yooniverse

You have to know it would be an adaptation and not entirely faithful to the book. After all, it has to have contemporary woke elements, like gender and race-swapped characters, millennials pretending to be experts, and diverse casting for a story that originally has almost all Chinese characters. And since there aren't enough key characters for Benioff and Weis, a bunch has to be created to weave more complicated character arcs.

Once you choke down the initial nausea and stick with it for a couple of episodes, the main story straightens out and stays mostly on track. The China-based flashbacks that tell Ye Wenjie's story that triggers the course of events are reasonably true to source and done well, even as the London-based invented mess meanders, while Benedict Wong's character and performance is initially buried and wasted.

The VR simulated world of Three Body is very well done, high budget, and it shows. By the third episode, the show begins to take better shape and redeems itself, and, at least for me, allowed me to assimilate the changes that were made to the source, and becomes watchable. I might even be able to start a drinking game to call out actors brought over from GoT.

Having previously watched Tencent's 30-episode adaptation (that's far more faithful to the book), I almost would have wished that version had the same budget and treatment. But for what it is, this appears to be a quality production worth watching.

I wasn't entirely sure where the show was headed when early reviewers and synopsis described it as a show about an astronaut who returns to Earth to find it different. Through subtle and not so subtle scenes, the story builds its plot device on "quantum physics for dummies" to weave a story where two events can happen or not happen, and happen AND not happen at the same time. Understandably, this can be confusing to follow, and a good review and a bad one can coexist and both could be right.

As with most interesting mysteries, there are secrets being kept that will be revealed. The show incorporates sci-fi horror elements, such as darkness, screams, imagery of the dead, and the terror of the unknown. The main premise seems that those who went out to space and back no longer experience reality as a certainty, in the quantum physical sense.

The acting is fine though a bit uneven, but in retrospect, this could be due to the way the story develops nonlinearly at certain points. But the suspense does start to build up by the third episode, and there is enough there to make me speculate on what's going on. Some may need to suspend a little disbelief early on, on how the entire ISS can be rendered so useless by one impact, as if the minds of multiple space agencies haven't planned for myriad contingencies, module and system isolation and redundancy, etc. But it's realistic enough to get the story going.

This appears to be a decent sci-fi horror suspense thriller in the making, and maintains Apple TV's standard for production quality. I do hope there is more to this than Hollywood's literal take on Einstein's "spooky action at a distance".

After watching the fourth season, I think this anthology needs to come to an end. After what was a tremendous first season, the subsequent seasons have been generally disappointing. It was Harrison and McConaughey's performances in the first season that was magical but they just can't catch the same lightning in a bottle. After a disastrous second season and a salvageable third season, the fourth season looked promising as the mystery deepened, but in the end, it just dissolved into nonsense, devolving into yet another politically correct messaging and "justice trumps law" eyeroller featuring "first" peoples and mysticism, nature and naughty corporate interests, and sprinkle in some LGBT with zero story relevance. How disappointing that Jodie Foster and the rest of the cast put on such unremarkable performances!

This is your typical woke salad production. What a way to run this show into the ground. Skip the show if you haven't watched all the episodes yet.