Have just watched the first 90 minutes of this (spoilers)

Oh. My. God. What a mess.

So we kick off with Helo from Battlestar Galactica in a bar, which duly gets blown up by a suicide bomber (Oriental rebel type, rather than risk alienating any Muslim viewers). Bomb takes out him, his girlfriend and her mates (consisting of an old gay couple and an old straight couple).

Helo then wakes up in an admittedly pretty decent visualisation of the scene from To Your Scattered Bodies Go where Burton woke up pre-resurrection, and at this point I think "ok, wrong character, but nicely executed". Right up until the point that Bit from Tron turns up and starts buzzing around. Then an Ethical turns up. Ethicals, inexplicably, look like refugees from Blue Man Group. Ethical then phasers away a bracelet Helo is wearing. (Later turns out this is a "grail band" which you need to operate the grail stones. You put one of these up to a grail stone and you get a little container full of grub. The "chosen" ones don't have grail bands. Nice one, Ethicals - make your agents dependent on the kindness of strangers from day one. But I digress).

Helo then wakes up underwater. In the same clothes he was wearing when he died. Errrm, right. And to think people on this board were worried about resurrectees not having hair.

He swims to the bank of the river - and the first person he meets is the woman from the old couple in the bar. Ok, fine, we'll go with that. They make their way to a grailstone - where there are already wooden huts etc. We then round up, get this, pretty much everyone who had been in the bar when it went kaboom apart from Helo's missus. At this point the phrase "epic fail" is starting to wander around my mind.

Helo does obligatory "have you seen Jessie" bit, asking random people. By this point it wouldn't have surprised me if he'd been able to whip a photo out of his pocket. He bumps into Richard Burton (who it would seem is being set up to be the series villain. Yes, you heard that right.) Turns out Burton is also looking for Helo's squeeze. Burton kicks Helo's arse.

We then have Burton confronted by his own member of Blue Man Group where they fling in statements like "the Second Chancers might have already got to him". By now it's seeming like they took Farmer's original books along with a few scripts from Lost, flung them in a blender and chose random phrases.

I was just about to give up on it when the infonugget emerges that not everyone has been resurrected at the same time. Hmmm. Interesting plot twist, which I suppose lets them get away with having our main character resurrected into a Riverworld that seems to be already have the "rules" of the world already known by everyone except our intrepid main character, and houses, huts, technology etc being already extant. So I stick with it.

It's getting monotonous now. Basically Francisco Pizarro turns up as another villian, proceeds to enslave people. It emerges that Pizarro and Burton are waiting for Sam Clemens to turn up in the Not For Hire. Gritting my teeth I repeat to myself "but we've come into the story late, not everyone was resurrected on day one, so maybe the Hire could have been built by now".

Oh, you know that other people have mentioned how there are horses in Riverworld? They're robot horses. We find this out because one of them gets sliced open. Yes, robot horses. This is going on the Sci Fi channel after all. Of course we have to have robot horses. Consider yourself lucky they didn't have Cylons (well, Helo is in it, and did I mention that Gaeta is the young version of one of the gay guys?).

The Not For Hire turns out to be this ramshackle thing, hardly the cross between the QE2 and a riverboat that I always imagined. Budget cuts, you know. I suppose it was cheaper to rent out this crappy old boat than to CG a credible Not For Hire. Oh, and it isn't powered by a batacitor. It's powered by a mini warp core type thing that one of the ethicals gave to Sam in return for some unnamed future favour. We have no Joe Miller - instead we have this African guy - turns out he used to be a taxi driver - as the head of the Hire's marines. But hey, African feller's brother was a soldier so at least military acumen is in his family.

We have a bit of a battle. Japanese nun-type woman who I've not mentioned yet but latched onto Helo's group fairly early on suddenly turns into an extra from Kill Bill, turns out to be a samurai, and kicks Pizarro's arse. Burton abandons Pizarro. Clemens turns up at last knockings and shoots Pizarro in the back. Hoorah. The forces of good have triumphed.

We get back to the Not For Hire where Burton's turned up and got the jump on everyone. He steals the boat and kills Helo for good measure. And that's basically the end of the first 90 minutes.

Ok, there were some bits I liked. As I said, I liked the resurrection chamber look. And having staggered resurrection does have advantages for TV. You sacrifice the en mass "WTFOMG?!" opening scenes of To My Scattered Bodies Go, but you can jump straight in with your main character straight into plotlines already on the go, and not have to spend the first few hours setting the scene. You can learn things along with the main character in exposition from other characters who've been in Riverworld for longer, which makes for a faster pace. This is a miniseries, after all - otherwise we'd have taken half the time available to get through resurrection day. I can see the logic of that choice.

But what they did with it? Bleaugh.

Who knows, maybe it'll settle down in subsequent episodes. Maybe the point was to get us somewhere analogous to the halfway stage of the books early on, and later hours will be more authentic. But they could have done this so more better. And there is so much wrong with what I've seen so far that I don't have much confidence.

So, people - fans of PJF's work. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And pray to the Ethicals that producers can salvage something from this. Because after the attempt in 2003, if this doesn't work, unlike the resurrectees, there won't be a second chance for Riverworld on TV.