So... Having read the novel, the part in China is amazing, really manages to capture the feel in my opinion, watching the first scene in 1966 I was glued, really good acting from everyone!
That's the first giant star in our binary system.
However, the second, present-day part feels like a mediocre run-of-the-mill Hollywood flick, unlikable and simple characters, the common girl-boss tropes, which belongs more in a university activist sorority than a multimillion dollar production.
This is the white-dwarf orbiting the giant...
Sometimes it felt like two completely different TV-shows, one a serious, thrilling and intriguing one, the second, another "Oo something spooky happening, but did you see that one dumb guy, lol slay"-story.
Note that almost none of these present-day characters are in the novel, yes each are based on book characters, but, how much though... Basically, when the writers, David Benioff and D. B Weiss, follow the story of the writer it's very good, when they get to write on their own the quality plummets as fast as a neutrino going through earth... Now where have we encountered this situation before...
And let's just get this over with. They took Liu Cixin's novel and wanted to adapt it for the screen, and doing so changed character genders. That's fair, can always be interesting to give your own take on things, as long as you do it with a respect to the source material. Is that what D&D does though? Well, not yet... This is just episode 1, so we'll see how it goes. But as of now, just cut, pasting the gender of a bunch of characters and similarly cut & pasting the standard Hollywood girl-boss dialogue is not worthy of praise in any way. If you can't write women in STEM without making them into the standard unlikable Hollywood feminist protagonist, what does that say about your view of women?
Anyway, they setup the main storyline and introduce one or two very interesting characters (mainly Ye Wenjie, portrayed amazingly by Zine Tseng), which will be interesting to see how they adapt Cixin's work in later episodes, the rest though, recycled tropes and common grabs. Not that interesting.
I still give the episode a 6/10 since the parts in China are well done and the main idea presented well.
