On Fary Cry:
“I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out – I’m saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men [he created FX’s Legion] or Alien, ‘Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.’ We can have a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting video games specifically because games are built in a way that doesn’t make for the best drama.
“When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cut scenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show.”
It felt like it should have been the first episode. It did kind of break up the show itself midway and as I really hate kids in shows and I hate adults pretending to be kids even more … having an Alien-ish episode made me re-engage for a bit but you’re right in that I don’t know why I should care.
(I can’t seem to get Spoiler tags working on Connect, so SPOILERS BELOW!)
spoiler
You get to see to Boy Cavalier (or whatever) bribe the guy on the spaceship which is a “sort of” reveal … then you think about it and it’s kinda dumb. The guy has to crash the spaceship and he’s not likely to survive? Also, it’d be a better reveal if we thought Barefoot was like an honest dude, you know? Then his betrayal would mean something. Instead when I watch it, I’m like, “wow, that’s a zero latency call happening between Earth and Space”.
I agree, it would have worked a lot better as a horror episode if it had been the opening. The writers know this too, because they did open with scenes from that episode and used them as engagement bait for the rest of the series. That’s probably why it was shifted into the second half of the season. It forced people to watch half the show to “get to the good bit”, after which they were over halfway through and were more likely to finish it due to sunk cost fallacy.
Perhaps another reason for moving it into the second half is because it’s so far removed in terms of tone and style from the rest of the series that it may have felt like a bait and switch to audiences. I imagine the complaining would have been a lot louder if audiences had expected episodes like that the whole way through.