When we switch to Pierre, Paul Dano has a strange walk that he uses to try to highlight the awkwardness. All it seems to really do is make it look like he has a limp, but Dano is growing on me with his interpretation of the character so I don't want everything I say about his performance to be negative. There is a scene with Anatole and Helene in bed that plays up the incest. She also explicitly calls Pierre a buffoon, but the camera lingers on her face long enough I wonder what they were trying to portray. I think what they want to show is a sweeter side of her we don't see in the novel and give her character more complexity (her accepting the marriage as inevitable in this version mirrors the inevitability Pierre faces, giving the situation more complexity than Tolstoy does).
I like the conversation between Pierre and Anna Mikhailovna and how all the women look at him, playing out the way his new wealth makes him an attractive suitor, even though he says he can't talk to ladies. This is a good demonstration, in my opinion, of taking the expository structure that Tolstoy reveals information about the characters and making a scene out of it, which a reader could complain that Tolstoy doesn't quite do enough of. Count Ilya Rostov is played really well (the letter scene is much more muted and only involves Sonya after the fact) though he has been cut down in adaptation here.
I like the scene that shows Nikolai has gone to a prostitute, where he wakes up, and we see a woman lying with Denisov and he asks if Denisov will take care of the bill. We don't get an unnecessary sex scene (we don't even see who Nikolai sleeps with, adding to the anonymous nature of it), but we, as revealed in the dialogue (and somewhat hilariously reinforced with his mustache), see his development into an adult. I like how young the actors of Nikolai and Boris look, making their formal uniforms look ridiculous on them. Whether intentional or not, I feel that it plays the intent by Tolstoy that I've talked about a lot well. Another character with them (I wonder if he is supposed to stand in for Telyanin? We don't see this subplot) looks even more ridiculous. Nikolai is much stronger in his confrontation with Andrei and the whispering way Andrei comes off is extremely strong and confident, without being overly abrasive and unlikable, which is how he could be played. There is a really nice very white ice skating scene and the overall scenic choices of the novel have been really good, not opulent and somewhat restrained, much less grand than the Soviet version for example, but you get the point and you can be in the setting without it feeling like a television show or showing obvious budget deficiencies like the previous BBC version.
Pierre has a dream where he follows Helene as she takes her clothes off and beckons him to a bed. She also does the Brigitte Bardot laying in bed like in Contempt, which seems silly and a little too modern, but it is a decent alternative to the childish way that Pierre realizes his sexual attraction to her in the novel. The episode also later heightens the sexual nature of their relationship after the marriage and dabbles into, while tasteful, the sexualization of the novel that I thought was done really terribly in the 2007 version.
There is some weird slow motion before Vassily says congratulations to them. Notably Pierre never says I love you in French and instead says really nothing. I'm not sure they played up the awkwardness of it up enough and not having Pierre consent to it with his halfhearted French is I think very important because it is something he explicitly regrets in the novel and shows his consent to the marriage. Pierre and Helene's first conversation after their wedding in bed is about Pierre wanting to tour all his estates and Helene not wanting to go, immediately showing the disconnect between them and their different motives, but doing some in a restrained way.
The introduction of Alexander here is a rather combative one with Kutuzov while the soldiers cheer him on, calling Kutuzov too old. Kutuzov tells Andrei to write to his wife and the latter reflects and says to himself that he would give them all up for glory. This does give us that motive that Andrei really has (I'm just now putting together how we lost the part of the conversation between Pierre and Andrei where the latter said that he didn't go to war to fight for what he believed in and how there would be no wars if this was the motivation people had for going to war), but a character talking to themselves about their motivations is almost never not silly.
The chanting returns right about midpoint of the episode, where we cut back to the opening shot, the one with the back of Napoleon before cutting to his face. They didn't go for a face that looks like Napoleon's and we don't see a lot of him in this episode, so I'll save comments on him for later.
It is extremely foggy and Boris even explicitly says he can't see anything, really capturing the way that Tolstoy describes Austerlitz and the battle scenes in general (there isn't a lot of emphasis in the episode that this is Austerlitz and I think this is because a modern, especially Western and post-Bonaparte-cult, audience may not put much stock or have much knowledge about Austerlitz, despite the importance it had to Napoleon and European politics). The soldiers are all really dirty, and I guess if I have a complaint it is that soldiers are blown way up into the air and back when the artillery hits around them. It looks a little silly and over the top.. We don't get any upward scale shots as you might suspect (there is one at the end, but it is extremely zoomed out), but the ground shots do a good enough job, especially since it is supposed to display confusion anyway. The camera is not too shaky but feels authentic enough to feel like you are there.
The episode really isn't interested in the French versus Russian big-scale part of the story, and even though this is less important in this part of the novel, I wonder if this is a sign for things to come, with the broad, birds-eye political sections of the novel being skipped (which makes me wonder exactly how much we will see of Napoleon). It also fixates on the human carnage and there is a great shot of Alexander (who doesn't really need to be saved or anything) holding back tears.
The Andrei seeing the sky scene is done very well and I don't think we need to comment on it very much because it is a great scene and it works on the screen.
Helene is much more sympathetic, especially in the conversation about having children she has with Pierre (one of the most non-amoral but downright dreadful moments Helene has) and he is forceful about having Dolokhov in his house, which she has trepidation about. Dolokhov has not been really introduced, but he is very well cast, at least by looks and plays the dashing immoral soldier very well. Not introducing him sooner makes him much more random than he appears in the novel, but we'll see how his character arc plays out throughout the series. There is also an awkward scene where the three of them eat together and Dolkohov eats some of Pierre's food and says it always tastes better from another fellow's plate and then later Dolokhov and Helene have sex on the table very briefly and clothed. Interestingly, when he gets the letter about the affair, it is read in a woman's voice (I think Mikhailovna's?).
Pierre talks to the pigs again when he visits the Rostovs and rambles about Napoleon in an awkward way. I really like the sensitive, and then angry, way Dano plays the challenge scene and this is what ends the episode. On a side note, the Catana is here and sang, but in Russian and despite the look on Bagration's face, there isn't really any comedy in it, and of course all the sections that focus on Count Rostov trying to put on the feast and then being honored for it are cut.
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