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Justin Credible posted:Saving Private Ryan is just like, so devoid of tension. You know they are going to win the war, it already happened, why should we care? I mean it's in the title too, they win the war AND save Private Ryan. Justin Credible posted:But you're like trying to pick apart the framework and saying the writing's bad on.. some kind of level I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around. Justin Credible posted:It's establishing some kind of rules, and as I have said multiple times, supernatural and horror elements need rules or else there isn't tension because literally anything can happen, and you don't know what particular risks for the characters are there at any given point because there aren't any specifics on the threat. Justin Credible posted:You aren't going to be logic'd into having empathy for people in a situation just because you know some of the ultimate outcome. It's a human level connection and there is no amount of instruction or explanation is going to get you over whatever hump you have here, man. We can't teach you how to watch things. Justin Credible posted:If you don't like it it's fine but you're trying to pick it apart like your personal reaction to it is some kind of structural failure of the writing, and it's just not happening, because those issues are in your head, and not objective script issues. Chamale posted:If the show hasn't clicked with you, that's fine, but you don't need to post every week that you didn't like it. Chamale posted:This seems to be how the show is explaining the fungus taking over the world - a whole harvest of tainted flour that hits the market in a thousand cities and causes a crisis everywhere. I think you could create a show about the descent into a zombie apocalypse - Romero made a good movie called Diary of the Dead with a similar theme. Part of the problem, though, is that depicting that many people dying would make it extremely bleak. Every episode would be like the first half hour of The Last of Us, with more elderly people and children getting killed every time.
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Jan 24, 2023 10:26
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I like mushrooms and mycology Terence McKenna and I love post apocalyptic media so this show is just the ticket! My favourite part is all the Annihilation-esque aesthetics, which make me feel this is weird zombies and weird apocalypse and that's just rad. And that mushroom zombie that can hear you but not see you was freaky as!
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Jan 24, 2023 10:54
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Platystemon posted:Bush read John Barry’s The Great Influenza, and it instantly catapulted him to a top-shelf American president for pandemic preparedness. I did like the SARs poster in the hospital/med unit. withak posted:Someone start a 2003 politics thread in D&D. no
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Jan 24, 2023 11:12
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I liked this episode, but the scientist going 'welp we've tried nothing, lets bomb everything' was a bit silly. Also the teen kid being snarky all the time - I get it, she's a teenager - kind of deflates the tension in some spots. I'm not sure a kid who's grown up in this hellscape world would act like that in the face of grave danger to be honest.
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Jan 24, 2023 13:08
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Tiggum posted:. If don't like it by now it's going to be more of the same. Why not stop. Save yourself some time and read a book instead?
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Jan 24, 2023 14:02
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Thundercracker posted:If don't like it by now it's going to be more of the same. Why not stop. Save yourself some time and read a book instead? Danger posted:FWiW pretty much all early reviewers said the next episode is a big departure from the game and maybe the best in the series.
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Jan 24, 2023 14:16
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Watching something you dislike is perfectly fine. It's not a lot of time. A lot of us sat through the dreck of Obi Wan. If it something is TRULY dreadful you stop though like the new "90s Show". Just utter wank and I am not gonna finish that poo poo. TLoU though is really loving good. Pedro Pascal is enormous in any role.
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Jan 24, 2023 14:48
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Dead forum user posted:I liked this episode, but the scientist going 'welp we've tried nothing, lets bomb everything' was a bit silly. It was re-iterating what the scientist in the first episode said that if a fungal infection of this sort ever existed, we lose. Even if you thought you could whip up some vaccine or cure, how many months is that going to take? The entire world would be infected long before you came up with anything. Heck, we just went through a pandemic of a virus that wasn't something outside our conception. If COVID turned you into a mind-controlled zombie that exists just to infect as many other people as possible, we would have gone extinct by April 2020.
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Jan 24, 2023 14:54
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Vintersorg posted:If it something is TRULY dreadful you stop though like the new "90s Show". Just utter wank and I am not gonna finish that poo poo.
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Jan 24, 2023 15:01
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TyrantWD posted:It was re-iterating what the scientist in the first episode said that if a fungal infection of this sort ever existed, we lose. Even if you thought you could whip up some vaccine or cure, how many months is that going to take? The entire world would be infected long before you came up with anything. Heck, we just went through a pandemic of a virus that wasn't something outside our conception. If COVID turned you into a mind-controlled zombie that exists just to infect as many other people as possible, we would have gone extinct by April 2020. He just sounded like some quack. So we're meant to believe that all mycologists are of the same opinion and have not been screeching about it enough for even some small preparedness? It was a really stupid line for someone who has looked down one microscope and cut open one leg to make. It's fine when you want to move things along fast but what is the point of this show if it's not going to aim to be slightly more intelligent than TWD.
