Honestly, if this series started on 6th episode or if the pace of the action was the same throughout the whole show rather than only during second half, I’d gladly gave it a ten point score. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. For the first half of the show we can observe festival of very poor CGI (honestly, couple of times I had to check when this series was made, because for a moment I assumed that in late nineties) and very two dimensional characters. I call them “one line characters” these are the ones, that you can describe only by one line. For example “This is John, he’s the drone guy”. And we have around five characters like this introduced in one scene. This is luckily corrected on the second half of the show (two dimensional characters, not the CGI, this is poor till the very end) but I felt that it was way too late for that. And shame, because on about 6th or 7th episode this show starts to be amazing. We finally get some depth to the characters, action gets on its track and motives are finally clear.
I’d get back to the beginning of the show once again. Let’s talk about how this show is made. Because for some time we have a plethora of singe scenes that seemed to be cut in half. And there’s like a hour long break between those halves, which results of situations like this:
In first half of the scene enigmatic character enters the restaurant. The owner is suprised, since she haven’t seen him for ten years. We don’t see the face of the character, he doesn’t say a word. Cut.
Second scene, about half of the episode later, we finally see the face of the character, he sits by the table and orders. Brother of the owner explains that this is that guy who haven’t beed visiting the restaurant for a couple of years. We get the name. How it’s relevant to the story? It really isn’t, we get a bit of more explanation at the end of the series, but it’s not so important to make viewer figure out who this guy is for half of episode.
Plus he have a lot of characters to follow, a lot of threads that happen simultaneously (or at least that’s how they’re shown), we have characters from the past and their present versions. I was watching it on Rakuten, where you can turn on comments from the viewers, and trust me, not only me had problems to follow what’s happening on the screen.
The problem is, that if I would have some more of social life or we wouldn’t be in the middle of the pandemic, I’d decide that my time is too precious for this. And that would be a big mistake, because last five episodes are amazing. At this point we finally have some character development (finally we can clearly see who’s who). Scattered pieces of the plot finally come together. All lines are connected. And even silly moments don’t hurt so much (I mean fighting using Samsung phone, because you know, product placement, we need to show how durable this thing is).
To finalise, I can say that it’s either great show with poor beginning or average show with very good ending. I guess it all depends of which perspective you’ll get.