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Marsupial Ape posted:I’m still a fan of the idea that the isolated NK engineers outsider-arted a hyper-efficient consumables recycling system. In FAM universe, Human Centipede was not fiction.
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Jan 10, 2023 03:05
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Maybe they launched a Salyut-style module filled with provisions that their Soyuz-alike was docked with for the trip to Mars? Or did they show rule that out, I forget
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Jan 10, 2023 03:14
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You guys have thought about the logistic of the NK way more than the shows writers have tbh. I still like the show but reminder that this is a show where the mission leader let the kid who is a junkie for space-pills monitor an important part of the drill, which also for some reason had no override on the actual drill and was all controlled from their base which meant he could let it blow up because of his anger/space pill abuse.
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Jan 10, 2023 17:34
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It's also the show where the plan was to rocket the woman with the risky pregnancy that was causing her to lose consciousness from blood pressure on a launch vehicle and have her jet pack to the orbiter. Still feels like the work of an in some way insanely culturally conservative writer's room that not a single character at a single point in that dire edge of survival context even whispers the word smasmortion.
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Jan 10, 2023 17:50
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It's a show where America is the good guys, literally only children and idiots believe that in 202X.
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Jan 10, 2023 18:17
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Owlbear Camus posted:Still feels like the work of an in some way insanely culturally conservative writer's room that not a single character at a single point in that dire edge of survival context even whispers the word smasmortion.
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Jan 10, 2023 18:24
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tokin opposition posted:It's a show where America is the good guys, literally only children and idiots believe that in 202X. You're watching it wrong.
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Jan 10, 2023 20:26
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Mmmmmmmno.
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Jan 10, 2023 20:44
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The show basically lost all it's believability when it became clear it needed to be about the same characters at the centre of all the world events, to ensure there was character ensemble throughline. It's very hard to do that and realistically portray space / make historical event analogues, whilst also advancing their world state at the pace they want to. It kind of flipped on me, in that I now enjoy seeing the ridiculous way that Karen or Ed will find themselves as God Emperor of the galactic fleet.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:42
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That's true but at the same time a lot of the big breaks with realism (i.e. treating orbital mechanics like travel on a sea surface) are not at all required by the retention of Ed and Karen at the center of everything.
bawfuls fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jan 10, 2023 |
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Jan 10, 2023 21:47
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You can plausibly have a space pioneer transition to an important public facing admin role at NASA or be a major political figure and keep them in the plot for several decades. Making literal spaceman dynasties kind of strains it into soap opera land, and frankly makes me dislike all the characters more because nepotism is gross.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:49
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The stupid thing is that were building an ensemble in the 80s, and then they dumped all those characters and stuck with the apollo era characters.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:49
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At first I was like "ok this is getting kind of dumb" when Ed was chosen to go to Mars but now I'm kind of hoping they go all the way and by season 5 or 6 he's half robot flying out of the solar system.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:54
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It's not even hard to have a persistent ensemble of space pioneers in your many-decade spanning scifi epic while still being grounded in realism. Kim Stanley Robinson did it in his Mars trilogy by having the Martian biologists develop a gene therapy that halts aging. The thing is he still had some die to accidents/cancer/revolution/etc, added subsequent generations of characters, and then also explored how those later generations would react to the longevity of their predecessors and their continued domination of political power. And none of this requires pretending that a man could survive on Mars for months in a Soyuz capsule or that a dozen people could make the ~9 month trip to Mars in ship the size of the Space Shuttle.
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Jan 10, 2023 22:06
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The only astronaut adjacent thing Ed should be rated for after the time skip is punching hecklers.
