[2] In the year 2009, a meteor shower above Earth claims the life of American astronaut Jeff Hale (Brad Johnson).

A mysterious cloaked figure pierces his bubble with a staff, pressing it against his forehead, forcefully filling Hale's mind with images to come.

Dazed and in pain, Hale finds himself crawling nude onto a beach littered with metal canisters containing unisex clothing.

Hale becomes close friends with some of his fellow castaways, all of them from different time periods: Alice Liddell Hargreaves (Emily Lloyd); Mali (Karen Holness), a former slave of the pre–Civil War era; and Lev Ruach (Jeremy Birchall), a Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust.

The Neanderthal among the castaways is later killed by a man introducing himself as Lucius Domitus Ahenobarbus (Jonathan Cake), a citizen of Ancient Rome.

While in captivity, Hale and the others meet two more prisoners: Monat (Brian Moore), an extraterrestrial who died—along with the rest of mankind—in a cataclysm in the year 2039; and a young girl named Gwenafra (Nikita Kearsley), the only human in Riverworld reborn as a child.

The original hero and villain are replaced by other characters, the timeline of events is compressed (including the learning of languages which is eliminated entirely), and the nature of the resurrection process and food and clothing production are altered.

The character Loghu is apparently replaced with another female warrior named Mali, and the alien Monat is radically different in appearance and behavior from that described in the books.