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Proteus Jones posted:Lee Pace was great. It was a cool concept with the clone emperors and also characterizing the same person at different stages in life. Like how Day has such a level of overconfidence, arrogance and belief at other client states in the empire don't have choice. similar to how people in their 20s feel that are invincible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F35_VNUNoeA etalian fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 16:41
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Show's ok. The intro looks like every other expensive TV series since Game of Thrones, but that's to be expected. I did kind of tune out part way through ep 2 during the parts on the ship. I really liked the space elevator crashing, it looked great. Basically everything about the Empire is fun because it's showing off this huge, advanced, weird civilization. Megastructures, weird civilizations out on the periphery, clone emperors, guns that make you loving explode. Everything about the Foundation is less interesting because they're basically an Antarctic expedition going to settle in Iceland. The most interesting thing about them is the magical mathematics, but they just represent that as a big swirly hologram that makes mathematicians look surprised. Atarask posted:The emperor outfit definitely shows off Lee Pace's armpit hair I think more than intended. He does sorta look like he's about to drink a Coors and jump on a dirt bike or something. quote:On the bright side it's not mind numbingly "smart people written by stupid people" as say Star Trek discovery gets. There were some pretty decent bits that cropped up like the number base discussion for the encyclopedia. I don't think the number base thing was actually very intelligent. It reads to me like someone wanted to make a statement about how historians, archivists, etc. tend to be rather self-centered: you'll find a relatively large amount of first-hand documentation of how wealthy Roman men lived, but very little about the lives of the female slaves in their households. They're drawing a line from Eurocentric histories to number systems, but it's not a very good line, because the details of a numeric system just aren't that complicated. If you're writing about India, you can mention their counting system of lakh and crore, but numbers are numbers: if you see "2.5 lakh", translate it to "200,000" and move on. I personally use base 2, base 10, and base 16 every day; the only thing "300 planets use base 27" tells me is that I wouldn't like to design their computers.
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Sep 26, 2021 17:16
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This was honestly really terrible. Cliche dialogue and plot. And had so little to do with the books that I’d bet money this was one of those situations where they had an unrelated script, some executive remembered they owned X intellectual property, and changed the character names. Ironically the exact same thing that happened with other Asimov classic I Robot.
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Sep 26, 2021 18:26
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You know the Foundation sub-plot is going to be thrilling when the most recent episode spent time on a work Budget discussion scene.
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Sep 26, 2021 19:07
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etalian posted:You know the Foundation sub-plot is going to be thrilling when the most recent episode spent time on a work Budget discussion scene. It could be worse. It could actually be a more faithful adaptation. Then it would be a bunch of discussions of things that happen instead of seeing the things that happen. So far I've been enjoying it. Not sure if that's because I've read and enjoyed the books or not. I'm mostly glad its not a case of plucky para-militaristic rebellion against an oppressive, stagnant monolithic government. Instead it's more everything has led to this unavoidable collapse, and instead of suffering a Dark Ages of tens of thousands of years we want to soften the fall and give humanity the means to claw themselves back to some kind of better society. I mean these last two eps are still in the stage setting mode. The story gets decidedly weirder as it goes on, in fact towards the end (of the Asimov written books) it definitely veers into some big WTF moments. The only real hurdle I see is his later Foundation books assumed the reader was more or less familiar with the Robot Series and specifically with R Daneel Olivaw. A lot of the impact of later events will be lessened without this I think Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 19:10
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I checked this show out after seeing reccs in the chat thread, and I also started rewatching Person of Interest for the same reason and drat, there are some serious overlaps. Not just with the Psychohistory and The Machine, but also an unprecedented act of terrorism (Space Elevator/9-11) that stirs up chaos and leaves the government desperate enough for a solution to let the hero start work on the project, and the creator of the predictive algorithm is a librarian exile accused of treason who the government wanted to kill to keep Psycho/Machine under wraps. I would just say I'm seeing patterns in clouds, but the guy in PoI is straight up named Harry and they explicitly talk about him being an Isaac Asimov fan. Not saying PoI's writers were making a reference, but Harold's name on PoI is an alias anyway, and naming himself after Hari Seldon feels like an extremely Finch thing to do.  Anyway, Really enjoying the show so far, love the world-building focus, though the first episode was more my jam than the second. Usually I like drama, but in this case I was getting more excited discovering brave new worlds and concepts (like the emperor and the weird math cube and people standing in the ocean on a platform and Gaal waking up during a jump and seeing crazy poo poo, drat that black hole effect for the jumps looked cool) rather than interpersonal conflicts, so I guess it's natural the first episode was gonna be the funs for me. Ugh I just wanna see how Terminus and the Vault are gonna play out, I situations where everyone's starting from scratch. I wish that's what Raised By Wolves would have been, just a couple strange and friendly robots and their precocious children building a new society on a crazy alien planet.
