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.”
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.