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Jan 24, 2023 15:13
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nine-gear crow posted:When you think about it, Boston really is just Calgary and Edmonton. Boston doesn't actually exist. wait do I even exist?
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Jan 24, 2023 15:33
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Bedshaped posted:He just sounded like some quack. So we're meant to believe that all mycologists are of the same opinion and have not been screeching about it enough for even some small preparedness? The only reason he sounded like a quack was that he was saying he was worried about something that is supposed to be impossible, and this scientist in Jakarta who knows that it is impossible discovers that not only is it possible, it has already happened and its the worst case scenario. Between cutting open the leg and seeing the tendrils come out of the mouth, we were so far beyond what was supposed to be possible.
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Jan 24, 2023 15:49
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Dead forum user posted:I liked this episode, but the scientist going 'welp we've tried nothing, lets bomb everything' was a bit silly. You’re right it would of been 'welp we've tried nothing, time to go to Applebees half price apps, can’t live in fear forever doomers’
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Jan 24, 2023 15:50
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jfc use your heads nobody is going to start bombing cities because 1 professor/expert said so They were obviously asking for options and they still need to relay said options up whatever chain of command they have. Perhaps even convene a panel of more experts to debate/get a second opinion. ffs
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Jan 24, 2023 15:50
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Flash Forward -- "The Gang Bombs Boston"
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Jan 24, 2023 16:00
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I still am jazzed for this show but I liked the second episode less than the first. I found the creature design on the clickers to be very cartoon-y and stiff - they reminded me of the foam creations people would make on that Scyfy monster makeup competition show Face Off. Totally understand the practical limitations but I think what bothers me is that the medium made the heads look inorganic, which creates such contrast in a creature intended specifically to look organic. I think it just took me out of the moment and I didn't feel particularly spooked by the clickers (but then again I have never played the videogame so I don't have the associated adrenaline rush of hearing that noise while only carrying around 2 bullets). I also wasn't a fan of the execution of the mycology prof open. This lady has spent her life studying fungi and cordyceps infections but only in bugs. I can see an academic paper coming out where she writes about infection in humans and how we're all hosed being responded to with a flood of response papers about how human physiology is vastly different than bugs, and there is to-date no cure for cordyceps infection because who gives a poo poo about funding research to find a cure for a plague for ants? She's also just a fungi lady and then she goes into this room completely comfortable cutting open a cadaver like that's something she'd been trained to do her entire life. And based on what she's seen, she only knows that some dead person has a bite mark on their leg and a mouth filled with tendrils. She doesn't have the knowledge of these things turning into human-eating zombies, or how an infection could even change human behavior, or how long an infection would even be viable in a human. Like if an organisms purpose is to spread into hosts as much as possible in humans that could also mean just being extra slutty or something. So to see that and jump immediately to 'yea just loving annihilate everyone' is very extreme and took it out of the realm of plausibility to me. I guess the solution would have been to have even just referenced a longer period of isolation and research, which maybe would be boring tv idk, but it does seem very circular logic that the big emotional moment was supposed to be that the cordyceps sample came from a human which we already knew to be spooked by as an audience because we saw the first episode. There was a way to do this that doesn't depend on fleshing out a full reasonable-sounding scientific explanation of an impossible fantasy thing but could have been used as a vehicle to explain more about the creatures. For example instead of relying on joel to offhandedly be like 'yea some of them die and some of them don't', they could have brought in mycology prof to the lab and been like 'here's an actual human doctor who has been monitoring this weird lady for two weeks and she hasn't gone down, she's tendrils in her mouth, what do you think is up with that?". Maybe I'm mostly annoyed by mycology prof being a lovely scientist but this whole portion fell flat to me. I still like the show though and am having a good time watching it. Piano playing frog was my favorite 
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Jan 24, 2023 16:27
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Tiggum posted:It's been two episodes. I'm giving it a chance. It's been said that the third episode is where it really picks up. If I don't like that episode, I'll stop. Bad news for you, even if you like the 3rd episode, I don't feel you will like the rest of the episodes given the complaints you had so far. Because the show is it what is it and if it the show follows 90% of the game you will have the same complaints. While I disagree with pretty much all of your thoughts so far, I do realize it is subjective and it doesn't make you wrong (although I don't think I would trust your opinions on anything at this point). I will say some of your posting feels very low effort, to the point it comes off as trolling. But hell that is subjective too and at least it is better than 2003 politics bullshit.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:32
