Mary Wilkes is found 30 miles from her home in the middle of the night in her nightdress with no memory of who she is or what happened to her. Lesley Hahn is visited in the night by what she believes to be ghostly telephone repairmen. By chance, psychotherapist Neil Chase comes into contact with these completely separate women and finds disturbing similarities in their cases - similarities that might be evidence that aliens are kidnapping them to carry out experiments on.

Alien abductees is a popular subject for science fiction on TV for the simple reason that it's set on Earth and doesn't need too much in the way of special effects. That's the case here as the opening episode of this two part drama attempts to concentrate on the human stories whilst still crafting a thriller story around them. It's only partly successful in either case since the two have a tendency to cancel each other out.

The scenes of alien abduction are luridly coloured sequences in which blinding blue light streams in through windows, but doesn't seem to wake up the whole neighbourhood like it ought to, especially at 3 am. The direction here is heavy on the threat and the music becomes strident and overbearing, trying to pummel the audience into a sense of fear.

The main reason for these blatant tactics would seem to be the aliens themselves. Seen only in flashes through soft filters and obscured by backlighting, they are nonetheless not the scariest of creatures, nor the most believable.

The human characters are, though, much better with some solid performances from solid actors. Richard Crenna makes for a solid centre to anchor the whole thing and both Mare Winningham and Daphne Ashbrook make their abductees different and believably rounded characters. Then Steven Berkoff walks in with a typically bonkers performance as a UFO nut to undermine them all.

Scenes of hypnosis start to get repetitive and since the audience know that the abductions are real going through the same process over and over again to gather corroboration might be realistic, but it does get a little dull.