Review: Disaster lurks around The Rig

Prime Video’s latest offering The Rig is a group of workers on an oil rig

Hyderabad: Get some burly Scotsmen together on an isolated and cut-off oil rig and no hope of getting home whilst being surrounded by a thick, menacing fog, and you have the perfect recipe for dissent and fear.

Prime Video’s latest offering The Rig is a group of workers on an oil rig. The Kinloch Bravo are left stranded after a thick and eerie fog disconnects them from the outside world. Radios, phones and their computer systems all conk off for which there is no explanation.

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To make matters worse, the oil workers come to know that their company, Pictor Energy, is going to decommission all the rigs which will leave the workers broke and jobless.

Iain Glen plays Magsun, the offshore installation manager who has the difficult job of calming the irate workers eager to get home while figuring out a way to get back in touch with the beach aka the mainland.

Emily Hampshire of Schitt’s Creek fame who is Pictor’s rep at the oil rig is a good example of how all companies are heartless at the end of the day; at an oil pumping company, it’s just ten times worse.

She has no qualms sacrificing workers if it means pumping more oil. Her romantic involvement with communications officer doesn’t help matters which lead to resentment among the other workers as he gets more benefits than them professionally.

Things take an awry turn when junior oil worker Baz climbs up the communication tower to fix the radios shrouded in the supernatural fog, but falls from a height. Hutton played by Game of Thrones alumni Owen Teale is adept at stirring up trouble, much to the irritation of the infallibly calm Magsun.

At the end of the first episode, as Hutton (Owen Teale) incites workers into a mutiny on the helipad, a seemingly reanimated Baz tells them it’s too late just as ash begins to fall on them.

By episode three, it’s obvious there is something fishy going on and mother nature is perhaps fighting back against the erosion of her treasures.

As the body count rises, everyone is on edge, eager to get off the shaky structure where disasters multiply. The premise of The Rig is interesting enough, but not enough to hold your attention for six episodes.