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the one thing the phantom menace was missing was a scientist in a white lab coat calming explaining that lasers are dangerous to the audience for 10 minutes. maybe have a few scenes to show how he is an expert on lasers first also? also, are mammals susceptible to the gungan energy bombs, or just robots? i hope we get a detailed explanation of this at some point.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:35
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How did Ellie first notice that Tess was infected, anyway? drat cat jumped on my lap during the scene.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:38
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Did anyone notice that The large "hive mind" group laying in the street would groan and move when direct sunlight went over them? I love the changes to the infection for the tv show so far, and that part really creeped me out.quote:How did Ellie first notice that Tess was infected, anyway? drat cat jumped on my lap during the scene. I believe Ellie picked up on it from her body language / dialogue? Chello De Don fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 16:39
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filmcynic posted:How did Ellie first notice that Tess was infected, anyway? drat cat jumped on my lap during the scene. Unlike goons, she's good at reading subtle clues in human behavior.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:40
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filmcynic posted:How did Ellie first notice that Tess was infected, anyway? drat cat jumped on my lap during the scene.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:46
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Dead forum user posted:I liked this episode, but the scientist going 'welp we've tried nothing, lets bomb everything' was a bit silly. Ellie has lived her entire life in a military stronghold, which the show has shown to be a pretty humdrum existence. Other than getting bitten by a recently infected person I don't think she's had much face-to-face experience with the infected. When they get cornered in the museum she learns to STFU real fast.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:50
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kliras posted:just her general behaviour Gotcha, thanks. Wasn't sure if I missed a tendril or something.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:00
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Small White Dragon posted:That opening in Jakarta was really awesome. That's all I wanted to say. The Jakarta intro was cool, I hope they do more flashbacks like that. Reminds me of the various notes & environmental storytelling you encounter in the game which flesh out what happened at the outbreak & in the 20 years since. Also I don't think the fungus affects other species, the real life Cordyceps fungus has many different sub-species and each one is tailored only to a specific host species. Although I am guessing based on the dog in episode 1 that the infected humans are aggressive towards any life, not just humans.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:30
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The point of the cold open was world building as well as foreshadowing/introducing the tendrils as a concept. It's showing us the moment the world ended for the purposes of emotional payoff while trickling a few new details out that continue to build on what we know about the zombies and how the world ended up like it did. The scientist is deliberately built up to be the wise old unflappable sage character. She's intentionally made to be a soft-spoken old lady; the science stuff isn't meant to show us she knows science, that was established by the fact they sent the soldiers to retrieve her, nor was it meant to give us a zombie biology lesson, it's meant to show us that she's calm, collected, and methodical so that it heightens the emotional impact when she subverts our expectations with the "bomb them all to hell" answer. It's not meant to be a serious policy suggestion in a geopolitical drama that needs to show us how the government weighed it, I don't get the impression she even thinks that's a viable plan as it comes off as more hopeless desperation as anything. It's a dramatic way of communicating to the audience that they just witnessed the first person to come to the realization the world is ending. Along the way we see the mouth tendrils in action for the first time, which foreshadows their importance to the plot of the episode, confirm the original vector was flour, and learn that Jakarta was the epicenter. All this while emotionally priming the audience for the rest of the episode by showing us the very moment humanity realized it was doomed. edit: we don't need to see all the science and policy details fleshed out to give credibility to her fear because the audience already knows what is going to happen and that she is correct. The point is to give her the credibility that her answer is derived from the fact she truly knows what is about to happen and it's not just irrational panic or an over the top reaction that is correct by accident. Jarmak fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 17:57
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Shageletic posted:Bush said mealy rear end poo poo from the side of his mouth as he used 9/11 to create a domestic national security behemoth who spent every day invading and violating Muslim rights and spaces. I'm telling you, you don't know poo poo about this. Still no idea where that weaponized anthrax that could only come from a military lab came from.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:18
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Next episode will open with someone notifying GWB there’s urgent news from Indonesia, and he’ll say to bomb them without finding out what the news even is.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:21
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I would actually liken the jakarta scene to the s1 visit to the CDC made by the protagonists of TWD. The purpose of this is to message to the audience that "science won't save us," but the key difference is that, by that point in TWD, we didn't know that the world had ended or that there was no coordinated response to the zombie outbreak anymore, or that a cure wasn't possible. This scene was well done and felt impactful, but it came off as unnecessary repetition of obvious facts with nothing new to add and borderline overexplaining. Whether we veer into "too much stupid detail" or not we'll see.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:28
