Night

Big reveals and great action just after the halfway point for the series. A much stronger episode than previous.

This episode will leave you wanting more, but not in the same way the previous episode did.

The writing was better this episode, although some moments and lines still fell flat.

The episode was shocking, exciting, and built on the previous 4 very well.

There is some more mystery added, for all the mystery revealed.

If you stopped watching after episode 3 I highly recommend smashing 4 and 5 together. I'm now eager to watch the rest of the series, where before I was watching for the sake of it.

I'd give this somewhere between a 7 and an 8, by far the strongest episode in the series.

The number of moments when characters did things that made no sense (or omitted to do things they should have) was probably in the 20 or 30 range, but you know what? I don't care. At least something happened. The big reveal happened, and it was terrible, but you know what? I don't care, because at least something happened. The previous four episodes, nothing happened. Well, to be fair, there was a fire and a bunch of witches died, but we don't even know how/why/who did it, so it falls in the 'nothing happened' category. Finally, people do stuff in this episode. And most of it was dumb, but i don't care. Substantial improvement, and i had fun.

The Good:

Finally something interesting happened in the episode! I won't spoil it, but there was at least some sort of action and conflict that was engaging. Far more entertaining than people walking through a forest for 30 minutes.

Additionally, the choreography of the fight scenes in this episode were actually quite good for the most part. Much stronger than Asoka, in this episode.

The Bad:

Amandla Stenberg playing a twin of herself. This was written as a key plot element of the story (however cliche) but she's just not a strong enough of an actress yet, to make this convincing. She would have been fine for one role or the other, but falls pretty short to play herself as a different person. Twins are very different people. She plays both the exactly same, but with a different haircut. You needed someone with a strong and dynamic range of acting skills to pull this off properly, and I don't think there are too many actors or actresses that could do that. They should have added in a 2nd actress to play either a twin or a sister. Or even just ditched the twin idea to begin with. It was rather unnecessary imho.

The Ugly: The CGI in this is like early 2000s Doctor Who. Really low budget look and feel. The general sets are also very Star Trek (80s series) quality. Really surprising given the extraordinary budget.

Overall, credit where credit is due, so I gave it a 6/10. This was the most interesting of the episodes to date, and really I'm left thinking this should have been the opening episode of the series. Everything that led up to this episode was slow and so much of it unnecessary. But this episode had challenges too. Still was far better than the other 4.

Everyone is giving props to Leslie & Disney for this episode. If you knew anything about how action movies are made these days, you'd know that all action is subcontracted through specialists. So Leslie Headland has no say in the action choreography. Disney was smart to hire Christopher Clark Cowan to be the action director / designer. And because this whole episode was basically light saber and hand to hand fighting, it basically meant he directed the whole thing. And everything he did was great.

But Leslie's horrible leadership still bleeds through. The entire episode was filmed on this horrible jungle set, never truly looking like a real exterior. The dialogue was still cheap and corny, the twists were still predictable. Get a real director and pair them with Christopher Clark Cowan and we'll finally have something great.

Other than the fight scenes, everything else was pretty unbearable again. The dialogue has been consistently bland and flat throughout these five episodes, and the monologues in this specific episode were just uninteresting. Like he was trying to cook, but I personally did not think he cooked. I would also say that 90% of Osha's dialogue within the last two episodes consisted of her and someone else walking through the woods, them stopping in their tracks, and then her just spewing out a bunch of nonsense.

I also have not been a fan of the editing of this series, specifically with the transitions from scene-to-scene and with the music. I don't know why it just feels off every time there's a switch in scenes (don't know if anyone else feels the same way). Even the fight scenes contain pretty decent choreography, but the editing just does a number on it imo.

Overall, definitely the best episode so far. I still find the dialogue and characters to be lackluster, but I guess it was a step in the right direction (maybe, idk)