Post S2 Finale. Frustrations…
I’m frustrated. I love the show. I love environment. I love a lot of the characters/performances. Where it admittedly lacks pace, it usually makes up for it 10 fold in the end. But boy oh boy did they drag their feet this season... it feels as though it was full of wasted potential. Too much time spent with inconsequential characters (looking at you Shirley and Knox) or on inconsequential plot points (let’s go scuba diving!), while glazing over what feels like could’ve/should’ve been very impactful/interesting/powerful moments (Lukas becoming the shadow/cracking the cypher, Juliette gaining entrance to the Silo 17 vault, etc).
Juliette ventures to a different silo, basically does nothing (aquatic adventures), basically discovers nothing, basically ignores the tech/contents of the vault entirely. She spent the entirety of S1 questioning the status quo, working with George and then Lukas to dig for the truth. Access the hard drive. Uncover the lies. Did she just forget all of that this season when she had access to the entire vault/library? I thought for sure it would’ve been more about her getting into the vault. Learning. Uncovering more of the mystery. Piecing together what’s happening, what will happen back home and how to stop it. Nope, she just randomly stumbles upon Safeguard because Jimmy happens to conveniently remember it…
And again with the 18 vault, when we finally gain access with Lukas and he’s kind of picking up where Juliette/George/himself left off, researching, digging, solving the riddle, etc. They only give us tiny bits and pieces of that whole process? The mystery and buildup of the vaults and tech and what’s inside and we get like 5 minutes of screen time? Frustrating. Lukas is a fantastic character. The actor is fantastic as well. He’s criminally under used.
They have home run character/actor combos in Juliette, Billings, Bernard, Lukas, etc but we spent over half of the screen time this season either swimming, with Simms or with Knox and Shirley bopping around in mechanical.
I want this show to be a 10/10 but they fail to hit it out of the park. It’s frustrating that they underdelivered with the quality of the performances, production and (from what I hear, as I have not read the books) source material available to them.