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As others have said, this is more a fairytale than a realistic drama, we never really get a sense of how she got to be so good that she wins so often and so easily. There's nothing that convincing about her drug-induced hallucinations of the chess board on the ceiling or her simply reading tons of books about chess. Also, chess players have commented that at the top championship levels there should've been many more draws because players are so closely matched up there. Then there's the fact that chess itself is way overrated, it shouldn't be such a big deal that a woman can play chess as well as any man (you could say the same thing about Tetris or whatever). Anya's acting is also overrated, she's not showing much emotional range until the last episode, mostly she's just sitting around poker-faced, looking pretty in some well chosen era-appropriate supermodel outfits, spending time in expensive hotels. Also a bit disturbing how casually they gloss over her substance abuse or the fact that chess was essentially a dissociative refuge from her childhood trauma. But other than that, it was entertaining enough for a 7/10, I'll give it that.

Brilliant. So glad I found this on a "watch if you liked The OA list", it fit what I was hoping for almost perfectly (much better than Russian Doll). (It's a shame it's so hard to find this title on here, after the diphits running MC decided to bury everything made by Netflix in the search results.)

Amazing sci-fi, considering the other garbage we're being proposed these days like MandaLOLian, Another Life, Away, bla bla yadda yadda. Yes, it's heavier on the drama than 12yo future-tech-fetishists would prefer, but that only makes it more compelling, because the acting is world class. Absolutely can't wait for S2, already watched S1 a second time to refresh my memory. How anyone is rating this anything less than an 8 is blowing my mind.

As a first-contact with this franchise, I loved it and want to see more. Best part was the CGI and how much it was used to do mages justice, with large-scale/epic spells (like in Warcraft), not micro-magic BS like in Harry Potter or other kids' Fantasy shows. Then Cavill was impressive for being able to play a very different character, more sombre and brooding than what he's been famous for. Good and very good acting all around, some weaknesses in the dialogues here and there, some strange choices in the storytelling (mainly the timeline treatment, though I did also enjoy having the challenge to piece it all together - might be something that makes me rewatch it before S2 comes out). Greatest disappointment would be how high my expectations went after seeing the first part of Yen's evolution and finding out online that she's supposedly a very powerful sorceress, only to see her presented as... slightly above-average on confidence, knowledge and power for the rest of the season. Maybe they're reserving the more impressive Yen for later, when we start to get bored of seeing Geralt using the same strengths over and over. Oh, and one of the strongest points of this first season is a certain 1-on-1 swordfight scene that was better than any swordfight I'd seen in the last ~20 years.

Watchable with a little fast-forwarding here and there, but oh boy was this a disappointment vs. S1 and S3, it was even weaker than the previously weakest season 2. Too many characters, too many threads, too many slow expositional scenes, no satisfactory conclusion anywhere in sight.

Overall I'm keeping it an 8/10 because of how much I liked S1 and S3 and because S2 wasn't bad, but oh man did they drop the ball with S4. Too many threads and none of them ended in any satisfactory way. I hope the show recovers from this.

Half of these were excellent, the other half decent or (sub)mediocre. Maybe I'm not **** greatest fan because I liked some scripts that apparently have been changed vs. the original, but I really liked what the screenwriters and the whole production team did here with "The Hood Maker", "Real Life", "Human Is", "Autofac" and "Safe and Sound". As for the rest, I was OK with "Impossible Planet" and "Kill All Others", and could've easily lived without the remaining 3 episodes. Just please stop comparing this to Black Mirror, it's not the same thing. It's a bit more like Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, more fantastic and out there, not so anchored in today's and the near-future's technologies and social worries like Black Mirror.

Would've finished it in one sitting but eventually I started to realize morning was coming soon, so I left the last few episodes for the next day. Very well made, great mix of sci-fi, comedy, drama and a bit of mystery. I thought there wasn't going to be much to keep me subscribed to Amazon after The Expanse, Picard (though that one disappointed) and Psycho-Pass, but this show here is a definite winner.

Started out very enjoyable, but in S4 it got seriously slow and depressing, I think they brought someone on board to make some strange artsy-fartsy contemplative scenes zooming in on god knows what detail and sticking with it for minutes at a time, having us literally watching the grass grow. I almost lost all hope in this series after S4. But it got better in S5, at least so far. It still has those annoying slow scenes and deeply depressing moments, but it's not made up entirely of that kind of stuff, it's back to focusing on plot development and worthwhile scenes. And Mike action. Gotta have the Mike action.

