Amazon’s Night Sky Brings The Wonder And Drama Of Space Exploration To Our Doorsteps

Be still my beating heart and let me enjoy this solitude with you. Until a strange kid covered in someone else’s blood drops into this room and says…nothing, he says nothing and things get a bit weird. All photos courtesy of Night Sky’s IMDb.

The story revolves around Frank and Irene York from Farnsworth, IL who have for decades held hostage an incredible, multi universal secret in their backyard. In their woodshed, underneath the bandsaw and around the corner from the potting soil sits a doorway to another world, a doorway that literally transports individuals to a room in another universe that allows you to explore, from the comfort of a protective enclosure, a landscape of planets and stars so close to the horizon you can see them in all their cosmic glory set against a vista of sand-strewn planes littered with who knows what. However Frank and Irene are getting old and slightly disenchanted with not only their secrete but with life itself with Frank being the one carrying the burden of staying optimistic in the face of a spouse who’s slowly losing her will to live. If you’ve ever cared for aging parents this will particular part of the storyline will resonate with you in ways you never expected.

As Frank and Irene’s life unfolds before us we learn they lost a son decades ago and haven’t fully let go of their guilt from it, they have an ostensively intrusive neighbor named Byron who no one likes and who had to relocate his family after a frivolous whistleblowing lawsuit he filed against his employer (a vitamin company) actually went through prompting the shutdown of the company which meant numerous people lost their jobs and a fair portion of those numerous now jobless people harassed Byron and his wife Jeanine until they left town, and have a new member to their household after finding a strange person inside the room of where they go to relax among the stars. His name is Jude, he’s obviously not from around Farnsworth and he has a reason for being there that inadvertently involves everyone in this slightly rambling paragraph including Frank and Irene’s granddaughter Denise.

Deep in the mountains of Argentina lives a mother and daughter who harbor a similar secrete, except their sole purpose is to guard the secret of the portals at all costs. Jude is actually an escapee from a cult that not only uses the portals to check out the same planet surface Frank and Irene have been visiting but as a method of travel around Earth, and whose sole purpose is to monitor known portals and look for others. If their knowledge of travel gets leaked to us regular folk the consequences would be disaterous so when Jude escapes it is up to Stella, Toni, and Nick (a USA agent for the cult) to track him down and kill him for his crime of leaving the compound and murdering a guard who tried to stop him. Fellow guardian and obvious pervert who should not be left alone with anything Cornelius (Piotr Adamczyk) tags along to make sure everything goes to plan and let’s just say he gets his just deserts. Don’t mess with mom and offspring.

When Frank and Irene find and nurse Jude back to health he becomes their caretaker, a job he takes seriously but he also has a goal. Somewhere in Farnsworth is his father or at least the last known traces of him, and Jude needs to know if he’s still alive because not only does he miss him, but Jude’s Dad also escaped from the same cult and there are a lot of unanswered questions Jude has that only his father can answer. Jude’s drama brings new life to Irene who looks on him as an unusual replacement for her long-dead son which not only inspires her to take better care of her health but also brings to surface resentment Frank holds towards Irene’s newfound grip on life that she somehow didn’t aspire to when her only commitment in life was to her marriage.

Irene, Jude, and Denise take a road trip to Michigan where they find a Bed-And-Breakfast run by a very unusual woman named Hannah (played by Sonya Walger who fans might remember as Molly Cobb from For All Mankind) who knows Jude’s father Gabe, and who becomes a severe ally to Stella and Toni’s cause and the downfall of hundreds of years of alien tech repression, and it’s awesome.

The series starts off a bit soft, a bit small-town life with a weird glitch but that facade soon fades. The cinematography is beautiful, the storyline is damn near perfect, and the cast is just so, so good. My god J.K Simmons is almost flawless as an elderly husband dealing with a wife succumbing to the idea that it’s her time to go so why not do it in the name of science, Sissy (and her younger self played by Lily Cardone) is completely mesmerizing as a mother who has never stopped grieving or searching for something to validate her and Franklin’s pain. Unbelieve performances all the way around, and Night Sky is more than worth your time. All eight episodes are currently available to stream right here.