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Jan 11, 2023 00:40
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Owlbear Camus posted:You can plausibly have a space pioneer transition to an important public facing admin role at NASA or be a major political figure and keep them in the plot for several decades. the super lazy counter to this is "but it's realistic!!" okay good job, I hate the characters anyway thanks
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Jan 11, 2023 03:43
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Season three really soured me on the show, for just a bunch of reasons. I don't even hate the Danny plot -- it, in itself, could have been an excellent rebuke against nepotism. But the show's pivot into trying to make us feel sorry for him and Ed at the end of the season was pathetic; one's a literal puppy kicking psychotic and the other was his enabler. Ed should have crushed the kid's windpipe and left himself behind in space. Also the way they handled the Russian and baby subplots, and particularly that cliffhanger intersection between the Russian and baby subplots, was sloppy and smacked of behind the scenes chaos. Also, as has been pointed out before, the North Korean survivor was completely irrelevant to the season (potentially a last minute change propped up by some re-inserted news broadcasts and voice over in earlier episodes, or that's my guess).
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Jan 11, 2023 04:49
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Cojawfee posted:The stupid thing is that were building an ensemble in the 80s, and then they dumped all those characters and stuck with the apollo era characters. Yes, I still find this decision totally baffling. It fits the structure of the show to let the first season characters go, and they started to develop their replacements, and then they just... went right back to an increasingly rickety eye-rolling sequence of events with a main cast where every character seems to be shoehorned in. I would much rather watch former space mutineers Redhead Guy and Sally Ride as they transition into leadership roles with a questionable relationship to the lionized leaders of the past, that's much better than Old Guy Suits Up For One Last Ride, Again, And Also His Wife And Kids Are In Charge Of Everything. edit: oh, and also everyone younger than them is gone, too. oops all old people
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Jan 11, 2023 05:38
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What can Ed claim to be being first at, in space? First cuckold?
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Jan 11, 2023 06:02
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binge watched them all over a few days, the space nerd in me has been very happy season 3 was a marked drop in overall storyline/direction/editing quality but still good enough to watch, it's a real shame they stopped being brave enough to kill off main cast members at a moment's notice- it lost its "what the gently caress is happening, space is hard and dangerous" quality when some people clearly had some big time plot armour while anyone with no backstory might as well have been wearing a red shirt and the suspense and unpredictability evaporated away absolutely loved first korean on mars even if it was a bit silly and wish they had filled out the backplot more for that
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Jan 15, 2023 12:57
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Don't know how I slept on this show. Just finished binging it over the past three days. I did feel disappointment as well by season 3 when it became clear that rather than NASA, the institution, itself being the main character of the show, it would be a cast of highly dysfunctional individuals who would somehow yet remain central to every important milestone in the space race over a 30 year period. I'd only heard vague things about the show beforehand and I guess I went into it expecting something more like an alternate-history version of From Earth to the Moon mini-series. The insanity of North Korea beating everyone to Mars made up for it a bit however.
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Jan 16, 2023 23:26
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Just finished season 2 after blowing through the first season in a few days. Wouldn't Ed be in his 70's by 1995? Really hope the Karen hosed her best friends son doesn't become a plot point . Crossing my fingers that this show is a sequel to Battlestar Galactica and we find the cylons and everyone goes on cool space adventures with robots
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Jan 17, 2023 01:33
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bawfuls posted:this is essentially required by the plot because even for one guy that capsule isn’t big enough to hold air/water/food for just the months long trip to Mars, let alone more months on the surface God imagine how disgusting the smell must have been from all the loving in that tiny rear end ship
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Jan 17, 2023 05:06
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Your Gay Uncle posted:Really hope the Karen hosed her best friends son doesn't become a plot point . Crossing my fingers that this show is a sequel to Battlestar Galactica and we find the cylons and everyone goes on cool space adventures with robots I'm sorry friend
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Jan 17, 2023 05:06