E4: And that is how you make a single Westworld episode better executed, more impressive and memorable than an entire season of Picard. E5: And that is how you shoot yourself in the foot, making an unnecessarily slow and trippy episode that presents probably one of the most important developments in the whole season in a completely anticlimactic and disappointing way. Like, WTF. You give us this, after the glory that was E4? Who the hell wrote this? Did they borrow the artsy-fartsy-borefest specialist from Better Call Saul for this? (But yes, still a 9+ so far, because the levels to which the world and the story have expanded this season are staggering.)

Overall, this is a disappointment. Once I accepted, based on the trailer, that this would be yet another dark and conflict-focused show, I did like what they came up with as the focus of the conflict, because it was a new type of being, which is good for a "Star Trek". And I allowed myself to be pleasantly surprised by the way they used somf of the old ST technology we were used to in some new ways (like for a certain fight scene). But beyond that it's been disappointment after disappointment, and I haven't been able to watch most episodes without some fast-forwarding. First of all, most of the character writing and acting is bad, everyone's "too cool for school" and throwing snappy replies all over the place, just like the totally obnoxious characters from Discovery. Picard himself is unrecognizable, there's no serious and dignified attitude anymore, he never wears the uniform, never stands up for Starfleet's high principles, spends time with some ragtag band of misfits, which is completely un-Picard-like, and worst of all he's the focus of some strange "Picard Cult" the writers have created INSIDE the universe. WTH is that?! There was never any premise for that in TNG. He was just one of many Starfleet captains with healthy attitudes and principles, there was no reason to make him out to be this great hero that everyone knows about. He's a great hero for US THE VIEWERS, not in-world! It's very tiresome to keep seeing characters give all kinds of extreme reactions on finding out who he is, that was never what Picard was about - being a galactic rock star. Really the only likeable character in all this is dr. Jurati, because she has some realistic non-superstar modesty and is well acted. The main female character, while she does have some humility, is not well acted at all, the actress they picked does not have enough emotional range, even though she's almost passable because she's at least not acting like a superstar all the time. And while I fully expected there to be some throwbacks and a conversation or two about the good old days, it turns out that there's almost no episode without some sitting around the table scene, having a boring conversation about how things used to be and irrelevant stuff that happened in the past that does nothing to move the plot forward. This is just bad writing. Then on the tech side they also failed to make this a "Star Trek", with the most annoying part being the ship interfaces, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the LCARS we used to know. I could forgive the fact that they went with this popular stupidity going around these days of making the GUIs transparent and therefore unnecessarily hard to read, but they could have at least preserved the general "okudagram" look, to make them feel like "real Star Trek interfaces" to us TNG fans. But no, they threw that part out as well. Bottom line, there is no trekking, nobody's seeking out new life and new civilizations (we're practically served the new life on a platter in the first episode), and this is not Star Trek. Thank Seth we have The Orville, which I can't wait to see continue.

Loved this one to bits, it's one of my favourite sci-fi series ever, I've seen it twice, possibly 3 times. Great story, great plot development, great acting, great characters, just the right amount of tech. Too bad they got told to wrap it up fast and had to compress everything they had left into a single second season.

Much better. The fiction side gets moving on this one and there's actual plot development worth following, plus it works together better with the documentary side, showing some very relevant and solvable problems/conflicts/risks that would characterize the early phase of Mars colonization. In contrast, S1 was mostly a relevant-but-boring history lesson combined with a relevant-but-useless advert for E.M.'s unproven concept of an interplanetary rocket. (I've seen enough unwarranted E.M. a**-k***ing everywhere else already, I don't need it in my Sci-Fi too, thanks.) Sure, most of the actors carried over from S1 are still as bad as before, which makes most of the dramatic conversations hard to watch, sure the documentary sections are still too long and irritatingly shoved in between the fiction scenes (I skipped most of them; maybe I would've watched more if they had separated them to their own half of the episode), but other than that there's a very visible jump in quality, now I can really say I want to see more.

Weakest season so far. Though by no means bad, it was just... too realistic, I guess, too much like real life in how much it focused on mostly-humans struggling with their sense of morality or moral identity. I don't watch TV series and movies to see something that's quite that similar to real life, I need it to be substantially different, that's why I go for sci-fi and fantasy (superheroes included). And I did like how the superpowers were not so overly present and flashy and always in your face in previous seasons, but somehow this time it felt like they were really reduced to just an accessory to the main plot or main conflict. And this made it no longer a superhero show - that was the line right there, and they crossed it.

