It's been a long time since the final episode, and I'm probably commenting on it as one of the last viewers. I watched it two days after its premiere with my girlfriend, we liked the series in general, and with more or less pleasure, we followed the fate of the inhabitants of the planet Keppler22b. There have been some weaker moments, but overall everyone kept at least a decent level. Even 8, which was at least one of the weakest, if not the worst episode. Even in it there were some things that stimulated our curiosity to include the next one, and nothing foreshadowed a disaster, like the second half of the 10th episode. I hold back so as not to run this show from the top down. The creators have worked hard for these critical comments, and they are not only due to the serpent that the Mother gave birth to. In my opinion, it is such a symbol, the crowning achievement of all criticism. Complaints are due to them for a fatal scenario, carelessness in ending threads, poor plan, i.e. willingness to throw too many things at once, which made most of the issues insufficiently developed, as if the plot of the finale was written quickly, without prior thought. Something like - let's write anything, as long as it shock the viewers, as long as the finale is as shocking as possible. And as it happens in the case of fast work, many errors were not avoided that would normally be corrected or, in the worst case, written at least correctly. Even if Season Two gets things straightened and the action makes sense, it'll be hard to clean up the mess.
Let me start with a thread with Ragnar and that ship that came out in the last minutes. How is it possible that in the era of such advanced technology, super navigation, people never once mentioned other ships? How could they not have known about individuals who were outside the Earth when it was ending its life? I would have understood it at the beginning, right after the Ark crashed, when the survivors were shocked and for natural reasons did not think about such things. But after a few days, stuffing their bellies, putting everything in their heads, they might remember them. I'm not even talking about the fact that they had to debate like "let's not lose hope, let's make a relay, send an SOS signal and send it into space" (as Father did at the beginning of the series), one sentence of one of them would be enough to signal viewers. It could also be shown in flashbacks when Marcus and his wife were going to the Ark and he or she said, for example, "Several ships depart from Earth, but this one is the closest and the easiest way to get there."
Instead, we get an unexpected xD cliffhanger in which a barely alive Ragnar defeats the scouts from the other ship. Sorry, I couldn't help but add that "xD". I know he's an outstanding fighter, veteran of Atheists, but damn - barely alive guy, dehydrated, without food, hallucinating, smashes them as if he was prepared to fight like John Rambo. Despite the fact that it was emphasized several times how important it is to be in good shape under such unfavorable conditions. Speaking of him, my worst predictions came true. Travis Fimmel plays exactly the same way as if he had finished the set of "Vikings" a few weeks earlier. Even his plots are remarkably similar to the fragment in which he was addicted to opium and felt painfully narcotic. The fault in this case, however, is shared by the writers, director, showrunner and actor. It is the director and showrunner who should lead Travis, use his potential. After all, he wasn't a Raised by Wolves icon like he was in the Norman series, so he probably didn't have that much influence on his role.
Speaking of potential, I'll move on to the rapist topic. What made him suddenly start sucking blood from his Mother? Why did he get superhuman powers? Previously, he was exhausted from hunger, lost a lot of blood and had no strength due to natural causes, and after recovering some of his juice, he became so strong that he could throw people? I have one answer to that - the scriptwriters' hopeless skills and no idea how to end this character's plot in a meaningful way. It's good that at least they have not forgotten that the bucket will crush his head when his robot guard moves within 3 meters, because that would only be a problem.
Funnier was the story of Dad who felt like a cuckold. It was doubly funny because Mom cheated on a black Dad with a white, heterosexual man, the opposite of our world. For those who don't understand my sarcasm - black people from some parts of Africa have bigger penises and more testosterone (which means that the average Negro can make love more often and harder than the average white man). Not all of them, for example the Pygmies are not much better than the Japanese or the Chinese in this respect. But jokes aside. While I liked the Father's reflections on this problem and his attempts to solve it, it was so badly written that I inadvertently laughed when I watched this segment. Android did not have a role as a Father in terms of fertilization (why does he need a penis, and even if he does not have reproductive functions?). True, he did not feel emotions like an ordinary person, which he was talking about, but why did he react like that? Why couldn't he also turn it off or ask someone to reprogram it, i.e. turn it off? He always approached male-female relationships and other matters in a purely logical manner. Why was he not consistent in this regard? Again, it looks as if they forcibly wrote this thread to somehow stuff airtime. It's good that at least he reflected at the end and wanted to erase these emotions. Anyway, even if this thread was planned, they should write it differently and, above all, better write it. This could be a pretty good comment from the creators about excessive sexual promiscuity or wounded male pride in having to raise a non-own offspring that would be consistent with the content of the show. It turned out to be an auto-parody, doubly ridiculous because it seems they were writing it seriously.
Despite all the bad things I mentioned above, there were some things I liked. Mother's conversation with this android, rock paintings on Keppler22b, which can be interpreted as an "adaptation" of one of the conspiracy theories that people used to live on another planet, but exploited it to the end and decided to escape to another, starting everything completely from scratch, and a few others things, however, these are, in my opinion, irrelevant things after what we saw in the final. A great start, an intriguing development, but at the end Aaron Guzikowski probably made a bet with the producers of "Gry o Thron" about who would screw up the finale of his series more. It's hard for me to judge who did the worse job, but surely all of them deserved a potato medal for a perfectly botched job.
Speaking of having to block airtime, what the fuck is this snake that just came out of nowhere? xD I understood what they meant to convey. In a sense, it was supposed to be a reference to the biblical serpent, symbol of Evil, Satan and things like that. The only problem is that the whole action started suddenly, it did not have a previous storyline and those were literally the last minutes of the final episode. If unnecessary scenes with Marcus or Father were removed from IMO, and this time was spent on developing the serpent's plot, maybe it would make sense despite the WTF effect. Ok, the creators wanted to end the series with some deus-ex machine, but that's not how it is done. They could take an example from the creators of "Dark", more specifically the final scene of season 2, in which Marta from another world appears. There, however, we had previously received a clear suggestion that such a thing is possible (older Marta said to Jonas - "I saw the world without you"), so even if people had a feeling of WTF, like me, there was a justification for it.