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Phenotype posted:this season has been stuck in the doldrums Phenotype posted:Don't show me Karen
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Oct 17, 2023 04:05
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Phenotype posted:I like the character a lot, but I also feel like the migrant family from season 1 and the daughter Aleida could have been cut completely except that they wanted to give her an arc outside NASA. Again no spoilers, but remember that this show very intentionally covers decades of time, so sometimes characters are around to set the groundwork for what they do in future.
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Oct 17, 2023 06:51
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I really like the time skips. It makes the show more interesting
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Oct 17, 2023 07:12
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Wife is watching through and while I could hang for seasons 1&2 I had to dip out on rewatching three. It's fun to hear her audibly react to some of the worst of it.
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Oct 17, 2023 14:32
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Phenotype posted:I like the character a lot, but I also feel like the migrant family from season 1 and the daughter Aleida could have been cut completely except that they wanted to give her an arc outside NASA. Felt like her little visit to Werner in season 1 was kinda similar, interesting enough for the character but really kinda unnecessary, and divorced from everything else going on. A lot of stuff like that in general in season 2, just too much character drama versus the space missions and political commentary that stood out last season. Don't show me Karen almost getting with her son's old friend when you could be showing me tense standoffs on the moon where everyone's living at the end of a very tenuous thread and they're all hosed if people start shooting and blowing holes in their fragile little aluminum habitats. I love space poo poo as much as the next geek, don't get me wrong, but this show sold itself to me by being about alternative history. America having to actually reckon with PAPERCLIP and having Wernher von loving Braun as the wizard of Oz was pretty amazing story-telling from that point of view. And Margo being the apprentice in this scenario was pretty great too, it establishes her character and her drive, all the while she detests the Nazi. And then there is the mirror image of this with Aleida. Also Aleida is a fun and good character all by herself, she goes to visit Bill and that's a pretty good scene of people being people amidst all the space craziness. The show does go crazy with the character drama, but I don't think Margo and Aleida are the worst examples of this, by far, is what I'm saying.
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Oct 17, 2023 17:11
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loving Sally Ride goddamn you lock those loving missiles and you shoot that thing down I don't care how it turned out in the end, you sell it to them as restitution for killing all the Jamestown astronauts and blowing everything to poo poo. gently caress those people, they just openly plant cameras in our poo poo and outright move all our equipment out overnight so they can steal our mining site, and then OH NO AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH when they're, AGAIN, poking around our mining site after being chased off by dudes with rifles? And now that's somehow casus belli to shoot the poo poo out of the base and kill a bunch of people? That's worth a goddamn shuttle, gently caress your dumb asses, none of this would have happened if you hadn't, again, LITERALLY moved all our poo poo and stole our mining site. Oh ho the moon is for everyone? then why cant you fuckin park your asses on a different part of it? It's a big fuckin place why are you right here on our nuts?? It's probably good that I'm not in politics because I'd have probably led us to nuclear armageddon but goddamn those fuckers for killing all my favorite characters oh no jfk died we don't get a jfk 
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Oct 17, 2023 23:47
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lol at watching Season 2 and your takeaway is that those drat commies hosed everything up and Murica should have been more aggressive
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Oct 17, 2023 23:58
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No, I definitely would have gotten everyone nuked and it's good I'm not at the wheel. But the whole thing started with this pointless aggression by the Soviets, starting back in season one, and it's silly of them to have stolen the mining site and pretended that wasn't an act of war in and of itself. And doubly silly for them, with no communication, to send two more guys over after armed Marines chased them off of their stolen mining site. I don't know how you're supposed to deal with someone like that, where you have to treat them with kid gloves and pretend they aren't actually being huge bullies who deserve a kick in the face. e: mostly I'm just mad about poor Gordo and Tracy. But happy for Poole! Finally got to do something really meaningful. 
Phenotype fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Oct 18, 2023 |
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Oct 18, 2023 00:05
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Man I can’t wait for Phenotype to watch Season 3.
