The Expanse, Season 2: Stay away from the agua.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Expanse, Season 2: Stay away from the agua.

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Finally got around to watching this week's episode, and drat I love this show. :allears:

Didn't mind the Martian stuff since it took about five minutes of the episode, and the rest of the show is killing it. Amos in particular has gone from a character that never registered much with me in the books to one of my favorites. The club/battle sim sequence in this episode was a lot of fun too, and all the development of the Belter stuff in general.

My big complaint is that we never see the full opening credits outside of premieres and finales.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 05:05

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 05:31

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

VagueRant posted:

She's had some cool lines, but I get more and more confused by her accent in each passing scene.

It sounded to me like she was doing Dawes' Belter accent.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 21:45

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Cojawfee posted:

It wouldn't be so bad if the shot didn't start on one side of the Nauvoo and go to the other side. Like the protomolecule wanted to be a super bad rear end and jump in front of the train just before it passed.

I think the Nauvoo was just aimed at the center of the asteroid and Miller was near the end. It could have dodged the other way, but then you wouldn't get the cool shot of it passing overhead.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2017 23:22

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Phanatic posted:

Do they ever mention specifically Ceres's spin rate? I figured it at about .05 rpm.

Thing currently spins about once every 9 hours. So unless I screwed up the moment of inertia, it currently has about 1.6E15 GJ of rotational kinetic energy. That's six orders of magnitude less energy that you'd need to dump into it to spin it to .05 rpm (2E21 GJ) That's like an hour and a half of the total energy output of the sun.

That's actually waaaaaay more energy than you need to totally cancel out Eros's orbital kinetic energy (2.5E15 GJ). No wonder it took them so long.

Either I screwed up the moment of inertia, am greatly overestimating how fast they got Ceres spinning, or this stuff starts to fall apart if you look at it too closely.

Still a great show, though.

The artificial gravity is 0.3 g as I recall, so whatever spin rate that calculates to.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2017 17:03

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Cojawfee posted:

Pretty sure they have more.

Yeah, but that drone only had two days left until retirement.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 18:33

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

The final speed and 37 hour burn figures come from the short story "Drive", which was mentioned earlier. It's seven pages, free, and contains no spoilers for the rest of the series, so everyone feel free to read it!

# ¿ Mar 2, 2017 23:17

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Accretionist posted:

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen...

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 02:41

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

counterfeitsaint posted:

Diogo at Ceres, when the rear end was smashed to dust.

Milla, I do this for you!

# ¿ Mar 7, 2017 01:38

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Phanatic posted:

She can't handle Scottish and you expect her to understand Belter?

"Oi, Siri, kemang ese wellwalla, sabe?"
"I'm sorry, I have no information on common easy well water sobbing."

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 05:00

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Combat Pretzel posted:

Dawes had ~~a rather prominent part in the first season~~ the best accent on the show. How can you forget that?!

Fixed.

Also, I watched it on the Syfy app and there was no full intro.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2017 02:24

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

jfood posted:

What exactly are the internally developed motivations and emotional content of the character? There aren't any. It's external factors all the way down.

Trying to equate that with actual femisist ideology is laughable, cuz she ain't even a person let alone a woman. Just a collection of parts stitched together.

But hey, you can wank to it, so grind on that defensive line as hard as you can.

Sir, this is a McDonnager's drive-thru, I asked if you wanted extra black sauce on your noodles.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 00:52

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Frankenstyle posted:

You have characters claiming the moral high ground and berating someone who used violence to solve a problem in a desperate moment. Then two pages later they themselves do something out of stupidity and selfishness that results in the death of thousands but that's okay just because.

Characters acting in a way inconsistent with values they preach to others? Whoa now, no one would ever do that, that must be some bad writing.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 17:54

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

This article is a good summary of the history of the series (spoilers for later books near the end).

TLDR: Ty Franck was developing the background for an MMO that never got off the ground, turned it into an online forum RPG, later played it with Daniel Abraham and together they turned it into a novel.

Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 15, 2017

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 17:33

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

bull3964 posted:

Does Alex's twang affect how we perceive him or is it acceptable because it's more of a Texas drawl than deep South?

Interestingly, in the books Alex's accent is almost always described as "ridiculous" or in some other negative fashion. Of course, it's also suggested to mostly be affected, which probably has something to do with that impression.