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Sep 26, 2021 19:16
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XboxPants posted:I would just say I'm seeing patterns in clouds, but the guy in PoI is straight up named Harry and they explicitly talk about him being an Isaac Asimov fan. Not saying PoI's writers were making a reference, but Harold's name on PoI is an alias anyway, and naming himself after Hari Seldon feels like an extremely Finch thing to do. Given Jonathan Nolan, I'd say Foundation was a big influence on PoI. I had the same thoughts as you during PoI as more details about The Machine were revealed.
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Sep 26, 2021 19:26
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These first two episodes are some of the most incredible sci-fi I've seen in a very long time. The sheer quality/budget onscreen is unlike so many shows in recent history. Love the dialogue, music, costumes, editing, everything. I can't stop humming the main theme (drat you Bear McCreary and your catchy tunes!). I feel bad that I saw this before the new Dune movie because it's going to have a very, very high bar to clear and I don't think it's going to make it.
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Sep 26, 2021 19:56
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Odoyle posted:Am I nuts or did Daneel Fuckin Olivaw just watch a bunch of people get hanged like the Laws of Robotics aren’t even a thing? Loomer posted:That 0th metalaw they invented presumably allows for some very flexible interpretation of 1, and by this point Daneel has been adapting to it for, what, a couple of thousand years? Proteus Jones posted:
This is actually a plot point in the "Second Foundation Trilogy" that got written by Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Greg Bear after Asimov's death. Daneel and his group of Spacer-derived Zeroth Law robots are opposed by Earth-based robots who only recognize the Three Laws and as such think that Daneel is dangerous to humanity. I think they're even called the Calvinists, lol.
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Sep 26, 2021 20:50
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Hari Seldon did Trantor's version of 9/11. Separatists bombs can't melt space elevator beams.
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Sep 26, 2021 21:46
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Chairman Capone posted:This is actually a plot point in the "Second Foundation Trilogy" that got written by Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Greg Bear after Asimov's death. Daneel and his group of Spacer-derived Zeroth Law robots are opposed by Earth-based robots who only recognize the Three Laws and as such think that Daneel is dangerous to humanity. I think they're even called the Calvinists, lol. Shoot, you're right. For some reason I thought it was in Foundation and Earth (although it is lightly implied). I may have to do a re-read.
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Sep 26, 2021 22:28
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Pham Nuwen posted:The most interesting thing about them is the magical mathematics, but they just represent that as a big swirly hologram that makes mathematicians look surprised. tbf, that's how it's described in the books. No they don't explain why they do it there either.
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Sep 27, 2021 00:46
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Proteus Jones posted:The only real hurdle I see is his later Foundation books assumed the reader was more or less familiar with the Robot Series and specifically with R Daneel Olivaw. A lot of the impact of later events will be lessened without this I think e: this is book stuff. It would have made more sense to do Robots first. I guess they could try to incorporate some parallel element of the Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw story as this develops to try to justify the 0th law, but then even that makes more sense in the wake of the Robots trilogy. Amniotic fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 01:27
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If you're talking about book stuff can you mention that before your spoiler text.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:41
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Amniotic posted:e: this is book stuff. It would have made more sense to do Robots first. I guess they could try to incorporate some parallel element of the Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw story as this develops to try to justify the 0th law, but then even that makes more sense in the wake of the Robots trilogy. (sorry Cojawfee, doing it going forward) (book stuff)Yeah, they need to definitely establish the entire concept of the Three Laws before they can even approach the 0th. Without the underpinning of the Robots Series, that's a significant amount of time that needs to be spent on Not Foundation story elements
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Sep 27, 2021 02:26
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Hakkesshu posted:But ok so what WAS actually the deal with the long-necked/limbed ftl travel people? My understanding is that people who grew up in zero-g wouldn't actually look that alien. My bet is these are genetically engineered people adapted to living in space and staying awake during the jump. We see lots of genetic diversity with people having Dune eyes and also body modification so genetic mods for a specific task seems reasonable. Also, loved the space-elevator drop, I feel like they pulled it from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series where the same deal happens to similar cataclysmic effect. It's a great bit of spectacle that serves the story pretty well despite having no basis in the books. Also very glad we got robots immediately, and a name drop of the Mule. I agree that Zeroth law in action which is why Daneel isn't stopping any of the wanton murder happening in front of them. The writers seems serious about covering the heart of this story, taking a different route of course. Which is fine for me both because the route the books took was stilted, and it's all short stories in a huge galaxy anyways so it's pretty easy to adjust things.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:30
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I was a bit confused about Gaal, when she was first introduced I got the impression that she was supposed to be a kid, maybe 14-15 years old. but I assume that was wrong since she is having sex and getting pregnant on the ship Overall I liked the first two episodes, though they seem to be adding a ton of new stuff to the story.