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Oct 18, 2023 00:12
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Season 1 of the show kinda felt like I went in expecting a goofy NASA space adventure but it felt kinda grounded and believable and I appreciated the "real attempt at portraying serious alt history". Couldn't believe they were approaching it so genuinely like a period piece about the past except things were different. And then the rest of the seasons happened. I might be forgetting Very Important Details which makes my take laughable but that's what I remember.
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Oct 18, 2023 00:44
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I wouldn’t call “doing science on the moon in the same place America did science” as initiating aggression. I’d say the first aggression was America sending marines with guns to scare them off, then that time they shot an unarmed cosmonaut who was trying to reach for a translation card
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Oct 18, 2023 01:06
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Dessel posted:And then the rest of the seasons happened. I might be forgetting Very Important Details which makes my take laughable but that's what I remember. i'm surprised Phenotype doesn't have more to say about S2E8 but maybe they fast-forward through all the parts not set in space which is honestly a good approach for S2 but might not be sufficient for S3
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Oct 18, 2023 01:24
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The USSR did nothing wrong Also in the show
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Oct 18, 2023 01:25
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bawfuls posted:I wouldn’t call “doing science on the moon in the same place America did science” as initiating aggression. I’d say the first aggression was America sending marines with guns to scare them off, then that time they shot an unarmed cosmonaut who was trying to reach for a translation card This feels like one of those things where you describe a crime in the blandest way possible so it sounds almost normal. The Soviets literally stacked up the American equipment outside and moved their own in. No communication, no invitation to work with them, just "it was yours but its ours now" in the most direct way possible. Again, there's a lot of room up there, that was a deliberately provocative move that makes them seem like enormous bullies. Sending in the Marines is also provocative, sure, but, I mean, what did they expect? If you jack someone's car and they stick a gun in your face and take it back, you don't really get to complain, do you? And then, again, what did they expect to happen when they sent two more cosmonauts back to the place with the armed Americans? It was an accident, but I mean, even if it was on purpose, that's the sort of thing that happens when two military powers are doing stupid aggressive games at eachother. Like sure, I get that the American side is doing sketchy military poo poo too, but we're only seeing the scenes where the American general is like "oh whoops, sorry we didn't tell you Margo, but we actually put a second secret military nuclear reactor up there and now it might kill everyone". We're not seeing the Soviet side where their officials are talking about "their mining site is better than ours, go in there and toss their poo poo to the curb and take it. What are those losers gonna do about it?" or maybe even "Go back to their mining site and do a lil science and see what they do about it, if they point guns at you then open your big suspicious military case and reach into it" while planning to use any outbreak of violence as an immediate excuse to gently caress up Jamestown. I do get that the point is like, stop militarizing space and work together for a change, but man, gently caress those guys. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Oct 18, 2023 |
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Oct 18, 2023 01:28
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Were the Soviets sabotaging the American equipment or impeding their ability to work at the site? No. So why show up with guns?
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Oct 18, 2023 01:46
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I don't think the "we put a secret nuclear reactor we're using to circumvent nuclear arms restrictions/inspections on the moon" thing should get underplayed! Even discounting that, it's loving bonkos insane poo poo to do something like that and NOT let the highly qualified scientists stationed there who need to work to VERY exact specifications to avoid dying horrifically if even a single thing goes wrong know about it! That was one of the things that irritated me, NASA had very specifically been set up in season 2 as having being managed by the little weiner dude with the express purpose of making it financially independent AND politically untouchable. So having the military just running around doing apparently whatever the gently caress they wanted and not letting anybody from NASA know, or being utterly immune from repercussions when they got found out, was crazy.
