4 reasons Netflix was right to cancel 1899 (and 1 reason they were wrong)

Reason to cancel 1899: None of the characters are worth investing in

You can watch the entirety of 1899 multiple times and still not care about a single person on the haunted ship. Not only do they lack depth, but very few of them contribute to the forward momentum of the story. Mostly they look frantic while running up and down corridors. Yann Gael’s Jerome can be considered an exception.

For a story to be successful, viewers need to be emotionally invested in at least one character. They might not be the lead; they might not even be one of the “good guys.” But they need to be someone fans can root for. If a ship full of tranced people begin to kill themselves by jumping overboard well into the series and you do not feel a single emotion for any of them, you know there is something inherently wrong.

Reason to cancel: No resolution to any of the story arcs

After sitting through eight confusing episodes, the only resolution we get is, “The whole thing is a simulation.” Maura is the one who created it in order to cope with the sickness (death?) of her son. Just when you think you might finally get some answers, Maura wakes up in a spaceship in the future and you are left with more questions.

None of the individual character arcs gets any resolution either. The only thing that connected the people on the Kerberus (or the spaceship Prometheus) was that they were all running away from something. We get the idea at the end that they all signed up for Maura’s passion project to escape their pasts. However, none of it ties together by the end of the first season. For all we know, the people on the shapeship are completely different characters from the people on the ship-ship.

Perhaps this all would have been resolved in a second season, but making eight one-hour-long episodes and not fully explaining a single storyline on the assumption that you’ll get to do it later is not a good strategy. 1899 builds up too much only to sweep it all under the rug by the end, because “nothing that you have seen has to make sense because it’s all a dream.” Fans end up feeling duped and cheated out of their investment.