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I just binged through Season 3 this week and have some Thoughts. Major S3 plot spoilers below. I wish they'd left out Jimmy's subplot altogether. The character sucks, the actor's performance is flat, and the motivations don't feel believable for me. We still could have ended with a JSC/OKC situation, but it would have been more satisfying if it was simply a group of out-of-work oil/coal people who became increasingly radicalized due to their situation. The show could have built it up over the season by showing more protests, maybe even leading to localized riots or something. The Jimmy stuff and his dumbass friends was lame, and unfortunately we'll almost certainly see more of him next season. I actually called the North Korean on Mars thing in the first or second episode, but it was more of an observation to my wife of "ha, watch North Korea Laika some poor guy up to Mars with no way home, but no, that would be way too stupid". When it didn't happen after a few episodes, I figured they wouldn't go there. Whoops. In a show full of unbelievable things, that dude surviving for nearly a year out of the Soyuz is probably the worst. There's no way a craft that size could supply food, oxygen, and power for the trip plus 6+ months on Mars. Even with a customized service module for the journey, it's a real stretch. I like the plot point in general, so we'll suspend disbelief. I hated Karen the first couple of seasons, but I was coming around on her this season. Then she got blown up. Which is fine, they're killing off most of the S1 characters. I don't understand why she got a whole plot thread this season that ended very abruptly with no resolution. Life just happens that way sometimes, but it seemed weird to do a huge buildup for nothing. Danny getting exiled was a good choice. Can we just leave him out there forever? Since him and Ed are both still alive, Ed's definitely going to find out about his part in the affair and will either kill him or do something dumb that gets himself killed. When Will Tyler came out and then later got promised a medal of freedom, I was 100% sure the character would die on Mars, probably in sume ultra-heroic way. My wife pointed out that the writers probably wouldn't kill off the only gay Black character. I hope she's right, and if it didn't happen this season, Will probably made it home. I was really, really worried that Margo would throw Aleida under the bus to save herself. When the Soviet space lady said "we can help you", I assumed she meant the KGB would plant evidence to make it look like Aleida was actually the one who sold classified information. I'm very happy they didn't go that route. I don't have an opinion on Margo's outcome. I feel like her plotline is done, and despite liking the actress, I'll be fine if we don't see the character again. As for the customary between-seasons time skip, this one feels weird because there were so many more unresolved threads than usual. Does Ellen get impeached, resign, reelected? Does the country come together after the JSC bombing, or does it go the 9/11 route and begin to polarize people even further? Does the Mars crew get rescued in the face of nobody wanting to go back to Mars? I'm sure we'll get answers during a montage and some exposition at the beginning of next season, but these storylines could have been interesting to resolve naturally, even if I felt like they needed to pick up the pace a bit. The whole season felt like it was running in slow motion until the last two episodes, where too much happened too quickly. I guess that's just how prestige TV works. Thanks, Breaking Bad, for popularizing the second-to-last-episode action bonanza trend. Edit: At least added a spoiler warning at the top. I think we're well outside the "air date" window of requiring spoiler tags for season 3, right? Anyway, FAM is still a good show. This season was uneven, but I have hopes for the next one.
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Jan 20, 2023 14:30
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WhiteHowler posted:I actually called the North Korean on Mars thing in the first or second episode, but it was more of an observation to my wife of "ha, watch North Korea Laika some poor guy up to Mars with no way home, but no, that would be way too stupid". When it didn't happen after a few episodes, I figured they wouldn't go there. Whoops. In a show full of unbelievable things, that dude surviving for nearly a year out of the Soyuz is probably the worst. There's no way a craft that size could supply food, oxygen, and power for the trip plus 6+ months on Mars. Even with a customized service module for the journey, it's a real stretch. I like the plot point in general, so we'll suspend disbelief. It's really weird that this show was made after The Martian. Having rewatched that recently, it really left its footprint on people's minds (or I'd thought it did) about how Job 1 if you're stranded on Mars is to grow food somehow, because no way are your shipboard provisions going to last you even a few months until help arrives, even if you have a full hab. A one-man module full of cans of cat food is just lmao. The movie was a big cultural touchstone too, hell the DuckTales show referenced it outright with Della stranded on the moon
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Jan 20, 2023 14:51