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Oct 18, 2023 01:49
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Jerusalem posted:I don't think the "we put a secret nuclear reactor we're using to circumvent nuclear arms restrictions/inspections on the moon" thing should get underplayed! Even discounting that, it's loving bonkos insane poo poo to do something like that and NOT let the highly qualified scientists stationed there who need to work to VERY exact specifications to avoid dying horrifically if even a single thing goes wrong know about it! Yeah, no, I mean, that's a big fuckin deal too! It was aggravating how even Ellen was in on it and didn't throw a huge fit like Margo would have (but I guess she's committed to the political game now  ). I was just posting in the aftermath of watching those assholes shoot up Jamestown and that gets me a whole lot more pissed off than scenes in an office with the shady general.bawfuls posted:Were the Soviets sabotaging the American equipment or impeding their ability to work at the site? No. ya sure i bet everything would have been chill if the Americans brought all their stuff back over and started working side-by-side cmon bro this is like "we just gestured at our waist and told the bank teller to give us a bunch of money, that's not a crime!" Sivart13 posted:seems about right to me What was in episode 8? That was the one where they shot those two cosmonauts at the end (jesus it would suck to catch fire inside a spacesuit omg) and I think that was when Karen finally banged the Stevens kid? Not super invested in her plotlines, it's not BAD but it's definitely something I'd jettison if they'd give us more space scenes in exchange. I do like the stuff with the Vietnamese girl they adopted, but again, it seems like the show didn't need to explore her character as much as it needed to do more stuff in space (or with Margo and Sergei). I think the end of that episode through the finale is when it finally became gripping TV again.
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Oct 18, 2023 02:04
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Phenotype posted:ya sure i bet everything would have been chill if the Americans brought all their stuff back over and started working side-by-side The Soviets did not bring weapons to the dig site, even after the marines chased them off with guns. They did not sabotage equipment. There was no treaty at that point declaring certain zones of the moon off limits to either side. The Americans at every turn took the most aggressive and antagonistic posture, escalating repeatedly. This is driven home in the show when Americans shoot an unarmed cosmonaut and it is revealed he was trying to reach for a translation card to communicate with them.
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Oct 18, 2023 02:27
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bawfuls posted:You’re just parroting Cold War paranoia. That’s fine as an explanation for why the characters did what they did, but not as like abstract justification for their actions. Of course I'm sounding like a Cold War paranoid, because that's the political atmosphere of the time. You cannot look me in the face and seriously tell me that stealing the mining site wasn't an aggressive, antagonistic move, like the Soviets that decided to do it were seriously thinking "okay this is a signal that we can all mine together peacefully." That's an insane conclusion to arrive at. It feels like you're treating the Soviets like dogs (or ghosts) that just sort of do things arbitrarily, rather than trying to ascribe some sort of logical motive to their actions. They're not camp buddies playing a practical joke on their friends, haha we moved all your equipment back up the hill! They're agents of two rival governments in the midst of a cold war. They were absolutely stealing the mining site and daring the Americans to do anything about it. And frankly, I cannot come up with any reason that they'd send those unarmed cosmonauts back to the mining site once they knew the Marines were there, except to provoke the Americans into doing something stupid that they could use as an excuse to raid Jamestown. Can you? What would the reasoning be behind sending your people, unarmed, back to where they were chased away with rifles, other than to provoke a false flag sorta thing? It's actually a little frustrating, because yeah, if there were nuclear weapons on the cargo ship Ed shot down, and if they were working a secret second reactor up there to create plutonium, then yeah, the Americans are just as bad if not worse as far as needlessly arming their space missions. It's just that one thing doesn't flow from the other -- the Soviets were definitely the ones taking the most aggressive and antagonistic postures on the surface here, and the Americans only "deserved" it because of stuff the Soviets weren't aware of.
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Oct 18, 2023 03:01
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I feel like I’m reading a history about how the cold war started because this is exactly how the historiography went. Historians said it was Soviet aggression. Then they thought it was American overreaction. Then it’s a bit of both.
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Oct 18, 2023 04:24
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the ussr were the good guys
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Oct 18, 2023 05:11
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tokin opposition posted:the ussr were the good guys They did Margo wrong though
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Oct 18, 2023 05:44
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General Battuta posted:They're going to do "anti aging drug that can only be synthesized in space" aren't they surely not Cannot wait for Ed's Counterattack
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Oct 18, 2023 07:53
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Okay S3 starting much better off here. This is what I'm here for, big ol space disasters and people doing difficult things trying to fix them. Glad that they're acknowledging the danger of the space debris from the failed Korean rocket. I wondered if Ed's shooting down the cargo ship last season was going to be a problem going forward, the big cloud of debris would just hang out in the lunar orbit forever and threaten to cause just that exact kind of disaster. I read an article once that there's a real danger of just kinda loving up mankind's ability to get off the planet for the foreseeable future -- if we end up with too much random debris in orbit, it'll be impossible to send up rockets without having them get blown up by a tiny chunk of metal traveling at orbital speeds.
