The thing the show executes the best is without a doubt the executions. I don’t think there’s another television show in history that has depicted gruesome violence this beautifully and disturbingly. It also handles, as mentioned earlier, some tense scenes and establishing a sense of unknown terror rather well. When it comes to expressing the more philosophical and moral beats in the show effectively, though, it’s not nearly as strong.
I get the sense that the conceptualizing of these conundrums, most famously the scene in which the group debates whether to execute one of their live prisoners, is detailed and smart, but that doesn’t come out in the actual, realized version of the scene once it’s put on the screen. I’m not sure why this is. But the result is, for me and people like me, a scene with some big ideas and a legitimate moral dilemma feeling entirely unnatural and more like a didactic morality play being too obviously inserted into this life and death environment. So people will praise the scene’s writing, but I would maintain that if it doesn’t fit as seamlessly into the action as it ought to, the direction has failed somewhere.
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