The Killings at Parrish Station: Cosmic Horror Series
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- The Killings at Parrish Station is an Australian crime drama set in 1987, in which detectives Georgia Cooke and Mick Thorne investigate astrophysicists torn apart at an outback radio telescope, with sole survivor Kate Reynolds as the prime suspect in a suspected broader conspiracy involving station owner Callum Parrish.
- The series was inspired by the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident, in which nine experienced ski hikers were found dead in the Ural mountains with severe injuries and inadequate cold-weather gear, an event still officially unexplained.
- The six-episode structure alternates between the 1987 investigation and a modern-day storyline in which the institutionalized Georgia is lured back by protégé Millie to probe copycat murders, with the lure being help locating Georgia's estranged daughter Frankie.
- Ackerley singled out the half-episode depicting what Reynolds and her colleagues endured in the desert as "utterly terrifying," drawing a direct comparison to John Carpenter's Antarctic-set alien-isolation film The Thing.
- The show includes a recurring satirical true-crime podcast called "Crime Sluts" that the reviewer enjoyed but felt was over-deployed in the scene-setting first episode, and she also found the modern-day timeline cosier than the grim 1987 material.
- The series aired to acclaim in Australia and is now being shown weekly in the UK on HBO Max.
Why it matters: For New Scientist's sci-fi-leaning readership, this endorsement positions a six-episode streaming show as a rare fusion of true-crime structure, Dyatlov Pass-style real-world mystery, and body-horror creature design, with Ackerley explicitly citing The Thing as the reference point — giving UK viewers unfamiliar with the Australian run a concrete reason to seek out the HBO Max broadcast.
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