Belter Creole serves a number of narrative purposes. In-universe, it's another way of separating Belters from Inners, giving them a shared cultural element to identify with. It's also a class signifier among Belters and their allies - the extent to which a character uses Creole is pretty well-correlated with how working-class they are, with higher-end political and military officials rarely using it. Non-native Belters like Fred never use it, which puts it into the argument over respectability politics that runs throughout the series. In that vein, there's some interesting stuff with code-switching in the books, where certain characters speak in thicker Creole among other Belters and use standard English otherwise. In the show, Dawes uses his accent and lexicon to mark himself as an ally of the Belter working class, contrasting with Fred's pure Earther dialect. Out of universe, it also provides a mini-history of the Belt, with the mix of languages showing who were the first to colonize it - other than some German words, it's largely languages from the Global South. This also gives readers a mental association of the Belt with modern-day Earth politics, with all the implications they derive from that.

Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Mar 15, 2017

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 19:23

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Orange Red Bull posted:

I know exactly what scene this was. gently caress. :stare:

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 03:32

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Do not gently caress with Drummer. :commissar:

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 04:04

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

So why was Johnson so pissed off with Holden at the end? That seemed pretty out of left-field. They had one disagreement about the feasibility of going to Ganymede. Hardly seems like the thing that would push him into revoking their right to dock at the station.

He told Holden to bring back anything about the protomolecule, and Holden was like "gently caress no, you can't even manage what you already have".

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Fair enough. It seemed pretty dumb. How'd it go down in the books?

In the books, Holden gives Fred the protomolecule sample from the Anubis. After Ganymede, he goes into Fred's office and accuses him of being responsible for the attack, since as far as Holden knows he has the only protomolecule left. Fred fires him.

Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Mar 16, 2017

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 14:32

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Yeah, Holden's never been known for overreacting.

*sends a message to the entire Solar System accusing Mars of a terrorist attack*

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 15:02

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Apoffys posted:

That scene was a nightmare though, not something that actually happened on the show. Mei and Prax weren't together when the attack happened, she was with Dr. Strickland.

I was thinking the same thing, but how long before the attack did Bobbie see the figure waving? I remember there being a cut between those scenes. It would also be odd if Prax happened to imagine something that coincidentally also happened with someone else.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 19:06

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

KPC_Mammon posted:

Maybe this thread is "dead" because people avoid it due to all the dumb spoilers disguised as speculation?

That is dumb when people do that. But honestly, the show is diverging enough at this point that outside of the major plot beats, book readers are guessing almost as much. This last episode, for example (no actual spoilers, but spoiled for people who don't want to hear anything about the books): Other than the broad strokes of what happened to Mei, and the existence of Prax, everything in it was unique to the show. At most, a few ideas from the books got used in a different context.

karrethuun posted:

Renewed for Season 3

Awesome!

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 22:34

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

stuart scott posted:

2312 also requires about 500 pages before anything actually happens, just as a warning

Yes, they already established it was by Kim Stanley Robinson.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2017 19:36

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Population size in The Expanse is one of those things I suspect the authors just don't have a good grasp of the scale of. Mars has two billion more people than modern day Earth, which just doesn't seem sustainable at all on a non-terraformed planet, and even a place like Eros has ten million in the books (the show dropped it to a, IMO, more sensible 150,000).

# ¿ Mar 29, 2017 01:40

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Toast Museum posted:

It's 4 billion for Mars and 1.5 million for Eros in the books. I don't know why they doubled Mars on the show while compressing the timeline; 4 billion already felt like a stretch.

Thanks, I stand corrected. Yeah, 4 billion's a little better, but still pushing it.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2017 01:55

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Really enjoyed this last episode, and with all the changes from the books, it's fun to be genuinely surprised by how the plot is developing. Caliban's War spoilers: Errinwright not being involved was an interesting twist, and I'm curious how that will develop. Nguyen was acting awfully shady trying to dismiss Bobbie's story, so I'm guessing that Avasarala didn't get the whole story and his/Earth's involvement is still a thing.

In regards to an earlier question about moving off Earth: as of the start of the series, places that aren't Earth or Mars are all just stations under contract to inner planet corporations, not independently run locations. You'd have the same issues getting a job out there as on Earth, since it's all the same companies anyway; worse, probably, because now you're competing with a Belter population that's better adapted to the environment. It still happens, of course, like with Holden or Amos or Miller's old Earther partner, but you have to get a job to go there in the first place, so it's less a solution to mass unemployment than another outlet for it.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2017 04:23

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Baronjutter posted:

The more red options you pick the worse your batman voice gets and now he's losing party members over it.