This is the Black Mirror I used to know, or at least the relevant social commentary aspect that was pretty much missing from the disappointing previous season. Sure, it's not the most advanced near-future-tech we've seen on BM, they went with rather close to present or actually-present tech for all 3 episodes (like they did in S1E1 and a few others since), but I won't complain about it at this particular point - it was much more important to me that they show they hadn't forgotten BM was supposed to have a clear connection with present life rather than being just dystopic far-out sci-fi (like a lot of S4 was - the worst season so far). So: good come-back after S4, good idea to return to fewer and better thought out episodes per season, hoping to see it continue.

So with my season ratings going 10-10-7-6-5-8-8-4, overall this ends up a 7. Also, not interested in watching any further GoT materials of any kind (except maybe they pull a James Cameron at some point in the future and straight up redo S8 the way it should've been done).

Almost as good as S1, but not quite. There's a certain excitement in the face of imminent life-changing discovery that's missing here (but I guess it was inevitable - there will never be another OA S1) and some of the fantasy-themed moments here are introduced rather randomly/incoherently. There's less of a sense of direction for the story than in S1, though there still is enough of a direction to hang on to. For me it's still very good, but with the new developments I'm afraid it might become either formulaic or just incoherent next season, throwing around random disjointed elements just to keep an appearance of freshness and creativity. We'll see.

Good for wasting time with something that won't feel to 'heavy', maybe if you're in between 'heavy' shows. Otherwise skip it - you won't be missing anything. It's like an almost decent imitation of Dexter. Almost.

Aaand after making an S2 that successfully avoided the all-too-predictable option of trying to imitate S1, they still fell into the trap, just took them a while longer, time enough to make sure they fell harder. They tried to recreate not only the sinister type of story with possible supernatural implications from S1, they also tried to recreate the Rust Cohle character. And as if that bad judgement wasn't enough, they tried to do it in an exasperatingly slow style where nothing of any consequence happens for 2-3 episodes at a time, and where after every line of dialogue you're made to wait at least 10 seconds before you get another one. Not that anyone ever has anything interesting to say. What a bad joke of a season. The past 4-5 episodes have been so fast-forwardable I'm at the point where I can easily check out and stop caring about the rest of the season. S2 was worlds better than this garbage. 1/10 for using good actors tho.

Too many drawn out conversations that don't really give us additional insight into the characters but just slow down the story for the sake of slowing it down. I'm OK with slow material in the right doses and in the right places but this was too much. Other than that it had the same action style as S1 and managed to bring something new to the table in terms of psychology and morality nuggets to think about. So while it's no longer a 9/10 like the first season, I can't go below a 7 because it did deliver in the end. Forced me into some fast-forwarding here and there, but it did deliver the goods.

Pretty much what you'd expect, judging by season 1: more overly dramatized action, every character acting like a rock star (reminds me of the terrible characters from Now You See Me), way too many explosions and nick-of-time resolutions, Hollywood-esque camera movements trying to make everything look cool because the content itself isn't, plus boring "high-minded" speeches all over the place. Visual production still looks great, but that alone can't save this catastrophe of a show. Now I can't even stand to see Sonequa Martin-Green's face anymore because I've associated her so strongly with her obnoxious smug holier-than-thou I-can-talk-over-anybody character from this show.

Starts out pretty promising - the 2037 sci-fi parts look really good, like a well-produced modern sci-fi, and the 2016 documentary sections are done well enough that they don't feel too much out of place, plus they showed me information about SpaceX that I didn't actually know, like what their core project is for making interplanetary travel viable. And that good part lasts about 1 episode and a half. After that, the documentary side becomes just a series of interruptions of the 'main content' like somebody getting trigger-happy with the remote control and switching back and forth to some annoying History-channel like flashbacks about previous manned missions, which no longer adds anything worthwhile to the sci-fi part. Plusss the sci-fi part itself devolves into a bunch of unnecessarily slow scenes of people in space suits walking over dusty or rocky terrain, unnecessarily long "dramatic" conversations and people with grim expressions staring to one side of the camera for too long, and the occasional "victory" of the colonists which elicits fake cheers, fake laughter and some hugs even though the happy event will have typically occurred due to dumb luck instead of any intelligent effort on the colonists' part. Whatever good parts this had could have been condensed into 2-3 episodes, easy. It still wouldn't have reached masterpiece levels of quality, but it could've at least been decent, like a 7/10 let's say, just for the few big important ideas we get here about what's likely to be problematic about trying to colonize Mars. I will watch a second season if they make one, but I expect to need substantial fast-forwarding again, just like I did in order to finish S1 after it got really documentary-ish, "dramatic" and boring.

