Topic: What's your favourite TV program of the moment?

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm pretty sure the protomolecule is introduced, although somewhat indirectly, in the first season.  Mao is locked into a secure room on the Scopulai (sp?) and there was protomolecule on that ship, which is where she got infected.

The others from the Canterbury/ice hauler, who end up on the rescue shuttle in response to a distress call from the Scopulai, are kind of sketchy figures whose characters take seasons to develop.  You have Naomi, former OPA engineer working way below her capabilities on an ice hauler, and the reasons why only become apparently several seasons later. Holden, who has a backstory as well, in part as a product of a strange polygamous family with a rebelious history; Amos, who is some wigged out guy who fought his way out from the chaos of the Baltimore underground on Earth; Alex, former Martian Navy officer whose wife and child on Mars think he's dead, but who has decided to take a civilian job hauling ice as a "glorified bus driver"  so this is a crew of misfits who coalesce as a family, but it takes a while to do this.  There are good supporting actors who make appearances of one or two episodes.

There are two main things I like about this:  one--it mirrors contemporaneous geopolitics; and the other is the way humanity grapples with how to deal with an artefact left by an advanced but unknown civilization.  You have the range of profit hungry Jules-Pierre Mao, mad scientists who are on a misguided mission to save humanity, those who just seek to weaponize it; and there are others who are more humble and think maybe "if you don't know what doo wah diddee means, maybe you shouldn't mess with it..."  I find the nostalgia of a culture that is so advanced that it technologized itself to death both compelling and sad.  It serves as a warning to our present state of affairs.

The UN One World Gov't is a bit of raw meat thrown to the conspiracy nuts who might like that sort of thing. The UN was never intended to be a government.  It's an organization dedicated to collective security and global welfare.  But, there were people in the mid 20th century when it was formed who had aspirations that it would help erase nationalism that had led to wars in the past.  The kind of people who took lessons in Esperanto.  Instead, on Ceres station, you have cops who hire the hooker with heart of gold to teach them Belter patois.  That's more realistic. 

This is a show that was developed by some guys who have thought about stuff in a broad way.  That it was a collaborative effort by two men sort of amazes me.  So I watch it and read the books when they come out.  I find it more interesting than a lot of sci-fi that I've read in recent years.

But I'll certainly look into c's suggestion of an alternative that addresses that same theme.

[8ullfrog]

Sometimes it felt like they leant too hard into "hard" sci-fi, while ignoring some of the requirements of actual "hard" sci-fi.

Like, most Sci-fi is fantasy with science fiction trappings.

The paintball uniforms were particularly painful. Aliens got space marines much better than The Expanse.

[8ullfrog]

Have you seen the David Mamet memo from the unit? He shreds 90% of procedural television and explains why common tropes are boring poo.

https://www.slashfilm.com/a-letter-from-david-mamet-to-the-writers-of-the-unit/

Iron Man 2 & 3 were written by the then established Marvel Committee. It was no longer "Let Favreau take a swing for the fences" it was "We really need to work on establishing the game plan going forward".

That's why Tony damn near takes a back seat to Scarlett. I bitched about it back THEN talking about how little of a golly I gave about Thanos. When Infinity War came out and people wanted to work Thanos magic purple crank, I was unhappy, to say the least. If you have the building blocks of the universe, maybe make people less selfish, instead of murdering their friends and family in an arbitrary manner.

Even Endgame works that purple crank, when Steve "War Criminal" Rogers talks about seeing whales in the Hudson. Which honestly seemed really stupid, but I was mostly checked out anyway.

The gift of a long form series is that you get to establish, evolve, and change a cast. They become different people over time, and that can be a treasure to the audience.

Instead, modern series attempt to hurt the viewer for getting attached to a character, turning them into a voodoo doll or pin cushion. Which is even worse, because they're aping Whedon's "The Woobie must suffer".


All that being said, Mamet really bent the pig when it comes to nepotism. He let his wife write an episode of a supposedly "grounded" series where Spec-ops badasses hide under the shade of being file clerks,

And mixed it with religious mysticism. That's right, she brought the spear of Longinus into play.

And yeah hey, that's a good note, gets the stew a brewing!

Nope, it's really real, it's the spear of Longinus. They use it to bring a mortally wounded main cast member back from the edge of death.

Like, even if you call cowpoo on mysticism, that's a good note. "We have to keep the fanatics away from the counterfeit religious sacrament to avoid them being able to claim legitimacy" is a spicy bless'ed story.

Nope, it's for realzies.

[6pairsofshoes]

I have to say that I am a long-form storyteller's worst nightmare. I would likely enjoy the books, as book writers are generally better at engaging me than TV writers; I'll give them a try.  The books are really quite good.

I don't have the time or the patience to discover that a TV series is brilliant after 15 hours of scene-setting and introduction.
I guess that's where we differ, as I have a high capacity for boredom.

I really struggled with an emergency call from a random guy being broadcast live to the whole station, for example, and that was an important plot point - or appeared to be.
I guess he had access to the space equivalent of Twitter?

