Countdown

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.

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.

It's definitely got me hooked, it's a book I read a little while back, and enjoyed, I had it explained to me by a Chinese former colleague, who detailed the significance of the book, and how big the theory was in China.

You'll have to concentrate, as there are lots of subtitles to read, and you'll need to, remembering how the story unfolds, there's a lot of detail in the early sequences.

I was a little surprised to see it actually brought to life, but it works very well, if I had one little gripe, only, it's that The British segments are so wonderfully English, we're straight back to the 1980's with those rounded English vowels, it jarred in comparison to the harshness of The Chinese segments.

I don't want to be critical, because this was a very, very fine start, it's unsettling, it's eerie, it very much feels like Judgment day is landing.

8/10.

It's no secret that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss' next project has been both highly anticipated and met with a lot of skepticism after how they ended "Game of Thrones." In the end, that show's downfall doesn't seem to be entirely their fault, but mostly because of the direction that the story was going that simply didn't work, so I was looking forward to seeing what they would be doing when adapting a big sci-fi novel instead. And while the first episode doesn't necessarily give us a lot, it does set the stage for an epic journey that has a very solid starting point.

At first, this show seems like it's definitely taking a pseudo-realistic approach to its subject matter, bringing in real-life events to enforce its narrative. Benioff and Weiss have often signaled that they have an interest in history (just look at "The Confederacy"...), so it doesn't come as a surprise. However, the opening sequence's impact on the larger show will have to come later. And maybe it's just the skeptic in me, but they're dealing with some big things in this that it feels like they're doing what they did with "Thrones," and that does leave me a little worried. However, looking at this episode for what is in it, there's a lot of good in this. The cast is already doing some good work, starting us off with a big emotional episode. None of them are sticking out properly, but it will be interesting to see where they all go. They are already setting up certain stakes for the characters, which may be why the character played by Benedict Wong is already shaping up to have the most interesting story. It also seems like the show is playing around with time, and I don't know if this will lead to a twist down the line, but if it does, I have a pretty good idea what it will be. The ending left us off with a lot of promise, and I'm actually kinda excited to see where they go from here, and hoping that the writing is good enough to bring us home satisfied.

"Countdown" starts off this new project with a lot of potential, although the skepticism is still there because of how they finished "Game of Thrones." However, on this episode alone, the bar seems to be set pretty high and the cast seems excellent and up to the task of bringing this mind-bending story to life.

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.