It's been slowing down more and more compared to S1, to the point where I had to start skipping scenes. There's only so much dramatic-moving-around or dramatic-facial-expressions of "Offred" I can find worthwhile before it becomes just a waste of time to keep watching that stuff. Same with the flashbacks of the life they used to have. I haven't lost interest in the series as a whole, I expect to keep following this to the end and into the next season, but... things are not looking up quality-wise after this season.

In a way the story feels worse than the first time around because it's not following a central line toward a clear goal, but at the same time there's a realism to this more unfocused and shifty way of doing it that just works well for what this particular season is trying to do. I wouldn't like to see the same formula attempted again anytime soon, but in this one case I will say it somehow just worked for me, against all odds and usual preferences. The series is fresh on so many levels it's hard not to classify it as one of the best superhero productions I've ever seen, a close second to "Unbreakable" (2000) and far above anything else we've been getting on the big screen lately (not counting comedy-superhero movies, of course). [P.S. The critics are closer to the true average on this one, for the simple reason that the score of this show is being artificially lowered by some fanatics originally organized in a FB group to downvote Black Panther. If you look at the critic rating on MC and also other user and critic ratings on other websites you will find averages of 7.0 and higher everywhere except here. This is because MC are not doing anything to prevent organized vote-rigging in the user section.]

This was... I don't know what this was, but it was glorious. This is how Fantasy/Supernatural should be done. It's sort of the same thing that made the first season of True Blood exceptional: the seamless way it mixes the world we know with fantastic elements, getting you to that hair-raising point of "What if these things did actually exist?". Hell, it could even be that it's more likely to have a big impact the more of a sceptic and the more anti-superstition you are.

Excellent show. The story might seem derivative, but it draws very good things from different places and simply makes a new highly enjoyable production that stands on its own. There's complexity to it, there's action, there's excellent visual work, there's good acting (with maybe something left to be desired from Martha Higareda), there's comic relief, there's a futuristic technology that might become relevant one day in just the ways shown here... there's very little left not to like. Maybe the gratuitous way in which some of the nudity is shoved in your face (and the mysoginistic choice of having full-frontal exposures of many more women than men), but then again it is a story about bodies being disposable and swappable, so maybe not quite as sensitive and tied up in people's identities as we're used to. Or how sometimes you wish you could understand the conversations better - someone could've put more work into the audio recording/mastering. But that's about it as far as faults go - no reason to give it anything less than a 9/10. Also, it was great to see "Dollhouse" actors Dichen Lachman and Tahmoh Penikett in a sci-fi again.

Production value looks decent, but the characters are unconvincing, the acting is bland, people start dropping dead and nobody's panicking about it... took me all of 30 minutes to realize this show is pure crap.

6.0? Ridiculous. It looks like the same thing that happened to Marco Polo: a world-class TV series getting rating-buried by fake ratings from Netflix' competition. Notice how few of the haters actually had anything to say along with their downvotes.

Sure there is a grand story: they're saving the future by ensuring several wrong things don't happen so they don't combine to form the final catastrophe, but the show brings up the important pieces of this little by little, in interesting and surprising twists, and keeps us on the edge. Just when you think it's about to settle down and become procedural it throws another thing at you out of nowhere that looks like it's changing Everything in the space of a few minutes. This is highly compelling TV, and if you can't see that, maybe you're oversatured and need to step away from digital media for a while.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Only watched this because the Punisher's in it (OK, and Karen; that Deborah Ann Woll can act, and then some). Also the reason it gets an extra point compared to S1. Otherwise, all Daredevil-centric non-Punisher-related content in it is perfectly skippable. DD's fights are just as stupid as in S1. Everyone's doing backflips and other dumb s*** that would tire you out and get you killed in 3 seconds. It's like I'm watching some cheap Xena/Hercules/Mortal Kombat series from way-back-when. And then they have DD's scrawny ass throwing the much heavier Punisher around, just to keep DD looking unrealistically cool. They must have some 12yo DD fanboi writing all of this, including the fight choreography.

Hell yeah, Marvel is back. I was getting tired of comparing everything to Jessica Jones and finding it lacking. I might even give Daredevil S2 a shot now just because the Punisher's in it, and set aside for a moment the yawnfest of repetitive and meaningless fights that DD S1 was. Couldn't be more surprised to hear that some of the complaints are to the effect that this wasn't Progressive enough. For a gory show centered on a brutal male character with an army background, I was surprised at how many hints of multiculturalism, anti-gun and anti-war rhetoric they managed to squeeze in. You just have to take it for what it is and pay some attention at what's really in there.