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Oct 18, 2023 17:21
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Phenotype posted:Okay S3 starting much better off here. You poor sweet Summer Child.
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Oct 18, 2023 18:41
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Exodor posted:You poor sweet Summer Child. He ain't nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time
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Oct 18, 2023 21:20
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I dunno, four episodes down and this is looking pretty good so far! Only things I have to complain about is the Stevens kid who's still obsessed with Karen ten years later. (And he still looks like a child and Shantel VanSanten still looks gorgeous lol.) I just feel like, I dunno, stalkery kid arc doesn't really fit with the vibe of the show, yknow? I mean, it's always did a lot with the astronauts' inner lives, but not this darker psychological stuff. But yeah, so far it feels like they're trying to keep a tighter focus on the actual space stuff. Pissed off at how the Soviets did Margo though, and poor Sergei. I hope there's a happy ending for them somewhere down the line
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Oct 19, 2023 00:43
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Sergei and Margo's storyline was my favorite part of season 2. Loved that relationship in season 2. Great memories of their relationship in season 2.
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Oct 19, 2023 03:21
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Jerusalem posted:Sergei and Margo's storyline was my favorite part of season 2. Loved that relationship in season 2. Great memories of their relationship in season 2. It's okay, it wasn't Sergey's fault.
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Oct 19, 2023 04:51
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ahahaha ellen beat slick willy and still invented Don't Ask Don't Tell. Jesus Ellen come on, support that poor kid. But of course she's a goddamn republican Loved the touchdown on Mars, but it really shows how much they've moved past "realistic" space travel. I keep thinking of Molly Cobb with the lunar lander being soooo careful "8 meters, down 1. 7 meters, down 1, we have contact, kill the engines" and here they're just kinda winging it. I'm glad Ed had the guts to abort because cmon, if he was actually going to land that thing with zero visibility and no altimeter I think that woulda pushed suspension of belief a little too far. And gently caress, they're doubling down on this crazy Stevens kid thing, aren't they? I just want this whole subplot to go away and it's going to be what the entire season hinges on, isn't it?
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Oct 19, 2023 04:59
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She wouldn't be a Republican if she didn't walk through a door and then slam it shut behind her.
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Oct 19, 2023 05:08
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The really sad thing is just how perfect that first episode was with the kid basically stepping in to do the dangerous heroic thing instead of Ed almost like a passing of the torch between the generations, and you had that beautiful shot of him dangling from the slowing down space station in episode 1. Then nope, it's Ed forever baby and Danny's just the crazy drug-addled dude.
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Oct 19, 2023 05:08
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Jesus christ both of Gordo's kids suck so hard man. In retrospect it wasn't so much that they fell far from the tree, but that Gordo himself was probably pretty unique among his bloodline for actually being able to pull himself together when it counted.
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Oct 19, 2023 23:01
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Gordo means fat
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Oct 19, 2023 23:11
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A scene I loved in season 2 is when Gordo goes to meet with Tracey's new husband and straight up tells him his aim is to win her back. The guy takes this onboard, shrugs and basically says,"Shoot your shot dude, I'm not so insecure this is going to gently caress with my head, and Tracey's her own person and makes her own choices, she can deal with you however she feels best.  "
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Oct 20, 2023 00:37
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Jerusalem posted:A scene I loved in season 2 is when Gordo goes to meet with Tracey's new husband and straight up tells him his aim is to win her back. The guy takes this onboard, shrugs and basically says,"Shoot your shot dude, I'm not so insecure this is going to gently caress with my head, and Tracey's her own person and makes her own choices, she can deal with you however she feels best. Yeah, I really liked that scene as well. He had the right mindset for someone whose wife was gonna be working hundreds of thousands of miles away on the moon.
