Peacock’s latest miniseries “Last Light” is the newest addition to the “man trying to save the world and his family in the middle of the apocalypse” category and the man we are supposed to root for is Andy Yeats played by Matthew Fox, best known for playing Dr. Jack Shepard in Lost (2004-10) which is most certainly one of the most iconic TV characters of all time. This is a big selling point for the series as Fox is still a big name in the business but he has not appeared in any series post “Lost” so this series is effectively ending his 12-year-long hiatus.

Based on author Alex Scarrow’s novel of the same name, “Last Light” is an energy crisis thriller where a petrochemist tries to save the world from a group of eco-terrorists. The big ticket casting of the show doesn’t end with Fox as it also stars three-time Emmy nominee and Golden Globe winner Joanne Froggat, best known for playing Anna Bates in Downton Abbey (2010-2015), and Tom Wlaschiha who has been in way too many popular shows already from Game of Thrones to Stranger Things to Jack Ryan.

The show starts with a chaotic montage of a lovely man (Fox) in a desert, a woman (Froggat) is frantically looking for her who happens to be blind, and a young girl trying to contact her father on phone in the midst of a riot. The man has a gun in his hand and has suffered some kind of an accident. From what appears to be an insane desert storm, a group of mask-wearing soldiers with guns pointed at the man who puts both of his hands above his head gesturing surrender, and then screams “wait”.

The story goes two days back.

The man is Andy Yeats, a petrochemist who is working for a huge company called Luzrah oil and energy based in the middle-east. The woman is his wife Elena, a lawyer who hasn’t worked for a while to look after their eight-year-old son Sam (Taylor Fay) who is blind. And the young girl is Andy and Elena’s daughter Laura (Alyth Ross), an environmental activist.

The London-based family celebrates Sam’s birthday at a restaurant but right after they get back home, Andy finds out people from his employer are waiting for him and he has to flee to Luzrah immediately to take care of a critical situation. This upsets Elenna as they are supposed to travel to Paris where Sam is about to go through an experimental surgery that has a strong possibility of bringing his vision back. Andy still leaves as he doesn’t seem to have a choice, but promises Sam and Elena that he will be in Paris on the day of the show surgery which is going to be in two days.

Upon arriving at Luzrah Andy gets to know from his employer Khalil that there is something wrong with the oil in their refinery. Khalil is visibly concerned about it and wants Andy’s expertise in this situation. Andy also meets Mika (Amber Rose Revah), a British-Government representative who is there to monitor the situation with Andy. This makes him suspicious as Britain doesn’t take oil directly from Luzrah. While going to the laboratory for testing the sample taken from the refinery; Andy, Mika, and their driver Farooq are ambushed by a group of gun-holding masked men. Mika shoots them and saves them for now and eventually, it is revealed that she is actually an agent of MI 6.

Meanwhile, Elena and Sam reach Paris, and Sam’s doctor Lucas (Samir Boitard) gives him further hope as he is taking admission to the hospital. Very soon though, Elena finds herself in a difficult position as the city of Paris randomly suffers from a huge power outage which makes the hospitals panic and moves their patients elsewhere. Sam is luckily picked up by Lucas. The situation in the city worsens and after realizing that the surgery can’t happen at a time like this Lucas decides to drop Sam and Elena to the airport.

By the time they reach the airport, the air service gets suspended after the world experiences a number of plane crashes in quick succession. Seeing Elena desperate to get back, Lucas decides to take them to the border but that also seems to be closed. The border control authorities seem very staunch and despite Lucas requesting them to let Elena and Sam go through especially because of Sam’s condition, they don’t listen. In this extremely unfortunate moment, Lucas gets hit by a car and presumably dies. A frightened, anxious Ana and Sam flee the scene with a woman named Yara (Farida Rahouadj).

