Sci-fi Saturday: “The Big Nothing” melds sci-fi and whodunit
The combination of the sci-fi and detective genres takes some skill to pull off but this Australian crew succeeds“The Big Nothing” at DUST by Sharptooth Pictures (March 4, 2021, 37.54) “When the captain of an isolated mining station near Saturn is murdered, Detective Lennox is sent to investigate the three remaining crew members. Centered around a series of interrogations and flashback, Lennox discovers that everyone has a motive to kill. With otherworldly threats approaching and the killer amongst them, will everybody make it off the station?”
“The Big Nothing,” a sci-fi detective drama, actually premiered in 2018 as a TV miniseries.
The combination of the sci-fi and detective genres takes some skill to pull off. Both genres feature conventions that producers ignore at the story’s peril. For example, sci-fi should feature science. Of course the story can be a thought experiment like time travel. But it should not be magic (wave a wand and whatever we want to see is true). In detective stories, our detective can be flawed but he can’t be a stooge unless the film is a comedy or he is the sidekick of a serious thinker.
Not to worry here. Our detective is a sharp cookie and the atmosphere of the station mining a precious metal (“neodyneum?”) near Saturn amid serious threats from pirates is well maintained.
Briefly, Detective Lennox confronts a crew member, Mendoza, who would like him to believe that the captain’s recent death while floating out on the mining arm in “The Big Nothing” (as he liked to call outer space) was just an accident.
As it happens, he was already dead of asphyxiation when someone loaded him into his space suit. Try another one.
Mendoza, it turns out, had applied three times to be captain herself — and now she is captain by default. This, of course, is the classic red herring. It wouldn’t be a detective story if things were that simple.
![](https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/Big-Nothing-image-from-IMDB.jpg)
The next suspect, Bayfield, thinks of the space station as his home and was threatened with being sent back to Earth. So he has a motive but… murder?
By the time Lennox interviews the third of only three possible suspects, Operations Manager Callaghan, a very dangerous situation is developing outside the ship.
The characters seem believable, maintaining the story tension without resorting to gimmicks.
One suspects, no spoilers, that we could see Detective Lennox again in a new episode.
Other reviews from the “We are but DUST” files:
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