I thought the final episode was executed fairly well generally, but the whole thing kind of felt rushed, especially in the SPX:
The scene where the Pella sheds her “disguise” coating looked particularly bad, almost like Babylon 5-era CGI… I honestly wonder if it was an early render that the editor grabbed by mistake.
And while I generally enjoyed the marine assault stuff, the scenes where Amos is strapped to the chair howling and moaning were just silly-looking. I know he was supposed to be straining under 15 gravities worth of acceleration, but he looked/sounded like a man on a power-armored toilet after eating a particularly bad space-burrito.
And once on the surface of the Ring Station, all the grunt-soldiers stuff looked like something from a video game. There wasn’t much the CGI guys could do there: The surface of the station is glowing blue and the sky is glowing a lighter blue so it was always going to look cartoony, but then they went for the point-of-view, heads-up-display views from inside the characters’ helmets, and it made the whole thing look like Unreal Tournament… and not a new one either.
But on to the stuff that I liked: Naomi’s grief over having to kill her son was well-acted, though she seemed to get over it too quickly in later scenes. Clarissa’s health struggles should have been introduced earlier in the season, but she got some fun stuff to do. I liked the dinner scene, especially casting Amos and Bobbie as bickering kids (“It’s not ready yet!”). The final scenes setting up the Transport Union were pretty good – I liked the framing of the sequence where Holden gets drafted; they set it up to look like “The Last Supper”, which was a great touch.
But I really wish this had been a longer season. With all the setup between Marco and the blonde second-in-command, there was really no payoff. Similarly, Filip’s big moment - such as it was - felt like a massive letdown after all the time we spent with the character… it wasn’t great in the books either, but I was hoping for something better. Did we ever get any payoff for the whole thing with Filip and his prisoner buddy? That seemed to just kind of… peter out.
I also wish that they had done a “five/ten years later” sort of closer. Those are generally terrible, but since this was theoretically the series finale, it would have been nice to show that everyone’s sacrifices had led to something good… I would have loved to see an end-credits animation similar to the opening-credits animation showing new colonies or a prosperous Belt. The final scene with the Rocinante getting smaller and smaller was fine… but not great.