... and I don't think that space stations would be dirty, grubby places where rags are worn, either: dirt has to be made/ imported, and I can't see that happening in space even though showmakers use it to add verisimilitude to the "downtrodden underclass".

These are miners, for the most part, busy hauling out rocks and other minerals and the water supply is short.  In fact, there's one scene in which Miller takes advantage of Julie Mao's apartment's lavish water accessibility to take a shower.

Firefly/Serenity is Whedon, so don't watch it if you have issues with him!  I think I'm basically unfamiliar enough not to have issues.  Toy Story was cute.  He might look better if he shaved.  That's my take on him to date.

[6pairsofshoes]

These are miners, for the most part, busy hauling out rocks and other minerals and the water supply is short.  In fact, there's one scene in which Miller takes advantage of Julie Mao's apartment's lavish water accessibility to take a shower.

True, but they are miners in space: getting stuff from "space" into "habitation" involves rigorous cleaning and safety paranoia: no matter how blasé space miners get, they still have to be manically careful or they die. Lack of water doesn't make people dirty, dirt does.

My only experience with mining has been on this planet, so I'm not particularly well acquainted with the hygiene protocols of asteroid mining.  But even on this show, things tend to get discolored and break down with use.  I think there is also some rudimentary agriculture in these places where some plants and fungi are grown for food purposes.  I'd expect some dirt to have accumulated somewhere on a station that was over a century old.

Lack of water to me equals inability to bathe regularly.  I expect you could put somebody in a clean room for 2 weeks, and even without dirt, they'd start smelling bad and need a shampoo.  But I'm a big fan of baths, so I'm prejudiced.

[6pairsofshoes]

Bathing is OK, once a year; over-washing is unhealthy.

You sound like Napoleon Bonaparte.

I'm watching Season 2 episode 10 in which Bobbie, Martian Marine, desires to see the ocean.  She's at UN Headquarters in Manhattan. And she's advised that all she needs to do is walk though a drainage tunnel and she'll be there.  Fact:  this complex is on the East River, a tidal estuary.  The Atlantic is miles to the east.  Somehow, Queens and Brooklyn are gone in the future.  How to explain this?  Global warning?  Beach erosion?  Unscrupulous real estate developers?  From the gently lapping waves, I'd say it looks like the East River.  The Pepsi Cola sign -- visible on the east side of the river in Queens, seems to have disappeared, though.

[smokester]

You sound like Napoleon Bonaparte.

I'm tempted to say "same era", but I wont.

[6pairsofshoes]

I think we tried Murdoch Mysteries but didn't warm to them.   The other series sounds intriguing so I'll check it out after I finish with this season of the Expanse.

I've been watching the Expanse from the beginning again, for the third time.  This time, it isn't as compelling.  Re the 5th season, Marco Inaros seems like pretty boy psychopath, with no complexity of character.  He's just nuts and hates Earth.  Kind of like some 23rd c. QAnon guy.  I guess, given the current state of affairs, that makes him believable, but I prefer more complexity to my villains.  There seems to be a slickness to the production and more of a soap opera-ish tone to the writing.  It's still a very good series, but I get the impression that it's a victim of its own success.  Bezos money has caused the writers to lose their hungry edge.

There's another season to work through.  And there's another novel planned to be published in 10/21.

I don't recall there being any talk of neutralizing the protomolecule.  It doesn't really make sense.  My understanding was that this was a tool that would perform certain functions.  People messing with it by way of creating human hybrids and that sort of thing was just a perversion that mad scientists came up with.

That scene with the weird metallic sculpture of Miller going into the hole to stabilize things, if I remember, was to keep the machinery of the planet from making it uninhabitable.  Not to end the entire presence of the ancient civilization throughout the universe.  The book sort of hints at this vast ancient civilization and the beings that left the vestiges of its tech behind, but never really explores it.  It's left a big blank.  Do I smell a prequel? 

Maybe I have a brain like a sieve.  Anybody else up on this care to weigh in or to explain?

[6pairsofshoes]

Just finished rewatching season 4 of the Man in the high castle.  It held up to a second viewing.

We are onto season 4 of The Crown.  There sure is a complete lack of logic among the characters.  Diana comes across as a clueless orphan who had no family other than a pushy grandmother.  Her older sister runs off and marries somebody after a date or two with Prince Charles.  Other than throwing her sister a job cleaning her apartment (say what?), the older sister, Sarah, seems completely out of the picture and there seems to be no relationship with her younger sibling.  One comes away from the show with the impression that Diana has an absent older sister, a grandmother, and no other siblings or older relatives.  Not the case, but that's the show as currently playing.

Why Charles decides to marry this fresh faced dimwit with no life experience or education is God's own mystery.  And why the Royal Family couldn't have seen a disaster in the making by isolating her and ignoring her is another sort of shoot-oneself -in-the-foot strategy that's hard to understand.  Charles is either a completely spineless twit, or an evil scallywag.  It's up to you to say.  Princess Margaret is the only one with a whit of sense who suggests they "Just call the whole thing off," but of course, she's ignored and the unhappy union is allowed to proceed.

