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For All Mankind really established itself with the Apollo 11 landing right in the first episode. Once you realize clearly that this isn't a real historical space docudrama and you don't know how something is gonna turn out in the end, it gets real tense. And after that it ratchets up into knuckle-biting Apollo 13 situations and poo poo only as they were live instead of as comfortable history. It's also great how it is uniformly an American view of the space program. I mean, I'd love to see the other side of what the Soviets are doing in all this but having them as a distant secretive other really drives home the whole Cold War atmosphere.
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Dec 17, 2019 08:16
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Cojawfee posted:It is very obviously an alternate history where things happened differently, but that doesn't stop space youtubers from getting up in arms about how something just isn't possible and they are freaking out that maybe people will think it was possible for the Russians to get to the moon. But the truth is that regular viewers don't give a poo poo if things are drastically different or not possible with the technology of the time. Obviously it's a world where the N1 wasn't a total clusterfuck, but in the real world it was badly underfunded and the chief designer died suddenly a few years before Apollo 11. Without that who knows if they could have made things work. And like I said, the show doesn't say more about the Russians than you would see on American TV at the time so who knows how much earlier their timeline diverged. By all means it's a smaller leap than literally any "What if the Nazis won WW2" alternate history.
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Dec 17, 2019 09:06
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Paddyo posted:I mean, I understand the need to put together a narrative that's easier for a TV audience to follow, but it sounds like they are basically just inventing their own plot and characters out of thin air. It's hard to trust the writers with that much heavy lifting, although For All Mankind and Ted Lasso are two of the best-written shows out there these days. The point of Foundation is that the characters aren't important so I can give them some leeway.
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Jul 1, 2021 01:41
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Trig Discipline posted:Yeah it's been a decade or two since I read the Foundation books and I think I remember a grand total of two characters (Hari Seldon and The Mule). I honestly couldn't give a poo poo whether it adheres closely to the books as long as it's well written and gets the central ideas across. Yeah, those two characters are most essential, and some of the others later on are important. But for the most part, the characters in the core Foundation trilogy are important for their roles in the plot rather than who they are precisely and there's a lot of flexibility in how they're presented and interpreted. It changes a lot over the course of the series...which is another thing. The books were written over a literal 50 year span, with the earliest Foundation stories written in 1942 or so and the last actually written by Asimov in the early 1990s shortly before his death. There was a 30 year gap between books at one point, but in between that he wrote whole other series of books that he later tied into Foundation as an enormous shared universe spanning tens of thousands of years. It's an understatement to say that the themes and technologies referenced in the books were all over the map, including when he came back to revisit the same in-setting time period from different real-world decades. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of room for the TV showrunners to screw up or diverge heavily from the "heart" of Foundation such as it is. There totally is. But there's oddly a lot of flexibility in how a valid adaptation could be made and so far nothing seems too bad.
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Jul 1, 2021 09:38
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Oasx posted:I liked the first two episodes of Foundation, but it barely has anything to do with the book, given how much new content they have added to make it more interesting to the casual viewer. What we're seeing mostly seems to be natural extension or at least not incompatible though. And the look and feel is pretty solid. They get a similar but distinct feel to the Star Wars ancient and lived-in galaxy, and they're doing a decent job presenting a society and history so vast that even people in the thick of it don't comprehend its scale, with a Space Roman empire that's powerful but increasingly fragile. I guess they feel like a straighter adaptation really would feel like an early prototype of its genre of space opera, and I don't really blame them. Only doing the first two stories in the season feels a bit too padded, but the padding seems pretty neat so far.
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Sep 24, 2021 22:48
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Randallteal posted:That kind of framing isn't too surprising, but ironic considering how much worse things got in Russia after mass privatization in the 90s. On the other hand creators of hit puzzle games probably did do much better for themselves. A world where Korolev survived and kept the N1 project on track (the divergence point of FAM) doesn't necessarily imply a Soviet Union that kept full technological parity with the US. In that world both sides advanced more quickly due to the longer and stronger space race, it wasn't just the USSR that dodged some real world bullets and put more money into tech. I agree that they don't more than dabble in exploring the alt history side of things outside of space stuff, but given the push of the show I never expected them to. Alternate history done seriously really spirals in strange ways.
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Jul 1, 2023 01:46
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