To be fair, you need to ignore the books. Its often just the bare bones of the story you're getting with any adaptation, that's with film. In tv land, you have to stretch out a story over several weeks, so you are given more room, which means you go in wider directions. As with any adaptation, what works on a page often doesn't on screen. They are different mediums after all, with different rules and narrative structures.
Its no surprise that the series is diverging, that its doing more visceral visual scenes like in the previous episode. They are fleshing out and exploring characters more, because they have room, its interesting and they can. Plus, to a degree they need to when its going to be playing out over a number of seasons.
Trouble is they have sort of gotten bogged down in weird soap opera style storylines. There is an air of this is terrible, the world is falling apart, its a plague of biblical proportions, its chaos in the streets, but life carries on as normal, the shops are open, people go to work, there is no sense of a war going on or any real emergency or urgency to anything that the characters do.
Pacing has always been a bit of a problem with this show though. Timeline wise we are, what, a few weeks in to this outbreak starting, month or two maybe. It doesn't feel like that though.
There is an argument to be had as well that they just did a brutal sexual assault scene for kicks. Given that we already know what an evil bastard he is adding this on top isn't really needed. Fleshing out his history though, who and what he was before, how he became what he is, thats interesting. Showing him do what he was about to do is maybe, in story/character development wise a little unnecessary and over the top. It smacks of doing it for entertainment and I'm not sure its something that should still be accepted.
They need to stop with the near misses, get into scrapes, live to fight another day bollocks. They would be better introducing some new characters so they can kill them, rather than this thundercats cartoon villain fight run away rinse repeat crap.
