Pending Train

I remember sitting glued to the the screen over the years of LOST, loving every minute of its mystery and weird conspiracy and undermining western culture with exceptional knowledge of travel in time, and all of the insane and quirky and deceitful characters onboard the plane, who found themselves washed up on the island and had to survive and build relationships and trust and agree to survive and build alliences with the people already on the island and find food and water and keep up hope among each other and assist births and bury the dead and be inventive and strong and compassionate etc.

Pending Train tries and fails. No tension, just stereotypic characters acting stereotypical confronted with very little happening. And maybe they represent an average of Japanese culture, but when no one had moved to find water on day two, I began wondering if the series writers were paid to extend a 3-parter to 10 or more episodes.

This is WEAK and a wast of money and other resources, chiefly human watching this in the expectance that something will improve, but that is not the case. NOTHING happens that will come as a surprise to anyone. Most characters are depicted as outright stupid - as if having lived 20, 30, 50 years under all kinds of pressure in life had not emparted preference, idiosyncracies (apart from those needed to separate main characters from each other) and a general IDEA of how to survive. Like in a universe, where No One has spend hours binging youtube videos to gather an abundence of information about all kinds of stuff related to living and surviving and pleasure and communication and relations to others etc etc. IGNORANTS, basically.

Actually I am a little horrified that this "product" has met some kinds of production standards somewhere in the world. As if its basically a tax write-off, where nobody really cares. A deal, where some actors are introduced, payment for that service met, and production costs used to leverage an abundance of wealth.

Horrible. Just horrible.

So, why 5/10?

I am at episode 6/10, and there are 5 more episodes to go. So, 1 star pr. Episode, basically. But if wont end with 10/10, be certain of that. Ye Gods!

What we have here is basically the Asian version of the TV show "lost", but with an explanation for everything within 1 season of 10 episodes. Japan is hit by an earthquake event that somehow triggers a moving train to be thrown into another world. In this world, the passengers of car 5 must find a way to get on with each other and survive in a strange territory.

I was initially intrigued by all of this, until I realised I would be spending each episode listening to the same piece of music over and over that tries to rouse some emotion out of you.

Characters achieve something towards survival, play music, show show mo emotional faces.

Characters realise a new strength, play music and show emotional faces in show motion.

Characters sneeze, play music and show slow mo faces.

It's terrible and makes up the overwhelming playtime of the show, especially when throwing in a love triangle and people delving into flashbacks of their previous lives. It's even funny when something bad is happening, yet upbeat sounding music starts playing

If it were shortened to just the bare minimum melodrama, it would be alright.... ish. The last 2 episodes do a lot more for me but I can't really spoil much. Was the stock footage at the end necessary though, it's more cheap cheese thrown on top.

I have watched the entire season, to be honest, it was quite boring. I would expect people to fight for survival, but instead, they wait for two days without looking for water and food.

They spend endless time arguing about nonsensical things and always hope to return to normal life, without using their time to build something meaningful.

If you haven't started watching this, I would say there's no need to start watching it at all. You should invest 10 hours in something more meaningful.

It's an interesting topic about traveling to the future, but the script is poorly written, and the actors are not convincing.

The general story and plot line of this series was decent, but even only 10 episodes seemed long and drawn out. The core problem was excessive melodrama.

Several people's backstory is told in narrative detail (regularly breaking the sense of realism). The acting was quite a bit over the top, which is probably the doing of the director rather than the actors. I did like their choice of actors; with what they were given they did a decent enough job.

Fair advance notice: the ending is an anti-climactic letdown. Sigh. You'd think by now producers would know to start with a sharp script or don't do the series at all.

Throughout this entire series I regularly wondered if anyone in 160 people had any real leadership ability or any knowledge of survival at all. The first thing they should have done was organize into subgroups based on skills and taken care of water and food requirements. Not knowing the wildlife situation, quality weaponry should have been on the agenda; perish forbid a hungry bear would have come through the camp. But it seemed there was little or no organization. Some people tried and accomplished a little through emotional encouragement... but aside from the old guy that left early on, none of them seemed to have a clue how to survive in the wild. (Seriously, they're low on food and what they focus on is a bathtub? They're kidding, right?)

The second camp fared better, but they were located in a much better spot than the first camp. They pretty much had water and food handed to them on a platter. Not much to lead there... but at least they had things in order. Even then, some of the things that went on at the second camp were pretty illogical script-wise (sorry, no spoilers).

Overall there was too much angst, too much emo, too little focus on getting their act together and surviving this thing. There are so many other gaping holes in the logic of this that I can't go into them without spoilers. It's an okay series, but the ending is one of those "Really? They're stopping it there?" type of things. Disappointing is the key word. It's like the writers just suddenly ran out of imagination, time, funding, or all three.

This series is an "okay" watch, and some people may enjoy it. But for me it was only mediocre throughout, and a poor conclusion. They could have done a lot better with this unusual and potentially interesting theme.

Barely a science fiction except for the plot and a few rare strange things here and there.

Basic common sense things missing, actors are always fresh, wearing new clothes, survive just fine not feeling hungry for extended period of time. Some character development is the only thing that is not so bad. Strange unnatural emotions such as not being grateful for someone saving your life! Overall not very entertaining, if you have nothing else to do and you are extremely bored you can watch it in 1.5x speed. Don't let "japanese" mislead you, they can be bad too :) Highly doubt there will be a second season any time soon, if at all.