What’s your favourite science-fiction trope? I’m not talking about subgenres like dystopias, space operas or “punks” of every flavour, but the small moments that keep cropping up. Jumping to warp speed? Waking from cryo-sleep? Unearthing an alien artefact?
Here’s mine: when something awful and otherworldly befalls a group of scientists at a remote research station, it never fails to make me smile. And that’s exactly what happens in a series I recently stumbled upon while scrolling through HBO Max.
Aptly named The Killings at Parrish Station, this is an Australian crime drama, now being shown weekly in the UK. It received quite a bit of acclaim back home, and from the first scene, I could see why. We are thrown right back to 1987, as detectives Georgia Cooke and Mick Thorne arrive at a radio telescope in the outback to find a pile of mutilated… astrophysicists.
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Someone (or something) tore them limb from limb, bar lone survivor Kate Reynolds, who can’t (or won’t) explain what happened. Naturally, she becomes the number-one suspect, but Georgia is convinced there is a much bigger conspiracy at work, one that may involve the station owner, Callum Parrish. Her investigation throws up many fascinating leads, from the station’s past as a uranium mine to an antiquarian book called The Bone Gospel.
The Killings at Parrish Station was inspired by the 1959 Dyalatov pass incident, in which nine experienced ski hikers were found dead in the Ural mountains with severe injuries and wearing little to no cold-weather gear. The strange circumstances of their death, though still unexplained, are commonly thought to have been a reaction to a possible avalanche.
I enjoyed the send-up of a grimy kind of true-crime podcast, via snippets of woefully titled Crime Sluts
You don’t need to worry about such a mundane explanation in this series, however. The case is a pulpy, Lovecraftian nightmare – and one that might just happen again.
Alongside the investigation, we flash forward to the modern day and what happened to Georgia in the intervening years. We learn she has been living in a mental health institution ever since the Parrish Station killings, which have gone unsolved, and neither Georgia nor Mick ever worked for the police again. Her protégé Millie, now a seasoned detective in her own right, lures Georgia back to investigate a series of copycat murders by promising to help her locate her estranged daughter, Frankie.
That’s a lot of action for a season with just six episodes – and sure enough, there are parts that work better than others. I came to enjoy the show’s send-up of a particularly grimy kind of true-crime podcast, seen via snippets of the woefully titled Crime Sluts, whose hosts discuss the Parrish case in lurid detail. But I could have done with less of it in the key scene-setting first episode.
Overall, the modern plot line, while charming, can feel like it stumbled out of an altogether cosier show. Whenever we see the older Georgia grumbling about today’s ultra-sophisticated photocopiers or the fact you can’t smoke indoors any more, it’s pleasant enough, but you’re eager to get back to the nastiness of 1987.
The series is never better than it is in the half-episode stretch where you finally get to see what Reynolds and her colleagues went through in the desert. It’s utterly terrifying.
In fact, parts of The Killings at Parrish Station (especially when Reynolds is on screen) are straight out of The Thing, another eldritch nightmare about researchers facing a deadly extraterrestrial threat. If, like me, you take perverse pleasure in watching unfortunate things happen to intrepid scientists, then I can whole-heartedly recommend this slice of cosmic horror.
Bethan also recommends…
The Thing
John Carpenter, On demand
This electrifying film begins with a helicopter chasing down a dog that is running across Antarctica, for reasons unknown. Realising just what was going on – and how gonzo this film about a group of isolated researchers was going to get – was one of my all-time favourite cinema experiences.
Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor at 51¶ŻÂţ. She loves sci-fi, sitcoms and anything spooky. Follow her on X @inkerley
