TL;DR warning: THIS EPISODE BLITHELY RUINS A MULTI-BOOK BUILDUP IN THE SERIES

If you haven't read it, and value the idea of experiencing the actual (original) story at all, stopping before this episode would be a good place to step off, as they just casually ruin a reveal by referencing what was a long buildup in the books, and which, arguably, one of the best novels in the series was entirely concerned with (with zero buildup, so only people who've read the books would have any idea of what they were even referencing, and so it just blends in with the rest of the throwaway line writing.) And they're nowhere near covering or introducing the time or any of the characters in that saga.

This happens in the second scene, but it's in every scene with Harry. It's just a too-quick cut played out by more of the boring, generic score, and now it's also going to be defacto ruined by constant referencing unless they just stop showing Harry and Gaal after this.

The first scene would have worked as an actual, decent backstory setup for whatsherhalfface, but then they went back to the present day and the show deployed more of its terrible and unmemorable dialogue, quickly killing any sympathy or investment I might have had.

I was able to get a chuckle out of the heartless reference to Salvor's father's death, though. Every time they recap it or reference it, I'm reminded of how stupid and pointless and perfunctory that scene was, and how feckless was his character, and I get a good laugh. This show doesn't really have any humor that I can interpret as intentional with certainty, and that's kind of a damning hallmark of this kind of pretentiously lofty fiction.

The only other morsels come from brother Day's imperious and dismissive responses: "I'm surprised they're not all just hallucinating about food."

Aaaaand they ruined it. Gaal v. Harry is just idiotic. They just keep adding more condiments to the idiot sandwich. I'd say this one is along the lines of that awful, flavored lip stuff they market to little girls.

I know there are more planets; my mother taught me their names

I hate whoever wrote this exact line. It's legitimately like lines I've gotten from a particularly dumb and inattentive AI chatbot that isn't following the conversation and didn't reference its knowledge base prompt.

Back to Day: One thing this show is actually surprisingly adept at is showing harrowing and dramatic moments and making you feel it. From Fortnight Salvor's blackout sequence, to the desert delirium.

Back to the Invictus: She shoots a point defense railgun (the same on the outside of the ship???) with a fucking arrow... and it explodes. And she proceeds to look at it like she's Jean Claude van Damme and it killed her family. I honestly couldn't have predicted this level of stupidity. What's frustrating is knowing how many shows and films have been marred by distractingly inadequate SFX, but these are perfect... for this stupid bullshit.

We're only twenty minutes in.

eXo aLsO mEaNs FrOm OuTsIdE

Oy, it's starting up with the comedy again. I'm wheezing. Thank you, captain Fortnight. You are brave and wise.

positive: The pilot stations actually look really good, with great lighting prop work. Kind of a riff on a TRON light cycle and Sid Meade meets Ralf McQuarrie.

And back to incompetence:
"... jumped too far to resupply."

Space Scale Rant

Look. Either you have technology that's capable of reaching outside of THE FUCKING GALAXY, or you have ship that can accidentally jump too far to get back to resupply its crew provisons. Pick one (1). This is a common problem with incompetent science fiction writers, and lazy writers in general, and, most likely in this case—both. They don't understand scale. The solar system is unfathomably big. Literally. Humans cannot comprehend the scale. Outside of solar systems is a vast expanse that dwarfs that by dizzying orders of magnitude. Then you can get to the next star. Galaxies have hundreds of billions of stars. Full stop. You don't need to go anywhere outside of the galaxy to have unspeakable horrors and vast, unexplored regions to get lost in. And if you can get lost that easily, it's because you only have intrA-galactic travel, not the orders of magnitude grater scale intER-galactoc travel.

Multiply the previous jumps by 100-500 billion, and then you can get to another gala—nope, hold your hyperdrives—that just got you out of the neighborhood. The space between stars is vastly dwarfed by the space between galaxies.

Rant over.

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The Zephyr & Duh'MERzl (as it's apparently pronounced, now, since showrunners can't confer with their directors to get their actors to say the characters' names properly once they establish a pronunciation) scene was actually surprisingly well-plotted (in a vacuum that is, since it's still a total destruction of the character and mainline plot), although I still couldn't help from rolling my eyes at the dialogue due to how religious the characters were, but Laura Birn proves she can do far more than look extremely pale and deferential. But I find it hard to believe anyone could be as unaffected and unshaken by news of their imminent demise, however self-deceived they are due to their religion, as Zephyr was.

Back to Invictus: It really seems like some kind of vendetta joke that they're putting Hardin (name only) into as many shootan'n'fitin scenes as possible. Making her space blaster stop working just so they would have another kicky-fight with Cyclops Sait was too obvious and gratuitous not to be funny.

And the Finalé

Ah, we have it. Robot Visions, and the sadistic pleasure of derision.

Now that they've character assassinated who is, now, essentially their own creation, with Gaal Dornik, I think the Cleons, and especially watching Pace be mean to robots, is my lasting motivation to actually continuing this.

However, it's still quite trying with the continual thread of supernatural woo~woo emotional sensationality that they weave into the story in a way that verifies it into the worldscape. While I would have much rather seen Cleon's general empirical attitude and faithlessness consistently upkept, I have no issue with showing him wrestling with feelings of inadequacy and fear; they just need to have found a way to do that without making up something like an apocryphal deathbed conversion. I also found his laying of the old believer's body, respectfully, to be annoyingly out of character. He had no reason to go to those lengths, and it would have been irrational to waste the energy when he's barely hobbling upright on one foot. You're just being stupidly sentimental with stuff like that as a writer. They almost handled the scene where he implored him to reconsider his perspective on one life to live well up until that.

And that's one of the main problems with these new (attempted) epics—they don't have the conviction or the competence to stick with a chapter long enough to not cut an important moment short, or just switch back abruptly to some other (often stupid) plotline with (often stupid) characters that the writers don't actually know how to write properly.