Wow. My reactions to this one are a bit all over the place, but...
First of all, nice job adapting the anime's opening-credits sequence. That was fun. And now that music's back stuck in my head.
For the most part, this one's story is that of the original anime's "Asteroid Blues" episode, with some minor adjustments, and that much works pretty well, although introducing Faye this early is a bit odd but... we'll see what they do with that.
I'm not sure I like giving Jet a family, making his immediate motivations about buying his daughter a decent birthday present. That sorta works, but the anime's making him the starving loner ex-cop whose motivation is mostly about putting food on the increasingly empty table seemed more effective. Otherwise, I'm liking Mustafa Shakir's take on Jet a lot—as well as John Cho's on Spike. Haven't seen enough of Daniella Pineda's Faye yet to have much opinion, but her attitude seems to work so far. (I don't really care that this Faye's not playing so hard to original-Faye's overt sensual angle, as long as this Faye is otherwise similar and interesting.)
As for the end... Hmm. Vicious is, of course, well, vicious, but that seemed rather unnecessarily unstable of him. And was that Julia? If so, that's a rather large change...
Waitaminute. No preview-of-next-session with those randomly wacky character narrations? Perhaps they were a bit too goofy to adapt well. Sigh. They were a fun dessert to each anime ep.
Overall, an interesting start with its own adjustments and wrinkles which we'll have to watch to see how they play out.
While I did like and enjoy this episode, I agree with everyone saying that (1) it was too simple, compressed, and quick and (2) it would have fit much better as a Season One finale than as a Season Two premiere.
Ideally, IMO, this should have been three episodes added to the end of last season:
1. The Trigon-prodding and descent of the remaining characters (Cory, Donna, Jason, Hank, Dawn) into their Darkness, fleshed out much more believably than they were, and laced with a few quick sightings of Rachel's growing despair and Trigon's self-satisfaction.
2. The darkened characters' near-deadly assault on Gar, Rachel's heart, Gar's reaching through to Rachel, Rachel's reaching through to Dick.
3. Dick and Rachel frantically decide what to do, maybe try to free the others, etc., leading into a much more complex and believable fight against and vanquishing of the legendarily powerful Trigon.
Optional Bonus: A short after-scene of Trigon and Mallus commiserating.
As it is, while fun—like a meal of perfectly good food that's just much too quick and small to be truly satisfying—this episode had the effect of feeling like an almost dismissive tossing-aside of the whole Trigon backbone-storyline in a sudden rush to move on to freaking out poor Slade and whatever else is coming next...
I just... what is... going... errg.
Lemme see if I can break some of this down:
Overall high-level storyline: fair (6/10).
Actual story-portrayal execution: ranges from terrible to fair (4/10).
Sigh.
2021-01-01T00:00:00Z2021-12-31T23:59:59Z