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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.

In a word, intriguing.

Interesting that we have to see a world based in science fact that moves into science fiction. Bravo on world building Messers Benihoff and Weiss, good to see that you learnt your lesson from the, frankly, criminal ending to Game of Thrones.

I won't go through the plot, I will let others do that. But I will say that it is well made, well written and the time jumps are effective because all parts of the story are important and relevant.

Nice to see a depiction of the horrors of the cultural revolution in China that murdered and tortured millions. The parallels of todays woke mind virus are not lost on me.

This episode was really good. I liked it quite a bit it has pretty good performances so far and looks great and at times even stunning. I think the best thing about this episode is the feeling of tension that gets slightly released in the end while not revealing anything too significant. The ending is pretty interesting and leaves me excited to see more.

The episode is also a pretty good introduction to this world and the feeling that something bigger than us is present, that is a good thing. Excited to see where the other episodes are headed and yeah overall i'm pretty suprised since I didn't expect to like this as much as I did.

I found the first episode to be a good intro to a world where history, science, and mystery exists!. From the flashbacks of China's revolution to London in the present day, the way this episode mixes past events with our present, literally science and fiction, was good!

As the episode kept going on, I found myself drawn into the not so much alien mysteries hinted at throughout the episode. Not to mention that the pacing of the storyline literally forces you to binge the entire thing.

One thing in mind is that they maybe should've chosen an older actress for the role of Ye, as in the sixties she looked 20ish so now she should be in her eighties! Other than that, all is good!

Overall a decent adaptation, excellent job on the parts they chose to stay close to the source. It is nearly verbatim from the book. I understand the decision to change some of the characters, my issue is the dialog, I don't know anyone who literally drops profanity every other word. These are supposed to be the geniuses of our time? I don't know Marines who talk like that.

Some of the structure of the story is different, I'm interested to see how it works. Honestly it seemed like their last show fell apart when they no longer had the source material to use, probably a brilliant move by GRR to not tie himself to it.