In London, Laura meets a man named Owen (Victor Alli) at a party after a protest. She gets close to him and as the world embraces the darkness of power outage and subsequent energy crisis; the two of them start a relationship. Their bliss doesn’t last much as Laura gets attacked at her home by a man named Ash (Felix Sandman) who claims to know her father. She manages to escape with Owen but while escaping Owen gets shot by Ash and both of them end up in hospital.

Andy and Mika reach the lab and Andy handover the oil sample to get it tested. Two hours later, when he gets back to the lab for the result he is shocked to see all the lab technicians are murdered by someone. Andy spots the murderer, quickly hides and takes the result with him, and eventually runs away with the murderer chasing him. As the murderer almost closes in on Andy, Mika arrives on a motorcycle and rescues Andy quickly. The two of them reach a hideout from where Andy contacts Laura through Mika’s satellite phone and asks her to break into his office to scan a particular document to send him. Mika informs MI6 about this.

Upon receiving the document Andy tells Mika that the oil has been intentionally attacked by a particularly developed bacteria and soon the bacteria will contaminate all the oil in the world. Mika suspects Khalil as the mind behind this. Khalil mysteriously arrives in their hideout and after an intense physical fight, Mika and Andy manage to beat him and run away to take a specially arranged Plane to get back to London. While returning to London in that said plain Mika gets to know from her boss Cameron (Rhiannon Harper-Rafferty) that it was Andy who invented the infamous bacteria twenty years ago.

Elena and Sam find shelter with Yara, who turns out to be a very generous brave woman. With the help of Yara, Elena even breaks into a pharmacy during the curfew in the middle of the night to take medicine for Sam. Eventually, Yara introduces Elena to a man who arranges a pass for Elena to go to Britain through the service tunnels. Elena goes ahead with the said plan and actually succeeds to go through but ends up detained by the British authority. She is sent to a detention center along with Sam but the authority separates the two of them.

After breaking into Andy’s office and successfully sending him the document, Laura goes back to the hospital where Ash again comes to attack Owen and her but they manage to escape again and take shelter in a boat. It is eventually revealed that Owen is actually a spy and both Ash and his work for this group called Apocalypse watch, who is behind the attack as depicted by MI6. Owen does have a change of heart after seeing the radicalness in the action of his group and also developing genuine feelings for Laura.

Ash manages to find them and tries to take Laura with him but Owen fights him, takes his gun, and ends up killing him. A distraught Laura, who by now is aware of both Owen’s betrayal and her father being the person responsible for the invention of the virus tries to contact a Government official to share all the information and eventually meets a high-ranked official named Carl Bergman (Wlaschiha) who works very closely with the British Prime minister.

A mysterious man is introduced in the middle of all these who seems to be the main mastermind orchestrating the whole thing. His face is not revealed.

Soon after reaching London, Andy gets arrested and after getting interrogated by MI6 he reveals it was indeed him who invented the bacteria but he was not alone. He had a partner named Tobias Heller who used to be his best friend and he is more than certain that Tobias is the man behind everything that is currently happening. Tobias has been missing since 2004 and there is absolutely no trace of him. Andy warns Cameron that Tobias is smarter than all of them and manages to convince her that with the help of a team of scientists he might be able to alter the course of the bacteria and stop the attack from happening.

With the help of MI6, he manages to rescue both Laura and Sam from the detention center. Meanwhile, MI6 manages to solve one piece of the puzzle thanks to agent Thompson (Jim High) arresting a man named Stefan Pesivic (Andrej Polák) who turns out to be the person who runs most of the organized, internet-based operation of the Apocalypse watch group. Following this trail, they end up zeroing in on another man named James Bradford which seems to be an alias of Tobias. After reaching home with Elena and Sam, Andy finds Laura is missing, and at the same moment MI6 storms into Bradford’s location only to find out that Tobias is none other than Government official Carl Bergman who has now kidnapped Laura.

