Red Eye (from the BBC, on Hulu) was a bit of a mess. I’m always a sucker for airplane action shows, but they work better as movies, because there’s just no way to sustain tension on a plane for more than a couple hours. Last year’s Hijack (AppleTV) was OK, but it dragged, and it depended on a ton of flashbacks and super-powerful international conspiracies that for some reason chose to mess with a plane flight rather than just use their super-powers for world domination in more convenient ways.

Red Eye does something similar, with flashbacks, ground-based drama, and family entanglements. Nearly all of that it does worse than Hijack, but it’s still kind of entertaining. The thing that really broke the show for me was how breathtakingly stupid everyone was. When a highly-trained MI5 officer needed to miss a detail she wouldn’t miss, she did. She also openly called her CIA boyfriend on a protected line from within MI5, which has to be against about seventy rules. The plane had an increasing number of unexplained gruesome murders, but rather than land the plane, or even search it, they just dithered and made up reasons why they had to keep going to China. The Prime Minister listened only to an obvious skin-crawl-inducing toady rather than listening to any other person who could have told her what was going on. A headstrong reporter with no apparent journalistic training made it her mission to headstrong into danger at every turn, never once pausing to think about how utterly stupid she was being. Sadly, she escaped all the murders and abductions her behavior warranted.

The worst was accused murderer Matthew Nolan (portrayed by Richard Armitage, whom you can see in every other British suspense series playing exactly this character with no nuance or variation). Despite being an accused murder with a proven flight risk, and despite the promo shots showing him handcuffed, he was almost never handcuffed in the show, despite being escorted by an otherwise very competent DC Li. He was also left alone uncuffed, presumably because if he had been cuffed, the show couldn’t happen. Because of this, he was able to run from a terminal gate, through security, out into ticketing. He was able to accost the captain and make an impassioned statement about his innocence. He was able to infiltrate highly secure parts of the plane uncontested. He was seated in first class and was able to order muItiple expensive alcoholic drinks. It was as confusing as if Tim McVeigh had won a $10,000 vacation package to a Chinese prison on The Price is Right.

The various bad-guy plots and the ending were likewise silly and nonsensical. However, I didn’t hate it while watching – only while I thought about what the writers were insisting I accept. Jing Lusi was really great when her character wasn’t forced to be mindnumbingly foolish.