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bobjr posted:Next episode will open with someone notifying GWB there’s urgent news from Indonesia, and he’ll say to bomb them without finding out what the news even is. The timing is a little off, but GWB might've been one of the best modern presidents to deal with a global pandemic: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic-late-prepare/story?id=69979013
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Jan 24, 2023 18:36
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Jarmak posted:Along the way we see the mouth tendrils in action for the first time, which foreshadows their importance to the plot of the episode That wasn’t the first time we saw the tendrils. They’ve been shown since the beginning. When Sarah walks in on Nana Adler attacking her daughter, we see the tendrils coming out of her mouth and into the wound she inflicted.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:42
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Phylodox posted:That wasn’t the first time we saw the tendrils. They’ve been shown since the beginning. When Sarah walks in on Nana Adler attacking her daughter, we see the tendrils coming out of her mouth and into the wound she inflicted. That's right, I forgot about that. Still foreshadows their importance to events in the episode.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:48
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Chamale posted:Twenty-one million people have died. The doomers were right. It's the old paradox that if you react in proportion to the threat, it'll look like you overreacted. If they had listened to Dr. Ibu Ratna and bombed Jakarta, they could've tried to save the world, but by the time she made that suggestion it was already too late. I am likening her to e.g. the COVID commentators who (in my country) argue that even now in 2023 with 99% of people vaccinated we should still have perpetually closed borders, rolling lockdowns etc. I don't really want to derail, although on the other hand given what happened over the past few years it would be kind of weird if we didn't draw parallels at various points. Though I find it more interesting how differently it hits now to just unthinkingly recreate Boston as a soulless Orwellian dystopia.
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Jan 24, 2023 20:48
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say what you will about bush he was a dude you could sit down and have a beer with. who better to navigate this crisis than a real fungi
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Jan 24, 2023 21:10
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bush was a dipshit and would have bungled a pandemic perhaps worse than trump, but the messaging would have been slightly less overtly stupid
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Jan 24, 2023 21:51
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matureaudiencesonly posted:II also wasn't a fan of the execution of the mycology prof open. This lady has spent her life studying fungi and cordyceps infections but only in bugs. I can see an academic paper coming out where she writes about infection in humans and how we're all hosed being responded to with a flood of response papers about how human physiology is vastly different than bugs, and there is to-date no cure for cordyceps infection because who gives a poo poo about funding research to find a cure for a plague for ants? She's also just a fungi lady and then she goes into this room completely comfortable cutting open a cadaver like that's something she'd been trained to do her entire life. And based on what she's seen, she only knows that some dead person has a bite mark on their leg and a mouth filled with tendrils. She doesn't have the knowledge of these things turning into human-eating zombies, or how an infection could even change human behavior, or how long an infection would even be viable in a human. Yeah why jump to “this is literally the zombie apocalypse”? The fungus can probably only grow in immunocompromized people, right? Right?
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Jan 24, 2023 21:55
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Moltke posted:bush was a dipshit and would have bungled a pandemic perhaps worse than trump, but the messaging would have been slightly less overtly stupid In 2005 he read "The Great Influenza", which says that global pandemics happen every 100 years. So he spent $7 billion preparing for a flu pandemic. But in 2003, it seems that the possibility of a pandemic wasn't on his mind so I don't think he'd do a good job.
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Jan 24, 2023 22:37
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Chamale posted:In 2005 he read "The Great Influenza", which says that global pandemics happen every 100 years. So he spent $7 billion preparing for a flu pandemic. But in 2003, it seems that the possibility of a pandemic wasn't on his mind so I don't think he'd do a good job. It bloody well should be on his mind because in 2003 SARS 1 happened.
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Jan 24, 2023 22:40
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Bush in 2003 may not have had a great handle on pandemics, but compared to his successors who failed even to refill the stockpile of N95 respirators in the decade after 2009’s Swine Flu pandemic, I think that he still takes the “W”.
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Jan 24, 2023 22:44
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spankmeister posted:It bloody well should be on his mind because in 2003 SARS 1 happened. From what I've read, it doesn't seem like SARS spurred him into action, it was reading that book in 2005. (Probably a combination of both). They could have tried the SARS mitigation strategy in the show, but then it'd essentially be a show about covid, so having it spread through tainted flour instead lets them go in a different creative direction.
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Jan 24, 2023 22:45
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