At the end of the first episode, I actually thought that I had watched the first two episodes until I checked and saw it was only the first. That first one hour episode seriously seemed like two hours of time.
The story premise is really compelling and there are bits of story along the way of the first three episodes I watched that really reward you for sticking with it. But there's no doubt that either the person who directed the first episodes is trying to mess with the viewer's sense of timing or they just don't know how to direct or edit. Or someone doesn't.
So, I kept getting this feeling, like why does this seem to constantly be dragging on and on? I'm normally very patient with a good story. Then in the second episode when Jo's capsule lands, I realized that I spent a full three and a half minutes watching her unbuckle her seat belt and begin to get out of the capsule. Three and a half minutes. That's an eternity for a scene that should have taken maybe a minute max. Before that scene when she's sending messages to her family that she loves them, I noticed it was almost like she was dragging out the lines and repeating feelings two, three, even four times, like it was bizarrely written, acted, directed, or all three. I could literally see Jo pausing briefly between words, seemingly for emotional effect, like she was directed to do that. There were scenes when Jo is reunited with her family where they were so awkwardly long that I found myself wondering if they were acting awkward toward Jo or if the scene was just so long that I was reading too much into what I saw in their acting. Like is Alice actually being awkward around Jo or is the actress playing Alice just standing there trying to act like she's supposed to be standing there staring coolly?
The other strange part about this show is I had to turn on the English subtitles specifically with Closed Captioning. Because there were so many times I wasn't sure if I didn't hear the dialog or if it was just one of the languages I didn't understand and there were no subtitles. They flip flop between languages so often, like Swedish to English to Russian to English to Swedish to Russian, etc. That it often just doesn't make sense, like people don't do this in real life, so what's the point? I got later on that maybe there is a point of something subtle changing related to languages, but it was a whole lot of language immersion for just that one point to be made. There were many times when someone is speaking a language that had no English subtitles, just "speaking Russian" or "Speaking Swedish", like huh? Why? It seemed mostly pointless. Or maybe the point was the character in the scene does not understand, so you feel that by the lack of subtitles or English.
And yet, this is a good show that I will keep watching. By the end I'll know for sure whether it was just poor writing and direction or if there was an actual point in the story as a whole. I'm hoping there's a point for all of this weirdness.
