It's true, I've done only a very little "acting", and what I have done definitely deserves those qualifying speech marks, and I can't claim to have expertise to properly qualify my assessment, beyond the usual years of viewing we all have 'under our belts' just from living post mid-20th century, but I felt almost 100% convinced by Constance Wu here. A very authentic-feeling range of expression and emotion.
With any acting probably it's probably always visible to some small extent at least that the person is saying words they knew they were going to say, and reacting in ways that they're thinking through to some extent in advance, even if in microseconds, and I guess that might be one of the key aspects of good acting, but Constance almost totally gets it here, and beyond that is a completely believable character with totally familiar characteristics of behaviour and relatable reactions, though also specific enough in a way to a certain type of character. And there's a range of stuff here, and some very hard emotions at the end. So, the acting to me was the best so far in this series. I'll see how the later episodes compare as I continue through them.
The story itself is more a personal story than anything else, giving all the context and reason for the reactions and emotion, the picture growing as we progress through the retelling, and the sci-fi element is merely the reveal of the context it all turns out to be happening within at the end, so perhaps not what many watching this kind of series are looking for, and maybe also not the most unpredictable story outside of that, but for what it is, for those less bothered about the sci-fi, and for the performance particularly, worth seeing.
