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Cojawfee posted:They do their final burn into the orbit of Jupiter. Ed, beaming with pride, says "We did it, Danny." Danny replies "Aye aye sir" and looks back to hid, his face melting onto the floor. Radiation alarms start blaring, but it's too late. In the module period appropriate diagetic Black Eyed Peas music blares.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:38
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Cojawfee posted:I was hoping for Billy Talent. I'm telling you only one group perfectly encapsulates the early aughties. "Everything looks nominal skipper. We are go for Proxima burn." "Alright activate the Alcubierre drive." "Let's... get it started." "No need for radio edits in space. Hit it!" (and the bass keeps runnin runnin!)
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Aug 14, 2022 13:56
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Drunk in Space posted:I was honestly hoping the time skip would be bigger this time, maybe to the mid-late 21st century, the reason being that I'd love to see them actually explore the idea of starting a whole new society on another planet. Ellen's political story this season was honestly pretty boring, but a focus on the politics, ideology, law etc of an entirely new world could be awesome. Just go full Red Mars and explore the development of a Martian identity and a split with Earth, culminating in either a bloody revolution or an amicable separation. Of course, it would mean cleaning house of almost every character, and they obviously don't want to do that given how doggedly they're clinging to ol' Ed. Hard disagree. We already have Star Trek, The Expanse, Firefly, Aliens, etc etc etc to say "here's a society with routine space travel in the somewhat distant future, a bunch of stuff happened in the early/mid 21st century to get us there but that's not what this story is about. Don't worry about it we'll have a guy in a jumpsuit mention something about how we got here in a throw-away line every now and again." To me that's the whole unique selling proposition of FAM: That is what this story is all about. The further it gets from the first season point of historical divergence the more maudlin soap opera goofy it gets, but there's still meat on the bone. To me it's more interesting to me to see alt-history where a zig instead of a zag with the USSR's Zond program leads to the space future I was hoping to live in as a kid in the 80s but still recognizable as our world, than yet another show where we get served up warp drives and pan-human one-Earth governments in a future I'll never see. Going decade by decade and really breaking it down from that point of departure is a big part of the draw. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Aug 14, 2022 |
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Aug 14, 2022 15:32
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Marsupial Ape posted:My only deal with paralleing the JSC with OKC is that the bombers had no real motivation besides "they're up to something, I tell ya!" That's very asymmetric thinking for a goddam fuel bomb solution. Timothy McVay was a racist Christo fascist wound up by Bill Cooper, The Turner Diaries, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and everything else the 90s far right had to offer. McVay was a self radicalized nut striking a blow against the Jew run globalists. They never really sell the political stuff because it's like an E-plot wedged in there with 6 other plots and the show seems scrupulously uninterested in exploring any coherent ideological or political framework for the alternate history they've created. There's a vague bit of red-bashing with the Russians and the North Koreans being vaguely sinister, and their attempt to kind of half-do a party flipped Lewinky affair merged with Don't'-Ask-Don't-Tell but it just all falls flat. The Out of Work Coal Miners and general economic malaise we're told exist fall flat because they don't really world build outside "The world is different but the same." There's cheap clean energy everywhere, but it's still The 90's in every other respect, so it's hard to know what the stakes are. President Wilson just seems to have made absolutely no policy decisions to deal with this paradigm change at all. I would take from this the cynical read "capitalism is only capable of exploitation; machines that will deliver paradise will still deliver Hell in the hands of a system with corrupt motives." But I'm not sure if that's what the show is trying to say of if it's just underwritten. The terrorists are just... ridiculous in the interest of giving us a little twist at the end. In part because they don't have the courage to really run with anything that could alienate anyone in the audience-- as said upthread, abortion was never once even mentioned RE: Kelly's absurdly risky pregnancy. And in part because they've spread the ensemble out into so many subgenres of family melodrama, corporate intrigue, West-wing backbiting, etc. on top of the space stuff that they can only like a third do any of them and they seem to re-establish them with every ep by spinning the wheels a fair bit, even with 1:20 runtimes on some eps. I'd love it if in S4 they could pare it down to like... 3 solid plots they really want to drill down on, and let some of the Political Development stuff happen in interstitial segments without needing to try and put a character in the oval office to wring character drama out of it.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:07
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QuoProQuid posted:i don't mean that in a derogatory way, just that that it operates under the same logic as something like "The West Wing" where every character is able to deliver inspiring speeches and how expertise and determination alone are able to transform the world. I groaned when Dev, tipped off that he's going to be voted out by the board, goes to the bullpen to poach away all the talent for a new space venture with blackjack and hookers (almost assuredly cause for civil action on multiple grounds, but whatever) with a Big Speech and they all are spellbound with his heady words, and Karen brings the oinking thoughtless slobs to their senses by calling down from the balcony reminding them that their Helios salaries and benefits are things that they require to meet their material needs. There are even ADRed in crowd lines like "I have a mortgage!" "My 401k!" "Dental plan! Lisa Needs Braces!" Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 14:25