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Oct 20, 2023 03:53
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Phenotype posted:Jesus christ both of Gordo's kids suck so hard man. In retrospect it wasn't so much that they fell far from the tree, but that Gordo himself was probably pretty unique among his bloodline for actually being able to pull himself together when it counted. I remember Karen and Tracey getting competitive around their kids, e.g. Tracey getting proud when it turned out that Danny was leading Shane into trouble rather than the other way around. And those two families were basically living in each other's pockets, with that communal living base-wives vibe, so I reckon that a lot of the toxicity came from both families. I feel pretty badly for the kids in all of this tbh. Both Danny and Jimmy are fuckups, but they were both pretty horribly raised -- particularly after Shane's death. Karen and Ed keep using Danny as a replacement for Shane (or, in Karen's case, for Shane and Ed). Jimmy, meanwhile, was basically ignored even before that. I don't think Gordo ever pulled himself together when it counted, because when you're a parent every day counts. Gordo was a Christmas and Armageddon parent.
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Oct 20, 2023 04:39
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All right, that's a wrap on season 3. Really don't understand a lot of the veiled complaints you guys have posted, that was a pretty good season of TV altogether. Karen in particular, I was waiting for her to do something incredibly stupid based on the comments here, but naw, I liked her as a counterpoint to Dev. loving LOVED it when she shut down Dev trying to steal away the entire Helios team when the board was going to force him out. I think Jerry Maguire came out that year too, Dev must have seen it and thought hey, I'm much more charismatic than Tom Cruise, right? But gently caress no, Karen's seen enough of his bullshit to break them out of his spell. I could have done without the majority of her plots in season 2, but her arc in S3 was a pretty good way to keep her involved when she's increasingly less attached to the main characters. Was it Jerusalem who said it felt like a high school writing class took over after the first season? That's honestly a pretty apt comparison, although I think the S3 writers had a little more skill than that. S3 felt like they finally returned to a proper focus on the space stuff, but they never quite hit the same tone as S1. I posted earlier about how during the Mars landings, I kept thinking of how much planning went into the original lunar landing down to the last ounce of fuel, and how incredibly careful and precise Molly had to be to bring the lander safely down on the surface. And then lol they actually bring back Molly so she can give Ed a speech about how he'll only have, I dunno, maybe 2 or 3 percent fuel left, and he shouldn't use the instruments, just look out the window and fire his thrusters when he thinks it's the right time, just wing it, man. The writing was better than you'd get from a high school class, but it felt like they never had any interest in going back to the more realistic "space is super difficult" stuff from the first season, which was the best of the series. I dunno! As a whole, it was pretty good, it just feels like they made a lot of strange choices on where they wanted to take the series, and didn't explore a lot of the things I'd have liked them to explore. The timeskips especially -- I'm not averse to the way they're trying to tell a story over decades, but I think they should have planned them for spots where the current-day stories were coming to an end, felt like every time they skipped ahead they were leaving multiple plot threads hanging. Even at the very end here, we met this mysterious Korean astronaut, dragged him to Happy Valley with a "this is your home now," and welp, that's it for him, let's jump ahead another decade. I woulda liked to see him integrate, yknow? Still looking forward to the new season, though, was definitely worth the watch so far.
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Oct 20, 2023 20:36
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The globbering that was alluded to itt was all just regarding the Danny subplot.
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Oct 20, 2023 23:09
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| # ? May 3, 2024 05:24 |
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I don't like a lot of stuff about season 3. I like it when the show keeps the spaceflight side low-key and naturalistic, with respect for the politics and procedure as well as the human drama. There were just too many disasters, collisions, fuckups, deaths and general mishaps in 3. In real life the after-accident reviews for Columbia and Challenger were long, grueling, dramatic, full of both heroism and skullduggery — and they also basically grounded the US space program and led to serious introspection about culture and objectives. A space accident, like a plane crash or even a boat sinking, is a Big Deal. When they start happening as often as they do in S3 my brain just starts repeating "none of these people should be in space, go home, stop loving around." Maybe that's why we don't have a Mars base irl, I dunno! But the Mars mission in S3 was just too much for me. Danni crashing her ship and leaving her entire crew and the Russian crew stranded, surely dead without the mercy of the corporate crew, would be one of the worst misjudgments in human exploration. But it just gets shrugged off as cost of doing business.
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Oct 20, 2023 23:25
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