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Sep 27, 2021 05:59
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I think what they're doing (mostly) is front-loading a few elements found later in the books and also showing events that were mostly delivered via exposition and/or discourse in the books. I would not be surprised if they do make additions (or subtractions) to parts of the book to serve a more streamlined narrative and plot. The show very definitely has captured the spirit of the books so far, so I'm not complaining. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 06:05
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What tech is the vault on terminus using if the cradle of all collective human knowledge can't get into it?
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Sep 27, 2021 07:58
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droll posted:What tech is the vault on terminus using if the cradle of all collective human knowledge can't get into it? It's just using current empire tech at the time it's built. Even at that time, outlying systems near Terminus are already well behind the tech curve. By the time nearby planets and kingdoms find out about it, and could want access to it, the decline has already started and tech has regressed to the point that no one can really oppose the Foundation. The books also use the old trope of declining civilizations that have access to tech, but no idea how it works or how to fix it. Many nearby kingdoms could stamp out the Foundation purely through military might, but are kept in check being beholden to the Foundation for tech needs.
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Sep 27, 2021 08:56
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If she’s unaffected by it it is probably related to whatever was going on in the jump ship.
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Sep 27, 2021 12:21
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Nitrousoxide posted:If she’s unaffected by it it is probably related to whatever was going on in the jump ship. The character that woke up during the FTL jump will never step foot on Terminus. Are you thinking of Salvor?
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Sep 27, 2021 16:57
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I've been nervously putting off watching the first 2 episodes i downloaded because The Foundation is such a beloved story for me since I was a kid reading old paperbacks with wonderful cover art from the library, that I'm just preemptively in knots over how badly that hack Goyer must be screwing up the only shot at an adaptation Foundation will get, and turning it into some generic space story with Foundation names sprinkled throughout. Like I'm half expecting to hear that the Mule shows up, but the hacker alieas of a cyber hacker with super hacker skills to break into the 'net and control peoples cyber iphones, who joins up with our rag tag band of heroes fighting off an alien invasion. Thats the level of complete abandonment of the story I'm psyching myself up for from Goyer. Is it as bad and completely off script as I'm worried it is so far?
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Sep 27, 2021 17:01
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Tom Guycot posted:
It is a perfectly acceptable adaptation. Not a letter-perfect one because hardly anyone would actually want to watch that. It’s not just a generic space story with Foundation stuff bolted on.
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Sep 27, 2021 17:09
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droll posted:The character that woke up during the FTL jump will never step foot on Terminus. Are you thinking of Salvor?
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Sep 27, 2021 17:25
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JazzFlight posted:Could goons stop just spoiling the show outside of spoiler boxes? Should I un-bookmark this thread already? You already watched the first two episodes so I haven't spoiled anything for you. Gaal straight up says it in her narration in the beginning of the first episode
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Sep 27, 2021 17:32
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droll posted:You already watched the first two episodes so I haven't spoiled anything for you. Gaal straight up says it in her narration in the beginning of the first episode There have been other posts here and there in this thread that are book spoilery, so I'm kinda wary about checking back in this thread.
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Sep 27, 2021 18:20
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feels suitable epic and the change with lee pace seems like it'll pay off. there are no spoilers, there is only psychohistory.
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Sep 27, 2021 18:21
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Oasx posted:I was a bit confused about Gaal, when she was first introduced I got the impression that she was supposed to be a kid, maybe 14-15 years old. but I assume that was wrong since she is having sex and getting pregnant on the ship Yea holy poo poo agreed - she looks 14 I looked up the actor and she's in her mid 20s, I guess she just looks extremely young.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:09
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The real reason the planets got nuked is there weren't impressed by the big beautiful Space Emperor Mural.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:22
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Thought it was pretty good, partner was into it without any background in the books. I've read the first trilogy of books twice and I thought this was a good take.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:30
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Really liking the visuals so far. I don't think the mechanics of space travel was really mentioned in the books, was it? It seems to generate a black hole or something and then use that to traverse time and space. Interesting and it makes me wonder if it's cribbed from a different Asimov work. I've read a decent amount of his works but it's been awhile and I don't remember anything like that. They should have got Sean Bean to play Hari Seldon if they were gonna kill him in the first season.