So far, (up to episode 3), the whole business is playing out like a cheesy soap opera, just balancing on the salacious details of bulimia, extramarital affairs and a bunch of chain smoking dullards who like to go hunting and rave about "DUTY" while not bothering to perform the most basic of them: to wit, insuring that anyone admitted to their rare circle might be properly prepared to do so.  What a bunch of stick up the butt snobs.  But, I'm one of those savage creatures from the other side of the pond, so I'm sure my coarse senses are missing some of the more refined details underlying this mess.

[8ullfrog]

The biggest indication that the show is accurate is the repeated demands the show place a disclaimer before every episode.

Crown not happy with "The Crown".

There was a recent resurgence in interest in a 1970's documentary that just followed the royal family around, pretending they were normal, and the crown had it pulled from the beeb.

Someone slapped it on the internet, and sure enough, the crown once again demanded removal, under "copyright".

Thankfully, the internet never forgets, and they don't give a poo if the crown enjoys the footage.

I do notice it's getting harder to get unfiltered views on the web, you have to go to scummier and scummier sites. Everything is being curated and filtered by a bless'ed algorithm.

[6pairsofshoes]

I think you are most likely 100% correct on this.  Check out Prince Charles' Wikipedia entry.  It reads like it was written by the P.R. dept. at Buckingham Palace.

Is this the documentary you are referring to?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Family_(film)#:~:text=Royal%20Family%20(also%20known%20as,an%20estimated%20350%20million%20people.

[8ullfrog]

I was unaware the crown has a super ultra mega copyright, that's interesting.

[6pairsofshoes]

All you have to do is remember that you are watching fiction, with characters that share their names with some fairly well-known people.

I don't pretend to care about the Royals: I sort of understand they have a historical function like politicians do, but they don't bother me so I don't bother them.

The media make characters out of them, so that they can sell papers/ adverts/ themselves, and therefore they make readily identifiable caricatures: people to sympathise with (Lady Di & her boys), hissable villains (Meghan Markle, Charles), idiots (Andrew, Philip) dutiful old stalwarts (the Queen), gold diggers (Sarah Ferguson) etc.. Then they report whatever they want that plays to the caricature they have created. They have no fear of reply, as the answer to any rebuttal is "they would say that, wouldn't they?". The people that digest the media uncritically accept this as truth. Even those with some remaining critical faculties tend toward the "no smoke without fire" analysis.

Then the TV series is a serialisation of the back-story that the media have created for the fictional characters whose lives they document, and your summary is a pretty accurate version of that back-story. To the media everything is (or should be) a soap-opera. Think of it as "Keeping Up With The Windsors", or "Palace Shores".

Don't mistake this for anything approaching an accurate portrayal of the actual people, though.

Yes.  I'm sure it's fiction, and kind of sensationalized in ways that simply don't add up half the time.  Olivia Coleman can't resist a tendency to comic performance in this that seems like it misses any wit the Queen herself might display.  The Royal Family is a strange institution, but I'd take it any day over the Trumps, even if I had to pay for it with my tax dollars.  They are entertaining in a less nauseating way.

[6pairsofshoes]

The problem with the Royals is that we only have access to "fiction", none of us really knows anything about them; we only know what we are told by the media, and they are just as guilty of sensationalization as is Olivia Colman.

I'd say that our fictional views of the Royals say more about us as a culture than about the Royals themselves

I have never really understood the overseas vew of the Royal family as an outdated but quaint institution, when dynasties are all too prevalent everywhere (Trumps, Kennedies, etc., etc., etc.).

The difference on our side of the pond is that these families get "voted into office" while the Royals are born into it.  That, odd religious aspect of their "power" is what we find a little bizarre.  The Divine Right (Dieu et mon droit, and all that implies) of the Royals is a concept I find hard to wrap my brain around.  It reminds me of shamans or some magical power that is bestowed by the deities of far away peoples.  At least the Kennedys got their start as bootleggers who parlayed this fortune into the realm of politics and other "legitimate" arenas.  The Trumps are another kettle of fish.


I may have mentioned it before, but I am all for 100% inheritance tax, in the hope of destroying all such dynasties.

The US has a combined gift and estate tax that kicks in at 11.7 million dollars and the tax is on the donor or estate initiating the property transfer rather than the recipient.  There are some cases where monies are taxable to the recipient, but there's an entire field of tax experts and attorneys who practice in this area because it's so complicated.  The larger the transfer, the greater the tax rate.  But, of course, there are legal entities, such as trusts, that have been established to avoid or to minimize such taxes.  Placing a 100% inheritance tax, as you suggest, on such large transfers, would most likely create an incentive to move assets offshore and create an entire industry devoted to avoidance.

[smokester]

I was loving The Stand even though it was a bit bogged down with God and the other one. Didn't bother me too much until episode 8+ when the balance shifts too much.

I must say that episode 8 with it's kangeroo court and lots of bad people chanting and whatnot, might have been scary if it hadn't truly reminded me of a bog standard Trump rally.