ChungMo

Is this series finished? Hard to tell from the last episode but it does wrap up the main story line.

There's a good, slow reveal mystery here based around flashbacks to a time in the United States in the 1980's not covered much these days. It also revolves around abusive and manipulative men psychologically tormenting women much like your average Lifetime movie but it's better than one of those.

The main problem with this series is that the character we follow isn't the tormented personality played by Toni Collette but her daughter as we follow her frantic path of discovery about her mom's mysterious past. Unfortunately the daughter isn't given enough sympathetic characteristics to elevate her above a 30 year old screw-up. She's initially portrayed as helpless but suddenly becomes a pro at evading professional security goons out to get her. Since, unlike all the other main characters, we are given almost nothing about her (except that she's a drawing artist), it's very hard to follow and care. And the other characters are for the most part flawed people.

Nothing here that hasn't been cribbed from other movies about dystopian futures and/or robots being exploited by depraved humans. Perhaps a few rewrites and some added action would have saved this. The actors are clearly up to the task but not when asked to present such indifferent material. Some good lines are peppered throughout but there's clearly not enough script so the movie has to fill the time with way too many atmospheric shots. This works when we haven't seen something like this before but not when the sources are so obvious and been around for 30 years.

This is possibly one of the best photographed series I've ever seen. All sixteen episodes are gorgeous. However the number of episodes is probably the biggest problem with the series. The show establishes a specific pace by the second episode and never wavers from it. That's fine but by episode 12 it gets obvious that the show makers are starting to stretch it out to fill a 75 minute 16 episode commitment. It gets soapy at times.

The actors are all great and the story, while intentionally confusing at times, is compelling enough to have kept me watching to the end. The show has action but it's not a fast paced show overall so not good for binge watching. If you pace it out, one episode every week, it'll be much more enjoyable.