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The longer this show goes on, the more I've become convinced that one of the central mandates Moore put down for it is "end with some sort of united Earth government that allows humanity to go interstellar." It makes a lot of the really contrived stuff- such as North Korea being first to land a person on Mars- go down a little bit smoother. You start the show off with the USA losing the race to the Moon as a means to take the USA down a peg in terms of its collective ego. In showing them handle that loss through even further ramping of space funding, you contrive various events that are based on actual real world history, which force conflicts and resolutions to occur between the USA and USSR that ultimately result in a cooling off of the cold war to some degree (which has to happen if the USSR is sticking around). Then you show the race to Mars being a complete shitshow, where the clout-seeking "first to land on another planet" behavior from all of its competitors continually causes massive problems and death, and forces those competitors to become more collaborative with one another in order to survive. When they finally do make it to Mars, you have one last major display of that behavior in the form of the two heads of each major power's mission essentially racing to be the first out of the airlock and set foot on Mars, which ends up backfiring in such a way as to have it appear to the general public as if the USA and the USSR were sharing the prestige of being the first to set foot on another planet. To top it all off, a while later it's discovered that, oh wow, it turns out North Korea was actually technically the first to set foot on Mars, and they did it by having a complete and utter disregard for the comfort, safety, and livelihood of the people they sent to Mars. All that clout-seeking to be the first to set foot on Mars, all the dumb decisions that brought death and destruction to the USA, USSR, and Helios missions, it all ended up being completely pointless in the end. They had already been beaten by North Korea, because North Korea was willing to make the sole focus of their entire mission be "first to set foot on Mars" and nothing else; no doing science, no finding water, no surviving. Even that ends up then being undercut to some degree in the end, though- yeah, NK was the first on Mars, but no one would have ever known (or it would have been much longer before it was discovered) if the three other missions had never bungled things up so badly that they wound up needing to make a journey over to the NK capsule. The NK cosmonaut surviving for so long did still bug me though. I remember there was some line from Margo earlier in the season about a failure with one of the unmanned presupply missions to Mars, and as soon as the NK reveal came, I thought for sure it was going to wind up being that the reason the presupply mission had lost contact was due to the NK cosmonaut raiding it. Having it be that North Korea's entire plan was to beat the USA and USSR to Mars and then survive off the supplies they had sent would have been a much more fun plot point imo. They could have made investigating that presupply mission's landing site into one of the USA mission's goals, slow burned it throughout the season, maybe even mix in the same thing happening to the USSR, and it would have made for one hell of a better reveal when they finally figure out what happened. Also, it's a bit surprising the number of people who were flabbergasted that the pregnancy plotline didn't end in abortion. Like yeah, scientifically, that baby is going to be complete hosed up once it's born due to spending so much development time in space or on a low-g planet, if it even survives birth in the first place. But even ignoring the fact the general audience of the show may not be aware of that, look at the context in which the pregnancy occurred. It's the lovechild of an American woman and Soviet man, and was conceived on what essentially ended up being a joint USA-USSR mission to Mars. It's also the 90's, and even with this being an alternate history, anti-abortion sentiment is still going to be pretty prevalent in the USA. Plus, there's that whole "what if the mother wants to keep it no matter what?" bodily autonomy/rights thing that, you know, is pretty important. I did not find it implausible at all that in the end, the pregnancy was allowed to continue. What I will find implausible is if season 4 has Kelly suffering no professional repercussions for getting it on with no protection on the USA's first mission to Mars, though. Data Graham posted:SET foot 
mpeg4v3 fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jan 20, 2023 |
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Jan 20, 2023 18:26
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One big question that I don't think the show answered: When the crew dug out the MSAM with the plan to fly back up to Phoenix, they said it had to be a one-way trip with all nine of them aboard due to the limited fuel they'd be able to extract on the surface. But my understanding is that the MSAM was making constant runs up and down before the landslide, and that they could refuel it on-orbit. Obviously the pregnancy emergency made it so they didn't have time to harvest enough fuel to reach Phoenix, but if that hadn't happened, I don't get why they couldn't have extracted enough fuel to fly two or three people up, refuel, then go back down to pick up more people. Was it also refueling at Helios' ex-base on the ground? mpeg4v3 posted:The NK cosmonaut surviving for so long did still bug me though. I remember there was some line from Margo earlier in the season about a failure with one of the unmanned presupply missions to Mars, and as soon as the NK reveal came, I thought for sure it was going to wind up being that the reason the presupply mission had lost contact was due to the NK cosmonaut