the latest turn of events in a Sid Meyer God game.

It's as if the production team has decided that in selecting an unusual South African location they have done their job - so once you get past the impressive backdrop, there is absolutely no sparkle or inspiration in the camerawork or the scene-setting, apart from the irritating and over-used direct light and lens-flare effects.

In Lost, some of the interesting back-story questions were tackled very effectively (for the most part) via the flashback device. It would be difficult for Outcasts to do the same thing because it would be accused of copying. But it desperately needs some other narrative device to help answer these questions (and others). Actually I think it had a potential answer in that dream memory monitoring machine they have. That's a great piece of sci-fi imagnineering but it has been under-used so far.

This week's cliffhanger (the approaching starship that only Julius Berger seems to know anything about) was a welcome addition to the series, as is the President Tate's developing dark side (such as the ease with which he is prepared to treat humans as lab rats), but again, these are all ideas floating in an otherwise poorly-realised and somewhat 2-dimensional universe.

There is a story to be told there somewhere, and that's why I'm sticking with it. But I hope they had the good sense to record two endings to episode 8, and have dusted off the "we're not getting a second series" ending to use a fortnight on Sunday, because I can't see the BBC spending this kind of money on what it now knows is a core audience of well under 3 million.