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Sep 27, 2021 21:35
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CornHolio posted:Really liking the visuals so far. I don't think the mechanics of space travel was really mentioned in the books, was it? It seems to generate a black hole or something and then use that to traverse time and space. Interesting and it makes me wonder if it's cribbed from a different Asimov work. I've read a decent amount of his works but it's been awhile and I don't remember anything like that. Sean Bean's death had more impact since even though it later become a GOT cliche, you actually got know his character for multiple before he outwitted and killed in the finale episode.
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Sep 27, 2021 21:40
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Brigadier Sockface posted:Is that little finger? Assuming you mean Jerril, I thought so too for a second, but it's not. He's actually this guy who may or may not be the lovechild of Littlefinger and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
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Sep 27, 2021 23:24
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CornHolio posted:Really liking the visuals so far. I don't think the mechanics of space travel was really mentioned in the books, was it? It seems to generate a black hole or something and then use that to traverse time and space. Interesting and it makes me wonder if it's cribbed from a different Asimov work. I've read a decent amount of his works but it's been awhile and I don't remember anything like that. The Foundation series (along with a lot of other Asimov works) uses Hyperspace, which allows ships that are sufficiently far from any gravity well or large mass concentrations to cross through higher dimensions and move directly to any other point in the universe, assuming that point is also in a low-gravity vacuum. Theoretically, ships could move between galaxies as easily as they move between stars.
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Sep 27, 2021 23:48
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Is there a reason Brother Day doesn't let Hari use black-hole-hyperspace-jumping beyond just being a punitive rear end in a top hat? It strikes me as odd that for a trip that will take 5 years, Day can jump back and forth like a gazillion times between both planets and pick up/drop off anything he likes. Hell, he can jump regularly near the Foundation ship just to taunt him and then jump away! And maybe others can too? In that sense, they're not really "out there" in space, and more like crawling along the side of a superhighway. I woulda thought it Hari's shoes it'd be less of a risk to just find some Han Solo dude to jump his crew there anyway, if he truly believes Day and the rest of humanity won't be organized enough to stop him later.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:22
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It’s a digression from the books, but in this version the imperial government has a monopoly on faster than light ships, David S Goyer said so in a podcast. So, No Han Solos. As for why make them take the slow route, the empire thinks their message is dangerous and this keeps them quiet for a while.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:44
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It seems like he's just being a punitive rear end in a top hat. (edit: Oh, that makes sense.) The idea of other ships just popping up to resupply them or taunt them and then popping back out is kind of amusing. In the book, the author only mentions that they're given six months to prepare before they have to leave Trantor
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Sep 28, 2021 02:46
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Can anyone explain why the emperor made the painter dude go splat when the Empire has guns precise enough to sever your spine but still keep you alive? I'd assume those same guns could kill him just as well without making that mess.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:52
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Glimpse posted:It’s a digression from the books, but in this version the imperial government has a monopoly on faster than light ships, David S Goyer said so in a podcast. So, No Han Solos. Thanks. I kind of assumed this, but it still seems like pretty heavy lampshading of some game changing tech. As an example, I can easily assume those 2 warring planets used some FTL to arrive for their diplomatic talks. Makes sense that the Empire lets them do that, sure. But then, doesn't that mean the Empire contracts that tech out to them for other stuff? Also, doesn't that imply that Day can easily take that tech away from any planet in order to effectively quarantine them from the rest of the Empire for as long or as little as he likes? Seems like a more reasonable plan of retaliation over, say, genocide of innocents. It also seems like a kind of trump card that could easily stop any kind of rebellion (assuming he has such a tight grip on the tech that there really are no Han Solos at all). Unless, of course, there are terrorists with FTL, or other such underworld people that the Empire wishes didn't have that tech. In that case, I gesture back to Hari using them? Maybe I'm missing something. Edit: ymgve posted:Can anyone explain why the emperor made the painter dude go splat when the Empire has guns precise enough to sever your spine but still keep you alive? I'd assume those same guns could kill him just as well without making that mess. Yeah I get that he's a megamaniacal rear end in a top hat. I guess I still get hung up on literally being told by Extra Smart Professor that his actions are leading to a collapse, and so his first move is to play directly into that, when it seems like he has many tools to punish whole planets with his proprietary tech and chooses instead of run headfirst into the math prophecy. There's dumb and then there's dumb like I though this guy was supposed to be smart he's been ruling for 12k years! sure okay fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 02:53
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