It's okay, he just has to pass Naomi's loyalty mission.

Great episode. Bobby's arc gets its payoff as she finally comes into her own. Alex continues to be one of the big improvements in the show. And as much as I've been enjoying the new and adapted stuff, most of Ganymede played out exactly like the book, so it was a lot of fun to see those scenes in action - the pizza and grenade scenes were two I was looking forward to in particular.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 05:44

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Also a great bit: Martens the Space Boomer complaining about today's coddled Space Millennials.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 16:54

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

Was episode ten the last episode of the season?

Considering that the most recent one was episode 11, no. :v:

(There's two more.)

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 17:26

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Longbaugh01 posted:

Good episode, but I guess I'll be in the minority and say that scenes where characters talk to themselves always seem forced to me.

He wasn't talking to himself, he was talking to the Roci. :colbert:

(Amos' "We?" and Alex's reaction at the end were pretty great.)

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 21:06

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

gohmak posted:

https://fat.gfycat.com/InstructiveBoilingGermanpinscher.mp4

This show is missing out on so many merch opportunities.

I don't remember it being in the show, but in the books, Holden chats with Miller about this cartoon when they're dying on Eros. I thought that was a nice Easter egg.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 23:22

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Baronjutter posted:

Did you not hear how when he as a kid they made him do drills where he had to bravely hide under his desk? Can you even imagine asking someone to do that in the name of their country, to sit under a table? Entitled kids today don't even know to stop drop and roll. My grandpa still has PTSD from his stop drop and roll drills back when he was a kid, but he gave up his childhood for mars, for the cause.

Everyone gets a terraforming participation trophy these days.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2017 00:33

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Number Ten Cocks posted:

Actually, (TV only speculation): Holden could instead discover Naomi didn't destroy that bit of protomolecule.

I'm assuming this is it, hence the rocket of the episode title.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2017 21:52

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Even if you can theoretically track every object in the solar system, is that information going to be practically usable? All the known natural objects at least stick to their orbits, but between any uncatalogued natural object, every bit of space traffic (a lot of which runs dark), and any sort of derelicts or large enough debris, it seems like you'd have all of the problems of big data to deal with to actually find something useful in there. Unless you know specifically where and what to look for, what's to distinguish a stealth ship (that's not currently lighting up its drive, obviously) from an unidentified asteroid or random piece of space junk?

The Earth and Mars governments may well have telescopes noting every single thing that pops above the background radiation and sending it to a big computer, but all that means jack without some good way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2017 21:36

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

We got a "coyo" and a "sasa ke" this episode. :neckbeard:

This season is continuing its hot streak. Aside from all the other highlights mentioned, I liked Avasarala being out of her element for once during the launch. It was a nice humanizing touch.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 04:03

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

I figured it was the ship that Mao was leaving on to hightail it back to Earth.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2017 02:45

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

In the show, Caliban is also the codename for the protomolecule monster.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2017 20:32

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

nimby posted:

Is it worth it to find the books, or is the series as good as or better, story-wise?

I enjoy the books a lot, and if you like the series, I recommend giving them a read. Like any adaptation, there's stuff changed for the better, for the worse, and just different; but since the authors are so involved in the series, in many ways it's a second pass at the books, streamlining some plots and fleshing other stuff out that the books didn't get into (Avasarala, for example, isn't in book 1 at all).

# ¿ Sep 13, 2017 19:47

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Syzygy Stardust posted:

The preview chapter(s) of book 7 present some difficulty in doing a faithful TV adaptation in the unlikely event they get that far.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-s-a-corey/persepolis-rising/9780316332835/

Convenient, it would probably be about 30 years before they got to it anyway. :v:

# ¿ Nov 20, 2017 23:29

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 05:31

Lord Hydronium: Sep 25, 2007; Non, je ne regrette rien

Baronjutter posted:

-Will Miller come back some how due to alien space magic? Maybe he'll become Venus like what's her name became eros.

Huh, I just now noticed the Venus-Eros connection. I wonder if that was intentional.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2018 23:27

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Expanse, Season 2: Stay away from the agua.