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Even if it got hosed up and re-writen and edited down to little more than a cheap gag, I'd love to know what the outline or bible had in mind with the North Korean guy and by extension their whole program. I follow the logic of "We launch several unacknowledged manned missions, every one that doesn't make contact because of a hard landing/we hosed up the radiation shielding/other that was retroactively an 'unmanned probe.' If we get a ping back from a successful landing, we win the race for a manned landing and announce. If we never hear back, we protect our reputation and never killed a bunch of guys in space." But it seems like even under optimum circumstances, it was a one-way suicide mission. There was no orbiter for recovery and the lander didn't seem to be a an orbital launch vehicle? So you're still announcing dead astronauts either way. IDK the whole thing seems to be a "Ha ha Koreans are Orcs throwing people away like lemmings because they're too Oriental to value life good" punchline, which seems lazy since you can do anything with NK without the fall of the USSR and the famine of the 90s turning them into a convenient US propaganda boogieman punching bag like it did here on Earth Prime Timeline. The one kind of cool thing was the surprise Ed being the one to break the language barrier when they got him back to base, but it being totally earned with the old man's backstory.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:52
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Rental Sting posted:On the 3.10 episode of the FAM podcast, one of the executive producers (either Matt Wolpert or Ben Nedivi) explained that since human-crewed spaceflight is so predominant in this timeline, North Korea would pour all of its resources into its space program rather than a ballistic missile program as a means of gaining international prestige. They didn't go any deeper than that, though. This kind of Orientalism does not fill me with confidence the showeunners are being serious minded with their world building, but I guess the NCIS level "tied up next to the bomb in a van" or "Soviets suicidally gunning their engines because Moscow wants to win the Rainbow Road Cup" thing or any other of a number or plot beats weren't exactly subtle either. This just ain't gonna be the kind of thoughtful show one might like it to be.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:50
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Open Source Idiom posted:Does anyone else think it's kinda funny that all the regulars leave this show by dying? Like, no one just quits or becomes boring and moves away, they have to have a building fall on them or their plane drop off of the sky. For all it's initial presentation as grounded sci-fi, this show somewhat leans into the mythos of space pioneers as ten foot tall folk heroes, so of course they can't just retire or get a job on the speaking circuit. And even when they do, the call to back adventure ultimately gives them one last chance to go out in a blaze of glory and exit this mortal realm through the gates of Valhalla.
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Aug 16, 2022 15:10
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nexus6 posted:That still doesn't explain why they had to go get a chip or something. Pretty sure they left for the docking module before Kelly's collapse accelerated the timeline and obviated their whole sidequest by making the new plan for her to be a second stage in the MMU instead of docking the module.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:09
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They could have at least had some simmer with Ed's conflict over the Father being a drat Rusky to work out but they just kill the guy off so that ends up going nowhere. I have a conjecture it will be redeemed as a plot point with the time jump that the kid really is "A Martian," with no relief to return him to Earth he's a space oddity developing in low G and basically has to stay there, the very first pioneering Space Colonization Baby. I seem to recall that being the main plot conceit of a movie that came out a few years back I remember from trailers at the time but never saw. But they're not shy about borrowing. Jerkface posted:? Kelly saved herself with an insane untethered eva manuever while pregnant she's a space hero While diagetically true, it's funny that given the conceits of dramatic TV and the way it was shot we the audience pretty much know the MMU maneuver is almost certain to succeed and it's Ed's fate that is very much in question. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Aug 22, 2022 |
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Aug 22, 2022 19:20
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Marsupial Ape posted:Honestly, the “baby launch” sequence has a lot of 70’s Men’s Movement myth themes in it. The Wounded Father uses his prowess to help usher the Daughter across the metaphorical threshold of Womanhood. The Wounded Father knows he can only take the Daughter to the edge of that threshold, she must make that transition under her own power. The Daughter propels herself from the Wounded Father and initiates herself into the larger world. By being the Shouting Father to the Failed Son, he prevented himself from becoming the Cucked Father.
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Aug 23, 2022 02:46
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tokin opposition posted:the portrayal of communism is too negative for my liking. It's weirdly red-bashy, and teeing up the DPRK being the butt of the joke as tryhard silly little oriental juche missile men to be both mocked and pitied is particularly lazy worldbuilding in a world with a strong, extant USSR. Like, when you're doing alt-history, you can't just CTRL+C CTRL+V your preconceptions from our timeline-- at least take a cursory look at how your point of departure impacts stuff in the alt timeline more than the most immediate, direct way.
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Oct 13, 2022 18:05
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Jerusalem posted:Now I never followed up on any details of the court case (if there was one), but I'm 100% certain that Buzz's lawyer said,"My client walked on the moon, this guy over here told him that he didn't" and the Judge immediately vaulted out of their seat and just started whaling on the dude himself. The guy's lawyer was aghast, then shrugged and started putting the boots to him too. No charges filed "Police declined to charge Aldrin after witnesses came forward stating that Sibrel had physically provoked him by poking him with a Bible and demanding the 72-year-old swear he really did go to the moon. Additionally, Aldrin had stated he was acting in self-defense and in defense of his stepdaughter, who was accompanying him. Witnesses also stated that Sibrel had not only lured Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses, but that he had repeated harassed Aldrin and other Apollo astronauts over the years."