raiding it. Having it be that North Korea's entire plan was to beat the USA and USSR to Mars and then survive off the supplies they had sent would have been a much more fun plot point imo. They could have made investigating that presupply mission's landing site into one of the USA mission's goals, slow burned it throughout the season, maybe even mix in the same thing happening to the USSR, and it would have made for one hell of a better reveal when they finally figure out what happened. It would have been hilarious if the Sojourner crew got to their Mars base only to find a North Korean flag flying over it, and a couple of (armed) dudes inside eating all their ice cream and stuff. It wouldn't have been believable though, since I'm sure NASA has a ton of monitoring on all of the hab systems and would immediately know if someone else showed up early. WhiteHowler fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 20, 2023 19:47
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SET foot
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Jan 20, 2023 20:15
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Ed going into space in his 90s storyline confirmed https://twitter.com/TheRealBuzz/status/1616600085441159168
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Jan 21, 2023 14:11
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Ed/Aleida romance confirmed
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Jan 21, 2023 17:54
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Rappaport posted:Ed going into space in his 90s storyline confirmed Hell yeah! Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Ed/Aleida romance confirmed Oh hell no 
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Jan 21, 2023 18:58
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So I'm 3 episodes into season 3 and I think I might bail. Is the Danny/Karen thing going to be stretched out the whole season? It sucks because I love all the space exploration and moon based stuff, but the soap opera poo poo just kills it. I'm tempted to just fast forward any scene with Danny or Karen in it. I don't want this to come off as a Skylar White sucks post, but I really don't care about Karen at all. She was fine in season 1 but you can tell they had to justify having her still on the show by making her a space entrepreneur. I wouldn't be surprised if they make her president of Mars so she has a reason to be in season 4. I also hope Pam outs Republican president Ellen, especially after Reagan let all her husband's friends die of aids
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Jan 25, 2023 18:58
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Your Gay Uncle posted:So I'm 3 episodes into season 3 and I think I might bail. Is the Danny/Karen thing going to be stretched out the whole season? It sucks because I love all the space exploration and moon based stuff, but the soap opera poo poo just kills it. I'm tempted to just fast forward any scene with Danny or Karen in it. The Danny stuff is awful, but MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS about Karen they kill her off at the end of the season. It was a very stupid plot line, but there you go. If you don't like Ed being a big space dude doing big space stuff, the show probably doesn't have that much to offer at this point.
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Jan 25, 2023 19:14
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If for nothing else it's pretty interesting to watch this show as an example of the age makeup state of the art. Over the course of three shooting seasons they're depicting a whole cast as everything from 20 to like 70, and doing a pretty convincing job of it. Like with The Last Kingdom, where you get characters like the new king who starts out as a teenager and by the next season is a very convincing 29-year-old. Really pretty impressive
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Jan 25, 2023 19:41
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I don’t think it’s all that convincing, all the 70 year olds look 50-something at best.
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Jan 25, 2023 20:42
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I had been assuming with NASA's superior moon technology they had invented some de-aging serum and that was what Ed was injecting into his butt
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Jan 25, 2023 22:40
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Man I just do not get why people are so annoyed about the Karen storyline Someone posted a big thing a few pages back about why it makes sense (and it does!) and character drama is important in shows like this you can't JUST have space stuff, it gets too dry
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Jan 26, 2023 09:13
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Taear posted:Man I just do not get why people are so annoyed about the Karen storyline Maybe for you, dumbass. I want all character drama to be the question of which bolt size the US is standardized on and if it will allow for cross compatibility when the soviets win the world for communism and the metric system
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Jan 26, 2023 09:27
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The Karen storyline is annoying for two reasons: -Danny -it feels like it’s taking up space that could have been used by characters they introduced in season 2 but then killed or abandoned
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Jan 26, 2023 16:25
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