The Blackout (Season 1)

The Blackout (Avanpost, 2020) is a Russian science-fiction action series you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Egor Baranov, it opens on the night contact with almost the entire planet goes dead, leaving a single lit patch of Eastern Europe untouched. From orbit, cosmonauts can see only that one spot where life still seems to flicker.

A military unit pushes past the perimeter to learn what happened to the rest of the world, and what they find is far worse than ruins. The people out in the dark are alive, but something is steering them like puppets. Behind the silence sits an alien intelligence preparing to invade, and a garrison near Chernobyl has to hold the last line. The cast features Alexey Chadov, Pyotr Fyodorov, Svetlana Ivanova, Konstantin Lavronenko and Yura Borisov.

Spun out of a feature film, the show surprises with a scale rarely seen in Russian sci-fi: large-scale battles, a grim post-apocalyptic mood and solid effects. It's for viewers craving hard sci-fi in Russian who don't mind measuring it against Western blockbusters. Stream The Blackout online on iFILM.