Epiosde 4 Pre-release Review

I have a confession to make. The previous spoiler post was somewhat disingenuous because I have in fact seen episode 4 as a pre-screener. This somewhat gave me a confusing sensation like my parents giving me presents a week before Christmas, but never mind. What follows below is an impressionistic, unstructured spoiler-free review.

As mentioned in the interview, this episode 'Triangular Diplomacy' gives a perspective on the events of the story from the outside world. In fact if this was the first episode you saw you might be forgiven in misunderstanding who the main characters in this are. It's almost a quarter of the way in before we see our friends at Calgary and I think most of the story here takes place off-base. As a result the feel of this episode is much broader and less shut-in than previous couple.

I don't know enough about the technical side of film/tv making, but on an impressionistic level the overall quality of the show is also certainly improving. I don't just mean audio and video quality but things like the framing and the angles seem more developed. As usual the music is spot on. I'm starting to get a feel for the structure of the episodes now; they all have an opening formula.

The final scene also sets up a whole new intriguing plot thread, which of course I shan't tell you here.

Here are some random tidbits:

- There's more unsubtitled Russian.

- Watch for two Lionshare references.

- Watch the clocks.

UPDATE: As per the comments, I realise I didn't actually come right out and say that I really enjoyed this episode. I did really enjoy it. I thought it is an excellent addition to the corpus, which shows a fascinating new angle on the story.