Episode Reviews

This is a spoilerry review for the whole season.There’s probably a thoughtful show about morality and reckoning with the sins of the past somewhere in here but it’s so deeply buried under arbitrary stylization and a mystery box plot that’s ultimately a cheat, that it merely collapses in under the weight of its own pretensions.Firstly, for a show that’s this reliant on cryptic foreshadowing and a mystery box, the reveal has to justify all that handwringing by the Scientist at the Cook’s invention. How much handwringing, you say? “There’s no way you were able to contain it safely.” she says. “Do you realize how bad things could be if it goes wrong?” ”He’ll take one look at it and think weapon.” “It’s dangerous and for what?” Ok, it turns out the Cook wiped out humanity by weaponizing the Marburg virus so I guess this device could be threatening. The Cook’s invention is ... wait for it ... an electricity generator.Do you feel deliberately misled? Do you feel like they’ve exploited your investment, only to play fast and loose with the details? I do. I went back to listen to earlier episodes because I thought I missed something but there’s really no other way to interpret the quotes that I pulled out. It’s well and truly a narrative cheat. Think about it further and the writing looks even poorer because it turns a presumably scientifically literate Scientist into an irrational technophobe who can’t keep from conflating the evil done by one kind of technology, with all other types of technology. Off the top of my head, bringing electricity to rural areas allowed for safer lighting at night than candles, and refrigeration of foods and medicines. A million things that don’t involve killing or injuring people. To leap from electricity generator to “WEAPON!” doesn’t make sense except in a superstitious irrational way. And it only comes about because these writers were more interested in priming that mystery pump than writing a coherent narrative. Maybe the Scientist will go scream in fear at a mobile phone next. Better still, to be analogous to her reactions in the show, she could scream at a mobile phone if its battery exploded, and then ban vaccines.BTW, once the reveal happens, the Scientist drops any fears or apprehensions for the electricity generator. Almost as if this was only ever meant to be a nonsense fakeout by the writers rather than an important and coherent character trait.This has the effect of making many of the other aesthetic choices look less deliberate and more arbitrary. In this world, the Soldier and the Scientist hate names and they hate dredging up the past, other than to make vague references to how awful it was. The Scientist explicitly wants no ties with the technologies or evils of the past. So every character in this group has no name but instead goes by his/her professions. Except of course, in this world, the Scientist doesn’t do science anymore and the Soldier doesn’t soldier. They’re legacy names. So what does this achieve other than the exact opposite of forgetting? For that matter, despite the show wanting to talk about morality, there's a casual inertness to how they react to situations that have dire consequences. The Traveller is really not upset about the people he spent his entire life with starving to death, even though they represent more than half of the world's known population. What a mess.

Fantastic storytelling!I would love to hear more of this story. Please make a season 2!