The biggest problem here is that the show tries to cover an extremely long period of time, forcing it to rush through huge moments and never really give the characters our world time to breathe. It feels like it's trying to hit highlights from a textbook more than trying to create art or say anything about these characters. This starts to improve a bit around episodes 4 and 5, which have a narrower scope, better direction, and a new character injecting some life, but basically all of that improvement is killed fast other than the directing, which remains improved. I never felt like I knew any of these characters or their relationships or understood why they were doing things, and the lack of interiority is particularly glaring when it comes to the three main female characters. For a show that seems to want to be about shedding light on the unseen roles of women in history, this is disappointingly misogynistic, making those characters quite archetypal and even placing a lot of blame on them for issues. This even gives my main reason for watching the show, Rebecca Ferguson, limited room to make anything of this character. She finally gets a bit more space to flesh her out and do something in the last few episodes, but she's filling in a lot of gaps left by the writers and it comes far too late in the game, after several episodes of her character Elizabeth seeming neutered and unrealized. The craft all around is also just not very good. Again, the directing improves, but the writing is just bad, frequently sloppily delivering exposition, and often repeating that same exposition equally sloppily. The costumes looked very bad in my opinion, with decidedly cheap and modern looking material in many moments, and I have to assume this must be a budgetary issue because the battle scenes are also terribly done. You can't see anything and they're edited horribly to obscure basically anything other than a couple of major deaths.