Holden Miller, Daniel C. Connolly

Amazon Prime Video, 20 May

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GETTING older is never easy, but ageing couple Franklin and Irene York are able to take refuge from their ailments and frustrations by going out to “see the stars“.

Played by J. K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek, the main characters of don’t just use a telescope to gaze at the heavens. Instead, they descend into a cellar hidden under the floorboards of a shed in their backyard, walk down a dank tunnel and open a bizarre, alien-looking door.

There, they find a chamber that, somehow, transports them to a room on what appears to be another planet. They look out the window at a view that no one else on Earth gets to experience. Or so they believe.

Night Sky, created by Holden Miller and Daniel C. Connolly, starts slowly, spending plenty of time with Franklin and Irene as they go about their daily business in small-town Illinois, with the sci-fi elements of the story often fading into the background.

Simmons and Spacek are such strong actors that Night Sky would have been engrossing simply as a story about a loving couple headed into their twilight years, reckoning with nostalgia and regret. The first episode doesn’t deal with much more than that, at least until the end, when Irene discovers a mysterious man inside the underground portal.

The interloper, Jude (Chai Hansen), both disturbs and invigorates the Yorks, leading them to new discoveries about the device they have been using for the past 20 years without ever questioning it. He also has an agenda of his own, which, just like everything else in Night Sky, unfolds slowly over the course of the first six episodes.

The glacial plot progression can be frustrating, especially when the focus shifts away from the Yorks to other storylines whose connections to the main narrative take a while to coalesce.

The second episode introduces a mother and daughter living in rural Argentina, protecting a strange chapel and reluctantly taking orders from a dangerous secret society. The dynamic between Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) and her teenage daughter Toni (Rocío Hernández) isn’t as emotionally rewarding as the Yorks’s lived-in relationship, but their direct involvement in the vague conspiracy lends their scenes a bit more excitement.

Still, the character development is as incremental as that relating to the plot, and some of the show’s detours look more like dead ends. The Yorks’s nosy neighbour goes through an entire unrelated drama on his own just so he can circle back to poking around the shed and making an actual impact on the plot. There are plenty of scenes of similarly dubious relevance involving secondary characters that contribute to the lethargic pacing.

Maybe there will be satisfying answers in the remaining two episodes of the eight-episode first series, but, for now, Night Sky is more about insinuations and atmosphere than explanations. There are references to “quantum entanglement” and “spooky action at a distance”, but nothing definitive about the origins or mechanics of the Yorks’s portal, or the related projects of the apparently globe-spanning ancient order that Stella and Toni belong to.

There is usually enough enticement to keep watching until the next episode, though, and even when the show seems to be spinning its wheels, Simmons and Spacek find lovely grace notes in their performances.

Night Sky‘s most affecting and engaging moments have nothing to do with intergalactic travel or transdimensional portals, however. No special effect matches Irene delivering a heartbreaking monologue about the death of the Yorks’s adult son, or Franklin comforting his granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan) at her father’s grave.

These characters are on their way to learning the secrets of the universe, but they have already lived long enough to know what truly matters.

Apple TV+

WITH a name like Dr Brain, the title character of the first South Korean-language series from Apple TV+ sounds like he should be a second-string Marvel superhero. Yet while Dr Sewon Koh (Parasite‘s Lee Sun-kyun) does have superhuman powers of a kind, he isn’t a superhero, and no one actually calls him Dr Brain.

The series is an adaptation of a South Korean webtoon in which a neuroscientist develops a way to mine the brains of dead people for their memories, which he can weave into his own. Despite the somewhat absurd premise, this adaptation plays it mostly straight, keeping its story grounded in character drama and sci-fi.

Sewon is a talented and eccentric neuroscientist who has devoted his life to understanding how brains work. He develops a technology called brain syncing, which connects two brains through a silly-looking contraption made of wires, dials and blinking lights that are supposed to have something to do with quantum entanglement. The details are hazy, but series director and co-writer Kim Jee-woon presents it all with due reverence.

Sewon decides that he must be the first human test subject for his invention. So he tasks his assistant with procuring a fresh body from the morgue and hooks himself up to the dead man’s brain.

As we soon discover, Sewon’s motivation for uploading other people’s memories isn’t solely scientific curiosity. He also comes overburdened with a tragic backstory, which began when his mother was killed in a road accident when he was a child. Then, years later, he saw his young son die in a house fire and his wife fall into a coma after a suicide attempt – a condition in which she remains.

The incidents with his wife and son occurred under mysterious circumstances, and soon after Sewon’s first brain sync, he is visited by a private investigator who is also looking for answers about those tragedies. The police soon show up, too, and Dr. Brain morphs into a murder mystery, as Sewon uses his skills to uncover a shadowy conspiracy that is targeting him and his family.

However, the more brains that Sewon syncs with, the more his mind fractures, as bits of the personalities and skills of the subjects take hold in his own brain. At one point, he hooks himself up to his family’s dead cat, which may have witnessed a murder. From then on, he possesses cat-like abilities, allowing him to quickly climb a tree, see better in the dark and land on his feet when jumping from a building. It is an appealingly goofy touch in a series that sometimes takes itself too seriously, given its somewhat outlandish premise.

Kim, who is best known outside South Korea for mind-bending thrillers A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Last Stand), directs Dr. Brain as a mix of mundane police procedural and bizarre head trip.

The middle portion of the six-episode series drags a little, as it focuses more on crime solving and less on brain syncing. But Kim reliably returns to the surreal imagery of Sewon’s visions, regardless of whether he is hooked up to another brain or just receiving some crucial piece of insight. The director also stages some exciting action sequences, including a chase through a mall and a close-quarters fight in an empty cargo transport.

Dr. Brain isn’t quite as out there as fans of Kim’s best-known films might hope for (or as its faintly ridiculous set-up might suggest), but it is still an entertainingly off-kilter take on a murder mystery, with a protagonist who is admirably committed to his own strange ideas.