+1
Initially, I thought the character split was just a necessary concession to the switch in mediums (in TV people care about characters more than plot, as a general rule, and the book's characters are exactly as poor as you'd expect from a hard sci-fi novel)...but after the first half of the season, I started to see what they were going for, realize which characters were being "assigned" which things in the story, and it started really working for me. There's a lot of cool allusions in there about things that happen later, or won't happen until next season (or even after that). They did a good job with the meta stuff and symbolism and all that.
I'm pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. I have a lot of criticisms, for sure, but there are a few things it nailed, were more or less exactly as I'd imagined, and some of the changes I can at least see were pretty thoughtful and show a lot of advance planning.
Definitely hope they get to make the whole thing because it gets much crazier, somehow.