MossMan

I'm not sure why it gets so much hate in these reviews. In my opinion they have faithfully recreated the games from the drama series to surprising effect and the tension between the players is closer to the drama than I would expect as well.

My only minor complaint (watched up to the penultimate episode) is that they leaned too much on the backstabbing nominate-my-enemy type games for the later episodes - I would have preferred mostly chance/skill/strategy games with just a couple of nasty backstabbers thrown in... It would have had more impact when it happened, that way - instead it did feel a bit too reality-show towards the end.

Looking forward to the finale!

What I liked about the premise and the first two seasons was when nice little "what-if" ideas were teased out and developed. As a fan of sci-fi realism and world-building - and as an aerospace engineer - I tried to overlook some of the more annoying soap-opera and personal-drama aspects and concentrate on how the real events, personalities, tech and concepts I knew about were being woven into an interesting story.

This first episode of season three started out a little clumsy and muddled but I kept my hopes up that the slightly awkward character re-introduction and exposition was just necessary to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately though, things took a turn for the disaster-movie worse instead. Without going into spoilers, I will just mention that every tired and predictable trope was ticked off - countdown of doom, swelling of music, heroing of heroes, trashing of engineering realities... so instead of being excited I was bored out of my mind and heading to the IMDb reviews page instead.

I remember rolling my eyes during the season two opener as well, and things certainly improved following that one, so I just hope the "drama" is dialled back a bit in subsequent episodes of this season too.

Addendum: I'm now watching season 4 and in my opinion they have un-jumped the shark in a big way! I'm happy to say I am enjoying the genuinely intriguing stories and - despite the season opener again having an "action movie" bent - so far there has been no eye rolling silliness or soap-level drama. Phew!