Only bothering to leave a review here because I think it's a travesty that this episode currently has a 7.1 on IMDB. To share my thoughts on it, I'll paste from a comment I made on YouTube:
In all seriousness I think that the belief by the minority of viewers out there who actually liked the show - that the hardcore fans are most upset because they didn't get a 1:1 adaptation - is a major misinterpretation. If you really listen to what most disparagers are saying, you'll hear that it's predominantly about the unfaithfulness to practically every major character in the show. Many, many fans have been clamoring for years, decades, for more, different adventures with these characters. It's kind of unfounded to fault them for being vocally displeased when their one chance in twenty years to have this wish granted is so fantastically stomped on in the apparent favor of prioritizing the usual Netflix checklist, especially after so much marketing effort went into convincing fans that they were going to get something faithful created by a team that understood the source material.
Defend the show all you like, you can't deny that the characters of (off the top of my head and only having been able to endure 1.5 episodes) Spike, Faye, Vicious, Julia, and Gren were done very, very dirty. The only character who felt truly "right", at least in terms of his portrayal, was Jet. But the fans didn't really get to have a faithful Jet either, as his entire backstory and therefore his character motivations were completely altered.
Also the action scenes were just terrible. All of them. John Cho got ripped for the role but it still felt like either he wasn't right for these action scenes or he was very poorly directed in them. If Netflix was going to go for an elderly Spike Spiegel they should have just splurged for the extremely action-competent Keanu Reeves, who showed interest in playing the character over a decade ago and is simply an all-around better embodiment of Spike to begin with.
In all seriousness I think that the belief by the minority of viewers out there who actually liked the show - that the hardcore fans are most upset because they didn't get a 1:1 adaptation - is a major misinterpretation. If you really listen to what most disparagers are saying, you'll hear that it's predominantly about the unfaithfulness to practically every major character in the show. Many, many fans have been clamoring for years, decades, for more, different adventures with these characters. It's kind of unfounded to fault them for being vocally displeased when their one chance in twenty years to have this wish granted is so fantastically stomped on in the apparent favor of prioritizing the usual Netflix checklist, especially after so much marketing effort went into convincing fans that they were going to get something faithful created by a team that understood the source material.
Defend the show all you like, you can't deny that the characters of (off the top of my head and only having been able to endure 1.5 episodes) Spike, Faye, Vicious, Julia, and Gren were done very, very dirty. The only character who felt truly "right", at least in terms of his portrayal, was Jet. But the fans didn't really get to have a faithful Jet either, as his entire backstory and therefore his character motivations were completely altered.
Also the action scenes were just terrible. All of them. John Cho got ripped for the role but it still felt like either he wasn't right for these action scenes or he was very poorly directed in them. If Netflix was going to go for an elderly Spike Spiegel they should have just splurged for the extremely action-competent Keanu Reeves, who showed interest in playing the character over a decade ago and is simply an all-around better embodiment of Spike to begin with.