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Nov 30, 2022 01:23
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Taear posted:Imagine being this person, what a loving thing About 20 or so years ago I spent the better part of the day trying to convince one of my bosses at work that the dumb gently caress "documentary" he watched on Fox "proving" we never went to the moon was wrong. Men and one of my co-workers built visual aids and carefully had to explain to him among other things how photo exposures worked (how come there's no stars in the pictures?!") This was in the Air Force. He was a Lieutenant and we were junior enlisted. In a photography/video production unit. 
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Dec 8, 2022 21:27
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:I, too, went to DINFOS. Hell yeah. DINFOS-trained killers. In "defense" of this Lieutenant I think he was a former enlisted who cross trained out of fuels or something. Still though. On principle I felt like I couldn't let a USAF officer go around with a brain telling him that arguably the most colossal aerospace achievement of the 20th century was a hoax.
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Dec 9, 2022 04:56
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feedmegin posted:Actual real world basket case north Korea has nukes and ballistic missiles. I don't think it's unrealistic for Space Universe Notth Korea to make it up there. There's... a LOT of history since the 90s that made them want to develop these things, and it's very lazy writing in a show where the whole sell is alt history and ignore the collapse of the USSR and it's absence in your universe just to say "lol tiny pp dprk missile man same-same all timelines."
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Jan 7, 2023 03:14
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Rappaport posted:They should've expanded on it, yeah. Instead of getting fixated on movies and kidnapping actors, the monomanic dictator of North Korea goes all space core from Portal 2 and begs, begs the USSR for space tech for decades, so the glory of Juche can conquer all of SPACE (or at least the solar system). I don't think the DPRK is a major player in the solar system scale politics of the FAM universe if you actually extrapolated from a timeline with an extant USSR. Their whole ascent to boogieman du jour basically hinged on the collapse, with them like so many Soviet-allied smaller states being reduced in material conditions by losing their primary benefactor/security guarantor/trading partner and the US holding open auditions for the next Evil Empire so we could keep cutting checks to Raytheon and making them front-runners subject to bellicose threats. Thus incentivizing investment in force multipliers as a deterrent (j/k anyone but us would only want nukes if they are a crazy madman, we're sane to have hundreds though).
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Jan 7, 2023 16:01
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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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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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yeah, but the character drama should be good E: It doesn't help that it feels like it's sucking air away from the more dramatic stuff happening because that stuff feels underwritten and underdeveloped. Whether it's true to the writing process or not it feels like they tried to do too many half-rear end stories instead of focusing on their most compelling threads, and I think most people would be happy to excise most of Karen corpo intrigue for a better baked version of the Mars stuff and the poorly established and weirdly motivated terror bombers. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 16:35
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WhiteHowler posted:The show needs some new blood and didn't introduce any during Season 3. uh someone forgot about the martian baby if you're born in orbit around the planet i guess you're technically a space baby even cooler
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Jan 26, 2023 22:52
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tokin opposition posted:Really? Like what, pray tell? One guy got so drunk he ordered a nuke launch and Kissinger had to talk the joint chiefs out of it until he sobered up.
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Jan 27, 2023 20:41
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The one fun thing about the dumb, absurd Korean landing plot was the payoff that because of his time in the war, Ed was the only one who could talk to him.
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Jun 1, 2023 13:10
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Glad we're in the 2000s. I don't get why so many people are eager for this show to do a big time jump to become another space opera set in the future. The "alt history" angle is the biggest unique factor that makes it hit different than Star Trek, The Expanse, The Ark, Dark Matter, et al. I'm also glad if they did quietly ditch a few characters between seasons-- while I like the alt history angle, the half-century running soap opera nepotism dynasties were straining credulity.
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Sep 14, 2023 12:56
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I'm not like a Sinologist but it seems to me if the show is about superpowers racing to space the conspicuous absence of China as a player would be more insulting than having them in the game, even as a Yellow Peril Boogieman. Hell, I had a great time watching The Battle at Lake Changjin where MacArthur gets introduced like a loving Metal Gear Solid villain and US Airmen cackle gleefully and twirl their moustaches while strafing wounded Chinese soldiers; I can totally imagine a Chinese audience watching this for yucks to see what the dumb Yankees thought an alternate history Evil Space China would be like. Having loving North Korea essentially taking their place narratively (absolutely idiotic in an alternate timeline with an extant USSR for reasons I've said already in this thread) is just insulting. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 16:21
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MarcusSA posted:It’s entirely possible that China didn’t develop the same way as it has in our timeline Which makes lifting the Western conceptual geography of the DPRK whole cloth from our timeline all the more baffling a choice but I've said my piece on that.
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Oct 13, 2023 16:34
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