marcus-19743

Was a really intriguing concept from the beginning. The alternative history with a good amount of references to actual historical events was handled well. We had the whole 'what if' scenario that has been tackled before in other shows and movies, but it was done quite subtly in many ways. Enough differences to have it make sense, but nothing too drastic. It's not as if being first to the moon completely defined the USA in the late 1960s and into the 70s, but the show portrays a the world in a slightly different light because of it. We also have a few little things that show how we could be following a different timeline where even things completely unconnected to the moon landing may have played out differently. The whole of the first season was generally pretty good. Yes there was some wooden acting in places, and a couple of bits of poor CGI, but on the whole it was decent. Season 2 maintained that level whilst moving forward in time by a decade. Unfortunately from the beginning of Season 3 it began to lose its way. It began VERY badly with the farcical Ep1, although thankfully recovered somewhat from Ep2 onwards, but continued to become more and more like a daytime soap opera than a (space) drama, and it got progressively worse into Season 4. Some of the character development was very questionable, the standard of acting generally fell, even from some actors that had thus far been fairly decent, and some of the dialogue was laughable. Even the sense of it being an alternative reality was now lost, with 90's technology that we know, now suddenly replaced with tech that would seem current or advanced even today, as if the intensified space race had forced humanity to accelerate its development of all technologies, not just those related to Lunar and Martian travel. Overall I enjoyed the show, but feel a bit disappointed by the third and fourth seasons.

So here we are at the end of the season, and I'm not really sure why I bothered to be honest. On the whole it's been reasonably enjoyable, but there have been so many moments of ridiculousness, and things that almost turned it into a silly kids TV show. It's also been full of rather shallow and uninspiring characters.

The season started promisingly enough, but after the first few episodes it generally went downhill from there, with frankly ridiculous things like star whales, horse sized wolves, 'cute' little shelled characters and zombie stormtroopers. We ended up with a much feared 'villain' that actually seemed more like a boring (but blue skinned) accountant than a galaxy conquering warlord, and had 'heroes' that seemed impossible to kill or injure despite being bombarded with countless lasers and explosives. But then it seems the bad guys (even the zombie ones!) were even more inept than we're already used to!

After all of the fan complaints about the lack of Jedi stuff (i.e. Lightsaber battles) in Kenobi, which was another train wreck of a show, we seem to have had way too much this time round. Lots of boring and pointless fights that looked so stilted and lame, with no real sense of jeopardy over whether our 'hero' would make it through unscathed. All of the clichéd sequences with the pauses and stares and stances, all of the lame mid fight dialogue and posturing. All ending up with the result we expected all along.

And to cap it all off we're presented with the 'cliffhanger' ending that leaves more questions than answers, whilst also knowing that a second season is far from being confirmed at this point. Having said that, even if a second season isn't commissioned, I can't say I'll be too disappointed, as I have no real desire to find out what happens next anyway!

In fact, now I've put my thoughts into words for this review, I now feel I was too generous, so I'm off to knock another point off my rating for this episode! 4/10.

I'm just glad we have more Andor on the way at some point to satisfy my Star Wars Galaxy interest, with a mature, well developed plot and characters with depth!