Why are we spending a quarter of the last episode recapping the premise for the fifth time?
Impressions:
Let’s start with the non-ending, since it announces “to be continued in season 2,” but this episode was atrocious enough for me to have zero enthusiasm with continuing. Just the first half was horrendous. A minute and a half of clips-montage recap, to be followed by another five minutes of flashback recap in case you’ve made it to the end of the eleven episodes and completely forgot the entire premise of the show. Then the OP plays, so we’re a third into the episode, and finally ready for the big battle against one of the half dozen underlings… but first we need to have another minute of recap and flashback to the last time they had a brief fight. My god. Can we get on with it, or are we just going to sit here recapping and talking for the entire episode? Since the fight starts and we continue to talk over it, I gues that’s the answer. Which it makes even more insulting by insisting that they’re fighting, not talking… as they continue to blather nonstop.
It, of course, unceremoniously ends with being lasered through the face from offscreen and then everybody simply wanders off in order to make time for… you guessed it, more montage and recap. I think the most mystifying thing was how the test-takers just decided among themselves who passed and failed. You’d think a massive disaster and multiple assassinations in the middle of it would have at the very least prompted any input at all from literally anybody else, but nope. Nobody was paying attention to any of them at any point. It’s like all the different little factions each existed on entirely different continents. Oh, but the one guy survived due to… magical nonsense which they handwaved over, even with a “huh, that seems weird and makes no sense” but ran with it anyway. You spend so much time yapping, and decide to instead call out plotholes. What are we even doing here?
