I haven't read the book/s so I don't know how faithful the TV series is to it.
What drags the rating down is, among other things, that the dialogue is sometimes quite stilted and convoluted.
The personal portraits are very simple and the character development too obvious and easily guessed. They are forgiven a little by the fact that it is the Victorian era when you think that it is a little like what they were then.
It is unrealistic, yes of course it is a sic fi written 150 years ago but you can do a better job of making it all believable anyway. Above all, the technical solutions, even if they would work in theory, feel rather MacGyver, and the battle scenes (there are few of them, but they exist) sometimes feel like Indiana Jones, so very unrealistic, something that worked in the 80s but feels quite passé today . Then they are constantly in trouble, it feels kind of illogical to continue such a journey if they are constantly at risk of dying, in the end you hardly care, as you are thrown straight from one danger to another without them building up the threats enough beforehand.
The Computer Generated Imagenary is not always that good and is used far too much, a lot would have worked better without using it so much. You hardly get a sense of the sea, even though it takes place under and on the sea, this could have been done so much better, perhaps by actually filming a bit under the sea, including real creatures living in the sea, etc. That's probably the saddest thing about the whole series, what you'd hoped it would really capture, but no unfortunately they don't succeed at all here. Almost everything feels studio made and then put on Computer Generated Imagenary. It might not be like that, but that's the feeling you get.
The series rarely get really tense and you have a hard time empathizing with the characters.
What still makes it worth watching is that it is interesting to see a series that takes place in a different environment, there is an element of adventure and in between it glimmers and becomes quite good.
You also get a bit of the political aspects that existed then, even if you only get glimpses of it
(and they are not completely historically correct, but you still get the idea), it is interesting to see the Indian freedom root/independence movement at that time, also some other historical perspectives even if they are often too obvious.
Worth seeing the series? Yes, it is entertaining, but hardly a masterpiece.