It has its moments, mostly due to the visuals they invested in (except the intro, which is completely out of place), but overall it's an incoherent, self-important, cliche-ridden and overly violent mess so far. I'm definitely enjoying The Orville more right now, but I'll still follow this along for another while, just because of the title.

And once again the critics are out of their minds, bashing a show that, while a bit confusing at first, has actually managed to bring us far more believable and enjoyable Star Trek (featuring some actual space-trekking for a change!) than the official/"serious" CBS production, which has been an incoherent, self-important, cliche-ridden overly-violent mess so far.

Looks like a bunch of snobby crap where they think forcing the viewer to come up with their own story (for lack of one on screen) is a brilliant idea and that it makes it a show "for smart people". No, it just makes it a heap of lazy vapid crap.

[Initial 4 episodes impression: 8/10] I already knew it was going to be about martial arts and "chi", and I was afraid of seeing the same tired sensationalist and juvenile way of presenting it, like "Look at me, I can kill you with my fancy Far-Eastern superpowers! I can solve any situation by kicking someone's ass with special martial-arts moves!", but no, it's not like that (so far). The Asian martial arts side of it is being handled more maturely than I'd dared hope, he's got much more of an actual-monk type attitude about him (though of course he's not quite a Buddhist, as he still seems to care about some worldly attachments). But 4 episodes in, I'm really digging this - it's already better than Luke Cage and definitely better than the "Daredevil" trainwreck. It remains to be seen if it rises to the level of Jessica Jones by the end of the season. [Update after episode 7: 6/10] Welp, that's that then. I'm starting to understand what the critics were talking about. In episodes 5-6 this thing takes a nosedive and turns into yet another Daredevil: excessively frequent and long and boring and tiresome fights. On top of that, its IQ drops to half, with characters doing things for stupid reasons, a good chunk of the dialogue now written by Captain Obvious, worthless fights set up just to showcase a comical array of implausible enemies that look like a Mortal Kombat character roster, and the overall story losing all direction and depth of purpose. [The End] 4/10 it is, then. Another Daredevil-like disaster.

I guess people who followed this as it was being released got bored somewhere around S2-S3 and never gave S4 a chance, otherwise I don't see how they could rate it as anything less than a comeback, a return to former glory.

Like S1, the second season kept bringing interesting-enough plot twists with sufficient regularity to keep me watching, so I have to rate it a 7/10, but it also kept throwing out frequent poorly acted scenes, hard to believe battles, an overabundance of dramatic-turnaround-and-a-last-thing-to-say scenes and stupid justifications for why things work out a certain way, so it's not going anywhere near an 8/10.

Pretty good, but also pretty cheesy throughout. They managed to make it interesting enough to want to follow to the end, but it has its share of eye-rolling moments. Even the little humoristic moments at times feel out-of-place. A lot about its paranormal premises is just beyond anything remotely credible and it's just dropped in your lap in a "take it or leave it" kind of way, which makes it feel like the show wasn't really trying to get itself taken seriously (unlike the much better The OA).

The first 3-4 episodes are pretty hard to get through, with the predictable action, blatantly preachy monologues and completely unrealistic and boring 1-on-1 dialogues that are supposed to show us the characters as real people having real conversations yet they make them feel about as real as cardboard cutouts. But the story does find its footing, it becomes interesting enough later on to be worth watching to the end. The monologues and dialogues don't get much better though, the only good thing is that there are fewer of them. From episode 4 onward I just had to fast-forward through about 80% of the long unbearably bad all-talk scenes (similar defect to what degraded Sense8 S1 after a while, but it's much worse here). Also, Alfre Woodard needs to get fired and replaced with a real actress.

First half of S1 was amazing - straight up 9/10, with possibilities of going to a 10/10 if it had kept up the pace. But keep up the pace it didn't, it just quickly degraded around mid-season and started doing really cheap, cheesy and stupid things (like introducing absolutely childish and cartoony characters like "The Scythe", or like the decidedly too many close-up horror scenes with happy music). So sadly I had to take it from a 9 and demote it to an 8.

I have to believe people were expecting S2 to be S1 all over again, otherwise I can't explain the bad ratings they gave it, together with the critics. But then if it had been a reiteration of S1 they would've complained that it was a reiteration. I think their expectations got so warped out of shape by how good S1 was that they forgot to stay rational. And now we have this indefensibly deplorable score for S2 even though it was a very satisfying, dark and complex story, just one notch below the quality of S1.

Superb superb series, this gave me something to watch when GoT turned to crap around season 3. In the meantime it's reached its own S3 and it shows no signs of becoming less epic in any way. 10/10 for every season so far.