Right after Dexter finished, UK’s FX Channel had a problem.
They needed a slightly off beat, adult oriented programme to keep that timeslot busy. Enter Chalie Jade.

I didn’t know much of Chalie Jade, other than it “looked right up my street”. But first impressions didn’t get me very far, and now, some 12 episodes in, I am still not sure about it, however compulsive it seems to be to me. And it doesn’t help that Xmas got in the way and my Sky+ decided to stop recording the sodding thing…thanks Sky+. You can already chop the end off a programme with ease…now you just demonstrate a complete lack of intelligence! But that’s another story…

Charlie Jade is a sci-fi drama set across three dimensions; Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Charlie, it turns out, get trapped in the Betaverse (aka our world) and is looking for a way home to Alpha. The only thing stopping him is that he doesn’t know how or why he got here. He ends up battleing a mega-corp called Vexcor which are determined to rape other “verses” of their natural energies, while becoming entangled with a psychopath by the name of 01 Boxer. Which brings me onto…

…the names! 01 Boxer (or Oh-One as he is known) is just one of many real stupid names emplyed for characters in CJ. It’s easy to suspend disbelief for a while, but this is not Star Wars. The realms of science fiction detailed by Charlie Jade fit into the more distopian future/Blade Runner/Battlestar Galaactica than Star
Trek. As long as oyu can suspend the writers complete lack of intelligence into character naming….then you will be fine.

The central characterisation are played very well, but the complex back story is not given enough time to breathe. For example, Jade has a girlfriend in the Alphaverse called Jasmine. It alludes to the fact that she is a second class citizen of sorts known as a C3. It only gets explained around 8 episodes in that a C3 is a lower class of human…up to this point I thought she was a replicant type being.

All in all, some very good telly.