Tobias aka Bargman threatens Andy and MI6 with Laura’s life and asks Andy to visit him by following a set of specific instructions. The MI6, led by Agent Cameron and Agent Thompson monitor the whole situation as Andy goes to meet Tobias. Even though Tobias keeps threatening to kill Laura, in reality, he actually tries to explain his activities to Laura, offers her food, and even takes her handcuffs off. Laura, being an environmental activist also seems like considering Tobias and the activity of his group as something substantial instead of completely writing them off.

Andy finally meets Tobias in the same place where they used to hangout years ago and it is eventually revealed that it was Andy’s idea to develop a bacteria which will contaminate all the oil and create a crisis in the world which will eventually make mankind more kind and sensitive towards the environment. Andy tells Tobias it was only an idea he had as a young student and never meant to implement it, especially in the radical manner Tobias did. The two of them engage in a physical tussle while Laura runs away to safety. The MI6 finally manages to reach them and Tobias kills himself in front of everyone. The bacteria attack could not be prevented, after all.

The series ends with a series of inspiring visuals about how the world recovered after the crisis along with voiceovers of Cameron and Andy.

As explained by Cameron in the final five minutes, Tobias’s original plan was to stop Andy from preventing the original course of the bacteria. While Andy was a rational, level-headed individual, Tobias was an eccentric radical person compared to him so naturally, they went separate ways. Tobias did make some very good points and he genuinely cared about the environment and the well-being of the earth. He was willing to die for the cause and ended up doing exactly that.

As it was revealed in the end that the world did face the crisis and then emerge from it stronger and better than ever without causing more harm to the environment, Tobias’s dream actually came true.

Considering all that, it can be said that Tobias did win. His means were obviously wrong and his act of terrorism can never be justified as we see an enraged Laura kicking the shit out of him telling him that people are dying because of what he has done. However, his whole ideology regarding the environment and how people should be indebted to mother Earth and her natural resources, and how politicians and businessmen should be prevented from exploiting it was so on point.

In the past, there have been millions of movies and shows about a man stranded in the middle of an apocalypse-like situation and trying to save the entire world and his family while battling with lots of obstacles. In the future, similar kinds of movies and shows will keep happening as well. The primary reason for that is there is always an audience for stuff like that because, at times, these turn out to be genuinely good and keep you at the edge of your seat. Although, there are many examples of these turning out to be absolute disasters.

“Last Light” falls somewhere in the middle. While it does have certain things going for it, there are glaring flaws as well which prevent it from soaring high. Especially the rushed, badly written, extremely generic finale almost ruins all the good work that was done in the first four episodes.

Let us look at the positives first. The acting in the show is very good, which is not really a surprise. Fox still seems to have it in him, Froggatt nails in whatever opportunity she has here, and Wlaschiha always has this magnetic screen presence and this show is no exception. But the real star here is young Alyth Ross who plays Laura who sets the screen on fire in every single scene she appears. Her acting effort is especially praiseworthy because the writing of the show is very wobbly as most of the characters are half-baked at their best.

The biggest problem with this show is it tries to be too much but while doing that, it doesn’t reach anywhere. It was evident from the beginning that they wouldn’t cast Wlaschiha in an insignificant role so the big twist right before the finale doesn’t really work and seems like a cheap parlor trick. Instead of doing that, the character of Tobias as well as Andy’s backstory with him could have been explored.

While the series does a fairly decent job at balancing the family drama and whatever is going on otherwise in the initial episodes, as time passes it loses its grip. Instead of developing proper character arcs and subplots, everything is rushed in order to reach the painfully generic conclusion which does not yield any satisfaction at all. If the character of Thompson was so important then he should have given space during the initial episodes. Mika was introduced as this big character but during the climax, she was completely sidelined with the excuse of “family” which wasn’t mentioned by her even though she had certain moments of vulnerability.

The ultimate result is a very underwhelming, unsatisfying, close to five-hour of media content about things we are already aware of. In any case, we certainly didn’t need this exhausting lesson in the name of entertainment. Fox does his best to save it and Alyth Ross’s spirited performance makes it tolerable but ultimately the whole thing is very much unnecessary and will be forgotten soon.

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