Parallel universes exist. Charlie Jade lives in on called the alphaverse, a place ruled by giant merciless corporations that keep a Big Brother watch over a populace made rebellious by poverty and the scarcity of resources like water and food. The largest of these companies, Vexcor, has found a way to link to a universe called the gammaverse, a verdant paradise with unlimited resources that the alphaverse Vexcor intend to exploit. Stuck between them is our universe, known as the betaverse.

Charlie is a private investigator and finder of missing persons. One such case takes him in pursuit of the son of Vexcor's chairman to a facility in the desert. Reena, a rebel in the gammaverse, blows up the facility there whilst the link is active and both she and Charlie are thrown into our universe. They begin a tortuous journey to find a way back to their own universes and to prevent the link from allowing the rape of the gammaverse and the destruction of our own.

Playing with three parallel, but different universes and telling a story of corporate greed, scientific endeavour, brainwashing, murder, redemption and a dozen other themes, CHARLIE JADE is certainly not short on ambition. It's also not short of visual flair either. Unfortunately, the visual flair is to the fore, often getting in the way of the narrative and, in its worst moments, making the plainly obvious bloody obscure. There is an extremely good six or eight hour mini-series here, but it is stretched out to 21 episodes and that is enough to try anyone's patience.

There's nothing wrong with a leisurely pace, concentration of character and a show that looks really good, but there also needs to be a story worth following and characters worth liking. Jeffery Pierce's Charlie eventually emerges as one such character, but it takes a long time and a lot of audiences aren't going to wait that long. Michael Filipowich's 01 Boxer is utterly repellant and extremely annoying throughout, only occasionally revealing hidden depths, providing an original villain, but not one that engages. Reena the terrorist (played with conviction by Patricia McKenzie) goes through a story arc of such utter depression that there are times when you wonder why you are putting yourself through watching the show at all and Tyrone Benskin's conspiracy-chasing Karl Lubinsky is the most humane character, but one whose flaws often outweigh his qualities, leaving the audience to wonder if there is anyone worth rooting for at all. There are so many other characters that whirl in and out that it is often hard to keep up.

There are things to admire here, though. The epic scale of the story is to be applauded (if only it could have been told more clearly), the complex characters not over simplified and the special effects that create the world of the alphaverse all impress. Sadly, the rest is such hard work that whilst you might be glad that you persevered right to the end, you almost certainly won't want to return these universes any time soon.