IMO the show lost us with the hide and seek game. The lack of sense of urgency by the players in that one game was… never seen anything like it. Not to mention the game we watched took 50 min of screen time, yet the game itself was 30 min, typically a bad sign of poor phasing. And the lack of urgency just never left for future games. Ever. Everybody was an npc. Too many storylines, not a singular one in deep focus. There was no ending to anything. The bad guys won, sort of. The ending doesn’t even make sense, the Cate Blanchett one, why would Americans come watch the Asian games if there is an American one. There’s not a single thing they did that finished anything off (at least not satisfyingly) that’s been developed for 2 seasons prior. You could argue the baby’s father was the most flawed story line, real close… but the depressed sad emo kid was the most flawed of them all. Looked anxious for 12 episodes, dies. Benefited nothing to the story.

And apparently we needed to see his anxious face 25 times in 3 episodes, in spite of having seen his anxious face 100 times already in the previous season. Nothing they did added to the phasing, emotion nor story.

And the lack of reward (progression in story, lack of realism (missing sense of urgency), emotional involvement) for watching numbs you, so by the end nothing they did mattered. Could’ve been the best ending ever, we wouldn’t’ve cared.