Honestly it was a struggle
By the end of this I was seriously reconsidering my commitment to finish every show I start, and after the end... Well, I consider all the time I spent watching this wasted.
The story was very similar to Lost; people get in an accident and it's revealed that they're all connected in some way and have been "chosen" to be there for some purpose. Very little time was spent on actual survival scenes after the first episode, and most of the survival situations seem largely avoidable if the characters had thought for even a second. There wasn't much time for more survival situations though, because the show was largely devoted to flashbacks... And flashbacks of flashbacks we'd just seen minutes or seconds ago. I do admit to fast forwarding by the end, because there are only so many times I can watch the same scene.
The flashbacks of the characters respective stories could have each been their own series and done better than this show. (Although Li Qiao's backstory got very boring for me, especially because they kept repeating the same scenes of it. I can sing Red River Valley by now even though I don't know much Chinese.) Unfortunately, all the back stories are rushed (while somehow being slow paced) and I couldn't really form a connection to any character because once I started to care about someone, it switched to someone else's story and the story I was previously almost getting interested in became just another thing to have flashbacks of with no progression.
By the end we were given the final pieces of the puzzle... But if this was a puzzle, half of the new pieces given were clearly to another puzzle. Suddenly it seemed only one survivor had any meaning for being there, and everyone else was just tangentially related. Everything fell apart in the last minutes when it was made clear that -nothing- would be solved and that we'd have to wait for a season 2 to even hope to understand anything. A season 2 that is most likely not coming, since this is 4 years old now. I won't be wasting my time on a S2 even if it does eventually show up, and next time I'm really struggling to finish watching something I'll check reviews to at least make sure I'm not heading into a meaningless cliffhanger.
The story was very similar to Lost; people get in an accident and it's revealed that they're all connected in some way and have been "chosen" to be there for some purpose. Very little time was spent on actual survival scenes after the first episode, and most of the survival situations seem largely avoidable if the characters had thought for even a second. There wasn't much time for more survival situations though, because the show was largely devoted to flashbacks... And flashbacks of flashbacks we'd just seen minutes or seconds ago. I do admit to fast forwarding by the end, because there are only so many times I can watch the same scene.
The flashbacks of the characters respective stories could have each been their own series and done better than this show. (Although Li Qiao's backstory got very boring for me, especially because they kept repeating the same scenes of it. I can sing Red River Valley by now even though I don't know much Chinese.) Unfortunately, all the back stories are rushed (while somehow being slow paced) and I couldn't really form a connection to any character because once I started to care about someone, it switched to someone else's story and the story I was previously almost getting interested in became just another thing to have flashbacks of with no progression.
By the end we were given the final pieces of the puzzle... But if this was a puzzle, half of the new pieces given were clearly to another puzzle. Suddenly it seemed only one survivor had any meaning for being there, and everyone else was just tangentially related. Everything fell apart in the last minutes when it was made clear that -nothing- would be solved and that we'd have to wait for a season 2 to even hope to understand anything. A season 2 that is most likely not coming, since this is 4 years old now. I won't be wasting my time on a S2 even if it does eventually show up, and next time I'm really struggling to finish watching something I'll check reviews to at least make sure I'm not heading into a meaningless cliffhanger.
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